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My grandfather had been a medical orderly on the hospital trains bringing the wounded and dying from the front during the World War II. When the Second World War broke out he couldn’t bear the thought of his two eldest sons suffering as he had seen soldiers suffer just over twenty years before and he actively encouraged them to be conscientious objectors. My uncle, my father’s eldest brother became a conscientious objector on religious grounds and worked for the railways throughout the war and until he emigrated to Canada in the 1950’s. My father objected on humanitarian grounds saying at his hearing that he was happy to serve in the forces, but would not carry a gun. My father was put in the army catering corps and served in places in the UK, including Hoylake in Cheshire, (where he met my mother at a Methodist Church dance), and Lancaster where he told us he was billeted in Lancaster gaol.

My mother said that going out with my father was not always easy as many of her age-group saw non-combatants as cowards. At the time her brother was serving in the Royal Engineers in Italy which must have given her a conflict of emotions. On one occasion a white feather was put through her letterbox and she said that girls with boyfriends overseas would spit at them as they walked arm in arm down the street.

My father's sister has still not told my uncle that her brother was a conscientious objector even though they have been married for well over 50 years, she told me she was ashamed of both her brothers.

For my part, having been born just after the war, my earliest memories are that of bomb-sites and grown-ups still talking about the war. During my teenage years in the Sixties, in the era of ‘make love not war’ I began to appreciate and admire my father’s courage in refusing to carry a gun and for standing up for his beliefs in the face of opposition, official questioning and public disdain. It would have been much easier for him to go with the flow and with the rest of his age-group join the services, go to war and possibly be ordered to kill a fellow human being.

For me my father was a hero, who followed his conscience in the face of much peer and media pressure and was certainly no coward.

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