why did friends resist? the war, the peace testimony, and the all-friends conference of 1920

WHY DID FRIENDS RESIST? The War, the Peace Testimony, and the All-Friends Conference of 1920

by Thomas Kennedy

One of London’s more melancholy, though generally unper- ceived, monumental ironies stands on a barren square in front of the modem version of Euston Station. It is a simple, undistinguished obelisk memorializing the sacrifice of “3,719 men of the London and Northwestern Railway Company who . . . served and died in the Great War . . . for their Country, Justice and Freedom.” From its steps one looks across Euston Road into the tranquil little garden beside Friends’ House, that citadel of pacifism, and wonders if the two statues facing South in infantry garb are not chiding their Quaker counterparts: “We know why we fought. Why did you refuse to fight?” The question, even if imaginary, is serious and not unreasonable. This arlticle is concerned with the postwar attempts of British Friends to answer it satisfactorily, especially in the context of the first All-Friends Conference. Furthermore, it assesses the significance of their antiwar stand as regards the future of Quakerism and its relation to the larger war-resistance movement.

The Quaker peace testimony is usually traced to George Fox’s reply in 1651 to a promise of release from Derby jail if he would accept a commission in the Parliamentary militia. “I told them,” said the prophet of Friends, “I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars. . . . I was come into the covenant of peace, which was before all wars and strifes.”’ And so, Fox spent another six months in jail.

During the following decade, many other Friends were punished for refusing to serve. Indeed, after the rising of the Fifth Monarchy Men in 1660, the Society felt compelled to issue a humble petition PEACE & CHANCE, Vol. 14 No. 4, October 1989 355-371 8 1989 Council on Peace Research in History and Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development

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356 PEACE & CHANGE / October 1989

to the restored Charles 11: “The Spirit of Christ, which leads us into all truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the Kingdom of Christ nor the King- doms of this world. . . . Therefore, we cannot learn war any more.”’

In acting as a witness for peace, neither Fox nor any other of “the first publishers of the truth” acknowledged either Scriptural authority or the example of earlier Nonetheless, their declarations seem to have had the desired effect. From the second generation of Quakerism until 1916, the peace testimony was widely recognized by non-Friends and never seriously challenged by the British state. Some historians, myself included, have argued that the comfort afforded by this tolerant acceptance caused the peace testimony to become peripheral, or even dormant, during the eighteenth and nineteenth ~entur ies .~ Recently, this view has been challenged by historian Roger Wilson, a former clerk of London Yearly Meeting. It is difficult, Wilson notes, “to be a peace testimony prophet when peace is not . . . a burning political issue,” but, more to the point, he believes the entire argument is anachronistic since “the peace testimony as a separate identifiable part of Quaker life is a twentieth century arr i~al .”~ George Fox’s testimony in Derby jail was not, Wilson holds, a separate declaration but “part of a coherent whole which included equality in class, social and economic structure, sex, language, truth speaking, fair wages, the lot,” just as the crusades of Victorian Friends against slavery, drink, prostitution and opium were part “of a total life-style.”6

Thus, in Wilson’s view, the identification of pacifism as a central and, in some minds, indispensable tenet of the Society of Friends arose chiefly out of the Quaker experience during the First World War. But Wilson also believes that “the Society would have had none of the sinew to stand up to the challenge” without the revital- ization and reinterpretation of Quakerism that occurred during the spiritually and politically turbulent years between 1890 and 1914.’ Beginning with a spiritual reawakening during the Manchester Conference of 1895, and quickening its pace throughout the next decade in the wake of the reforming zeal of John Wilhelm Rowntree and his associates, the Society of Friends faced the twentieth

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century with a strengthened collective will and a clearer perception of its role in the modem world.’

For the prewar generation of better educated, independent- minded young Friends, the peace testimony had a special and powerful appeal. For many, faith was most strongly expressed in the reaction against what they perceived to be the injustice, mate- rialism, and chaos of a modem political and social order resting on rapacious capitalism, invidious imperialism, and raging militarism. Quaker opposition to the Boer War, although in no sense unani- mous: had a particularly riveting effect on many younger Friends who saw the conflict as the inevitable culmination of misplaced national values. As one of these noted: “Our testimony . . . 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. . . .,’lo Though many anti-war Friends were disappointed in the mildness of London Yearly Meeting’s public response to the South African conflict, that statement at least placed the peace testimony at the vital center of Quaker witness.

Our position with respect to Pcace cannot be isolatcd without loss from the rest of our faith. . . . Our witness is not narrow and ncga- tive, but far-reaching. . . and intensely positive in the active service of Christ’s peaceable Kingdom to which it calls us.”

