A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  ‘Roncevaux’ and ‘Keep Troth’ essentially reject mainstream Quaker attitudes to war, but during the course of Bunting’s four terms at Leighton Park something momentous happened to change his position. We have to see this shift in the context of Quaker leadership on the issue.

  The war naturally had a significant impact on school life during Bunting’s entire time at Leighton Park. There were material changes, needless to say – the school clock wasn’t permitted to strike the hours and possible damage from air attack needed to be insured against – but the effect of the war on Quaker institutions’ sense of self was much more dramatic. In some quarters there was a lack of confidence in the relevance of traditional Quaker beliefs and practices to the circumstances of a long and bloody war. For example, in 1914 Leighton Park’s Debating Society carried a motion in favour of rounding up and imprisoning all German nationals but voted strongly against conscription. Two years later it reversed that decision. The Leightonian’s report of that debate on conscientious objection of 23 October 1916 shows how important this subject was to the boys. Nearly all members of the school attended and the minute book of the Debating Society confirms that the meeting was ‘open to the school and to visitors. It was well attended, only a few members of the school being absent.’116 I think it is inconceivable that Bunting was not at that meeting, but with one hesitation. It took place the night before Bunting’s extraordinary explosion at Evans about the ‘pain and torture’ culture of the school. Perhaps he was busy polishing his script.

  On the one hand generations of Quakers had deplored any kind of violence and witness against war had become part of the fabric of the Society. On the other hand this was a very different kind of war and many Quakers were uncomfortable about not making the sacrifices that were expected of the rest of society. This ambivalence was etched into Quaker school life. Bunting, a non-Quaker, became a conscientious objector in the First World War; his close Ackworth friend, Ernest Cooper Apperley Stephenson, a committed Quaker, fought and died in it.117 Britain’s public schools had started to become militarised during the Boer War and by 1914 there were twenty thousand schoolboys in the Officer Training Corps.118 At Leighton Park, however, Evans refused any kind of military training although the boys did make large quantities of splints for wounded soldiers. They supported a local hostel for Belgian refugees and visited German prisoners of war at a camp on Newbury race course. By the time Bunting arrived, every boy was expected to devote one hour of his spare time each day to working in the school’s gardens and in 1917 much of the school’s energy was devoted to growing crops. Brown reports that, ‘crops of potatoes were grown, and squads went as far afield as the allotments on Manor Farm to help. The boys bought spades and forks to the value of £6. The spirit in the school at this time appears to have been splendid.’119 By the time twenty boys and three masters attended the school’s first agricultural camp at Lincombe Farm near Stourport-on-Severn in spring 1918 Bunting was in prison.

  For the organ of a Quaker school The Leightonian seems to have been fairly even-handed in its treatment of serving soldiers and conscientious objectors. The December 1918 issue is apparently proud of both and announces the consequences of Bunting’s adherence to his belief that ‘the principle’s the same’ without condemnation or praise. Bunting would have been aware of Quaker ambivalence since 1914 when Ackworth’s Frederick Andrews had refused to criticise ‘Old Scholars’ who chose to fight in spite of the fact that he doubted the possibility of ending war by means of war: ‘If a man has no conscientious convictions against war, I honour him for enlisting.’120 Such compromise was bound to attract criticism, and it did. And at Leighton Park Charles Evans adopted a pacifist position while at the same time ensuring that old boys’ military deeds were fully appreciated in The Leightonian. Some Quaker families were divided by this issue of conscience, just as the Society of Friends as a whole was divided, many taking a strongly pacific line, others providing outspoken support to the prosecution of the war. By June 1915, for instance, nearly two hundred Ackworth Old Scholars had joined up and Andrews had received many letters from them: ‘I don’t wonder at these boys … feeling the call of their country, because we have tried to instil into them those very principles of liberty and fair-play which are being outraged. They have heard at School of the contributions that small nations have rendered to civil and religious freedom, such as Athens at Marathon and the Netherlanders in their heroic resistance to Philip and the Duke of Alva.’121 It just doesn’t work. Invoking the spirit of Marathon to promote world peace wasn’t even papering over the widening Quaker crack. ‘The position of ours that Friends take with regard to National Service is liable to be misunderstood’, Andrews complained.122 It was misunderstood because it was completely incoherent. Just after the war the Secretary of the Ackworth Old Scholars Association (AOSA) reflected ruefully on the divisions, sometimes bitter, that the war had thrust upon the entire Quaker community and on him in particular, having been the ‘target fired upon from all sides’. His conclusion is bizarrely neutral: ‘We are neither pacifists nor militarists, Quakers nor Jingoes. To us it matters not in what direction the service of any Old Scholar has lain during the war.’ How could an explicitly Quaker institution take such a position? The answer, in a stroke of dazzling Jesuitry, is by splitting the moral responsibilities of the AOSA from those of the school, the only common denominator for those the association served. Having made this daring moral leap he goes on to celebrate the values that underpin it: ‘The fact which does interest us is that, according to the light within them, Old Scholars have done their duty in so many varied ways. Inasmuch as Old Scholars have endeavoured to live up to their convictions, we see in it the result of their Ackworth training, and the practical expression of their School motto. It is of this that we are proud, and for this reason we gladly record their service in “battlefield, prison cell, or scene of unaccustomed labour”.’123

