A Challenge to Traditional Tolerance? The British Police and the Anti-War Movement in the First World War

Introduction

Peace advocates had been active in Britain since the beginning of the nineteenth century, but they were not perceived as a threat that warranted police attention. This changed with the First World War, particularly with the introduction of compulsory military service in 1916, when anti-war protesters came to be widely suspected of acting against national security, if not as collaborators with the external enemy than as domestic subversives engaged in weakening public morale, discouraging recruitment and promoting civil unrest. ¹ Against the backdrop of a war marked by an unprecedented ‘outburst of nationalist passion’, ² opposing government policies was denounced by a large section of the population and the establishment as treachery, and fighting the traitors was considered a patriotic duty. ³

Although wartime Britain was ruled by Liberal-led governments (headed by H. H. Asquith until December 1916, and then by David Lloyd George), it was during this period that the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), ‘the most Draconian legislation ever enacted by a British Parliament’, was passed into law, firstly only four days after the start of the war. ⁴ The act, later amended and extended, granted the government the authority to formulate regulations for securing the public safety and the defence of the realm without parliamentary approval and to rule by proclamation, thereby drastically expanding the power of the executive and the various law enforcement agencies. ⁵ Even though quite a few of the practices inscribed in the regulations were regarded as inconsistent with English norms before the war, the emergency laws passed with little parliamentary opposition and gained substantial public endorsement.

An array of government departments – both civil and military – supervised the various components of the peace movement. Of all the bodies involved, the police were the major instrument of oversight and had the most intense interactions with those groups. In addition to their other duties, the police were charged with assisting the naval and military authorities ‘in giving effect’ to all the regulations issued under the emergency legislation. ⁶ The emergency regulations equipped the police with sweeping powers to carry out the large variety of new tasks imposed on them in the course of the war. They certainly made it easier for the police to suppress the activities of those who opposed the war and to deny them traditional rights, in this way playing a crucial role in determining the limits of anti-war protest. While the new regulations and the pre-war laws served as a frame of reference, beyond those guidelines, the police response to the activities of the anti-war camp was dictated by the particular structure and culture of the institution of the British police and the conditions within which it acted.

Most police forces (close to 200) were under the control of local authorities and not of central government. The Secretary of State for the Home Office – the department responsible for law and order – issued circulars and letters of advice but had no statutory powers to force decisions on chief constables or to secure uniformity in administration. Only the Metropolitan Police of London was answerable to the Home Office, indeed serving as a kind of national police, with its Special Branch, in charge of fighting domestic subversion, operating all over the country. ⁷ Otherwise, as a consequence of local autonomy, each force had flexibility in forming its reaction to anti-war protests. However, reinforcing a practice in use before the war, the Home Office now increasingly issued instructions and recommendations to the various constabularies in the country (alongside the military) and ‘police chiefs became more accustomed to acting under governmental direction’, thereby generating a greater uniformity of action. ⁸

What enhanced the similarities was the fact that, for the first two-and-a-half years of the war, the Home Office was run by three consecutive Liberal secretaries of state, known for their espousal of individual civil liberties, including freedom of speech and assembly. Under them, the draconian emergency legislation notwithstanding, the Home Office appeared reluctant to be seen as a censor of opposition voices. ⁹ The police chiefs did not necessarily agree with its policies, but customarily sought its advice and were naturally affected by it. Another important factor influencing police conduct, or at least the impression they aimed to create, was sensitivity to public opinion, a trait characteristic of the modern British police since their inception in 1829, as seen in instruction books directing officers to ‘be civil and attentive to all persons’. ¹⁰

The anti-war camp confronting the police consisted of men and women of disparate ideological orientations: pacifists, socialists, radical liberals, members of religious groups, suffragettes, anti-conscriptionists, anti-militarists and combinations thereof. What united them was the condemnation, to varying degrees, of government policies regarding the war. Otherwise, individuals held diverse views of the origins of the war, the reasons to oppose it, what its aims should be and how to end it. There were those who backed the war but objected to conscription. Out-and-out pacifists, who opposed all wars in principle and could not ‘conscientiously bear arms for the purpose of taking human life’, ¹¹ constituted only a minority. ¹² The majority of war objectors were socialists who did not object to the use of force as such, especially if it was directed against capitalism and in support of socialism, but strongly disapproved of this particular war, seeing it as a capitalist conflict ‘using the workers as tools and cannon fodder’. ¹³ The movement was made up of organisations and associations in existence before the war, like the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the Herald League, and others that emerged during the war, like the Union of Democratic Control and the No-Conscription Fellowship.