During the decade before the Great War, the British Society of Friends was characterized by revived social activism and renewed spiritual vigor. Among Friends, respectable groups like the Liberal Friends Social Union-which could call upon the services of Seebohm Rowntree, among others - worked to Christianize the social order, while disreputable bodies such as the Socialist Quaker Society (SQS) attempted to persuade Friends that Christianity was utterly incompatible with a capitalist society. Neither group accom- plished many of its fundamental aims, but the SQS, although it remained small in size, eventually had considerable influence because of its strong attachment to the peace testimony and its impact on the growing Young Friends Movement.”

The idea of organizing younger Friends into a separate deliber- ative and social body was another product of the “Quaker Renais- sance.” Reformers were convinced that the future of the Society


depended on the loyalty of young people and that this loyalty, in turn, depended on their receiving honest, vigorous, up-to-date training in the ideas and practices of their faith. Although the activities of the Young Friends Movement were concentrated around “summer schools” for Biblical study, and occasional tramps through the Yorkshire dales in the footsteps of George Fox and other early Friends, such a movement naturally gravitated toward social and political “concerns.”’3 One of the most important of these was the struggle against what seemed to be a spreading wave of militarism in Britain and the Empire. At home, there was the well- organized and generously financed campaign of the National Ser- vice League to establish compulsory military service; abroad, Friends saw the actual imposition of compulsory training for teen- aged boys in Australia and New Zealand.I4 Finally, there was in 1911 the ominous revelation that some young Quakers were en- listing in the new Territorial Army being recruited as a British reserve home defense force. In light of these developments, and with strong backing from the Young Friends Movement, London Yearly Meeting in 1912 adopted the first explicit Quaker “Testi- mony for Peace.” This document, published and circulated as the official position of British Friends, defined the witness for peace as “an active movement towards the oneness of all humanity and the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth.”” But, alas, God’s Kingdom was not yet.

Friends were stunned by the outbreak of war in 1914, but the Society rapidly recovered its equilibrium. Its first organized response to the conflict, the Llandudno Conference of Septem- ber 1914, set a very high standard for thoughtful war resistance. Because this conference had been planned long before even a rumor of war, its original agenda did not mention the peace testimony.I6 But in his opening address, Chairman Henry T. Hodgkin made it clear that the struggle for peace would be the sole focus of the conference. He noted how the war had caused Friends “to realize with almost startling freshness how fundamental to our Quaker position . . . is the protest which Friends have made against war.” Another speaker noted that the war, by forcing a decision on the


peace testimony, would “make or break the Society of Friends.” An influential Friend, L. Violet Hodgkin, told the conference:

Our peace principles are.. . going through the furnace.. . . We have to find out whether the peace principles that many of us have simply held academically and comfortably hitherto are really part of our vital faith, or if they are merely what one of our Friends call ‘an ornamental appendage, like a magpie’s tail.’”

Besides forcing serious consideration of the peace testimony, the Llandudno Conference had the additional merit of inspiring Quakers to make contact with “the outraged Peace feeling of the country” outside their Society. Such contacts, in fact, led directly from Llandudno to an interfaith gathering of peace advocates at Cambridge in December 1914 at which the Fellowship of Recon- ciliation was founded under the leadership of Henry T. Hodgkin.’*

In the aftermath of the Llandudno Conference, London Yearly Meeting issued a definitive declaration on the necessity for absolute loyalty to the witness for peace, and several individual Quakers published their own personal statements. One of these, by author and lecturer William Littleboy, noted that the peace testimony was “a direct, inevitable outgrowth from the great distinctive message of early Quakerism - that of the reality and universality of the Divine indwelling. . . the Inward Light.”Ig But however accurately such a declaration reflected the consensus of the most outspoken and “weighty” Friends, all British Quakers did not receive the same message from the Indwelling Spirit. Indeed, some Friends, in the words of a postwar critic, “carried their conviction as to the Inward Light to the length of claiming that on this occasion they might be divinely guided to join the army. . . .yy20 And join the army they did.

Despite exhortations at Llandudno that Friends who supported the war helped to create the impression that the Society was divided against itself and, thus, weakened Quakerism as “a bulwark on which all believers in peace may lean,” every survey of male Quakers of military age indicates that over 30 percent of them enlisted in the armed forces.” Such figures are perhaps misleading because of the Quaker practice of listing the children of Friends as “birthright” members regardless of whether they maintained a real connection with the Society. Nevertheless, the considerable num-

360 PEACE & CHANGE I October 1989

bers of enlistees - and the occasional public declarations of dissent- ing or “war Friends”- troubled and embarrassed antiwar Quaker leaders. But although they wished to avoid an open division between the minority of Friends who supported the war and the majority whoopposed it, antiwar Friends were unwilling to acqui- esce in any compromise that might diminish the impact of the peace testimony or the Quaker witness for peace.22

At the conclusion of the annual gathering of London Yearly Meeting in March 1915, the clerk (presiding officer), John Henry Barlow, made an unequivocal declaration on the society’s official stand on the war.

