Eye - a hundred years ago

From cunning plans to devout skeptics

Cunning plans

Catherine Marshall at the No-Conscription Fellowship (N-CF) office devised a cunning plan to help conscientious objectors (COs) communicate with each other and cheat the silence rule. Every member awaiting arrest was provided with pencil leads, a sticking plaster and instructions for smuggling them into his cell. New prisoners were strip-searched, but one part of the body that wasn’t routinely inspected was the soles of their feet, so the instructions were to place the pencil leads there and seal them with the plaster.

It was not without risk. When Fenner Brockway stepped into his hot bath prior to being searched at Walton jail he discovered to his horror that the leads were of the indelible variety which stained the water purple. Every time he moved a foot a burst of purple swirled around it. When his warder noticed, Brockway complained that too much disinfectant had been put in the bath water! He contrived to keep the precious leads – and used them to good effect.

He began producing a weekly newspaper, the Walton Leader, using toilet paper collected from his ‘subscribers’, who each contributed their daily ration of one sheet. The paper was passed from prisoner to prisoner to be read in the privacy of the lavatory.

On press days – Mondays and Thursdays – there was always a queue at the ‘reading room’. The medical officer was instructed to enquire into the diet on Mondays and Wednesdays, but before he could make his report the newspaper was discovered and its editor sentenced to six days on bread and water.

COs in other jails produced their own handwritten journals – Quaker Barratt Brown’s Canterbury Clinker celebrated the surreptitious communications of the exercise periods:

‘Gin a conchy meet a conchy
Comin’ through the Clink,
Gin a conchy meet a conchy
Should a conchy wink?
Ilka conchy has a comrade,
Ne’er a one hae I;
But all the comrades smile at me,
Comin’ on the sly.’

William Chamberlain’s Winchester Court Martial carried a mock advertisement for a ‘Special War Edition of the New Testament sanctioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which every reference to peace has been deleted’.

What the papers couldn’t say

Quakers and socialists (and many COs were both) worked together on the N-CF monthly Tribunal, but by 1918, with the men in prison, production of the paper was largely in the hands of women. Joan Beauchamp took over as editor, supported by Lydia Smith, Gladys Rinder and Ada Salter.

The 14 February issue carried an article by Joan Beauchamp entitled ‘The Moral Aspect of Conscription’, which protested against the provision of licensed brothels for soldiers in France, and lumping together licensed prostitution and conscription as twin evils. The military authorities, having conscripted the flower of the nation’s youth, were now bent on deflowering it. A morally outraged Home Office ordered the police to seize all copies of the paper and dismantle the presses on which it was printed.

The N-CF women found a small press in Streatham and the 11 April issue included an article headed ‘Stop the War!’ which concluded: ‘Armies and Navies cannot end this war. Who can? Only the people have the power.’ On 22 April six policemen visited the printer’s premises and smashed the press with hammers and crowbars.

Another press was found, but it was so dilapidated and run-down that the compositors kept running out of type. The large capital letters they needed for the masthead were missing, but fortunately someone knew someone who worked on the militantly pro-war Daily Mail, and the letters were ‘borrowed’ from its print-room. Once, however, an ‘r’ was missing, so a messenger was sent to the Mail at night to pick up a replacement. Unfortunately, on his way back he stumbled in the dark and dropped the precious letter. Next morning he retraced his steps, found it, and the N-CF was saved from issuing The Tibunal instead of The Tribunal.

In other news

On 6 September 1916 the Evening News reported on a ‘Talkative Quaker’. When three members of the N-CF were released from prison it was noted that: ‘Another – a Quaker – is still detained, as through talking he lost the good conduct marks entitling him to a remission of sentence.’

Not so silent Meetings

Quaker Meetings for Worship in jail were eagerly looked forward to as a precious time together. While most prisoners attended the prison’s Anglican services as a matter of routine, many socialist and nonreligious COs refused to go and listen to the ‘warmongering parson’. But Clifford Allen, the N-CF chair, successfully petitioned the prison commissioners to allow them access to the Quaker chaplain and to Quaker Meetings.

John Graham, the Quaker chaplain at Strangeways, Manchester, welcomed them all – but that was the end of Quaker silence! Half an hour’s respite from the prison’s silence rule was too valuable to waste, and Quakers and socialists spent the time in animated discussion and eager sharing of news. In Walton and Winchester jails, prisoners in solitary confinement found ingenious ways of communicating with each other. They organised secret ‘telephone codes’, a special prison morse of dots and dashes for each letter of the alphabet. The ‘telephone’ was a hot water pipe which passed through each cell, and messages could be sent by tapping on the pipe. This developed into a sophisticated means of communication whereby news was exchanged and discussed. In Winchester, Clifford Allen played chess with Scott Duckers five cells down. News from the Friend and The Tribunal was quietly, if laboriously, tapped along the line, undetected by warders.

Charlie chaplains

William Chamberlain, recalling services in Winchester jail, reported the chaplain as saying ‘Do as Christ bids you, never mind your conscience!’ Another chaplain argued in one of his sermons that since the apostle Paul was a tent-maker by trade ‘he must have been an army contractor, proud to do his bit for the Roman empire’. In Wormwood Scrubs the preacher spoke of ‘the Prince of Peace and the brotherhood of man’, and was startled to hear an approving stamping of feet from the COs’ benches which rose to a crescendo and brought the sermon to an early conclusion.

Moment of truth

In one prosecution of N-CF leaders under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) the crown advocate Archibald Bodkin lectured the accused to the effect that ‘war would become impossible if all men were to have the view that war was wrong’.

The N-CF expressed its gratitude for so neat and concise an expression of its own case and proceeded to issue posters with Bodkin’s words, prominently credited to their author. This enraged the authorities, who took the printers to court – with Bodkin again as prosecutor. The N-CF then demanded the arrest of Bodkin as the author of the subversive words, suggesting it was his patriotic duty to prosecute himself. If he went to prison, they promised, the N-CF would contribute to the maintenance of his wife and children.

Devout sceptic

Bertrand Russell offered his services to the N-CF, taking over as chairman when Clifford Allen went to prison. The notorious atheist argued that ‘the distinction between what are called “religious” and what are called “political” objectors was nothing more than an invention of politicians’, adding that ‘no-one else would have supposed it was impossible to be interested in the affairs of the world in a religious spirit’. He was deeply moved by the selflessness of the young men who faced prison and army brutality. Their aim, he wrote, was ‘to bring the Kingdom of Heaven on earth – nothing less’. He confessed that his favourite Biblical text was Exodus 23🔢 ‘Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil’.

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