HISTORY
John Carey
Battles of Conscience
British Pacifists and the
Second World War
by Tobias Kelly
Chatto & Windus £22 pp384
With war raging in Europe
once again, Tobias Kelly’s
book has a topicality he could
not have foreseen when he
wrote it. He is a professor
of political and legal
anthropology at Edinburgh
University and believes war
to be “deeply wrong”,
although he is not, he says,
a pacifist. In Battles of
Conscience he shows how
pacifists in Britain in the
Thirties and Forties were
sometimes stigmatised, and
condemned from pulpits,
with William Temple, the
Archbishop of York, calling
pacifism a “heresy”. On the
other hand Winston Churchill
and the Archbishop of
Canterbury both defended
pacifists’ right to freedom of
conscience, a concession Kelly
finds “peculiarly British”, not
matched in any other country.
He shows too that pacifists
tended the wounded in many
theatres of war and drove
ambulances for a nonmilitary
Quaker organisation called
the Friends Ambulance Unit
(FAU). His book focuses on
five representative pacifists,
chosen, it seems, because each
left a rich store of journals and
letters. The first is a 27-year-old
Liverpudlian clerk called Roy
Ridgway who, like 100,000
other pacifists, among them
Aldous Huxley and AA Milne,
joined the Peace Pledge Union,
founded by the charismatic
antiwar preacher Dick
and had trained as a
horticulturist at Dartington
Hall. She was convinced that
you could not be a Christian
and fight, and after leaving
school she joined a pacifist
organisation called the
Fellowship of Reconciliation,
serving soup to London’s
homeless. She also joined the
Hungerford Club, set up by
Westminster council to feed
and delouse vagrants who
were either too filthy or too
mentally disturbed to be
welcome in air raid shelters.
Still refusing to be conscripted,
she was sent to Holloway
prison for six months, where
her cell contained a metal
bed, a basin and a pail. The
food was “indescribable”.
But, writing after her release,
she recorded that “no one
could have been kinder” than
her fellow prisoners.
Some pacifists were granted
exemption if they worked full
time in agriculture. These
included another of Kelly’s
five, the former public
schoolboy Ronald Duncan,
who had visited Gandhi at his
ashram in Gujarat, and on hisreturn set up a collective farm
in Devon. A friend of TS Eliot
and Ezra Pound, Duncan
became famous as a poet and
dramatist, writing, among
much else, the libretto for
Britten’s opera The Rape of
Lucretia. He was joined on the
farm by his wife, the artist and
musician Rose Marie, and his
younger sister, Bianca. As a
farmer he seems to have been
a bit of a fanatic, believing
that they should weave their
own clothes and shun coal
and tinned food. Still, they
achieved a lot, growing
vegetables, oats and barley,
rearing hens and pigs and
generating electricity with a
newly refurbished mill, while
their cow provided milk,
butter and cheese.
Duncan’s set-up seems the
happiest of Kelly’s five case
histories. Of the other two,
Tom Burns saw more action
than many serving soldiers,
travelling with the FAU from
Finland to Egypt and then to
Greece, via Russia. But he was
captured with more than
10,000 Allied troops and
became a prisoner of war in
the Greek town of Kalamata.
Like many other pacifists he
seems to have enjoyed the
camaraderie of military life
once he experienced it. His
friend Cathy sent him books
and he organised a study
group in the PoW camp.
Fred Urquhart was in some
respects the unluckiest of
Kelly’s five, because he was gay
at a time when homosexuality
was illegal. He yearned to be a
writer, and in 1938 published
an antiwar novel, Time Will
Knit, praised in Britain and
America. He requested
exemption on the grounds
that writers such as him were
a vital part of civilisation. The
tribunal was unpersuaded,
but granted him exemption on
appeal provided he engaged in
agricultural work. This would
leave him time to be an author
and he wrote in his diary that
night: “Behold we live again!”
Kelly makes a point of
contrasting British treatment
of pacifists in the First and
Second World Wars. In the
First, conscientious objectors
were widely branded cowards
and traitors, and a third of
them ended up in jail. In the
Second, the vast majority
gained exemption conditional
on taking up some alternative
service. So perhaps we are, as
a nation, gradually becoming
more civilised. ccould be hostile and were often
dreaded — Kelly notes that
both Benjamin Britten and
Michael Tippett came close
to breakdown awaiting their
tribunals — so the Central
Board for Conscientious
Objectors organised dress
rehearsals to lessen the ordeal.
Despite this precaution,
Ridgway failed to gain
exemption and, after serving
a short prison sentence,
agreed to join the
noncombatant Pioneer Corps
in Ilfracombe. It was a popular
choice with university
students and young Oxbridge
dons, and Ridgway reported
that he found “almost the
whole of the Vienna
Symphony Orchestra” there.
Later he served in the Middle
East with the FAU, and
followed the Free French
forces up through France. He
was working at a hospital near
Antibes when the war ended.
In 1942 conscription was
extended to all women aged
between 20 and 30. This
affected Stella St John, the
subject of Kelly’s second case
history. Stella was upper classGETTY IMAGESSheppard. Ridgway joined
the FAU too, and worked in a
hospital in Orpington sorting
out the dead from the
wounded during the London
Blitz. It was an ordeal he
never forgot. “When the first
ambulance came in at 9.45 one
evening, it carried a pregnant
woman with one eye out, a
crushed hand, and her nose
blown away. Her 12-year-old
daughter was already dead.”
Conscription for all males
between 18 and 41 was
introduced at the outbreak of
war, so Roy had to register as a
conscientious objector and go
before a tribunal, which would
decide whether he should be
granted exemption. TribunalsThe hard
price of
pacifism
Being a conscientious objector
in wartime Britain was not an
easy option, finds this study
They were
sometimes
condemned
from the
pulpit
BOOKS
Rights of
refusal
Members of
Britain’s No
Conscription
League
marching
in 193934 24 April 2022