Left to right: Walter Ayles, John P. Fletcher, Will Chamberlain, Barry Brown, Clifford Allen, Fenner Brockway. Photo: The NCF Executive Committee en route to prison 17 July 1916.
All of a peace: Cyril Pearce on Friends’ work with other organisations to resist the first world war
‘Meetings began to see the purpose of their faith in a far closer engagement with a whole range of social, moral and even political issues’
Readers will likely be familiar with the broad issues of British Quakers’ response to the outbreak of war in 1914. Even the more recent work on their divisions, and Thomas Kennedy’s identification of ‘War Quakers’, has been absorbed into the narrative. What is less clearly understood is the extent to which, rather than standing alone, Quakers in communities across Britain were deeply involved in the day-to-day business of opposing the war and in supporting others who did so.
That support varied hugely across the country, and in many places involved Quakers in the sorts of close personal and political alliances which, had they appeared before 1914, might have been considered unusual. The origins of this coming-together of the like-minded – at least where matters of war and peace were concerned – had been in the all-party multi-denominational ‘Stop the War’ groups which appeared nationally and locally at the time of the Boer War. Those personal and political collaborations continued in the years before 1914 in popular campaigning against imperialism, militarism and compulsory military service. It should be no surprise then to see them revived and even strengthened in the face of the even greater challenge of world war one.
But there was a difference. In the aftermath of the 1890s’ ‘Quaker Renaissance’, leading figures and Friends’ Meetings began to see the purpose of their faith in a far closer engagement with a whole range of social, moral and even political issues and in campaigning for their redress. Inevitably this drew them closer to others who shared the same concerns – radical ‘New’ Liberals, socialists, women’s suffrage campaigners, trade unionists and the many fragments of the broad cultural and political ‘Left’.
The best way to understand how this worked with respect to the 1914-1918 war resister communities is to look a little more closely at some of them. But before that, it needs to be said that Friends’ Meetings were not present everywhere. North of the border in Scotland and in Wales they were thin on the ground. In England there were Meetings, sometimes more than one, in most major towns and cities and some survivals of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century foundations in more rural areas. However, with some exceptions, it was in the larger urban areas that the Quaker presence was strongest and its contributions to the anti-war movement most marked.
The nature of those contributions differed significantly from place to place and was determined as much by the strength and number of the other elements in the local anti-war movement as it was by the numbers and influence of Quakers. In some places, the Quaker presence was dominant, in others it was balanced by that of its partners and in a handful the Quaker contribution was hardly evident at all.
Local anti-war movements where the Quaker element appears dominant are in the minority but they were in important places such as Croydon, Birmingham and especially in York. In all of them the war resisters community and its conscientious objectors (COs) were numerous, but it was the strength of the local Meetings and the influence of their leading figures in comparison with the weakness of the other groups opposing the war which ensured Quaker leadership. In York, for example, the local labour and socialist movement was weak and was seriously divided about the war. The Quakers, on the other hand, if not unanimous, were much stronger in their commitment to their traditional Peace Testimony. The Rowntree family’s cocoa works was one of the town’s major employers and the patriarch, Joseph, and his son Seebohm, took their social and political roles very seriously. Seebohm’s damning report on poverty in York, published in 1901, set the local Liberal party on a radical course and towards control of the city council and Joseph’s model village at New Earswick was set on the same direction but by different means. Local press accusations of ‘cocoa and cant’ did little to undermine the Rowntrees’ reputation as active and generous supporters of ‘good causes’. Of these arguably more important in both social and political terms were the local adult schools and their links with the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) which led to the foundation of the ambitious St Mary’s Settlement. Arnold Rowntree, Joseph’s nephew and York’s Liberal MP elected in 1910, an opponent of the war and of conscription, was a beneficiary of all that. A consequence of this was that the branches of the principal war resister organisations in York – the Union of Democratic Control (UDC), the No-Conscription Fellowship (NCF) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) – were largely Quaker surrogates. The city’s Meeting houses, adult schools and St Mary’s Settlement were where they had their meetings and where intending COs were coached in how best to present their case before the local Military Service Tribunal. Another, and arguably more important factor, was that the majority of York’s Quaker COs were not politically radical and, while refusing to kill or to take part in killing, were more inclined to offer some kind of war service. In that, the city’s anti-war community, unlike that in many other places where it had more rebellious associations, was able to deflect accusations of extremism. Such ‘co-operators’ outnumbered the ‘resisters’ – men who disobeyed and were sent to prison or work centres – by three to one. The figures for Birmingham are similar although Croydon’s hard core COs were outnumbered by their more emollient comrades by more than five to one.
