The community in 1941 at Collow Abbey Farm. Photo: Courtesy of Ian Sharp.
A matter of conscience
CO Donald Sutherland talks to Rebecca Hardy
This month, in a Labour Club in Lincolnshire, a ninety-nine-year-old Quaker stood up and told an audience about his experiences in a pacifist farming community during the second world war.
Donald Sutherland, a conscientious objector (CO), was performing in Conchies! by Ian Sharp. The play tells the story of an idealistic anti-war community that grew up around the villages of Legsby and Holton-cum-Beckering in Lincolnshire. The community, which contained several Quakers, started when Roy Broadbent, father of actor Jim Broadbent, and fellow CO Dick Cornwallis, decided to set up a cooperative training farm for COs at Collow Abbey Farm.
‘I joined the community after I left my job for refusing to fight,’ the nearly-centenarian says, who is thought to be the community’s sole surviving CO. ‘I was a Presbyterian and didn’t agree with conscription. I knew I was breaking the law, but it was a matter of conscience. What does your conscience tell you? It’s an inward struggle, particularly if you’ve not been brought up with Quaker ideas of nonviolence.’
Donald first came into contact with Quakers when he registered as a CO – or ‘Conchie’, as people called them. ‘This was the first time I came across the Quaker attitude to war,’ he says. It was here, too, that he first heard about the pacifist community in Lincolnshire. ‘It was a difficult time,’ says Donald, ‘particularly as I’d been to Germany and seen what was happening. But the British government supported Hitler before the war, because he was against communism.’
Donald went to one of the notorious tribunals and was granted exemption on religious grounds. But he paid a price. He lost his job in an insurance firm, where he had worked for six years, and was shunned: ‘On the day I lost my job, a manager said he wanted to see me. He said: “I’m very sorry about what has happened.” He was a member of the Independent Labour Party, which was for peace. No one else in the office spoke to me. All the chaps were signing up. One young man was just married, and I found out later he lost his life.’ He sighs: ‘It was very difficult.’
Donald moved to the Lincolnshire community, where he lived happily for twenty-five years. ‘I can’t remember receiving any opposition from the local people,’ he says, ‘but, when I was handing out pamphlets in Newcastle, protesting about the imprisonment of COs, a woman slapped my face.’
Based on interviews and testimonies amassed over the years, Ian Sharp’s play movingly captures the challenges many COs faced. Although he says that COs in the second world war ‘were treated massively better than in the first world war’, many lost their jobs and some were imprisoned. But, as the play unfolds, we see how the locals softened their stance.
‘When they first arrived, there was lot of suspicion,’ Ian Sharp says. ‘The Germans had just invaded France, so people were frightened, and some locals reported the community, saying they were spies for Germany.’
What happened next, he explains, was a ‘turning point’. One hundred soldiers turned up at their doors demanding to be shown their ‘weapons store’. He says: ‘Of course, there wasn’t one, so they were bundled into a lorry, people booing as they passed, and interrogated at the police station.’ It was soon discovered they weren’t spies, and the locals changed their views.
Nowadays, the community is remembered with huge affection and many of the cast are direct descendants of the original members. ‘It still exists. I feel it, still,’ says one character in the play, which has been performed at sixteen venues so far, including the Edinburgh Fringe, with more hoped for next year.
For Donald Sutherland, his ‘inward struggle’ will always stay with him. ‘The whole solution of peace is such a difficult one. All you can do is what you think is right. It was so matter-of-fact, so traditional, the idea that you should fight for your country. You don’t think about it until the time comes when you have to register – the nitty gritty of signing up. Nowadays, we don’t have to think about it. We pay our taxes, and someone else does our dirty work.’
Rebecca is the journalist for the Friend.