We have given prolonged and earnest consideration to our Peace Testimony . . . . [which] has been clear and unmistakable from the earliest days of our history . . . and we have rejoiced to hear it renewed today.. . particularly by our younger men. This testimony . . . comes welling up from within. It springs from the very heart of our faith . . . [it] must be a reality in our own lives.23

Although witness to the Peace Testimony among the antiwar majority took a variety of forms, leadership in active war resistance was assumed by the Friends Service Committee (FSC), a body of young men (and later women) appointed by the 1915 Yearly Meet- ing “to strengthen the Peace Testimony among Friends of military age” and “to oppose any move toward con~cription.”~~ In its struggle against the war and conscription, the FSC cooperated with religious bodies like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and with secular (mainly socialist) groups like the No-Conscription Fellow- ship. When in early 1916 compulsory military service became law, despite the opposition of the antiwar coalition, the leadership of the FSC took an “absolutist” stand, refusing any cooperation with military authorities and rejecting any but an absolute or unqualified exemption from military service. Most young Friends did not adhere to the FSC’s hard-line position but accepted some condi- tional exemption as conscientious objectors (COs). In the end, only about 10 percent of Quaker COs served time in prison, and only half of these maintained their uncompromising stand until the end of the war.z However, “absolutists” formed the cutting edge of their religious Society, and nearly all Friends pointed with pride to the

Kennedy / A L L FRIENDS CONFERENCE 361

fact that, at one time during the war, the largest Quaker meeting in London was being held at His Majesty’s Prison at Wormwood Scrubbs.26As Wilfred Littleboy, an absolutist who would later serve as clerk of London Yearly Meeting, told his parents: “The spiritual atmosphere of Scrubbs must be something remarkable.” Fifteen months and two terms at hard labor later, Littleboy still felt assured that whatever the consequences, he and his companions would “never regret having come through such a time. . . .”*’ Hubert Peet, another absolutist “prisoner of hope,” expressed the view that it was FSC’s “special mission . . . to educate the Society of Friends, and the much larger circle with whom we are now in touch. . . .”*’

Thus, the experiences of war resisters, who comprised at least two-thirds of British Friends, tempered and hardened the witness for peace. And whereas in the general society the question of what one did in the war became a sort of crude litmus test for patriotism, within the Society of Friends the question of how one resisted the war provided a rough guide to individual influence in the interwar period. Those who suffered most, the absolutist COs, were most highly regarded, and some level of resistance was almost a necessity if a member was to carry any real weight. It would be difficult to imagine any “war Friends” in a position of real influence within the Society after 1918.29 Although they were not disowned or even treated unsympathetically, on matters of import these individuals were largely ign~red.~’

Ultimately, among British Friends wartime divisions stemming from the legitimacy of the peace testimony served to strengthen and clarify twentieth-century Quaker pacifism. Adherence to the peace testimony had another positive result for the larger, world-wide body of Friends: The admiration and sympathy with which Quakers in the United States viewed the war resistance of their British cousins allowed many American Friends - especially western Quakers (that is, west of Philadelphia) - to overcome objections to London Yearly Meeting’s liberal, nonevangelical religious practices and to extend the hand of unity in the struggle against war. This process began in 1915, when New York Yearly Meeting wrote to London offering its aid in “any joint enterprise for pea~e.”~’ Such a message touched a responsive cord among British Friends. As one


of their leaders, A. Neave Brayshaw, noted; “It is out of this sympathy and drawing near to one another that we can become strong and heal the sickness of the world . . . .”32 Thus, in 1916 London Yearly Meeting proposed a conference “of all those who bear the name of Friend with the object of giving full consideration to the deeply important subject of how to secure a general and lasting peace.”33

Amidst the travail and disorder of wartime, it was difficult to plan anything very precisely. But by 1917, American and British Quakers had agreed that a “World Conference” of all Friends (including the Hicksite branch, long separated from their American and British brethren)M would meet in London as soon as possible after the war “with the purpose not only to clarify and deepen peace testimony but to bind together the scattered branches of our Society for common work for the Kingdom of God.”3S So British Quakers, who had begun the war period at Llandudno by declaring the unshakable moral imperative as imposed by their traditional peace testimony to resist all war, would end the war years with a more sizable conference on the larger themes of “permanent universal peace” for the world, as well as reconciliation and unity for all Friends who lived in the world.J6 These were lofty objectives whose achievement would prove more difficult than the Quaker refusal, however dramatic, to lend support to the war.

The 936 delegates from every part of the globe who assembled at Devonshire House, headquarters of London Yearly Meeting, on August 12, 1920 to “discuss their historic Testimony and its appli- cation to the conditions of the world t~day,”~’ obviously held out high hopes for this first world gathering of Friends. These expec- tations, in light of the galvanizing and purifying effects of the war, were ably summarized by Henry T. Hodgkin, founder and president of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who was about to embark on missionary work in China.