Membership of the organisations overlapped, with people active in more than one organisation, speaking for each other's platforms and distributing the same literature. They came from various walks of life and social groupings, counting among them several MPs. In contrast to jingoist assumptions, they had no intention of aiding the enemy nor were they pro-German. Only a small percentage aimed at a revolutionary overthrow of the established order.

This article seeks to explore the ways in which the British police – widely perceived long before and after the war, both in England and abroad, as a tolerant force when compared to their European counterparts ¹⁴ – used their dramatically extended powers to keep watch on the highly reviled peace camp and the circumstances that affected their activities. What was the nature of their encounters with protesters, and how did the latter view police treatment? How did they reconcile the various pressures on them, particularly the need to respond to anxieties at home while not being seen as undermining civil liberties? Did this branch of the state exercise the full powers that the law conferred? The answers to these questions will help evaluate the performance and conduct of the British police in this period of national crisis and the impact this total war had on traditional police norms. Given that the police served as the arm of both the central and local authorities, the article also throws light on the degree of tolerance shown by the British establishment. In discussing the principal means employed by the police to have control of the peace movement, the article will first concentrate on intelligence gathering, then on the supervision of printed material and the monitoring of public meetings, and finally on the treatment of conscientious objectors.

Intelligence Gathering

While the police refrained from confronting anti-war opinions head on in the early part of the war, they wasted no time and as soon as hostilities commenced they embarked on gathering intelligence on peace activists and activities. The modern police had engaged in accumulating information on dissidents and infiltrating their ranks since their establishment in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. ¹⁵ The war, however, transformed these tasks into a central police mission, taking up a large portion of the human and other resources available. Various ministries and departments had set up or expanded an existing intelligence branch during the war to monitor suspected groups and individuals such as war resisters, ¹⁶ but the police, with their nationwide geographical spread and experienced personnel, played the pivotal role in this regard.

As part of this mission, police officers kept a careful watch on individuals, primarily, at first, to locate possible contacts with the enemy and, increasingly, to learn more about the ins-and-outs of the various strands of the peace movement. ¹⁷ MPs and other famous campaigners, like the philosopher Bertrand Russell, as well as less well-known activists, were put under close surveillance. ¹⁸ The venues where pacifists operated, as well as their homes, were objects of intrusive police supervision. Their offices were raided, publications and other documents confiscated and scrutinised, and meetings infiltrated. So deep was police penetration into the pacifist milieu that they got to know the names, addresses and occupations of the activists, their finances, social circles, life histories and profiles, and even their mental states. ¹⁹ Such operations also allowed the police to collect and store details of the pacifists’ modus operandi, to keep track of the dissemination and transmission of ideas, the number of followers and the size of audiences, future designs, current finances and donations, as well as the level of cooperation between the various anti-war groups. ²⁰ This work enabled the police to assess the effectiveness of the pacifists and the degree of risk to the war effort they represented. While the numerous reports based on this information served the specific local police force, they were also relayed, as needed, to other police forces, the Home Office, the military and naval authorities and other bodies responsible for the control of the peace movement.

To maximise the efficacy of data collection, inconspicuousness was required. Indeed, a great deal of this type of work was performed by detectives or policemen in plain clothes who were employed temporarily. Here and there, these officers were joined by policewomen – a new phenomenon in the British police – who were of service in gaining information under cover, especially about women's gatherings. ²¹ Whereas intentional concealment of officers’ identities had been considered an unsavoury tactic of enforcement in the evolution of the modern British police, this sentiment, which eroded over the years, ²² was significantly weakened during the war, and replaced by a widespread belief in its beneficial contribution to the war effort.

