Conscientious Objectors of the Second World War by Ann Kramer

Author:Ann Kramer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / World War II
ISBN: 9781783469376
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2013-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

Friends Ambulance Unit

The Society of Friends (Quakers) has a long history of providing service to those in need and during the Second World War, Quaker groups and individuals continued that tradition both on the home front and abroad. Small Quaker relief groups began forming as soon as war began. In November 1940, they came together as the Friends War Victim Relief Committee and set up a training centre in Devonshire. Roger Wilson, a conscientious objector who had been sacked from the BBC because of his views, was a leading light. He travelled around Britain setting up hostels for people made homeless in the Blitz, which were staffed by teams of conscientious objectors. One of them was Joyce Allen, who worked in a hostel in Liverpool: ‘When I started at the FSC the fleas came out to meet me! They always got onto a new arrival. They’d been picked up in the baggy trousers of these young chaps going round the houses, and started colonies in the hostel. We tried everything. Sometimes we’d look at the children and see their flesh covered with pin-pricks; they’d been bitten so often they’d stopped coming out in spots … We tried to get the children to school, we got grants for people in real need, we sent mothers who weren’t coping to a sort of home for mothers and children, all sorts of social work like that.’

One of the best-known organisations and one that did a great deal to raise a positive profile of conscientious objectors was the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU). As its name suggests, it was started by the Quakers and was originally formed during the First World War, when its members worked on ambulance convoys and ambulance trains with the French and British armies. It was disbanded in 1919 but with the return of a second global conflict a number of Quakers including Paul Cadbury, who had served with the FAU during the First World War, decided that a new FAU should be formed. A training camp was established at Manor Farm, Birmingham and the first 60 recruits arrived in September 1939. They issued a statement of aims: ‘We propose to train ourselves as an efficient Unit to undertake ambulance and relief work in areas under both civilian and military control, and so, by working as a pacifist and civilian body where the need is greatest, to demonstrate the efficacy of co-operating to build up a new world rather than fighting to destroy the old. While respecting the views of those pacifists who feel they cannot join an organisation such as our own, we feel concerned among the bitterness and conflicting ideologies of the present situation to build up a record of goodwill and positive service, hoping that this will help to keep uppermost in men’s minds those values which are so often forgotten in war and immediately afterwards.’

According to A. Tegla Davies, who wrote the history of the FAU during World War Two, those who served with the FAU were

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