During the war, we have all passed through deep waters and out of our struggle and sorrow new convictions have been won and. . . old ones have been strengthened. For ourselves, the War has meant a certain measure of isolation and misunderstanding, but also a great fellowship with many very fine spirits in various circles. Even more important, it has led us to see that the way for social renewal is the


way of Christian adventure, the full acceptance of all risks entailed in the way of love. . . .38

Although the peace testimony was to be the organizing theme around which all deliberations would go forward, as the historian William Charles Braithwaite noted in his introductory address, the “fuller vision of a true way of life for men will take us beyond the formal statement of our Peace testimony to the far-reaching issues of social and international behavior that belong to i t . . . .7739 To expose and develop these issues, Preliminary Commissions in both Britain and America were appointed even before the war ended, to report to the conference on the relationship between the peace testimony and various topics ranging from “Personal Life and Society” to “National Life ahd International Relations” and “Meth- ods of Propaganda.” The reports of each of the 14 commissions, incorporating several hundred pages and supposedly embodying “the most thorough and exhaustive study” ever applied to the peace testimony, were separately printed, bound, and made available to the delegates.a These reports make interesting, if uneven, reading. However, serious difficulties arose in making use of them because of both the wide diversity of opinions represented, especially between the British and American Commissions, and the difficulty in relating their conclusions to the main sessions of the conference. One modern historian of Quakerism has noted that the conference stumbled along in a desultory fashion, “at no very high level” because, despite the time available for preparation, no serious thought had been given to the necessity for a “weighty” steering committee to guide the conference proceedings toward the comple- tion of a carefully developed agenda:’

A comparison of two reports on “Personal Life and Society” provides a useful example of the distance between the social and political attitudes of American and British Friends. The American report is full of lofty, if hazy, generalities about justice and goodwill. It condemns “the unearned wealth of inheritance” and criticizes a system of production that had been “so diverted to the making of non-essentials for the wealthy as to leave an insufficient supply of necessities for the poorest and ~eakes t .”~’ Yet even its boldest declarations are thin compared to the conclusions of the British


Commission. Based on the work of a “War and the Social Order” Committee appointed in 1915 and heavily influenced by members of the Socialist Quaker Society, the British report calls for a “radical transformation of the social and industrial system as we know it . . . a social revolution . . . to redress inequality and injustice” and to create a “system which assures to every human being enough bread and goods for a full and finely-developed life.”43

Most American Friends, especially midwestern Republican businesspeople, and farmers, were not prepared to even hear the message of radical socialism, let alone to accept it as the basis for the collective social and political stance of world Quakeri~m.4~ Thus, although the conference’s official “Minute” on Personal Life and Society that expressed the sense of the meeting went beyond the timidity of the American report, it in no way reflected the radical and even revolutionary implications of the British Commission’s presentation. Without the ground being carefully prepared, there was simply too great a diversity of opinion to develop meaningful collective actions, or even statements, on subjects like social and economic reform. The same could be said for the conference’s discussion of the proper Quaker attitude toward the League of Nations, free trade and protectionism, the British government’s suppression of Irish nationalism, or the Council of Action organized by the Labour Party to prevent British intervention in the war between Poland and Soviet Russia. The official report of the conference spoke of how “harmony and good feeling pre- vailed . . . [and] carried through. . . difference to practical unanim- ity of judgment. . . .” But in point of fact, on larger questions such as those concerning the League, no positive guidance was forth- coming, and on specific contemporary ones - like the Council for Action or Ireland- minority opposition was largely igno~ed.~’

Still, if the conference was unwisely diverted by contemporary issues and seriously weakened by puerile, inane or ill-considered individual contributions, it did manage to achieve a considerable measure of agreement on the peace testimony - the overriding issue that had originally called it into being. Here, at least, Friends did not fall into the trap of turning discussion of the peace testimony into a self-congratulatory celebration of the remarkableness of

Kennedy I ALL FRIENDS CONFERENCE 365

Quaker wartime resistance. Indeed, several speakers on the subject began by acknowledging past failures. “We were all to blame,” said former Liberal member of parliament T. Edmund Harvey, “for our indolence in accepting conditions that led to war.” Edward Grubb, an older Friend who had been extremely active in the antiwar

added that if, prior to 1914, he and other Friends had not given way “to.. . apathy and weakness, things might have been different.” Another Friend noted that even the struggle against the war, which had provided the Society with the “the greatest opportunity in its whole history . . , to show the world the reality of our testimony for Peace,” was a partial failure because Friends “did not present the united front against the forces of militarism which some of us had fondly assumed . . . as a matter of course.7747