Covert attempts to obtain information on peace propaganda accelerated and became more systematic, intense and centralized in the Metropolitan Police in 1917 under Lloyd George's Tory-dominated coalition government, the Conservative Home Secretary George Cave (11 December 1916–14 January 1919), and the direction of the flamboyant and energetic Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and head of the CID and Special Branch (since 1913), Sir Basil Thomson. This was fuelled by the growing industrial unrest and the enhanced penetration of pacifist ideology within the Labour movement, worrisome developments to policymakers, such as Lloyd George, who believed that ‘ultimate victory’ depended on the ‘contentment and cooperation’ of wage-earners. ²³ With the conviction that detailed data on the current situation in the pacifist movement would render the government better equipped to deal with labour discontent, the Home Secretary nominated Thomson to accumulate such data, including the investigation of allegations that German money was financing pacifist propaganda, thereby enabling the government and the police to keep a tighter rein on pacifist agitation in the last year of war. ²⁴

Because it was wartime – and a war that profoundly engaged the home front – the police could easily extend their sources of information and avail themselves of the services of the many people who felt it was their patriotic duty to inform them of anything suspicious, including private conversations, without any expected gain. ²⁵ Tipping off the police was a longstanding tradition, but, during the war, it engulfed society, particularly concerning individuals or groups considered a threat to national interests, such as anti-war activists or enemy aliens. ²⁶ The people who secretly passed on information, whether as infiltrators on behalf of the police (or other bodies) or as casual informants, were drawn from all levels of society, by no means principally disreputable persons with criminal records or those with a personal stake in aiding law enforcement. ²⁷

Interestingly, however hard police agents and their collaborators tried to mask their affiliation, so rampant was this ‘persistent spying’ that its targets developed an ability to spot men in disguise, ²⁸ and on occasion threw them out of meetings. ²⁹ Nonetheless, as far as can be judged, a good deal of the undercover activity was not detected. Thomson relates in his diary that the only attendants of a meeting of the central Stop the War Committee were two female police spies – his informants – neither knowing the other's affiliation. ³⁰ Both these women were elected to the Committee. It is no wonder that such clandestine work caused profound damage to pacifist propaganda.

To boost their cause, pacifists sent letters to the press, organised petitions and deputations to Parliament, arranged consultations with ministers and other officials, assisted and gave advice to conscientious objectors and strengthened them in their convictions. ³¹ However, the greatest investment of resources was in influencing opinion by means of two major channels of communication with the public: printed matter and the spoken word.

Controlling the Circulation of Printed Material

Among its ranks, the peace movement possessed ample talent to produce as well as to publish propaganda material. Indeed, the movement issued millions of copies of books, leaflets, pamphlets and posters that were distributed in various venues, during private and public meetings, demonstrations, in the streets, bookshops and by mail, reaching an extensive audience. ³² This was over and above the copious articles published in pacifist, left-wing and mainstream newspapers. Both the pro-war and the anti-war camps regarded these publications as highly effective weapons in the battle for public opinion.

Asquith's first wartime government (August 1914–May 1915) was in no hurry to move against texts intended to dampen support for the war. It did, however, institute new legal provisions under DORA shortly after the outbreak of war and in the following months, making it much easier for its various agencies to forbid, stop or limit the publication and circulation of this sort of literature. The Police Orders of the Metropolitan Police sent out regularly to all stations, specified those regulations that ‘specially affect Police’ to be noted for guidance. ³³ Among them was Regulation 13, passed on 12 August as an Order-in-Council. Considered by the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to be of ‘special importance’ to the police, it gave constables and persons authorized by the competent naval or military authority broad powers to arrest without warrant any person ‘upon whom may be found any article, book, letter, or other document’, the possession of which gave grounds for suspicion ‘that he has acted or [is] acting or is about to act in a manner prejudicial to the public safety or the safety of the Realm’. ³⁴ On the same day, Regulation 12 was promulgated, empowering persons similarly authorized to enter any suspected premises at any time, if need be by force, to ‘examine, search, and inspect’ the contents and ‘seize anything found therein’ if it was used or intended to be used to undermine public safety. ³⁵

