Conchie: What my Father didn't do in the war

CHAPTER 1

War Child

To kill Germans is a divine service in the fullest sense of the word.

Archdeacon Basil Wilberforce, Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons (1914)

We are on the side of Christianity against anti-Christ. We are on the side of the New Testament which respects the weak, and honours treaties, and dies for its friends and looks upon war as a regrettable necessity… It is a Holy War, and to fight in a Holy War is an honour.

Right Reverend A. F. Winnington-Ingram, Bishop of London (1914)

Christ would have spat in your face.

Anglican chaplain’s words to an imprisoned conscientious objector during World War One (1917)

But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

Jesus of Nazareth

This is what conscience looks like. It’s a fourteen-year-old boy sitting anxiously on a sofa late in the afternoon. He’s fondling a bloodstained tissue as his parents look at the purple swelling around his right eye. A knock on the front door and in comes his grammar school form teacher and out comes the story. My brother Iwan had been playing football that lunchtime, during which he had been assaulted by the school bully, who for no explicable reason punched him several times in the face. To the consternation of everyone, Iwan had not retaliated and had walked away with a bloodied nose and mouth. None of his friends understood his reaction and neither apparently had his teacher. So this was his question to my brother: Iwan, why didn’t you fight back? You were entitled to defend yourself. This question has been bothering me since school ended and I had to ask you. Iwan, who has never been a timid soul, had a clear and surprising answer. It was the way I was brought up, sir, never to take revenge on anyone. It would have gone against my conscience.

This book is about the power of conscience and the way it influenced my family’s story. In particular it’s about my father’s life before, during, and after World War Two. I’m going to tell the stories of the people, events, and ideas that shaped a decision he took as a 21-year-old man; a decision that still reaches into his family years after his death.

Most of us over the age of fifty have a war story. In one way or another, our fathers and some of our mothers were involved in the Second World War, willingly or not. And whether alive or dead our grandfathers also gave report of life and death in the First World War, the Great War. Beneath the largely peaceable skies of the northern hemisphere, we are only one generation removed from events that rocked the world and shaped the culture we inhabit.

Take my friend Dave for example. As we sit sipping coffee and he munches on a teacake, he asks me about this book. I explain it’s about pacifism during World War Two. He then discloses two extraordinary war tales. His father, Ron Clague, was one of the first to liberate Dachau, whose infamy as a Nazi death camp has gone down in history. Such was the disfiguring and deadly evil witnessed by this twenty-year-old, that he barely spoke about it. Dave talked also about Ron’s best friend, Ernie. As a teenager, Dave casually asked Ernie what he had done in the war and he received a reply that had never been given until that moment. Holding back tears and trying to contain big, painful emotions, Ernie talked about the Death Railway, made famous in the films The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Railway Man. Captured as a prisoner of war by the Japanese, he was forced to work on the vast railway that stretched from Ban Pong in Thailand to Thanbyuzayat in Myanmar (Burma). It was a brutal and torturous regime and many POWs were beaten to death. There were also a huge number of deaths among the Romusha, Asian civilians forced to work on the railroad. Over 12,000 British, Allied, and American servicemen alone lost their lives. It is said that for every piece of track laid, someone died.

A few days later and I am having coffee with Martin, another friend. In the course of our conversation, I casually mention the subject of this book and he drops a bombshell. His grandfather Maurice Allen was a conscientious objector (CO) in the First World War, whilst his father Dennis was a CO in the Second.

I too have a story; I’m just not sure whether I like it that much.

CHAPTER 2

Conchie

My dad, John Russell-Jones, was a CO (or Conchie as they were usually called) in World War Two. I want to open the sealed envelope of my father’s account, get behind the story, and find the 21-year-old young man who was prepared to face such opposition. This quest is given added bite by the looming centenary of an Act of Parliament that made my father’s dissent, and that of many thousands like him, possible.

As World War One went on, and newspapers reported the thousands of casualties suffered by the armed forces, and mutilated soldiers returned home, Britain increasingly lost its appetite for glory on the field of battle. Widely circulating accounts of chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gassing in the trenches added to the public’s distaste for military service. Whereas nearly 1.5 million men had volunteered during the first six months of the war, numbers had dropped dramatically by 1915, and continued to do so.

It was the day that saw the death of the happy amateur, the gentleman volunteer. After two years of warfare with Germany, the numbers of men enlisting to fight for king and empire were dwindling. No longer able to resist conscription, Prime Minister Asquith relented and on 2 March 1916 the Military Service Act came into force, having been passed in January. Much to the chagrin of the Liberal Party, Labour Party, and Trades Union Congress, the new law represented the failure of several voluntary schemes. Military service was now compulsory for all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one, although there were a number of exempt categories: married men, widowers with children, men in reserved occupations, and clergy.

