Watford’s Quiet Heroes

Symon Hill reviews a documentary film that tells the story of conscientious objectors in Watford during the first world war

by Symon Hill 28th November 2014

On 15 June 1916 Howard Marten was led from a prison cell in Boulogne to stand in front of thousands of soldiers on a parade ground.

Howard, a thirty-one-year-old Quaker from the Watford area, then heard an officer declare that he had been found guilty of disobeying an order while on active service. The sentence, declared the officer, was to suffer ‘death by being shot’.

He thus became the first pacifist to be sentenced to death in the first world war.