A Quaker Conscientious Objector: Wilfrid Littleboy's Prison Letters, 1917-1919

Published for the first time, this private collection of his letters tells the story of how this middle-class accountant came to be imprisoned, and what happened to him inside.
The letters follow Wilfrid’s decision as an absolutist conscientious objector to voluntarily go to prison in 1917 rather than join the armed forces. He served his prison sentences cheerfully, with an abiding faith in his choice, and an increased awareness of working-class politics.
With an introduction and epilogue, Wilfrid’s letters bring to life the realities of conscience, military discipline, and early twentieth-century prisons. The letters are uplifting and engaging, vividly telling the story of hope through faith, books and nature, alongside the daily endurance of prison conditions in wartime Britain.
Wilfrid Littleboy went on to hold national Quaker leadership positions. His experience as a CO helped sustain in British law the right to conscientiously object to war, and influenced Quaker discernment on conscription and conflict during the Second World War and beyond.
Dr Rebecca Wynter is a historian of medicine, and Ben Pink Dandelion is Professor of Quaker Studies, both at the University of Birmingham.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Handheld Research
• Release date: May 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781912766284

Book preview

Foreword

by Deborah Nash

My grandparents Wilfrid and Winifred Littleboy came to live with us in the village of Jordans in Buckinghamshire in 1976. Wilfrid was by then 91, and although not as robust as he once was, he was still driving and still insistent on digging the vegetable patch! Active in mind and spirit, Wilfrid was deeply involved in the Society of Friends to the very end of his life.

Wilfrid had married Winifred Edminson at Jordans in May 1920. Winifred was brought up at Leighton Park School in Reading, where her father Frederick was housemaster of Grove House. She was educated at The Mount School in York, and at London University, and went on to teach history at Ackworth School. All three schools were Quaker schools. She gave up her teaching once she was married. It is likely that Wilfrid would have met Winifred through Young Friends in the immediate post-war period. After the wedding, they settled in Birmingham where they had two children – my mother Margaret (Mel) who was born in 1923, and Christopher, who was born in 1927.

My younger sister Beth Fenton recalls a conversation she had with Wilfrid about pacifism. She remembers being deeply impressed that he did not criticise people who had fought in the war, saying that each person should do what they felt God called them to do; but for himself, he felt he should witness steadfastly against the use of violence to address political differences – that always it must be remembered that war is not the only answer.

Wilfrid was a wonderful grandfather – kind and gentle, with a whimsical sense of humour. He was interested in all of us and keen to share in our lives. He never talked about his time in prison, though we were aware that his habit of taking porridge without either salt or sugar related to that period in his life. We knew, of course, that he had prodigious recall of texts, both religious and non-religious, as well as his enjoyment of the ridiculous. However, it was only 30 years later, when my mother and I set out on the project of transcribing his letters from prison, that I realised just how much this recall ability had been nurtured during his time in custody. Wilfrid had read a huge number of books and had committed a lot of text to memory. This served to strengthen his personal conviction, providing endless food for thought, as well as for ‘discussions’ in letters, or in the exercise yard.

The transcription process took us most of ten years. We were helped and encouraged by the eminent Quaker historian Ted Milligan, who was a family friend. Although they were many years apart in age, Wilfrid and Ted developed an enduring friendship. Their paths first crossed at Yearly Meeting in 1934, when Wilfrid had just been appointed Clerk. They remained closely in touch until Wilfrid died in 1979. Several Jordans Quakers and members of our immediate family also gave much welcomed support. My mother would have been so delighted that the letters have found their way into the care of ‘Ben’ Pink Dandelion and Rebecca Wynter at the Centre for Research in Quaker Studies at Woodbrooke.

Wilfrid was the eldest son of Francis and Lucy Littleboy of Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire. They were a close family who were all deeply committed to the Society of Friends and to the welfare of the people around them. Francis was a bank manager by profession, but he and Lucy spent a lot of time working at the Men’s and Women’s Adult Schools as well as the Temperance Societies in Newport Pagnell. Although Francis sat on the Urban District Council, he always refused magisterial work as he felt himself ‘unfit to judge his fellow men’.¹ Wilfrid inherited many of his father’s characteristics and values. He loved music, and although he was not allowed to learn an instrument as a child, took great joy from playing the pianola as an adult. He had a very strong singing voice.