That is not to say that there were no Quaker COs among York’s most disobedient. Four of York’s nine ‘Absolutists’ – the men who refused all compromise and served out their time in prison – were Quakers. Probably the most notable of them, John P Fletcher, a member of the NCF’s National Executive Committee, had already served time in prison for the NCF’s breach of the Defence of the Realm Act (DoRA) in 1916. A teacher at St Mary’s Settlement, he had also spent time in prison for his pre-war anti-conscription campaigning in Australia and New Zealand.
Quaker-dominated local anti-war campaigns, although mostly in larger urban centres, were not unknown in smaller settlements. The war resister communities in Rawdon near Leeds and Street in Somerset were almost entirely made up of Quakers but it is the Settle Rural District of the former West Riding – now in North Yorkshire – which stands out. There the proportion of men of military service age who refused to kill was much higher than in many larger or more politically radical places. Here the explanation lies in the survival of a late seventeenth-century rural Quaker settlement. In 1914 it remained largely agricultural and many of its COs were Quaker farm workers with membership of one or other of the Friends’ Meetings at High and Low Bentham. The silk mill in Low Bentham provided a different sort of employment and its owner, the Quaker, Charles Rawlinson Ford, a distinctive leadership for the local community of war resisters.
However, in the majority of war resister centres the different elements of their anti-war alliances were far more balanced. Quaker Meeting houses did still provide the safe places for meetings and CO training but the direction and management of local campaigning and support for COs and their families was more of a combined effort. The vehicles for this collaboration, initially, were the local groups which came together in 1915 to oppose conscription and which then became enlarged local branches of the NCF and of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL). Such groups in places like Manchester, Bristol, Rochdale, Huddersfield, Norwich and many others, brought Quakers together with representatives of the local trades councils, trades unions, the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the anti-war elements of the British Socialist Party (BSP) and the occasional anarchists from the Workers’ Freedom League. Perhaps more importantly, in many of these places the role of women, many of them Quakers, was more marked. This is true of Manchester and Huddersfield but particularly so of Bristol.
In terms of its CO numbers (427) and the proportion of its eligible men who refused to fight, Bristol, arguably, was home to the most remarkable war resister community in Britain – the hottest of all the anti-war hot-spots. That reputation flows from the strength and collaboration of its numerous elements. On the one hand, the Society of Friends’ Meeting houses and adult schools were much as have been suggested elsewhere – long-established, influential and safe havens for those who opposed the war. Quakers were prominent in local business and in local, largely liberal, politics. Joining with them in the anti-war campaign were members of local organised labour, the women’s movement and, in particular, the socialist and internationalist ILP. The alliance is epitomised in the contributions of two of its outstanding figures – Walter Ayles and Mabel Tothill. Ayles was a trade unionist, a local Labour city councillor and member of the ILP. He was one of the founder-members of the national NCF and became an Absolutist CO. Like York’s JP Fletcher he served time in prison for the NCF’s breach of DoRA in 1916 before returning to prison the following year as a CO. Mabel Tothill was a Quaker active in social work in Bristol, a suffragist, closely associated with the University Settlement and a member of the ILP. That combination of commitments to socialism and to the Society of Friends was not unusual although many anti-war Quakers, nominally at least, preferred to remain Liberals.
If the Bristol ‘hot spot’ reflected the strength of an anti-war alliance of diverse elements in which Quakers played a major, but equal, part, there were other places with strong war resister communities where Quakers were hardly evident at all and where the dominant elements were trades councils, trades unions, the ILP and the ‘Left’. In Scotland that was true of Dundee where those elements were allied to local Prohibitionists. In the rest of Scotland’s major cities the Quaker contribution was similarly negligible and in England, in the Lancashire Pennines and places such as Nelson and Rawtenstall, historic Friends’ Meetings at Marsden and Crawshawbooth were also largely anonymous. In the two major anti-war centres of South Wales – Aberavon and Briton Ferry – the absence of local Friends’ Meetings meant that there was no Quaker presence at all.
In the face of this evidence – and much more – any notion that Britain’s 1914-1918 anti-war movement was entirely a Quaker affair is unsustainable. Members of the Society of Friends were important and influential at all levels of that movement and in some places dominated it. Equally, there were other places where their role was important but far less overwhelming. The dynamics of war resister communities varied enormously from place to place and demonstrate very clearly that generalisations about the ‘national’ picture can only begin to make sense in the light of a proper evaluation of the role and character of its local and regional components – in history from below, if you like.
Cyril is the author of Communities of Resistance: Conscience and dissent in Britain during the first world war, on which much of this article is based