Conversely, speakers also attempted to put the best possible face on wartime divisions and warned against recriminations or bitter- ness against those who had thought it correct to enlist or otherwise support the war. But if, “in a spirit of love and humility,” war Friends could be forgiven, there could be no backing away from the principle that the peace testimony was “an organic part of our faith as Christians . . . a sure and inevitable outcome of our belief in the sacredness of human personality” which could never be abandoned but only “broadened, deepened and enriched by a larger vision of the needs of the world, and a keener insight into the realities of the spriritual Furthermore, said the British report on “The Life of the Society of Friends,” the Quaker witness against war could never again be simply a rejection of or withdrawal from the world: “The Church is in the world in order to transform it into the Kingdom of God; . . . we are to work as well as pray for the coming of that Kingdom and the doing of God’s will on earth. . . .”49

The wartime experience of Friends had convinced many of them that their peace testimony was political as well as religious and that “the way of Peace is within, and not outside, the domain of ‘practical politics.’” Quakers could not wait in the silence of their meeting houses for converts to come to them but should be out in the highways and byways teaching the message of peace that the entire world was awaiting?’ There was, said the British report on


“The Life of the Society of Friends,” “a real place and an urgent need for a prophet Society, a body of moral pioneers, committed to the upholding of a truth which, though unpopular now, will one day be accepted by men. . . .””

As the collective statement of its unwavering adherence to the peace testimony and, it was hoped, as a means of winning a larger audience for this view, the conference authorized the publication and distribution of a document entitled Friends and War.” This pamphlet was, in fact, a modified version of the report of the American Commission on “The Fundamental Basis” of the peace testimony. Written by Rufus M. Jones of Haverford College, the Society’s best known and most effective publicist, Friends and War remained the standard Quaker document on the peace testimony throughout the interwar years.’-’ It also contained a convenient summary of the reasons why Friends resisted the Great War and would continue to resist in future wars. They did so, Jones said, because of their agreement upon and devotion to “the Christian way of life revealed in the New Testament, the voice of conscience revealed in the soul, [and] the preciousness of personality revealed by the transforming force of love. . . .” Whether or not the 3,719 dead railway men memorialized in front of Euston Station across from Friends’ House would have understood or appreciated any of these explanations, most of them could surely have identified with Rufus Jones’s last, and least Quakerly, justification for resistance, “the irrationality revealed in modem warfare. . . .”54

It may be true that the All-Friends Conference of 1920 was, in the words of one critic, an “utter failure” in respect to its goal of forging a path that would lead humanity to “permanent universal peace.” But for all its lack of success in arriving at “a united judgment about future work for peace,”“ the conference did mark an historic turning point for Quakerism. Once and for all, it affirmed that for the Society of Friends, the peace testimony was “the fundamental basis of Quaker Christian truth, that man must not kill his fellow man and that this shall take preeminence over the claims of any other order of any other group of people.”56 Since the day of this reaffirmation, Quakers have been prominent in nearly every peace society and peace movement that has emerged. Although not

Kennedy / ALL FRIENDS CONFERENCE 367

every woman or man who called him or herself a Friend has adhered absolutely to this fundamental basis, the world at large defines Quakerism chiefly in pacifist terms, and the Society of Friends could scarcely survive as a separate religious body if i t were to disavow or seriously weaken its peace testimony.

In some final, mad moment, humanity may - through accident or design-put an end to itself, to life on this planet, and maybe, if we are truly alone, to life in the universe. But there is, perhaps, at least a glimmer of comfort in the knowledge that so long as there is a Society of Friends, there will be an active, organized peace movement served by men and women who believe, in the words of the All-Friends Conference’s “Message to Friends and Fellow Seekers,” that

the roots of war can be taken away from all our lives . . . Day by day . . . [to] seek out and remove every seed of hatred and of greed, of resentment and of grudging in our own selves and in the social structure about us. . . . Surely this is the way in which Christ calls us to overcome the barriers of race and class and thus to make of all humanity a society of friends.”

NOTES

1. Margaret E. Hirst, The Peace Testimony of the Socieiy of Friends: A Historical Introduction to the Reports of the Commissions issued by the Committee of the Peace Conference ofA11 Friends (London, 1920). p. 3. For a modem and rather different view of the origins and meaning of Quaker pacifism, see John Punshon, “The Peace Testimony,” Quaker Religious Thought, Vol. 23, no. 2-3 (Summer 1988): 55-73.

2. Hirst, Peace Testimony, p. 5 . See also Peter Brock, The Roots of War Resistance: Pacifismfrom the Early Church to Tolstoy (Nyack, N.Y., 1981), pp. 41-42, who makes the point that as late as 1659 “when an opportunity seemed to open up for the establishment of a leftwing republican government, a number of Friends accepted military office.”

3. Hirst, Peace Tesfimony, pp. 1-2. Cf. Punshon, “Peace Testimony,” pp. 62-66. 4. See Elizabeth Isichei, Victorian Quakers (London, 1970) p. xxvi, and Thomas C.