The four brothers – Wilfrid, Ronald, Alfred and Gerald – were educated at Bootham School in York, where, as well as pursuing their academic studies, they were all keen cricket players. This love of cricket (to which there are brief references in the letters) remained with Wilfrid throughout his life. Even in their old age, he and his wife Winifred would be regular visitors at Warwickshire County Cricket Ground.

Another passion of the Littleboy family was hillwalking in the Lake District and Snowdonia. Wilfrid’s recollections of these holidays were of great comfort to him during his time in prison. He was an accomplished bird-watcher, and was well used to reading the weather from cloud patterns. There are numerous references to natural history in the letters, many observations being made from his cell window, or out in the exercise yard.

After leaving Bootham in 1902, Wilfrid settled in Birmingham where he was apprenticed to a firm of accountants. He was closely involved with the Society of Friends both locally and nationally, and built up a very close relationship with his Uncle William (Littleboy) who was to become Warden of Woodbrooke in 1904, a Quaker settlement and later a college outside Birmingham. Wilfrid lived at Woodbrooke for two terms in 1905, and remained deeply committed to the college for the rest of his life.

Perhaps the most relevant aspect of Wilfrid’s witness in this period was his involvement in the development of the Young Friends Committee sparked off by the Swanwick Conference of 1911. Wilfrid was its first secretary, and guided it through the bewildering period between the outbreak of war in August 1914 and Yearly Meeting in summer 1915. Ted Milligan writes in his obituary of Wilfrid that ‘it was a time of confusion and unsettlement’ and that William Littleboy, who was by then 62, said with some justice at Yearly Meeting ‘that the older generation had been hesitating and seeking’. He goes on to say that ‘Wilfrid however, was among the young men of military age who showed no spirit of compromise. He knew that the absolutist stance was the only one, in true conscience, that he could take and that he would go to prison. Both he and his great friend Hugh Gibbins were arrested on 1 January 1917 and went through the process together’.²

In a letter found in my mother’s papers, Ted Milligan writes that ‘although a businessman by profession, William Littleboy was more interested in men and books than in machines. All his life he had been a reader, and although not a scholar, he kept himself abreast of present day thought and gradually built up an impressive library. Partly owing to this and partly owing to his great gift for friendship, he was able to help many through the problems and afflictions of life’.³ Wilfrid certainly benefitted from Uncle William’s support and friendship whilst he was in prison. The vast majority of books to which he had access to during this period would most likely have come from William’s personal library, or the library at Woodbrooke.

About sixteen years ago, my mother proposed that we transcribe my grandfather’s letters from prison as a gift to the next generation in the family. With the help of Ted Milligan, and more recently, Rebecca Wynter and ‘Ben’ Pink Dandelion who wrote the extensive introduction, the letters have now been put into a wider historical context than I could ever have dreamed of. I hope A Quaker Conscientious Objector will be of real interest to many. It is a fascinating insight into two years of my grandfather’s life, two years that were fundamental in the formation of his conviction that war was wrong and that there is ‘that of God’ in each one of us.

Dr Rebecca Wynter is a historian at the University of Birmingham. She has worked, published, and exhibited on the history of Quakers and the histories of medicine, psychiatry, and mental health.

'Ben' Pink Dandelion works at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre directing their postgraduate programmes and is Professor of Quaker Studies at the University of Birmingham. He has published widely on Quakerism.

Wilfrid Littleboy, faith, and First World War conscientious objection

By Rebecca Wynter and Pink Dandelion

The young man you see looking at you from the cover began his life in early February 1885. With many from his generation, Wilfrid Ernest Littleboy lived through the tumultuous world wars of the twentieth century. For millions of others, death took them early; on battlefields overseas, in violence of all forms on the home front and front line, or dying in hospitals or at home. But when this photograph was taken during his first term at Woodbrooke in Birmingham in the English Midlands in 1905, at what was known as a ‘settlement’ (a place for adult education), both wars were a world away, though the first arrived only a few years later. Unlike many of his generation, Wilfrid did not rush to join up in 1914. As a Quaker – a faith sprung from the mid-seventeenth-century English Civil Wars, and rooted in Christianity, peace and peace-making – he found that his conscience would not allow him to fight or support the war in any way, even after the introduction of compulsory conscription in 1916. So it was that this 29-year-old Birmingham accountant found himself on the wrong side of the law as an ‘absolutist’ conscientious objector (CO), arrested and imprisoned on and off for 28 months. He was released for the final time in April 1919, around six months after the guns had fallen silent.

