by Christopher Draper
PART
one of this story explained that 13 anarchists in the North-West region
were active conscientious objectors to WWI. As soon as conscription was
introduced in February 1916 two comrades, Arthur Helsby and William
Greaves, applied for absolute exemption but to no avail. A third
anarchist, Walter Barlow was arrested for ignoring the draft and fined
before disappearing for the duration of hostilities. Herbert Holt,
William Hopkins, William Jackson and Charles Warwick were nabbed as
“absentees” at Stockport anarchist club, along with Helsby (again!). The
police then rounded up and arrested a further 4 Stockport
Anarcho-Conchies (A-C’s) and by the end of the year all but 2 of our 13
(one was still under age and the other elusive) had been collared but
that didn’t end their protests.
Happy Christmas Conchies!
Christmas
1916 found 10 of our 13 anarchist conchies in captivity, 7 incarcerated
in Wormwood Scrubs, 1 in Leeds Prison and 2 (Greaves and Holt)
teetering on the edge of imprisonment. William Greaves hadn’t yet
exhausted his escalating appeals for absolute exemption after he’d been
automatically enlisted in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers whilst Herbert Holt
initially accepted alternative work on a Wakefield “Home Office Scheme”
(HOS). Soon both attracted the wrath of the authorities and they were
reunited with their imprisoned comrades.
Predictably Pointless Appeals
Herbert
Holt was the man who’d argued in court for return of the pamphlets the
police seized on their first raid on the Stockport anarchist club only
to be arrested as an absentee on their second visit. Holt’s appeal ended
with “alternative work” at a new HOS at Platt Hall Fields, Manchester.
The scheme aimed to cultivate unused land to increase home food
production. Twenty-five or so conchies were billeted in Platt Hall
whilst they worked the adjacent fields. As usual, the authorities
started taking liberties and when Herbert was ordered to maintain
Manchester’s other parks and cemeteries he objected and spent the rest
of the war in Strangeways. William Greaves’ sequence of appeals
concluded with a court-martial at Oswestry followed by serial
imprisonment; Shrewsbury, Wormwood Scrubs and finally Walton.
'Lion Taming'
Arrested
at the Stockport
'Workers’ Freedom Group' (WFG) Club both William
Jackson and William Hopkins were compulsorily enlisted in the Third
Cheshire Regiment and posted to Birkenhead Barracks whose infamous
unofficial motto was
'We tame lions here!' The regiment systematically
brutalised and humiliated conchies at their Birkenhead HQ but Jackson
and Hopkins remained resolute even after the shit hit the fan. Slapped,
kicked and thrown over eight foot high walls in full public view at
Birkenhead Park, along with 3 fellow conchies they were then
court-martialled for non-compliance. Their case became a cause celebre
after the national press learned of their outrageous mistreatment.
Despite the officers’ brutality it was the conchies who were
subsequently sentenced to two years imprisonment (with Hard Labour) in
Wormwood Scrubs.
Protest & Survive
Anarchist
club comrades Robert Seaton and Charles Bradlaugh Warwick adopted a
contrasting approach to conscientious objection. Seaton confronted
conscription head-on whereas Warwick preferred ducking and diving.
Initially arrested as an absentee and compulsorily enlisted in the
Yorkshire Regiment, Charles Warwick refused to sign his army papers and
immediately went AWOL. Posted as a deserter in the Police Gazette he was
eventually captured, court-martialled at Blackpool and imprisoned.
Subsequently sent to Dartmoor Work Camp he escaped and was again
proscribed by the authorities. Arrested inSalford on 24 October
1917 Warwick was charged with forgery, having
'creatively amended' his
call-up papers to facilitate his freedom. Pronounced guilty he was sent
back to prison.
Robert Seaton’s straightforward approach was to
simply say no to everything, no conscription, no tribunal, no
alternative work. He was the absolutist’s absolutist. Consequently
Seaton is amongst the conchie elite (anarchists form a solid chunk of
this group) who endured three courts-martial and three consequent prison
sentences; in Wandsworth, Walton and Carlisle. In July 1917, whilst
imprisoned at Walton, Seaton engaged in a mass hunger strike along with
around 20 other conchies and Irish Republicans in a solidarity protest
against force feeding. Subsequently transferred to Carlisle Prison, he
was incarcerated long after the war ended. On one occasion, when the
authorities feared he might die in gaol, he was “temporarily” allowed
out for 28 days under the
'cat and mouse act' but it wasn’t until August
1919 that Robert and the last of Britain’s imprisoned conchies were
finally and officially released.
The conchie career of Samuel
Brooks, another Stockport comrade, was remarkably similar to Seaton’s.
On occasions they even were court-martialled together and Samuel starved
alongside Robert in the 1917 Walton mass hunger strike.
