British official attitudes regarding anti-war protesters in two World Wars.

IN this article I will show that, while in the First World War 1914-1918 there was much less unanimity, much less uniformity in thinking about the causes, justifications and objectives of the war with Germany, but also much greater official intolerance of dissenting opinion, in the Second World War 1939-1945 there was an almost universal--admittedly not quite universal--acceptance of the need and duty to resist Hitlerite aggression, but at the same time a readiness to acknowledge that citizens had a right as individuals to disagree with government policy, almost as if people felt, 'What are we fighting for is the right of people to be pacifists if they want to'.

In 1914 Britain was governed by the Liberal Party, which for the previous sixty or so years had generally opposed the colonial military adventures of the Conservative Party and which depended for its electoral base to a considerable extent on Nonconformist Protestant organizations, Christian sects such as the Congregationalists and Baptists which generally opposed themselves to war on principle. When war came in August 1914 two Cabinet ministers, Lord Morley and John Burns, and a junior minister, Charles Trevelyan, resigned: two other Cabinet ministers tendered their resignations but later allowed themselves to be persuaded to stay on. Subsequently a number of Liberal Members of Parliament were active campaigners against the war, as was James Ramsay MacDonald who till the outbreak of hostilities led the Labour Party group in the House of Commons, which had generally supported the Liberal government. But it was not just political progressives who questioned the war: in November 1917 the Marquis of Lansdowne, a former Viceroy of India, one of the architects of the Boer War, and a member of Asquith's coalition War Cabinet in 1915-1916, caused a furore with a letter printed in The Daily Telegraph calling on the government to announced definite terms for a compromise peace: at a Conservative Party meeting next day he was, as he said, 'excommunicated'.

As in Germany in the same period, the widespread enthusiasm for the war in Britain in 1914 was not only fuelled by ignorance of what a major war really involved--Britain had not fought a European war since 1856--but also by the frustrations and fantasies generated by the sheer boredom and lack of sensationalism of peacetime life. And as in Germany, one detects an underlying hysteria. Prince Louis of Battenberg, who had been brought to England by his parents as a child and had joined the Royal Navy at the age of fourteen, was driven from his post as First Sea Lord--i.e. professional head of the Navy--because of his German title. Lord Haldane, the Lord Chancellor, who as Secretary of State for War before 1912 had masterminded the modernization of the British Army, was dropped from the government because he had been at a German university (Gottingen) and professed himself an admirer of German education. When the liner R.M.S. Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine in the spring of 1915 there were anti-German riots which consisted partly of attacks on, and looting of, shops owned by Polish Jews and, even more oddly, Chinese immigrants.

The same hysteria, amongst the official rather than the street-fighting, shop-looting classes, soon became evident in responses to continuing opposition to government war policy. It must be emphasized that unlike other western European countries, Britain had never had a system of compulsory universal military service, never had an organized system of censorhip or repression of political opinions. During the war against revolutionary France in the 1790s an attempt to put dissident leaders on trial had resulted in acquittals and the humiliation of the government, and though the ministers then resorted to detention without trial, the longer the war against France went on, the more people came to feel that repression was pointless.

Till 1914 British people were generally rather proud of living in a country where no-one (other than your employer, your landlord, your creditors etc.) could tell you what to do or think. Suddenly, when war came in 1914, it became terribly important that everyone should do and think exactly the same as everyone else. The needs of the Army quickly brought talk of compulsory military service, though this was not finally brought in till March 1916 (the Army that fought at the Somme consisted entirely of volunteers). The censorship of publications and of all communications with people outside the country was established with the aim--or on the pretext--of keeping useful military information from the enemy. It has to be said though that the British in 1914-1918, having much less practice than, for example, the Austrians, failed to establish a really efficient system of repression. In The National Archives (Public Record Office) there are files on numerous cases of disloyalty and anti-war agitation drawn to the attention of the Home Office (counterpart of a Ministry of the Interior) which have been annotated to the effect that there seemed no prospect of a successful prosecution. The wartime regulations stipulated that it was the Army authorities that had to initiate prosecutions of activity interfering with the country's military effort, and for example the Chief Constable of Glamorganshire reported in February 1917 that the complaints he sent in to the Army were 'sometimes kept months without an answer' and that even clear-cut cases were not proceeded with. The existing law provided the government with no obvious means of prosecuting the two most prominent anti-war organizations, the Union of Democratic Control and the No-Conscription Fellowship, and in those days British governments were very reluctant to bring in new, and necessarily controversial, legislation to deal with specific, short-term problems. Major General Wyndham Childs, who as Director of Personal Services at the War Office was the military man chiefly involved with the conscription issue, later wrote 'I always thought that the No-Conscription Fellowship or at any rate its organizers should have been dealt with under the Incitement to Mutiny Art'. The government knew that any such prosecution would be a propaganda gift to the anti-war activists.