Wilfrid’s experiences during the 1914–18 conflict were not ‘typical’, but they were formative for him as a person, for his faith, and for the other Quakers and COs navigating life after the Armistice, facing the Second World War, and looking forward to the years beyond. The letters in this book have until now been kept privately by Wilfrid’s daughter and grand-daughter. Written for his parents and other relatives, they give a profound insight into the experiences of a CO with a deep faith. Few such personal and reflective accounts from Quakers, detailed through a substantial collection of letters, have been widely circulated, and none at such a distance from the crucible of war. Wilfrid’s writing home is published here in full for the first time. Without being extensively mediated by the decades of myth that have been built around, for example, the accounts of absolutist Quakers T Corder Catchpool, Stephen Hobhouse and Hubert W Peet,⁴ this collection is a rare opportunity for an assessment of a first-hand account on its own merits and to gain unclouded insight from experiences of the war. Through Wilfrid’s own words we can see military discipline and prison life, and how a searching conscience was shaped by these often-overlooked experiences of the so-called ‘Great War’.

Wilfrid was born in 1885 to a Quaker couple in their late twenties, Francis and Lucy Littleboy, while they were living in Northchurch, Hertfordshire, in southern England. Three years later the couple would have a second son, Ronald. The household, which had moved to Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, a little further west, also included a domestic nurse and a general servant.⁵ Within a few years, Wilfrid had two more brothers (Alfred and Gerald) and began attending Bootham, a Quaker residential school at York in the north of England. In 1902 Wilfrid left to take up an apprenticeship at an accountancy firm in Birmingham. He settled in the city, staying with his well-to-do Uncle William and Aunt Margaret, both during William’s wardenship of Woodbrooke and at Northfield after his retirement as a gas and electrical fittings manufacturer.⁶ By 1915 the First World War was already five months old and Wilfrid had become a local partner in the chartered accountancy firm, Viney, Price, Goodyear and Littleboy.⁷ Two years later, he had left this comfortable, middle-class professional life, and was sitting in a cell at Wormwood Scrubs, a notorious prison in London.

***

‘Quaker’ was originally a disparaging name given by a seventeenth-century judge to describe the outward physical manifestation of inner faith that he saw in a group of non-conformist Protestant worshippers who rejected the Established Church of England. In a nation riven by religious tension, and amidst suspicions surrounding the motivations and loyalty to the restored monarchy from 1660, Quakers were actively persecuted for their beliefs and practices and in many cases were fined or imprisoned. In 1675, the faith group established a means to monitor these ‘sufferings’ and offer support. This became Meeting for Sufferings, which met regularly, and later expanded its remit to become the executive body of Quakers in Britain. It continues to be a central part of the British Quaker administrative structure. Persecution continued into the eighteenth century, sliding gradually into a more insidious manifestation, though non-conformists were still barred from participating in many areas of public life due to legislation like the Test and Corporation Acts (preventing their entry into crown and government positions) and barred from study at Oxford and Cambridge.

