Eye - 30 May 2014

From walking Conchiess Road to reaching out through witness

Conchies’ Road

Walking boots and anoraks were donned on 10 May as around two dozen Friends in Devon strode along ‘Conchies’ Road’.

On the Saturday before International Conscientious Objectors Day, Friends from Exeter and Tavistock Meetings walked ‘along a mostly dead straight, often rather rough, road that runs for about a mile and a half to the south-east of Princetown in Devon’.

Richard Oliver, of Exeter Meeting, explained: ‘The road was built by conscientious objectors (COs), including many Quakers, who were held in Dartmoor Prison during the first world war. They had refused alternative service, such as the Friends Ambulance Unit, and were set to work building the road.

‘Perhaps it was intended to provide a new alternative route from Princetown to Hexworthy, but, as it is, the surfaced part peters out in a mess of sedges and soggy ground “in the middle of nowhere”. This presumably indicates how far work had got, if not “at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” in 1918, then at any rate some months later when the last of the COs were released. There was also a branch road, of which about a third of a mile was built, that seems to go even closer to “nowhere”. Are the road and its branch the first T-shaped question mark? It’s certainly a “war memorial with a difference”.’

The walk took place on the same day as the Ten Tors Challenge ‘which often invites the Dartmoor weather to do its worst, and 10 May was no exception’.

Soggy Friends were thankful to return to the car park in Princetown, but ‘we were even more thankful that we had only walked along the road, rather than have to build it’.

Witness reaching out

As preparations continue for the start of the commemoration of the first world war, Anthony Wilson, of the Quaker Service Memorial Trust (QSMT), got in touch with Eye to point out where Quakers are making an appearance.

He writes: ‘The National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire features the Quaker Service Memorial on the cover of its WW1 Poppy Field self-guided history trail leaflet with a description inside of the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU).’

But Staffordshire isn’t the only place where a Quaker presence has been spotted, Anthony adds: ‘the National Portrait Gallery in London includes a portrait of Paul Cadbury in its gallery of ‘The Great War in Portraits’, with a clear statement of his FAU service on the front line.’

Friends have also been appearing on bookshelves. Sophie Hardach’s new novel, Of Love and Other Wars, features a second world war Quaker conscientious objector as the central character. Meanwhile, Esdaile Carter’s book, Pilot and Pacifist, uses contemporary letters and documents along with modern histories to tell the story of Jack, a second world war pilot, and his fiancée, Freda, a Quaker pacifist and FAU member.

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