Kennedy, “The Quaker Renaissance and the Origins of the Modem British Peace Movement, 1895-1920,”AIbion, vol. 16, no. 3 (Fall 1984): 243-245.

5 . Roger C. Wilson to the author, August 6, 1985. Also see Brock, Roofs of War Resisfance, pp. 61-62, for a different though not contradictory analysis.

6 . Roger C. Wilson to the author, August 6, 1985. 7 . Ibid. and Roger C. Wilson, “Of Changing Faces and Strengthening Hands,” The

Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust: Report for the Years 198214, pp. 36-37. The same point is made by Elfreda V. Foulds, “Rather Odd People,” in David Blamires, Jeremy Greenwood


and Alex Kerr (eds.), A Quaker Miscellany for Edward H. Milligan (Manchester, 1985). p. 71.

8. On John Wilhelm Rowntree and the “Quaker Renaissance” see Richenda C. Scott, “Authority and Experience: John Wilhelm Rowntree and the Dilemma of 19th Century Quakerism,” Journal of the Friends Historical Society, 49 (Spring 1960): 75-95, and Thomas C. Kennedy, “History and the Quaker Renaissance: The Vision of John Wilhelm Rowntree,”JourMI o / h e Friends Historical Society, vol. 55, no. 1-2 (1986): 35-56.

9. See Richard A. Rempel, “British Quakers and the South African War,” Quaker History 64 (Autumn 1975): 75-95.

10. Letter to The Friend by John Wilhelm Rowntree, January 26, 1900, pp. 56-57. 11. Quoted from the The Quaker Peace Testimony, compiled by Joseph S. Rowntree

(London, 1933), p. 8. Hope Hay Hewison’s definitive study of the impact of South Africa on British Quakerism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hedge o/Wild Almonds,, will be published in late 1988.

12. The best discussion of the Young Friends Movement is J. Ormerod Greenwood, Quaker Encounters, &I. I Friends and Relief(York, 1975), pp. 172-77. Also see Alfred Nleave Brayshaw, “The Young Friends’ Movement,”Swanick, 1911 (London, 1912), pp. 5-10 and Kennedy, “The Quaker Renaissance,” pp. 248-251. For the Socialist Quaker Society see P. d’A Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival, 1877-1914: Religion Class and Social Conscience in Late Victorian England (Princeton, 1967), pp. 367-389 and T. Adams, “The Socialist Quaker Society, 1898-1924” (Master’s Thesis, Leicester University, 1985).

13. Greenwood, Friends and Relief, pp. 174-1 77 and Kennedy, “Quaker Renaissance,”

14. Ibid., pp. 251-52. Also see Margaret E. Hirst, The Quakers in Peace and War (London, 1923), pp. 487-492 and R. L. Weitzel, “Pacifists and Anti-Militarists in New Zealand, 1909-1914,” The New Z e a h d J o u r M l ofHistory 7 (October 1973): 123-147.

pp. 249-250.

15. Quoted from The Quaker Peace Testimony, p. 8. 16. See “Memorandum for the Llandudno Conference,” pp. 23-30, September 1914

(Birmingham [1914]), 51 pp. and Herbe.rt G. Wood, Henry T. Hodgkin: A Memoir (London,

17. Friends and fhe War (Llandudno Conference, pp. 25-30 September 1914) (London, 1914). pp. 11,23,77.

18. Ibid., pp. 18,22; Wood, Henry Z Hodgkin, pp. 153-57; and Vera Brittain, The Rebel Passion: A Short History ofsome Pioneer Peace Makers (London, 1964), pp 31 -41. Some of Henry T. Hodgkin’s wartime letters, essays and other material, including a file on the “birth of the F.O.R.,” are in the Herbert M. Hodgkin Papers, Friends’ House Library (FHL), London. In his definitive study of Pacifim in Briuin, 1914-1945 (Oxford, 1980), Martin Ceadel calls the F.O.R. “Britain’s most thoughtful pacifist society,” p. 35.

19. William Littleboy,“Friendsand Peace” (1915), pp. 6-7. An extract from the London Yearly Meeting statement of 1915 is quoted in Quaker Peace Testimony, pp. 8-9.

20. Elizabeth Fox Howard, “Friends’ Service in War-time” (London, n.d.), p. 36. 21. Friedsandthe War, pp. 130,138-139. For statistical information on young Friends’

activities during the war, see The Friend, August 30, 1918, pp. 529-30 and January 9,1920, p. 15; Extracts from the Minutes and Proceedings of the Yearly Meeting of Friends, 1919 (MPYMF), pp. 75 and 1923, p. 232; and Leigh Robert Tucker, “English Quakers and World War I ” (Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1972), pp. 242-43.