Regulation 27, issued in November under the Defence of the Realm (Consolidation) Act, 1914, decreed: ‘No person shall by word of mouth or in writing … spread false reports or make false statements’ likely ‘to interfere with the success of His Majesty's Forces’ or prejudice their ‘recruiting, training, discipline, or administration’. ³⁶ This provision would commonly be put into practice to stop the publication or dissemination of a pacifist text, as was Regulation 51 (replacing Regulation 12 on 28 November 1914), which conferred upon the competent naval or military authority or any person authorized by them the power not only to seize but also to order the destruction of ‘newspapers and any other printed publication’ violating the regulations, as well as the equipment used for the production of the offending literature. ³⁷ Not every official felt entirely comfortable with these regulations. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police called the attention of police officers to the ‘drastic character’ of the powers of search provided for in Regulation 51, and instructed that, ‘while they ought to be put in force without hesitation’, it was also necessary to use them ‘with tact and discretion’ and to take care ‘to avoid arbitrary or oppressive action’. ³⁸ Sir Charles Mathews, Director of Public Prosecutions, thought that the powers conferred by this Regulation ‘too closely’ approached ‘the application of martial law’. ³⁹

On 28 July 1915, Regulation 51A changed the procedure. Before destruction, the police (‘of a rank not below that of inspector’) or any other person duly authorized had to lay the information about suspected documents before a justice of the peace who, if satisfied that they violated the emergency regulations, had the authority to issue a warrant for the police to act. ⁴⁰ The confiscated material had to be presented to a court of summary jurisdiction that, after an enquiry with the owner as to the content of the documents, had the power to order them either to be destroyed or restored to the owner who had the right to appeal against an unfavourable verdict.

No doubt, the government had at its disposal an array of laws and regulations – old and new – facilitating the curtailing of literature critical of the war. Nonetheless, the police did little towards this end during the first year of the war apart from investing time and energy in collecting information about such literature and its dissemination and circulating the information among the relevant offices. ⁴¹ This was despite the fact that, almost from the onset of hostilities, the Director of Public Prosecutions had been ‘deluged with complaints’ from various officials and members of the public about the proliferation of anti-war literature in the country and ‘its pernicious influence’ and was pressured to do much more to stop it. ⁴²

With mounting public debate around conscription in the months prior to and right after the passage of the Military Service Act of 27 January 1916, which forced enlistment on single men and childless widowers between the ages of eighteen and forty one (with an exemption clause for conscientious objectors), a rise in police efforts to keep circulation in check was in evidence. The first major raids by the police on locations responsible for the production and distribution of pacifist literature – the office of the National Labour Press in Salford and its depot in London – took place on 18 August 1915 when copies of the journal and several thousand pamphlets were seized. ⁴³ Significantly, though, Home Secretary John Simon (May 1915–January 1916), who would soon resign from the government in protest against the introduction of conscription, was not consulted and therefore knew nothing about such a plan. The raids were initiated by the Attorney General Edward Carson, a notorious diehard who recommended that far-reaching measures be taken against domestic protesters. Carson ordered the Director of Public Prosecutions ‘to put Regulation 51A into force’. ⁴⁴ As a result, thousands of the confiscated pamphlets were destroyed, although many others were returned to their owners by order of a magistrate in Salford.

