The long shadow of war

Julia Bush and Ruth Whitehouse write about how some Northamptonshire Friends commemorated the first world war through family history

Every Remembrance Day Quakers mourn for those who have suffered and died in wars, soldiers and civilians alike. We pledge ourselves to resist war and its consequences, whether or not our peace testimony has led us towards a stance of absolute pacifism. Commemoration of the first world war centenary has drawn Northamptonshire Quakers into an extended consideration of our own and our families’ relationship to war and peace.

During the first three years of commemoration we have reflected deeply upon the dilemmas that faced young men eligible for military service in 1914-18 and linked these reflections to our own dilemmas over conflict in the world today. We have come to understand more fully why resistance to war is never straightforward. Doubt and division perhaps deserve stronger emphasis within wider Quaker commemorations, and warn us against any tendency towards complacency as we remember our world war one peace heroes.

Resistance to war

Many Quaker Meetings have researched the resistance to war in their own localities. In Northamptonshire we took a slightly different approach, beginning from family history. Only a handful of local Friends come from Quaker families with a consistent history of opposition to all wars, including the first world war.

One local Quaker, who died at the age of 104 in 2015, remembered her family’s refusal to fight and her uncle’s visits home from the Friends Ambulance Unit. Another recalled the deep solemnity of Remembrance Days in the 1920s. The fathers and grandfather of three younger Friends put their peace testimony into practice by refusing military service in the second world war at the cost of family, as well as public, disapproval. However, the great majority of our ancestors found themselves caught up in the rhetoric of war and the pressing duties of military or civilian war service. Many suffered injury or death, leaving a legacy of ill health and family grief.

Some of our relatives came from military families. Several enlisted with enthusiasm at the first opportunity, volunteering while they were underage. Others served very reluctantly, including one family of three brothers whose musical talents enabled them to escape frontline duties. A fourth brother was less lucky and died in the trenches, leaving behind letters that chronicled his suffering, his love for his girlfriend and his nostalgia for his music.

On the ‘enemy’ side

Remarkably, we discovered that the Jewish father and stepfather of two local Friends were in action on the ‘enemy’ side during the first world war, fighting for Germany and Austria. The award of an Iron Cross did not protect Jewish men from deportation to the camps two decades later. Another Friend’s father found himself stranded for two years in Russia after mines prevented his ship from leaving the Baltic, while a Ugandan Friend recalled his grandmother’s tales of men who left her village to join the war in East Africa. Other family stories of civilian service in the first world war included a grandmother who nursed injured servicemen in Dublin and a grandfather whose work as a postmaster included the novelty of training the first female postal workers.

A surprisingly wide range of wartime experience was present in Northampton Meeting, and we listened to each other with a growing sympathy. Circumstances rather than principles had evidently dictated most responses to the first world war, but we also learned about the longer-term impact of the war upon the beliefs of later generations.

Some of us know that our own resistance to war is grounded in our knowledge of past wars as well as in our Quaker faith. Personal knowledge and experience is so varied that we inevitably grapple with our Quaker Peace Testimony in many different ways.

Committed to peace

When we turned to the historical records of the Northamptonshire Quaker Meetings we found that, even within a community committed to peace, there was no single response to the challenges of war. Perhaps for this reason, the minute books for 1914-18 have rather little to say about a war which dominated so many aspects of everyday life. The third of eligible young Quakers who volunteered to fight in the war included several from Northamptonshire. Wellingborough Meeting sent condolences when private Albert Owen died in France after his occupation-based appeal against conscription had been dismissed in May 1916.

Local newspaper and military tribunal records reveal that other local Friends continued to uphold their resistance to the war, with varying success. Three first world war conscientious objectors rest peacefully in the Northampton Quaker burial ground, including a schoolmaster who told the tribunal that ‘he could not consent to his profession being made a condition of exemption as it would make his work an acknowledged part of the organisation for war’.

The dilemmas of war and peace, and the pity of war, have been conveyed to us in new and poignant ways over the past three years. Many of the issues raised by local research still feel sadly relevant, as we consider our response to current wars. We rejoice in the steadfastness of Quaker commitment to peaceful living, but we also recognise and sympathise with our forebears’ struggle to translate their faith into practice. We commend the sharing of family history and a careful study of local Quaker history as ways to deepen understanding of our own war and peace dilemmas.

Northampton Meeting has recently published The Long Shadow of World War I, a booklet recording local historical research and other commemorative events. Copies are available from the Quaker Bookshop, Friends House (http://bookshop.quaker.org.uk/).

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