Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
From ambulance to fighter plane... how the horror of war changed my Quaker grandad
Armistice 1918-2018: First World War stories from our readers
My mother’s father William Day was 15 when the First World War broke out. As a Quaker from Davyhulme, then a village outside Manchester, he refused to bear arms and kill his fellow man.
At the same time he couldn’t sit idly at home while his pals were going off to war, so in September 1916 he stopped working as an apprentice engineer and joined the Quaker Friends Ambulance Unit, a civilian service.
We’ve still got the photograph of him posing in his khaki uniform with the distinctive Red Cross cap badge.
He was then posted to the Star and Garter home for severely disabled casualties in Richmond.
After five months there he decided to bear arms after all – perhaps the sight of so many amputees shattered his religious convictions. As my mother put it, “he felt he had to do more” and so he joined the Royal Flying Corps, swapping the safety of London for the Western Front.
A second family photo shows him in his new uniform, while a third shows him dressed for a sortie in an SE5, a renowned single-seater British biplane.
I’ve no idea if he shot down any Germans, but I do know he crashed at least twice – my mother would tell how he broke one arm or collar bone, then the other, and for the rest of his life could never fully straighten either arm.
Sadly, he died while I was still young. All I can say now is that I respect his right to refuse to bear arms as much as I respect his right to change his mind.