Childs told the Prime Minister, 'I did not consider any moral or ethical grounds should be recognized, though I realized that it was impossible not to take religious objection into consideration'. There were in Britain a large number of Protestant Nonconformist groups, many of which were opposed to war on principle. 'I discovered there were more than fifty types of religion in this country', wrote Childs. Some groups, like the Christadelphians, confined themselves to a specific objection to bearing arms, and agreed to accept non-combatant service. The Quakers, or Society of Friends, one of the oldest and most respected of such groups, and the one most established within the upper echelons of the commercial and professional classes, reaffirmed their opposition to all war at their London Yearly Meeting in January 1915 but, in accordance with their customary practice left it to the individual's conscience how one responded to what the newspapers designated 'the call of duty'. They ran ambulance units behind the front line in France throughout the war, doing good service and providing a refuge for hundreds of young men who objected to being soldiers. Opposition to war was not taken to mean that existence in wartime involved no Christian duties. Corder Catchpool, who went out to France with the first group of Quaker medical volunteers in November 1914, wrote 'I believed there might be great opportunities for service, rendered in the spirit of the Prince of Peace, in tending the wounded and dying, amongst whom I saw moving the figure of Him I strive to follow'. He became the unit's adjutant, or administrative officer, but when conscription came in March 1916 he recognized a new duty: now that men were being conscripted to tend the sick and dying and the Friends' Ambulance Unit was, in effect, doing the work of a conscript unit, his Christian obligation was to resist government compulsion. He resigned from the Friends' Ambulance Unit in May 1916, making himself liable to compulsory military service, refused to be a soldier, and was imprisoned from January 1917 till May 1919.

Quakers--many of them left-leaning political activists prior to the war--also supplied much of the finance for the No-Conscription Fellowship, which was set up in December 1914, but the active leadership was provided mainly by members of the Independent Labour Party, the most left-wing of the groups that together made up the Labour Party. Clifford Allen and Fenner Brockway had been respectively general manager and editor of the ILP's newspaper Labour Leader: both spent the second half of the war in prison, where Allen's health was so impaired by ill-treatment that he never recovered. The left-wing views of such men, especially their constantly reiterated opinion that the war was the result of capitalism and was simply a squalid contest between capitalist rivals, did not serve to excuse their opposition to conscription in the eyes of officialdom. Other oppositionists however, notably the philosopher Bertrand Russell, to a large extent owed their conversion to anti-capitalist views to their experiences and contacts while agitating against the war: but one notes that the three ministers in the first Labour Government in 1924 who had been Liberal backbenchers during the war--Charles Trevelyan, Noel Buxton, and Josiah Wedgwood--while all opponents of conscription had none of them moved very far to the left: Wedgwood, himself a war hero, having won the D.S.O. at Gallipoli, rooted his opposition simply in an objection to compulsion.

The authorities' response to this opposition was characterized by a sustained note of spite and paranoia. Major General Childs, the Army's Director of Personal Services, told the government that the No-Conscription Fellowship was 'a pernicious organization whose propaganda is that of conversion of the community at large to anti-war principles'. He warned 'The absolutists [included ...] those who were increasingly busy in their endeavours to induce their fellow-citizens to defy the Government ... working in close co-operation with the Union of Democratic Control, the No-Conscription Fellowship and other bodies whose activities, in time of war, were unpatriotic and dangerous. Such men, if they were released by the Military Authorities, would have immediately to be imprisoned, under the Defence of the Realm Act'. When Max Plowman, a Lieutenant in the West Yorkshire Regiment who had been blown up by a shell and severely concussed, sent home and, in the course of twelve months found to be unfit by seven successive medical boards, tried to resign his commission and refused posting to another base in Britain, Childs urged that he should be treated as 'mentally deficient', explaining 'This would largely, in my opinion, discount the capital which the various anti-conscription papers will make out of the case ... we could ... invalid him out of the Army for medical reasons which I think would not only demonstrate the humanity of the military machine but also the mentality of the majority of conscientious objectors. You will be interested to note amongst other things that he professes no religion!'