Friends (another name for Quakers) are generally thought to have gone through a ‘quietist’ period in the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries. This was a theological approach that favoured many of the elements inherent in the ideas of the founders of Quakerism, such as George Fox (1624–1691). The emphasis that this had, on contemplation, stillness, and being present with God, led some to limit their engagement with the world beyond the Quaker faith. While many men and women Friends engaged deeply with people and lives outside, especially with the influence of Evangelicalism in the early nineteenth century – and in business aided by the wide recognition that Quakers expressed their faith through strict adherence to truth and honesty – the Quaker Renaissance later in the century encouraged a new outlook. In the 1880s, younger Friends were beginning to question the stance that the Bible was the literal word of God and searched for ‘authentic historical roots of Quaker spirituality’.⁸ The conviction that the Light of Christ resided in everyone – that anyone could hear God if they only listened – now transformed and strengthened the beliefs underpinning the peace testimony, as it became ‘an unimpeachable verification of [Quakers’] historic refusal to fight with carnal weapons’.⁹ This rejuvenation of the peace testimony and an international brotherhood in Christ meant that ‘not only did the makers of the Quaker Renaissance discover what they believed to be a sounder basis for their faith, but they also came to believe that the practice of that faith required them to reach outside their own to Society to share the concerns of those less fortunate, especially the victims of ignorance, poverty and war’.¹⁰ The 1895 Manchester Conference of Friends was the culmination of this refreshed thinking, with progressive figures like Edward Grubb, John W Graham, William C Braithwaite and John Wilhelm Rowntree dominating proceedings, giving ‘encouragement and stimulus to … [those] who were endeavouring to find an interpretation of Christianity which was compatible with modern thought’.¹¹

This new outlook was soon tested by the 1899 outbreak of the second South African ‘Boer’ War, a conflict sparked by British Imperial interference in the country amidst the wider ‘Scramble for Africa’ by European colonial powers. In Britain this was notably driven by the Birmingham politician and Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. Progressive Friends were shocked at the vociferous jingoism shouted from the pages of the press, and whilst broad measures countered what was elsewhere considered the enthusiastic and patriotic attitude of the British public – such as the purchase of The Daily News by ardent pacifist and Quaker Birmingham businessman, George Cadbury – Grubb and Rowntree were speaking out to their co-religionists. In particular, they addressed those who felt the conflict was necessary or else should be objected to quietly, for there was an unsettling diversity of approach, with supporters of the war including Thomas Hodgkin, ‘the pre-eminent public Quaker of his day’,¹² and Joseph Pease, Quaker MP and President of the Peace Society. Rowntree, on the other hand, argued that this was:

no time for soft speech. There are elements in our national character which call for stern condemnation […] Our testimony against war, if it is to be vital, must not be mere testimony against the use of armed force – it must cut at the roots of war, at the pride of Empire, the narrow popular patriotism rendered ignoble by its petty hatreds and the insatiable hunger for wealth visibly threatens our ruin.¹³

This call continued to resonate long after the end of the South African conflict. The following generation of Quakers organised the first National Conference for Young Friends at Swanwick, Derbyshire, in 1911. Addressed by older progressive Quakers, the audience were those ‘who, in a few years would form the front rank of Quaker resistance to the Great War’.¹⁴ For many the ‘atmosphere and inspiration of Swanwick […] was probably the most significant event to give meaning and direction to their faith’.¹⁵ Wilfrid Littleboy was at Swanwick, and went on to become the first secretary of the new Young Friends Committee.

The radicalisation of younger Quakers was understandable, given that at home and elsewhere in the British Empire creeping militarisation was taking place. ‘Between 1908 and 1914 five parliamentary bills were introduced … to implement conscription in various guises’.¹⁶ All failed, but in the Dominions of Australia and New Zealand the authorities pressed to introduce conscription, ushering in compulsory enlistment to the military. In 1911 Australia introduced compulsory military training for boys and young men between 12 and 26.¹⁷ These rumblings came amidst increasing international tension, fuelled by nationalism in Europe and global colonial ambitions. In particular, recent decades had seen new nations unify and form under militaristic governments, namely, in 1871, both Germany and Italy. The old imperial powers of Britain, Russia and the Ottoman Empire had settled into their roles, with numerous treaties between many countries ensuring an aversion to brinkmanship and even introducing, in the case of Britain and France, l’entente cordiale. The new nations unbalanced the system, but war in the Balkans region of Europe would unsettle matters still further. On 28 July 1914, in what was an aftershock of the conflicts, Gavril Princip, a Serbian nationalist, assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and the system of international treaties that bound different allegiances together pulled the continent and various colonies all over the world into a mechanised and bloody conflict between two power blocs.