  This bewildering statement suggests that such all-encompassing neutrality is the only sane response to what had become perhaps the bloodiest war ever. With this kind of ethical leadership it’s not surprising that so many Quakers found themselves in such a deep moral bind. This failure of leadership was not lost on the Ackworth community. In his biography of Frederick Andrews, Isaac Henry Wallis quoted one of these deeply confused young men: ‘Many of us were in great distress of mind and in grave doubt as to what we ought to do. We had learned our peace principles at the feet of F. A. and we naturally looked to him for a clear lead. Alas he never gave one. I never understood why.’124

  One consequence of the Quaker leadership’s failure to articulate a coherent response to the war was the enlistment by 1917 of, remarkably, nearly a third of all eligible Quakers,125 the desire to make a contribution outweighing the certainty that participating in war was wrong. To be fair to the Quakers the rest of British society was just as divided. A recent study by Adam Hochschild has shown how families, friendships and communities were split, sometimes irrevocably, by the war. Along with the boy who became Britain’s greatest modernist poet, some remarkable people found themselves in jail for their beliefs during the First World War, including a future Nobel Prize-winner, Bertrand Russell, a future Cabinet minister, several future MPs and a distinguished investigative journalist who became the Labour Party’s chief spokesman on foreign affairs in the House of Commons. Ramsay MacDonald, who narrowly escaped jail for his antiwar position and was under heavy police surveillance, was Britain’s Prime Minister by 1924.126

  Bunting’s J. B. Hodgkin Speech Prize paper was, according to Leighton Park’s archivist, ‘remarkable, as courageous and fearlessly demonstrative as it was inflated with his usual posturing. This was to be his ultimate showdown, determined and uncompromising. His witness was carefully prepared, starting with the selection of his JBH topic and possibly (was it part of his plan?) leaving school two terms earlier than he expected in order to face a Tribunal at the earliest opportunity.’127

  In this vacuum of moral leadersh
ip Bunting had to make his own decision about his conscience. Ellen Fry or Charlemagne? In the event it was a mixture of both, Fry’s pacifism prosecuted with steely Carolingian ruthlessness. Bunting waged his peace.

  NEWCASTLE ‘CONCHY ‘, 1918

  Peterhouse’s identification of ‘recklessness’ and ‘brilliance’ is a fair characterisation of Bunting at eighteen. Just two months later, on 17 April 1918, Bunting was in front of the Newcastle Military Tribunal in an uncompromising mood. (He had attended a ‘Preliminary Examination’ by the National Service Representative at 26 Northumberland Street on 16 March 1918.) The report in the following day’s North Mail is a fascinating display of just how far Bunting could get under the skin of the establishment, even at eighteen:

  In a long statement the lad, who carried himself with great self-possession, objected to war, to non-combatant service because it released a man for combatancy, to national service because it helped the prosecution of war, and to leaving his present occupation of ‘desultory reading’ because he thought he was doing his duty as a ‘citizen of the world’ in remaining as he was. He had been educated in Quaker schools.

