Art
The experience of conscientious objectors is explored at the National War Museum, while David Mcclure finds beauty and power in industrial landscapes
Duncan Macmillan reviews Conscience Matters at the National War Museum
When I was 18, I had the choice of doing national service either before or after I went to university. I chose the latter and I was lucky. National service was abolished before I graduated. When I then decided to do postgraduate art history, I had to apply to the local authority in the hope of getting a grant (even in those generous days of education for all, postgraduate grants were tricky) and I went for an interview with the local Education Committee. The chairman was a bristly old soldier who evidently had no time for namby-pamby subjects like art history. He opened by asking if I had done my national service. I explained that I had not and why. “Pity,” he said. “It might have made a man of you!” Art history was evidently so unmanly as to be beneath contempt.
I didn’t get a grant, but I do think that in that exchange I got just the tiniest whiff, although with none of the potentially life changing consequences, of the hostility and prejudice that the 60,000 conscientious objectors risked for their beliefs during the Second World War. A small but fascinating exhibition, Conscience Matters, in the Scottish National War Museum tells a little bit of their story.
Before the war, the peace movement enjoyed wide support. There are documents here recording the activities of the Peace Pledge Union, for instance: “100,000 say no!” one of them declares.
Conscription came in on 3 September, 1939, the day war was declared. All able-bodied men between 18 and 41 were to be enlisted. A week later a mass demonstration was organised by the Peace Movement under the banner “We will not fight or serve.” Nevertheless, two years later in December 1941, single women between the ages of 20 and 30 were also conscripted, both into the services and into essential work like the Land Girls, working on farms.
For men and women alike, becoming a conscientious objector, whether for creed or conscience, was a very daunting business. You had to register and then within two weeks appear before a tribunal to make your case in person. These tribunals were often very swift, summary even. The individual did have the right of appeal, but if the appeal was rejected and you were ordered to enlist, you either conformed or faced prison as a common criminal. Stella St John who had been active in the Peace Movement, for instance, was imprisoned for her refusal to obey. Her diary, A Prisoner’s Log, is a telling witness to what people suffered for their beliefs.
Those whose case was accepted served as non-combatants in various roles. The artist Sax Shaw served as a tractor driver on a farm, for instance. There was also a dedicated noncombatants corps. One interesting document here is the application by Constance Margaret Bull to be recognised as a Conscientious Objector. She served, as did a number of others like her, with the Friends’ (Quaker) Ambulance Service in China. Evidence of their experiences include poetry written by one of their number, Duncan Wood.
The objection to being enlisted was not only to fighting, but also to the assumption by the state of the power to conscript and thus overrule the freedom of the individual. In Scotland such objections reflected both the left-wing tradition and the Nationalist cause. An Appeal to Scots Honour ,a pamphlet by Douglas Young, leader of the SNP at the time, declares uncompromisingly on its title page that it is “A vindication of the right of the Scottish People to freedom from industrial conscription and bureaucratic despotism under the Treaty of Union with England.”
Young was not only a political figure. He was also a distinguished classicist, famous as the translator of Aristophanes into Scots. He was
If the appeal was rejected and you were ordered to enlist, you either conformed or faced prison as a common criminal
typical of many whose consciences would not allow them to enlist. Those whose beliefs were the result of their own private reflection rather than subscription to a collective creed were almost necessarily both determined and self-aware individuals and so, in both wars, included a good number of artists and poets. There are diary extracts and correspondence here of Frederick Urquhart, for instance, author of a number of anti-war stories and who, like Shaw, was assigned to work on the land. Shaw himself later became director of Dovecot Studios. Some of his work here includes designs for tapestries for Coventry Cathedral, a building that was itself a monument to the hope for enduring peace, if not precisely to pacifism. The painter Edwin G Lucas was also a conscientious objector and spent the war working in hospitals. Particularly striking here is a drawing by him of a wounded soldier. A film in the exhibition which, although short, expands considerably on its subject includes the unmistakeable voice of Norman Mccaig, recounting with typical dry humour his experiences as a “conchie.”
One of the most striking images in the exhibition is The March to Death by John Olday, a remarkable artist quite new to me. He was born Arthur William Oldag to a Scottish father and German mother. The March to
Death is the cover of a book of his anti-war drawings. It shows all the war leaders including Churchill and Roosevelt alongside Hitler, Stalin and, I assume, Hirohito together taking the salute of a march past of the starving and the dying carrying crosses with names on them of all the fields of conflict. Its ferocity is more like George Grosz and Otto Dix then the generally more gentle British cartoons of the war and in fact Olday was born in London, but, actively involved in revolutionary politics, he lived in Germany until he had to flee the Gestapo. Coming to Britain, he was conscripted, but didn’t bother with the formalities of being a conscientious objector. He simply deserted and though eventually imprisoned remained in hiding till 1944. During that time he continued to produce anti-war propaganda. The March to the Death was published in 1943 when he was in hiding. His is quite a story, but here as elsewhere in this show we only catch a glimpse of it. It is an informative exhibition as it is, but nevertheless seems like a preliminary sketch for something bigger.
In 1943, a crisis in the coal production on which industry depended led to male conscripts being chosen by lot to work in the mines instead of being called up. Conscientious objectors who refused, as some did, were sent to prison and then down the mines anyway. These conscripted miners were called the Bevin Boys, after Ernest Bevin, minister of labour who introduced the scheme. There were several artists among them including David Mcclure . He painted some remarkable pictures of his experiences in the mines, but thereafter too he kept an interest in industrial landscapes. An exhibition at the Scottish Gallery brings some of these together and includes some remarkable pictures of harbours, storage tanks and smoking chimneys, all painted at Ardrossan. Whatever his subject, however, Mcclure never lost the inimitable delicacy of his touch or the beauty of his drawing.
Mcclure’s industrial landscapes are showing alongside very different landscapes by Matt Draper .Allin pastel, but some unusually large for the medium, these pictures record beautifully the constant theatre of mountains, clouds, light and water around the Isle of Skye and particularly of the stretch of water that lies between Skye and Raasay.
Conscience Matters until 26 January 2020; David Mcclure and Matt Draper until 27 April.