Watford’s Quiet Heroes
Symon Hill reviews a documentary film that tells the story of conscientious objectors in Watford during the first world war
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.
Thankfully, campaigning in Britain led to Howard’s sentence being commuted to ten years’ imprisonment. His story – including how he came to be in France – forms a key part of Watford’s Quiet Heroes, an excellent thirty-minute documentary on conscientious objectors (COs) from around Watford. Designed for schools as well as for interested adults, the film conveys some of the most important and fascinating issues about first world war pacifism in a succinct and engaging format.
I write as someone who has been to Watford on only two occasions (one of them was for the launch of this film!). By giving a snapshot of peace activism in a particular area the film grounds the issues in locality and lived experience in a way that a more theoretical documentary may have failed to do. Ignorance of Watford is no bar to appreciating the film; though I dare say that those who know the area will find that the local references make it all the more interesting.
The format of Watford’s Quiet Heroes strikes a good balance between interviews, pieces presented to camera by Simon Colbeck and dramatisations of tribunals and punishments. The narrative moves neither too slowly nor too quickly, but major topics are necessarily dealt with briefly and I hope that the audience will be left wanting to know more.
I was delighted to see that the film makers avoided a common mistake that arises in the discussion of first world war COs: the tendency to make an artificial separation between ‘political’ and ‘religious’ COs. In the film, Quaker writer David Boulton, author of a definitive book on first world war conscientious objection in Britain, explains that many COs were both Christian and socialist.
However, the peace movement in the first world war was wider than conscientious objection. The tendency of many writers to conflate the two has long had the effect of excluding women peace activists from the narrative. Watford’s Quiet Heroes made this same mistake. There are clearly limitations when producing a half-hour film on such a complex subject. Indeed, given the brevity of the film, it is remarkable that it covers so much ground.
The shortcomings are to some extent made up for by the quality of the additional material on the DVD. This consists of interviews with activists and historians. We see Hannah Brock of War Resisters’ International saying, ‘Women always form a really important part of war resistance movements, and that’s not just in a supporting role. It’s not just in making the sandwiches. It’s actually in making these movements possible.’
The test of this film will not be whether it makes more people aware of the first world war pacifists, but how that awareness leads them to think and behave. We are no longer physically conscripted in the UK. Instead, our money is conscripted to fund warfare. Our minds are conscripted with the pressure to believe that violence is inevitable. Our very language is conscripted when words such as ‘defence’ and ‘security’ are used as euphemisms for warfare. I hope this film will lead us to ask: How can we learn from our predecessors a century ago? How can we be conscientious objectors to war and militarism today?
For further information see www.watfordquakers.org.uk/quiet-heroes or call 01923 269599.