And a new exemption was created: that of the conscientious objector. Virtually alone on the world stage, Britain allowed men to appeal against conscription on the grounds of conscience. A handful of nations gave exemptions to Mennonites and Quakers but none recognized the right to dissent on broader religious and moral grounds. So this was a groundbreaking moment in British legal history on two counts; conscription was introduced for the first time, as was the right to resist it.

But still the numbers enlisting were not sufficient for the war effort, so the Act was revised four months later. All men previously declared medically unfit for service were to be re-examined, and retired servicemen were also included within its provisions. In 1917 the Act was again changed: servicemen who had left military service due to ill health were to be re-examined, as were Home Service Territorials, and the list of reserved occupations was shortened.

But still they wouldn’t come and so the legal stick was further strengthened in January 1918 with further amendments. Various occupational and other exemptions were quashed, and yet the war needed far greater numbers. So in April 1918, with the war now reaching its apex and the burial grounds of the Western Front filling with the fallen dead, the parameters were dramatically changed. Men aged between seventeen and fifty-one were now conscripted and for the first time this extended to Ireland (although the policy was never implemented there), the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man.

Three million men volunteered for military service between August 1914 and when the first version of the Military Service Act came into force in 1916. A further 2.3 million men were conscripted as a result of legal coercion.

Globally, over 17 million men died in the Great War and a further 37 million were wounded. At least 887,711 United Kingdom and Colonies military personnel were killed and when civilian deaths were added, the UK casualty figure rose to over a million.

Conscription was abolished in 1919 but reintroduced in May 1939 before the outbreak of war with Germany. The Military Training Act required all men aged twenty and twenty-one to be called up for military duty, although this was superseded in September when the National Service (Armed Forces) Act came into force. All men aged between eighteen and forty were required to sign up for duty and, after extensive loss of life, this age limit was extended to fifty-one at the end of 1941. From 1941 onwards and for the first time in the history of the British Isles, single women aged twenty to thirty were also compelled to perform non-combatant duties.

All these legislative measures recognized the rights of conscientious objectors (COs) and prescribed the means by which their appeals could be heard and judged. In the First World War there were 16,000 registered Conchies and there were 61,000 in World War Two. And it is not unfair to say that as a group they were generally reviled and misunderstood. Many of the COs in both wars objected on the basis of religious conviction, but others said no for political and moral reasons.

I’m going to try and find out why my father followed the voice of conscience instead of the prime minister’s.

My dad was not a killer; that much I do know. However, even though his war passed without salute, parade, or medal he served in a different way: protecting others without lifting a rifle. Not so my mother. Her world war came to an end sometime in the 1990s; in that decade she broke her long silence and began to break the hold of the Official Secrets Act. Initially a trickle and finally as a broken cataract, she spoke of Bletchley Park and her part in Hitler’s downfall.

Whereas my mother kept mum for over a generation and then spoke of nothing but the war for the last ten years of her life, my father was different. His running commentary started as Germany invaded Poland, gathered pace during his student years, and then petered out in his later adult life.

Within the confines of home, he could sometimes be volubly critical of war, always advocating a more Christian perspective as he saw it. His pacifism was bundled together with republicanism, socialism, and a general dislike of any kind of privilege. In public, however, he was a model of diplomacy; except on one very public occasion when he cocked a snook at the establishment.

I need to find out why my father refused to fight in the Second World War, especially as this decision heaped criticism on him and his parents. Not unlike him, I’ve largely kept quiet about his Conchie status outside the home. So this quest will also probe my own reactions. Why have I kept so silent? Am I embarrassed, ashamed even? From a young age I knew that Dad was a pacifist; it’s my reaction that’s the problem. But there’s another aspect to all this: whereas I can recall his pacifist leanings, not all my siblings can. This is why tracing any family’s narrative is more or less doomed to be a two-headed fact and myth creation. So what follows is my take on my dad’s dissent; I cannot claim it as the authorized version.

The publication of my book about my mother’s wartime heroism, My Secret Life in Hut Six, and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the D-Day landings in 2014 have forced me to look again at my father’s legacy of non-violence. On the day of the seventy-fifth anniversary, the TV schedules were filled with men of his generation: grey, distinguished, and lauded for their courage. There was even the story of 89-year-old Bernard Jordan, a World War Two veteran who escaped from his care home on the south coast of England and travelled to Normandy to be part of the celebrations. Without a formal invite and without the home’s permission, he took a ferry to France and became an overnight national treasure.

