Mapping Dissent: Conscientious Objectors in Northern England during the First World War

Abstract

The men who refused to fight for King and Country in the First World War have now been identified and placed in their home communities by a Register of British Conscientious Objectors. Doing that has exposed the geography of that dissent and has helped map popular attitudes to the war more closely than hitherto. With an explanatory text are tables of Conscientious Objectors (COs) in the eight counties of Northern England—Cumberland, Durham, Lancashire, Northumberland, Westmorland and the Yorkshire Ridings. Each table sets out the numbers of COs listed in the Register arranged by local government areas and calculates a CO Index to indicate the proportion of COs among those eligible to serve. Interpreting and comparing that data helps create new insights into the hugely diverse wartime politics of the Northern Counties.

Keywords:

• conscription
• conscientious objector
• community
• dissent
• resister

Notes

1 This opening section is based on my survey of the literature about 1914–18 war resisters; Cyril Pearce, ‘Britain’s 1914–18 War Resisters’, in The Spokesman, 130 (2015), 66–90; also, Cyril Pearce, ‘Writing about Britain’s 1914–18 War Resisters—Literature Review’, Reviews in History (2015), http://history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1779 (Last accessed 2023); the Introduction (pp. 17 to 23) in my Comrades in Conscience: The Story of an English Community’s Opposition to the Great War (2001 and 2014) contains a summary of the more general literature about the First World War which touches on the anti-war movement.

2 ‘Celebrated’ COs, usually identified by autobiographies or biographies which deal with their other contributions to public life, will include, among the more noted: Clifford Allen, David Garnett, Stephen Hobhouse, Bernard Langdon-Davies, James Maxton, James Millar, Bertrand Russell and John Rodker, Sydney Silverman, Fenner Brockway and many more.

3 John W. Graham, Conscription and Conscience: A History 1916–1919 (London, 1922).

4 John Rae, Conscience and Politics: The British Government and Conscientious Objectors to Military Service 1916–1919 (Oxford, 1922), p. 132; Pearce, Comrades in Conscience: The Story of an English Community’s Opposition to the Great War, pp. 168–69.

5 Pearce, Comrades in Conscience: The Story of an English Community's Opposition to the Great War; See also, Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge, 2008) p. 13 et seq. and his review of Cyril Pearce, Communities of Resistance: Conscience and Dissent in Britain during the First World War (2020) in Social History, 46:3 (August 2021), 346–47.

6 Conscience and Character: The Record of the Conscientious Objectors. An Enquiry and its Results, 21 Jun. 1916. Manchester and District NCF, Catherine Marshall Collection, Cumbria Record Office, D/Mar.4/7.

7 Pearce, Communities of Resistance: Conscience and Dissent in Britain during the First World War (London, 2020).

8 Winifred Holtby notwithstanding, in historic times there was no ‘South Riding’. South Yorkshire as an administrative entity was a creation of the 1972 Local Government Reform Act.

9 Pearce Register of British First World War Conscientious Objectors in Imperial War Museum, ‘Lives of the First World War’, http:blog.livesofthefirstworldwar.org/tag/pearce-register (Last accessed 2018); since 2019, https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk (Last accessed 2023).