Meanwhile, in Birmingham, life continued as before. Since the eighteenth century, Birmingham had become known as the ‘city of a thousand trades’ and ‘the workshop of the world’. The city had a well-established industrial heritage and enterprise based on un-conventionality, due to it being ‘a town without a shackle’: ‘strangers from whatever quarter’ were able to ‘pursue their avocations’ in a place noted to be ‘a free town’, without interference of ‘guild or corporation’.¹⁸ Even if this was an exaggeration,¹⁹ the city caught the imagination of America, too – in the late nineteenth century it had there been given the epithet ‘the best-governed city in the world’²⁰ – and its citizens continued to enjoy the fruits of the dramatic municipal reforms introduced by Joseph Chamberlain during his tenure as mayor. His death and burial in Birmingham came in July 1914. He had helped to make it ‘a leading city of the British Empire’ after it was granted city status in 1889, which, via the Greater Birmingham Act of 1911, had ‘almost trebled’ in size.²¹

At the centre of the city, around halfway between St Philip’s Cathedral and Birmingham Town Hall, in Waterloo Street, Wilfrid Littleboy was at work. At 29, he was an active Quaker, closely associated with the Woodbrooke Settlement, Sibford School and North Warwickshire Monthly Meeting (the Monthly Meetings were a core part of the reflective and administrative organisation of Quakers).²² On 4 August 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. Like millions of others Wilfrid saw that hostilities were not over by Christmas 1914. He witnessed the expansion of the conflict in 1915 and in 1916, with colonial warfare, war on the sea, and Italy joining Germany’s allies. He read about the slaughter on the Eastern Front, about Gallipoli and the Dardanelles, and Salonica. By 1916 the war had become one of attrition on the Western Front.

Wilfrid was part of a community that was both a key part of Birmingham’s success – with important families including the Cadburys, Lloyds and Albrights – and keenly focused on peace. ‘Although the city appeared to be a hotbed of pro-war enthusiasm, it had also been home to a lively pacifist opposition to the war from the very beginning’,²³ and Quakers featured heavily in these ranks. In wartime the effects of this were palpable: ‘many risked unpopularity, public censure and imprisonment for their beliefs’.²⁴ Indeed, as soon as the conflict began, Birmingham’s Mayor Elect, William A Albright, stepped down because of his anti-war stance. In late 1916, he, Harrison Barrow, Joseph Sturge and George Cadbury – all serving magistrates – were visited by the police, to have their loyalty assessed and their anti-conscription support checked.²⁵ This tension is of particular note amid the politics and attitudes of a pro-war city. Certainly, while Birmingham might have edged towards a ‘hotbed of pacifism’, it was not the ‘virtual citadel for the anti-war cause’ that historian Cyril Pearce found at Huddersfield in Yorkshire, a place deeply connected with non-conformists and the Labour movement.²⁶ The difference seems to lie either in the terroir of Huddersfield’s pacifism, or else that the opposition in Birmingham was perhaps thought more understandable, due to so many Quakers being in prominent, often civic, positions; or simply that its anti-war activities have yet to be fully explored. In Birmingham Wilfrid observed the gradual tilt towards conscription and in response the rise of the anti-conscription cause.

After the outbreak of war, the voluntarism approach had seen the growth of ‘pals’ battalions’, with friends, workmates and neighbour-hood groups signing up together to volunteer to fight. Autumn 1914 had also seen the establishment and deployment of the voluntary Friends’ War Victims’ Relief Committee and the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. The former was made up of men and women who, with the blessing from London Yearly Meeting (at that time the central administration for Quakers in Britain), worked to provide aid for civilians. The Friends’ Ambulance Unit was a male-only organisation, under Quaker direction but without official support, that provided medical care to soldiers and relief to civilians.