  In reply to Mr George Renwick, the applicant was quite prepared to let the German hordes overrun England.

  ‘Are you taught those principles in these Quaker schools?’ asked Mr Renwick.

  ‘The whole atmosphere is one of pacifism,’ came the reply.

  Further replies of an equally uncompromising character led Mr Renwick sarcastically to observe: ‘You would rather stay here and let other men die for you in France?’

  ‘Yes,’ interposed the objector.

  ‘You are a beauty, you are!’ said Mr Renwick.

  On hearing that the tribunal would grant him non-combatant service, the applicant inquired about appealing, whereat Mr Renwick indignantly broke in: ‘I want it to be clearly understood that I absolutely object to that – a boy of 18 coming here with such views’.

  It is easy to laugh at blimpish Mr Renwick, who was probably still spluttering when he got home, but we need to put this exchange in context. For a start Renwick, a local politician and businessman who would become Conservative MP for the newly created constituency of Newcastle upon Tyne Central in the December 1918 general election, had five sons away at war in various capacities so Bunting’s arrogant dismissal of their sacrifice must have touched him at a deeply personal level. (All five of the Renwick boys survived the war prompting their father to fund the Grade II listed Renwick Memorial at Barras Bridge in the heart of Newcastle’s university area.) More importantly though, in April 1918 it was not at all obvious that the war was reaching its final stages and that an armistice would be signed by November. If anything the German position had been hugely bolstered by the previous year’s Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which was ratified in March 1918 and in which Russia ceded to Germany part of Ukraine and all of Poland, Finland, the Baltic states and the Caucasus. This sudden gain of territory three times the size of Germany was a significant threat to the Allies, and particularly to Britain. With their Turkish allies Germany now had a real opportunity to expand into Asia Minor and threaten Britain’s position in India. The British War Cabinet believed that the decisive battle to end the war could not take place until 1919, possibly 1920. Moreover the British army was seriously under strength, having suffered nearly 800,000 casualties in 1917, and just a few weeks before Bunting’s tribunal, on 21 March, Ludendorff’s storm troopers had broken through British lines at the second battle of the Somme. Operation Michael began with a shock and awe barrage that put Gough’s 5th Army into complete disarray. The German artillery began at 4.40 a.m. and fired, on the first day alone, 3.2 million rounds, one-third of them chemical.128 It was followed by a release of tear gas and then the far deadlier mustard gas over the British trenches, after which seventy-six elite German divisions arrived out of the mist in a devastating assault that saw seven thousand British infantrymen killed by the end of the day. A further ten thousand men were wounded and twenty-one thousand were taken prisoner on a single day that saw German troops capturing over ninety-eight square miles of territory and bringing them within twelve miles of Amiens. By 5 April the Germans were in Amiens’ suburbs and the hole punched in Gough’s line had separated him from the 3rd Army on the one hand and the French army on the other. The scale of the German victory can be measured by the fact that the Kaiser awarded a ‘victory’ holiday to German children.129

  Just the week before Bunting’s tribunal the British public had received news that Operation Michael had been replaced by Operation George as Ludendorff switched his attack to Flanders, driving Horne’s 1st Army and Plumer’s 2nd Army back over the strategically important Messines Ridge. A British victory was not in the air as the young Basil Bunting tormented George Renwick at Newcastle Tribunal on 17 April 1918. The British Empire had lost over 900,000 military personnel, over 720,000 of them from the British Isles, and patriotic feeling was running high.130 In the context of such colossal sacrifice Bunting’s principled pacifism was courageous or selfish, depending on how you look at it. In 1918 there wasn’t much doubt about the way to look at it. The 900,000 deaths were dwarfed by the numbers of wounded and diseased men returning from the front and it is doubtful that many of the 160,000 premature British widows and their 300,000 fatherless children had much that was positive to say about conscientious objectors.131 As Adam Hochschild shows, hysteria against pacifists was encouraged by the authorities:

  A pamphlet by ‘A Little Mother’ typically declared that ‘we women … will tolerate no such cry as “Peace! Peace!”… There is only one temperature for the women of the British race, and that is white heat … We women pass on the human ammunition of “only sons” to fill up the gaps.’ It sold 75,000 copies in a few days. ‘The conscientious objector is a fungus growth – a human toadstool – which should be uprooted without further delay,’ screamed the tabloid John Bull. The Daily Express declared that COs were financed by German money.132

  On 4 May 1918 John Bull published a cartoon showing a CO sitting comfortably at home with the caption ‘This little pig stayed at home’.133 and a postcard reproduced by Hochschild depicts the conscientious objector at the front. A caricature brutal German soldier is bayoneting the campest possible (and long-haired of course) British CO in the buttocks while the CO, betraying no sign of not enjoying the experience, flirts:

  Oh, you naughty unkind German –

  Really, if you don’t desist

  I’ll forget I’ve got a conscience,

  And I’ll smack you on the wrist!134

  For the vast majority of British people Bunting was fungus, a pig, a homosexual. The self-appointed scourge of obscenity, James Douglas of the Sunday Express reacted predictably to the publication in 1918 of A. T. Fitzroy’s novel about homosexual conscientious objectors, Despised and Rejected. His rant in London Opinion of 24 August remarkably brings together three of these elements (money, fungus and homosexuality) in one hysterical paragraph:

  A thoroughly poisonous book, every copy of which ought to be put on the fire forthwith, is Despised and Rejected … Of its hideous immoralities the less said the better; but concerning its sympathetic presentation, in the mouths of its ‘hero’ and other characters of pacifism and conscientious objection, and of sneering at the English as compared with the Hun, this needs to be asked: What is the use of our spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on propaganda, and tens of thousands more on Censorship, while pestiferous filth like this remains unsuppressed? … I imagine that it will not be long, after the authorities have examined this literary fungus, before [the author] is a Daniel brought to judgment.135

  With this kind of cheerleading the voices of reaction were overwhelming. If nothing else one has to admire the physical bravery of young COs in 1918. The title of the reviled novel tells the whole story. Mr Renwick was furiously spluttering on behalf of the many.

  Bunting’s confident appearance before the Newcastle Military Tribunal was r
eported in predictably sneering tones in the local press, the Illustrated Chronicle and the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, presumably delighted to be prejudicing the outcome of Bunting’s appeal. The Illustrated Chronicle ran the story under a rabble-rousing headline: ‘NEWCASTLE “CONCHY” Would sooner see Huns Over-running Country Than Kill a Man’:

  An 18-year-old youth applied at Newcastle Local Tribunal yesterday for exemption on conscientious grounds. He stated that he was a student of History, and had because of his views, sacrificed a scholarship at Peterhead [sic]. He had been educated at a Quaker school, where the whole atmosphere was one of pacifism. He had a conscientious objection to killing a man; it was manifestly wicked to do so after months of preparation. He could not take up non-combatant service because that meant releasing a man to do what he himself objected to do. By continuing his studies he considered he was doing what was best in the interest of the country. He would sooner see Germans over-running this country than kill a man.

  On 20 June 1918 a local historian, F. W. Dendy, heard the appeal for the Northumberland Appeal Tribunal and Bunting was given one month to take up agricultural work or to sign up for combat.136

  The young Bunting must have felt intensely isolated in his defiance. At least 1.6 million British servicemen were wounded or fell seriously ill during the war. Bunting was one of just 16,500 men who had declared their refusal to serve on grounds of conscience.137 Of these the vast majority were granted some form of exemption or accepted national service in a nonmilitary capacity, that is they accepted the authority of the tribunal, leaving just 1,298, including the young poet, who didn’t and who were sent to prison, less than 1 per cent of the 1 per cent. These prisoners, as Alyson Brown has shown,138 provided the British authorities with a significant administrative and moral problem. Absolutists like Bunting became victims of a cycle of arrest, conscription, court martial and then imprisonment, a cycle that merely repeated once the sentence had been served.