The sheer pettiness of the officials was often quite startling. J.R. Ackerley, a wounded prisoner of war released on medical grounds to internment in Switzerland, wrote to a friend in England, 'The war I think is going well, by which I mean that it is coming to a head; what the end will be I neither know nor care, for I have relegated patriotism to the dust heap along with the Church of England ... Soon I hope we will shake hands across the trenches, chuck up this fool's game, and return to our respective homes, set them in order again and try to wipe from our minds the memory of these infamous deeds'. This letter was intercepted by the censors and confiscated on the grounds of its 'highly objectionable sentiments'. The censors also interfered with the transmission abroad of C.K. Ogden's anti-war weekly The Cambridge Magazine and when Ogden pointed out that he had been given a permit to send the magazine abroad Lord Newton, acting as junior Foreign Office Minister, minuted, 'It is cheering to observe that this paper has already suffered considerable financial loss through the Censor holding it up'. (In fact the Magazine's circulation of 20,000 copies a week yielded a handsome income.) When seventy-five year old Arnold Lupton, a former Member of Parliament--with Bertrand Russell the most socially prominent of the anti-war activists gaoled during the war--was sent to prison for distributing an anti-war leaflet, Sir George Cave, the Home Secretary, minuted, 'He is evidently actively engaged in a propaganda in the interests of Germany', and Lupton's file not only includes two separate transcripts of the rude remarks of the judge at the appeal hearing--'I don't think a more wicked pamphlet throughout, from beginning to end, could be conceived ... could any man write this in his sober senses?'--but also an official minute quoting choice extracts from these remarks.

Besides campaigners like Bertrand Russell, and Arnold Lupton and Union of Democratic Control Secretary E. D. Morel, around 1500 Conscientious Objectors were imprisoned in the last two years of the war: 69 died of ill treatment, 39 left prison only to go into psychiatric clinics. But their sufferings were not without fruit. Prior to 1914 no-one in Britain had ever supposed they had a moral obligation even to approve of, let alone participate in, any war the government was foolish enough to embark on, and till 1916 nobody (other than professional seamen in the era of the Press Gang) had been under a legal obligation to take part. Consequently though there had been anti-war organizations, there had been no secular pacifism in the modern sense, nobody other than Christian sectaries standing up to say 'It is against my moral conscience to have anything personally to do with a war'. The First World War can be said to have created secular pacifism in Britain. With the exception of the bemedalled Wedgwood all the anti-war Members of Parliament lost their seats in the 1918 election but Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, Charles Trevelyan, Arthur Ponsonby and Noel Buxton were once again returned in the election of 1922 and E.D. Morel entered the House of Commons as M.P. for Dundee, and throughout the 1920s one can see, as the lessons of the Great War were digested, a growing revulsion against war, militarism, national conscription and international rivalry. In the period 1916-1918 there had been 16,000 objectors to military service in Britain: in the Second World War there were to be 59,000, more than three and a half times as many--and bearing in mind the decline in religious sentiment during the intervening years, one would probably be justified in guessing that the number of secular--political rather than religious--objectors in the Second World War was five or six times greater than a generation previously: a remarkable testimony to the educative power of events backed by propaganda.

There was far more unanimity as to the necessity of war in 1939 as compared to 1914. There was no enthusiasm for war in 1939, but also no belief that it could be avoided. Even the British Union of Fascists leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, before he was finally locked up, urged his followers 'to do nothing to injure our country or to help any other power' and looked forward to a 'peace with the British Empire intact and our people safe'. The dogged determination to resist the Germans for the second time round was not without some of the hysteria characteristic of the 1914-18 War. The amazingly rapid collapse of the Netherlands, Belgium and France in the face of the German onslaught in May 1940 and panic stories about fifth columnists, parachute troopers disguised as nuns and so forth led to the arrest and detention without trial of over 800 British Fascists. Military conscription had been reintroduced before the war began, and even before the final military collapse of France the local governments of several English cities and counties began to take action against any of their employees who registered as Conscientious Objectors. By mid-August 1940 twenty-eight local authorities, from the City of Manchester down to Amersham Rural District, had resolved to dismiss Conscientious Objectors and three others had decided to reduce their objectors' pay to 'army rates'. This was entirely contrary to the view of the central government and on 29 July 1940 the Home Office issued a circular advising against such procedures, pointing out 'The first principle to be observed is that in this country no person should be penalized for the mere holding of an opinion, however unpopular that opinion may be to the majority'. However, there was little the government could do to force local authorities to fall into line, and eventually it was the sheer shortage of labour that obliged municipal administrations to employ and even recruit Conscientious Objectors, even as school teachers.

