Battles of Conscience: British pacifists and the second world war, by Tobias Kelly

Author: Tobias Kelly. Review by Lucy Pollard.

Making the choice to be a pacifist can never be easy, but being a conscientious objector (CO) in time of war must be much harder. In world war two, COs were generally treated with more sympathy than they had been in world war one, but their decision was often complicated by their belief that the cause was just. This book by Tobias Kelly, an anthropologist by training, emphasises that there was not an either/or of pacifists and non-pacifists, but a continuum of attitudes. Indeed, for some of those who served in the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU), working in uniform alongside soldiers, it seemed as if there was little difference between them and their fighting colleagues.

Kelly tells his story through the lives of five young people, four men and one woman. One of them, Ronald Duncan, is well-documented: he was a friend of Benjamin Britten and WH Auden. The coverage of the five is inevitably uneven – we know very little of Tom Burns’ background, for example – but Kelly has made excellent use of a wide range of archives. He uses thematic chapters rather than chronological ones, which makes an absorbing and thought-provoking read, even though it is sometimes hard to follow the trajectory of individual experiences. The final chapter gives a brief account of the after-lives of his five protagonists.

Roy Ridgway, one of three brothers who all professed pacifism, came from a family where conflict was frequent; one brother struggled with alcoholism, and Roy’s own mental health was sometimes precarious. He joined the FAU and served in France, Italy and Syria. Fred Urquhart, a writer from Edinburgh, spent the war doing agricultural work, for which he felt himself to be totally unfit. Tom Burns also joined the FAU and worked in Egypt and Finland before being captured in Greece in 1941, remaining a prisoner of war until 1943.

Stella St John came from an upper middle class background. She wanted to be a vet but her father would not permit it. At the age of twenty-four, however, she inherited some money that enabled her to enter veterinary college. Stella’s pacifism was deeply connected to her Christian faith. She found WE Orchard, a charismatic preacher who had been chaplain to COs in Wormwood Scrubs in world war one. She went to Holloway Prison for several weeks in 1943 because, despite driving an ambulance and other humanitarian activities, she was not doing the work as a clerk that her tribunal had specified.

I found the language in this book sometimes clumsy, and the proofreading poor. There is a passage about Dietrich Bonhoeffer which seems to belong in a different book. But it is a fascinating read, and I recommend it.

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