Battles of Conscience: British Pacifists and the Second World War

A ground-breaking new study of the forgotten lives of conscientious objectors brings to light a very different experience of the Second World War.

We often like to think that we have a conscience, that it helps us tell right from wrong in the most difficult circumstances. But is conscience always right?

The conscientious objectors of the First World War, resolute in the face of a terrible and wasteful conflict, occupy a special place in the British national imagination. In contrast those who refused to fight in the Second World War have been almost entirely forgotten, despite there being almost three times as many of them.

Tobias Kelly invites us to spend the war with the personal struggles of five of these individuals: Roy Ridgeway, a factory clerk from Liverpool; Tom Burns, a teacher from east London; Stella St John, who trained as a vet and ended up in jail; Ronald Duncan, who set up a collective farm; and Fred Urquhart, a working-class Scottish socialist and writer. We meet many more objectors along the way, taking us from Finland to Syria with an ambulance unit, from Gandhi’s ashram in India to a homeless shelter in London, from illicit encounters in Edinburgh to experiments in communal living in rural England, and to a prison in Trinidad. These are people who have gone on to leave an important but often hidden trace in the moral and cultural life of Britain and beyond.

The story of the Second World War is usually told in tales of bravery in battle, or stoicism on the home front, as the British public stood together against the Nazi threat. The story looks very different when seen through the eyes of these other ordinary people, people whose conflicts tell us a great deal about the relationship between individual and collective freedom, war and peace, conviction and faith.