Others mobilised in wholly different ways. The English Quaker Henry Hodgkin and the German Lutheran Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze shook hands goodbye at a train station in Cologne, Germany – pledging ‘We are one in Christ, and can never be at war’ – after the suspension of a Christian pacifist meeting due to the commencement of hostilities.²⁷ Shortly afterwards, in 1915, the Fellowship of Reconciliation was established as a non-denominational Christian organisation promoting peace. A few months earlier, in November 1914, Fenner Brockway, the editor of the left-wing Labour Leader, had published a letter from himself in the newspaper: ‘Although conscription may not be so imminent as the press suggests it would perhaps be as well for men of enlistment age who are not prepared to take the part of a combatant in the war, whatever the penalty for refusing, to band themselves together so that we may know our strength.’²⁸ Brockway received 300 responses, amongst them Edward Grubb and Reverend Leyton Richards (who would become the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s first general secretary).²⁹ The result was the No-Conscription Fellowship, which, under its chair Clifford Allen, united men and women opposed to conscription on religious, political, moral, philosophical and humanitarian grounds. It was vociferous and radical, and has even been described as the ‘hound of conscience’.³⁰

In 1915, as the numbers of early volunteers for the armed forces dropped, a recruitment drive was established. Known as the ‘Derby Scheme’, the project drew up a census of men in reserved occupations and of ‘fighting age’, the cut-off for which had also been raised to 51 years of age. The number of volunteers was still not sufficient, and a manpower crisis loomed, and with it the very real threat of conscription.³¹ Behind the scenes in Parliament pacifist sympathisers were preparing. A small group of anti-conscription MPs met with the aim of presenting a united front to the government. While the group worked together, their reasons for opposition were varied, including libertarian, economic, humanitarian, political, moral and religious.³² With their overlapping membership of the steering committee of the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, the few weeks in hand before a conscription bill was presented in Parliament permitted Quaker MPs like Arnold S Rowntree and T E Harvey to organise. Friends’ Ambulance Unit representatives would meet Lord Derby and other War Office officials to negotiate the continuation of the Unit’s work and the refusal of its members to join the armed forces on the grounds of conscience. These ‘negotiations … completely transformed the experience of the War for hundreds [if not thousands] of men. Not only did the arrangements ensure the Government officially recognised the spiritual influences, stance and voluntary nature of the FAU’, it also helped set in train the insertion of a ‘conscience clause’, which would see that the Unit would continue to operate and diversify into UK-based work entirely separate from any activity that might be considered as contributing to the waging of war. It would also instigate plans for the establishment of a body for non-Quaker conscientious objectors (known as the ‘Pelham Committee’) who could be placed in service, including the Army’s newly-introduced Non-Combatant Corps.³³

The ‘conscience clause’ seemed clear enough:

Any certificate of exemption may be absolute, conditional, or temporary, as the Military Service tribunal think best suited to the case, and in the case of an application on conscientious grounds may take the form of an exemption from combatant duty only, or may be conditional on the applicant being engaged in some work which in the opinion of the Tribunal dealing with the case is of national importance.³⁴

What this meant in practice was the mobilisation of a new legal mechanism to assess claims, planning where people might be placed and what counted as ‘work of national importance’, and what exactly should be done with those who might refuse conscription in any form. Officially the first two aspects went comparatively well, even if they were subject to local practice and bias and the uneven application of decisions.³⁵ The most significant controversy was over absolute exemption, which could have been given in theory, but was almost never granted. Tribunals were established in local areas and magistrates and other civic figures served on them. They not only presided over decisions involving conscientious objection, but also on claims for exemption from military service based, for example, on domestic, business or health issues. The first ruling could be appealed before a County Tribunal, and that decision could be taken to the Central Tribunal for reassessment.³⁶ For the majority of men who sought not to join up or fight, and whose case was supported by the tribunal, the decision was a conditional exemption on the proviso that they would take up work of national importance. This sort of work was described in detail by the Government’s Pelham Committee (which included Quaker MP T E Harvey), but the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in particular was recognised by local tribunals, with some also recognising the Friends’ War Victims’ Relief Committee, as offering appropriate alternative war service. The military had also hurriedly established the Non-Combatant Corps in order to try to cope with those who might not want to fight, but who could or must accept service that supported the armed forces in a logistical or labour capacity. Aside from the Non-Combatant Corps, the positions open to conscientious objectors included agricultural work, forestry, food production and factory work, but in reality ‘most COs were directed by Tribunals into’ the Non-Combatant Corps.³⁷

The third pacifist position that this new tribunal system faced was that of absolutist conscientious objection, which proved complicated and the mechanisms to deal with it had not been thought through. Soon after conscription had been formally