Stockport
cotton piercer Alfred Toft endured an extra level of suffering when he
went on hunger strike at Lincoln Prison August 1917 in protest against
enduring arbitrary punishment. Twice force-fed through a tube shoved
down his throat into his stomach he spent the rest of the war inside
Lincoln gaol.
In the inimitable words of Monty Python,
'he was
lucky!' - Stockport iron moulder Robert Stuart Williams was force fed
more than fifty times in Preston Prison. Arrested as an absentee in
1916, routinely conscripted into a fighting unit, Robert refused to obey
orders and so initiated the usual absurdist cycle of courts-martial,
prison, disobedience and then round again. After joining the A-C elite
with 3 CM’s, 3 prison sentences and over 2 years inside to his credit he
decided to hunger strike against his continued imprisonment after the
1918 armistice. As the prison authorities recorded, he was
systematically force fed
'to finish or release him'.
Knutsford Welcomes Burnley’s Bakunin
Arthur
Riley was a Burnley cotton weaver living at home and supporting his
crippled brother and aged mother, who was afflicted with chronic
rheumatism. Arthur’s father was already dead, as were four of Arthur’s
siblings. It was an impoverished family and the local tribunal initially
cut him some slack but in 1917 they demanded his enlistment so Arthur
tried to avoid them by sleeping at different addresses. Riley’s opinions
on the war were already well known around town as he was an activist
who, the previous year, had a long letter published in the local paper
defending conchies. Arrested and tried in September 1917 Arthur informed
the court,
'Politically he was an anarchist absolutely and he was an
atheist in religious matters. He believed it was morally wrong to take
human life or assist in doing so.' After a spell of imprisonment in
Preston Gaol, just before Xmas 1917 Riley was sent to Knutsford Work
Camp where, along with 800 other conchies he was housed in the disused
prison. As if that wasn’t bad enough the good townsfolk of Knutsford
conducted an unrelenting campaign of violent hostility to the conchies
billeted on their doorstep. An endless stream of stories published in
the local press stoked up resentment;
'Milk for Objectors but Not Enough
for Babies',
'Proposed Exclusion from Library',
'Freeholders Ban
Conchies from Playing Football on Heath' and the cruellest blow of all,
'The Ladies tennis club at Knutsford have decided that any member who
associates with a Conchie must resign at once!'
From 7am until
5.30pm Arthur and his comrades were set to work repairing the
dilapidated prison building but were then allowed into town as long as
they returned by 9pm. This wasn’t as attractive as it might appear as
townsfolk generally refused to serve the conchies in shops and even the
local medic, Dr Fennell, boasted,
'He hated them and would like to drown
every last one of them… One was brought to his surgery and he had shown
him the door.' Most nights a hostile reception committee was gathered at
the gates awaiting any conchie brave enough to leave the camp. Violence
erupted on numerous occasions and whilst Arthur was at Knutsford one
attack was so outrageous that the local authorities were obliged to
intervene and prosecute 10 local jingoes.
In Court Superintendant
Sutherland explained,
'The attack on the conchies began in Canute
Place and ended in front of the prison in something which approached a
riot.” Despite damning evidence the culprits were merely bound over and
the magistrates expressed their hope that their victims (the conchies)
would be removed from the town as soon as possible, and so they were. In
the New Year (1918) Arthur and the rest of the Knutsford conchies were
transferred to Dartmoor Work camp and as the local paper reported,
“There were great rejoicings in the town on their leaving.'
Cheeky Boy!
Conscription
continued into 1918 and in March, as the Manchester papers reported, 'An impudent and very empty appeal was made by an 18-year-old
conscientious objector at the Salford Appeals Tribunal…the youth said in
his application that the British war aims were all wrong. He did not
believe in war'. The Tribunal merely expressed amusement when the young
man,
'admitted he was an anarchist' and most reasonably argued,
'that he
did not think it was right that Mesopotamia when captured by the
British should go to Lever Bros. the soap manufacturers, as one Cabinet
Minister had intimated in a recent speech.' Our anonymous comrade was
ordered to report when called upon but appears to have evaded
conscription.
Aftermath
As our comrades claimed,
this was no war to end wars, on the contrary. Sadly the war’s deadly
toll included the British anarchist movement which never regained its
pre-war working class vitality. None of our 13 North-Western
anarcho-conchies were anything above skilled workers. Lithographer
Arthur Helsby was probably the most elevated and none typified the
middle class intellectuals that now characterise our vestigial movement.
Many of the most politically active workers that survived the war fell
under the spell of Bolshevism and joined the Communist Party. Burnley’s
Arthur Riley was a founder member but now Communism’s also collapsed.
The lessons of history aren’t obvious but our local anarcho-conchies
were motivated by an anarchism that hadn’t yet grown world weary,
cynical and sectarian. Their stories are an inspiration.
(Llandudno, August 2017
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