22. For examples of public letters from “War-Friends,’’ see the The Friend, August 20, 1915, pp. 652-654; September 3, 1915, p. 687; and November 19, 1915, pp. 871-873 and The Emes (London). March 3,1916 and June 4,1918; for reaction to these pronouncements

1937) pp. 148-150.

Kennedy / ALL FRIENDS CONFERENCE 369

by prominent antiwar Quakers, see The Friend, November 26, 1915, p. 887; December 17, p. 917, and December 24, 1915, p. 961. The question of whether service in the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU), a volunteer medical corps formed in September 1914, involved a compromise of the peace testimony became intense and bitter after the imposition of conscription in early 1916. Some FAU veterans, such as Corder Catchpool, resigned the unit and returned from the front to fight against conscription; Catchpool, decorated for his service in the FAU, eventually served two years in prison as a conscientious objector. See T. Corder Catchpool, On rhe Fronts (London, 1918) and M. Tatham and James E. Miles, The Friends Ambulance Unit, 1914-1919 (London, 191 8).

23. Quoted in Mabel Cash Barlow, “John Henry Barlow,”an unpublished memoir in the John Henry Barlow Papers in possession of Mary Millior Barlow Braithwaite. Also see William Littleboy, Friends and Peace, pp. 6-7.

24. See Friends Service Committee, Minutes, Records of Work and Documents Issued, 3 vols. June 1915-May 1920, I, pp. 7-8, FHL for the FSC manifests and a list of 20 original members.

25. For disputes within the Society about the necessity for absolute resistance or the acceptability of alternative service or some other lesser form of resistance, see Kennedy, “The Quaker Renaissance,” pp. 259-269 and “Fighting About Peace: The No-Conscription Fellowship and the British Friends’ Service Committee, 1915-1919,” Quaker History, vol. 69, no.1 (Spring 1980): 3-22. For statistical information, see MPYMF, p. 75 and Tucker, “English Quakers,” pp. 242-43.

26. Maude Robinson, ‘“Lest We Forget’: A Memory of the Society of Friends in the War Years, 1914-1918” (London, n.d.), p. 21. Early in 1917 one CO wrote that there were “about 20Friends”workingin the laundry at WormwoodScrubbs. James Jones to WilfredT. Ecroyd, April 8,1917. Wilfred Ecroyd Papers in possession of Henry Ecroyd.

27. Wilfred E. Littleboy to hisparents, January 17, 1917 and April 11, 1918, from W. E. Littleboy’s prison letters in possession of Margaret E. Nash (Littleboy’s daughter) and used with her permission.

28. Hubert W. Peet to Elizabeth Ellis, August 27, 1917, F.S.C. Correspondence, FHL. 29. See Howard, “Friends’ Service,” pp. I1,30 and Tucker, “English Quakers and World

War I,” p. 266. I have discovered only one outspoken war-friend, a g a r B. Collinson, among the many delegates to the All-Friends Conference of 1920.

30. Leigh Tucker notes: “Of the members who joined the armed forces or actively concurred in the war, few were disciplined. Most of them left the Society of their own accord; some stayed within it, uneasily quiet. A few remained persistently vocal. Expulsion was not necessary or desired. The morrow’s leaders came from those who remained true to their beliefs and had done so through personal experience and . . . example. These formed the meristematic point of a Society which was still vital” (Tucker, “English Quakers and World War I,” p. 266).

3 1. Roger C. Wilson, “The Best Things in Ye Worst Time,” in Quakerism: A Way of Lije, edited by Hans Erik Aarek and others (Kuekerforlaget, 1982), p.144.

32. A. Neave Brayshaw to Philip Radley, May 2, 1915, A. N. Brayshaw Collection, Radley Papers, Friends’ House Library, London. The initial inspiration for a postwar congress of Friends may actually have come from a special subcommittee of London Yearly Meeting appointed in 1915, under the leadership of Henry T. Hodgkin and John William Graham, and assigned the task of assessing the significance of Quaker wartime resistance in a world historical context, as well as attempting to define the Society’s most meaningful role in the postwar world. This body produced a widely distributed pamphlet entitled Looking Towardsfeace, but, unfortunately, nearly all of its other papers have been lost and, thus, its

370 PEACE & CHANGE 1 October 1989

influence isdifficult to measure. 1 am most grateful to Horace G. Alexander, thelast surviving member of the subcommittee, for bringing this information to my attention in a letter of November 23,1985 and an unpublished essay “British Friends and the War of 1914.”

33. Wilson, “The Best Things,” p. 144 and A l l Friends Conference (AFC), Official Report (London: 1920), p. 36.

34. “Hicksite” Friends, who take their name from Elias Hicks of New York, separated from the so-called “Orthodox” branch in 1827-1828 largely over Hicks’s emphasis on the guiding power of Inner Light as against the authority of Scripture. See Edwin B. Bronner, The Other Branch: London Yearly Meeting and the Hicksites, 1827-1912 (London, 1975) and H. Larry Ingle, Quaker Conflict: The Hicksite Reformation (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1986).