As in the earlier war, peace campaigners were kept under observation by the police. In May 1940 six people were summonsed in connection with a poster saying 'This war will cease when men refuse to fight. What are you going to do about it?' But the occasional denunciations in Parliament of peace activists were met by the blandest of official responses: in 1943 the Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office told the House of Commons 'the results achieved by this minority body are insignificant and it would be a mistake to exaggerate its importance by official interference'. The confidential minutes of the senior staff at the Home Office express exactly the same view. War Commentary, the most out-spoken of the anti-war organs, was marked down in June 1940 as 'fairly mild in tone and very dull'. In July 1942 it was noted that 'poisonous as it is it can perhaps be safely ignored'. The far-left Friends of Freedom Press was regarded as having 'a violently revolutionary programme ... but it is too detached from real life to cause much trouble'. The activities of the anti-war agitators, far from provoking the spite and paranoia evident in 1916 or 1917, seem to have been regarded merely as providing a mild stimulus for donnish lucubrations. when the Anarchists attempted to organize a peace rally, one official minuted 'A public anarchist meeting seems most unusual. I can find no parallel'. Then, having rooted around in the back files, he added in the margin 'at least since 1907 see 182, 843/3'.

A number of conscientious objectors did go to gaol and in October 1944 Lieutenant William Douglas-Home, son of an Earl and brother of the future Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, was sentenced to one year's imprisonment with hard labour for refusing duty in the front line, in protest at the refusal to allow the evacuation of civilians from Le Havre before the British commenced their siege bombardment. At his court martial his immediate superior stated 'It has surprised me that a man whose integrity I am here to vouch for should have been brought in front of a Military Court when I have known so many, shall we say, less desirable characters whose misdemeanours have been glossed over by, shall we say, an intelligent posting elsewhere'. Douglas-Home's imprisonment cannot be said to have harmed his future career: Now Barabbas, the play he wrote based on his spell at Wakefield Gaol, ran for four months in the West End in 1947 and was favourably reviewed even in the right-wing Daily Mail.

Because of the softer line generally adopted with regard to Conscientious Objectors perhaps the most contentious issue publicized by critics of the government's war policy was the question of bombing attacks directed against the civilian population of Germany. A Ministry of Information pamphlet issued in 1943 announced BRITAIN CONTINUED TO SET HER FACE AGAINST TERROR BOMBING but in fact the policy of Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, commanding Royal Air Force Bomber Command, was that the best way to disrupt German war industries was to paralyze the communal life of German industrial cities not by bombing the big factories on the outskirts but by destroying the city centres, and Lord Cherwell, Winston Churchill's most influential adviser on technological matters, thought the best idea was to put pressure on German factory workers by 'dehousing' them, i.e. burning down their homes. The Air Ministry wasted enormous amounts of time and energy trying to confuse the issue, telling Harris for example that 'in the case of cities making a substantial contribution to the German war effort, the practical effects of your Command's policy cannot be distinguished from those which would accrue from a policy of attacking cities as such [but] ... This distinction is in fact one of great importance in the presentation to the public of the aim and achievement of the bomber offensive'. In reality both the bomber crews and the public at large were perfectly aware, and for the must part entirely happy, that the object of the British air raids was to burn down the central area of German cities. After all, the Germans had attempted to do the same to British cities. The policy was denounced in the House of Commons by Richard Stokes, later a Labour Cabinet minister, and in the House of Lords by the Bishop of Chichester, backed by a former Archbishop of Canterbury. Corder Catchpool, the Quaker anti-conscription activist from 1916-1918, established a Bombing Restriction Committee in 1943. A pamphlet written for the committee by Vera Brittain, entitled Seeds of Chaos: What Mass Bombing Really Means, had a fair circulation but received little press attention in Britain, but the version of it published in the United States caused a continent-wide furore, being condemned even by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

The most decent and democratic-spirited way to handle opponents of the war was one of the lessons--practical as well as moral--the British government learnt from the First World War. Other lessons I think may have been less well-learnt, and other governments of course, notably the Italian, seem to have learnt nothing: but as the events of the last four or five years have shown the lessons of war seem in any case--shameful to say--something that may be remembered for a couple of decades but which basically have to be relearnt over and over again every thirty or sixty years.

This article was originally given as a paper at a conference at the City University of Hiroshima in January 2003 and is published here with the kind permission of the City University of Hiroshima.