All the men were of my father’s vintage, each with a story to tell. Whiskery, grey, and beret-capped, they looked back to a time when they took on the world. Like him, many of them became fathers and grandfathers and had known long professional lives. But they had faced a terrifying rain of bullets, bombs, grenades, and landmines and somehow survived. They came also to remember fallen comrades whose bodies now lie in foreign soil. Not so with my father. No stories of adventure, fear, or tedium; his world war was a very personal affair.

His legacy of pacifism sits uneasily with me and I’d like to know why he chose not to bear arms against the Germans and their allies. During my teenage years when teachers and other boys spoke openly of wartime connections, I kept my counsel. In more recent times my disquiet over the pacifism of my now dead father has grown. So this book is an investigation on two levels. I’m searching for clues about my father’s decision to stand up and not be counted as a soldier. I also want to understand and deal with my own warring feelings.

There have been times when I have admired his lonely, even heroic bravery. Not going along with popular opinion and having a dissenting voice is a deeply uncomfortable thing to do, especially when your actions are perceived as unpatriotic and weak. That takes a certain kind of courage. Particularly when I consider that my father was socially compliant, reserved, and conservative (with a small c).

I remember him as an old man: suited, aged, and blind. Quiet, dignified, he bore his sightlessness with great stoicism. Firm, often dogmatic, he was yet willing to find common ground with others. I want to reach back to his earlier outspoken bachelor years, and get beyond the guarded man, often suspicious of others, anxious about losing his reputation and messing it all up. I need to travel back to another age where he swam against the prevailing tide. I’m looking for a stubborn hothead; at least that’s the image in my mind. I need to peel back the layers, see beyond the various versions and copies that I and others have made. This is of course well-nigh impossible; in the end, our reputation is the sum total of what others think of us.

My cousin Gareth Morris published a small book during his seventieth year, a volume of poetry and prose catching each day of those twelve months. In it he reminisces about the mythical image of my father, known to him as Wncwl (Uncle) John. Gareth’s mother Madge was my dad’s oldest sister, and she died in 1992. Speaking of that generation, he says:

They always wanted to be seen to be doing the right thing and the chief arbiter of what was acceptable seemed to be Uncle John whether he was present or not. My mother would say to me as a child, if I spoke to her cheekily, Uncle John would never have spoken to Mam like that! Or if I was slightly unwilling to run a message, Uncle John used to clean the grate and lay the fire before going to school. I had such a strong impression that Uncle John was perfection personified that when, as a rather naive nine-year-old, an older boy introduced me graphically to the facts of life, I thought to myself Uncle John would never do a thing like that, even though I was fully aware that he was already the father of three children.¹

And it’s that perception of him that I’ve come across all my life, giving an added zest to my inquiry.

My brother Iwan has a further comment to add to Gareth’s observation:

He knew he was regarded as a paragon of virtue by his family and he couldn’t stomach it! I think he felt that he was as flawed as everyone else and certainly no better than anyone.

My dad never seemed to be, nor behaved like, a political activist and maybe he wasn’t. It could be that his sense of right conduct on all occasions rose out of his strong conviction about Christian morality and this included the duty not to fight. He also felt strongly about the duty not to consume alcohol, smoke tobacco, have sex outside marriage, and the need to vote for the Labour Party at all times.

As an adolescent I felt the strangeness of his pacifist viewpoint. As the youngest of five children, most of my friends had much younger fathers. Born in 1918, John was fifty by the time I was eight years old. My friends’ fathers belonged to a different generation; they listened to popular music and wore younger clothes. To the day of his death, my dad was most comfortable in a jacket and tie and his experience of modern music extended to Benjamin Britten, although we did also possess a copy of Herb Albert’s Tijuana jazz hymns. Military life for other dads had largely come through National Service, although there were a few friends whose fathers had fought in the war. I wondered why mine hadn’t. They had military photographs on their pianos: men in smiling khaki looking ahead to a brighter future. All we had were his powerful and oft-rehearsed arguments reflecting his Christian and political bias. Photographs of him from that period invariably picture him young and suited. But still I wonder how he could have been prepared to let Hitler in by the front door.

I recall an incomprehensible Physics lesson in 1974. The teacher assigned some sort of task involving ticker tape which I failed to complete in the company of a fellow pupil, Mark. Instead we talked about my parents. I’d spoken to him before and counted him a friend, but his tone that morning was hostile, biting. He poured scorn on my father’s profession as a minister, preferring his dad’s occupation as a fireman. This he said was a useful trade, helping many, whereas my dad probably did nothing from one Sunday to another. He wouldn’t listen to my counter-arguments. Somehow the conversation moved to the war. It transpired that his dad had fought in World War Two, North Africa he thought. What had mine done? I reddened, felt awkward as my collar moistened. I replied that he had been a conscientious objector. Never heard