35. J. Ormerod Greenwood, Quaker Encounters, Vol. Ill, Whispers of Truth (York, 1978), p. 215; Wilson, “The Best Things,” p. 144; and William C. Braithwaite, “The Conference: A Vision of Its Possibilities,”Alf-Friends Conference (AFC) . . .: A Guide and Souvenir (London [1920]), p. 5.

36. Greenwood, Whispers of Truth, p. 215. 37. AFC, Oficial Report, p. 31. 38. Henry T. Hodgkin, Letters (London), Letter # I , August 1920, pp. 1-2. 39. Braithwaite, “The Conference,” AFC: A Guide and Souvenir, p. 5 and AFC, Oficial

Report, p. 31. 40. Ibid., pp. 26-31, 61-66. All of the Reports were published together as The Peace

Testimony ofthe Sociery ofFriends (London [ 19201). Hereafter cited as Peace Testimony. 41. Greenwood, Whispers of Truth, pp. 215-216 and J. Ormerod Greenwood to the

author, September 20,1985. 42. Report of American Commission 111, “Personal Life and Society,” (Philadelphia,

1920), pp. 7, 12. 43. Report of Commission 111 (British) “The Implication of the Testimony in Personal

Life and Society” (London [1920]), pp. 3-4. For the origins and work of the “Committee on War and the Social Order” see Extracts Pom the Minutes and Proceedings of the Yearly Meeting of Friends, 1915, pp. 274-75; The Friend, November 10, 1916, p. 882; J. Edward Hodgkin, “War and the Social Order Committee,” The Ploughshare I, (February 1916), 33-34; and Herbert H. Honvill, “A Quaker Socialist Movement,” The Constructive Quar- terly, IX, no. 2 (June 1921), 218-331.

44. The British radical social message was not entirely without affect. On September 23, 1920 an editorial in The American Friend noted: “We trust and believe that many of us [Americans] had our horizons of understanding . . . widened by our conlacis in Lon- don . . . that Liberalism, even Socialism, is not prima facie evidence of mendacity or diseased mentality.”

45. “Personal Life and Society,”AFC Officiul Report, pp. 33-34, 72-74, 115-1 18 and Wilson, “The Best Things,” p. 144. Also see “A Message to the Irish People,” AFC, Official Report, p. 195 and “Letter to the Council of Action,” ibid., p. 197. Also see Francis, Beatrice and RobertPollard,Dernocracyandrhe QuakerMethod(London, 1949), pp. 136-143, which comments on the messages to the Council of Action and Ireland as examples of the success of the Quaker method of conducting business.

46. For Grubb see Thomas C. Kennedy, “The Ubiquitous Friend: Edward Grubb and the Modem British Peace Movement,” Peace Research, vol. 17, no. 12 (May 1985), 1-10.

47. The Friend, August 20,1920, pp. 524-525; Edward Grubb, “The Life of the Society in Relation to Its Testimony,”AFC Oficial Report, p. 122; and John Edward Hodgkin, “The Testimony in Personal Life and Society,” ibid., p. 94.

Kennedy I ALL FRIENDS CONFERENCE 371

48. The Friend, August 20, 1920, p. 524; “Life of the Society of Friends,” Peace Testimony, pp. 26, 12-13; and Herbert Corder, “Methods of Propaganda,” AFC, Oficial Report, pp. 181-82.

49. “Life of the Society of Friends,” Peace Tesrhony, pp. 6-7. 50. bid., pp. 5,9,31-33. 51. Ibid., pp. 21-22. Other COs, however, seem to have drawn a very different lesson

from their wartime experience, viz., that pacifism could never be based on a political ideology but was rather an act of personal faith resting, in the end, upon one’s willingness to take up the Cross as Christ had taken it as a sacrificial victim and witness to a better way. See, for example, Wilfred E. Littleboy to his parents, August 13, and September 10, 1917 and April 25, 1918, W. E. Littleboy letters and Herbert Wood. “Pacifism and Politics,” Friendc Quarterly Examiner, 75 (September 1941), 199-21 1. Also see Ceadel, Pacifum in Britain, p. 315 and Punshon, “Peace Testimony,” 66-72.

52. [Rufus M. Jones], Friends and War: A New Sratemenr of rhe Quaker Position (London, 1920).

53. E.W. Orr, The Quakers in Peace and War, 1920-1%7 (Eastbourne, Sussex, 1974), pp. 23-27. Friendc and War was reprinted by the Friends’ Peace Committee in November, 1931.

54. Friends and War, p. 24. 55. Greenwood, Whispers oJTmth, p. 216. 56. John Percy Fletcher, “Character and Basis of the Testimony,” AFC, OJficial Report,

57. “To Friends and Fellow-Seekers,” ibid., p. 201. p. 51.