Over the course of the next few months, the police conducted more raids on oppositional groups to get their hands on material suspected to be subversive. ⁴⁵ Yet, even after the passage of the Military Service Act, police engagement with printed propaganda continued for a while to focus primarily, albeit more extensively, on studying pacifist publications, whether collected by themselves or received from other government agencies, and seeking advice and guidance about how to understand and cope with them. ⁴⁶ The police thereby became part of a nationwide network of data exchange and appraisals of pacifist writings. Since the concept of sedition was ambiguous, and some of the text in the Defence of the Realm regulations, such as ‘prejudicial to the public safety’, was vague, no consensus existed as to the level of harm the various publications represented, and conflicting responses to them were offered. Notably, the Home Office on many separate occasions took the view that the investigated text did not ‘appear to contain anything illegal’, and directed constabularies around the country not to take any action against the producers of pacifist literature or its distributors. ⁴⁷

However, after the first conscription law came into operation on 2 March 1916, police action conveyed a deeper sense of urgency, noticeably after the second Military Service Act became law on 25 May 1916, extending enlistment to married men between the ages of eighteen and forty one. The pressing need for more manpower for the military and the growing concern that pacifist writings might influence men not to join the army (or the munitions industry) made the widely available anti-war material appear even more damaging. The Home Office now increasingly pressed police chiefs to seize leaflets and pamphlets deemed prejudicial to recruiting, ⁴⁸ and the police became ever more engaged in confiscating and destroying the written texts they found. ⁴⁹ The number of agitators brought to court and convicted for writing, publishing or circulating literature of a compromising character surged. ⁵⁰

The harassment intensified after the fall of the Asquith government and the nomination of Cave as Home Secretary in December 1916. ⁵¹ The police were now under greater pressure to interfere in pacifist activities and to curb any support for what the government viewed as a premature peace on terms favourable to Germany. ⁵² Under Cave, Regulation 27 was amended to make it even more difficult to publish and disseminate material denouncing the war, and easier for the government and the police to trace and stifle this type of dissent. ⁵³

Clearly, the police had invested substantial resources in obstructing the spread of pacifist propaganda materials, arguably far more than they had ever invested in suppressing the literature of any political movement in the past. War resisters who later wrote about the movement provided a glimpse into how they experienced the ‘official interference’ in their activities ‘under the successive Governments of Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George’. ⁵⁴ John Graham, an activist in the No-Conscription Fellowship, recalled: ‘All the time the Fellowship was in ceaseless conflict with the authorities. The head offices were constantly raided. Papers and books were indiscriminately seized, and every possible method of disturbance was practiced’. ⁵⁵ Helena Swanwick related a similar predicament regarding the Union of Democratic Control, pointing out that ‘in many cases publications passed by the Censor were seized and impounded, and people who were engaged in selling them were taken up, threatened and intimidated’. ⁵⁶ Eyewitnesses from peace societies who recounted their impressions of police activities while the bullets were still flying described how their privacy was invaded. ‘North Briton’ of the National Council of Civil Liberties complained in 1917 that, during the recurrent police raids, members’ personal belongings were meticulously searched, ‘their pockets turned out, and every article examined and, if they were so unfortunate as to be in possession of any of the publications of the No-Conscription Fellowship, fines and imprisonment awaited them’. ⁵⁷

Where the Home Office appears to have exercised a clear measure of restraint that had a bearing on police performance was in tending not to recommend pressing charges against pacifist protesters, even when the texts seemed ‘offensive’ and ‘of a highly mischievous character’. ⁵⁸ Predictably, its officials were guided by the question of how realistic a successful prosecution was likely to be. Another important factor was the fear that trials might give the impression that the government was preventing the free expression of opinion. ⁵⁹ Home Secretary Herbert Samuel (January 1916–December 1916) was of the opinion that ‘the points at issue’ were ‘less for courts of law to determine than for Parliament and public opinion’. ⁶⁰ Moreover, Samuel, who believed that those who opposed the continuation of the war rendered a ‘grave disservice to this country’, shared with pacifists the understanding that the publicity of trials had the effect ‘of advertising the speeches and publications which are now, for the most part, left in obscurity’. ⁶¹ Hence prosecutions ‘would cause more harm than good’. Apparently, the wish to deter and even punish agitators was often outweighed by the preference for relying on confiscation and keeping the printed material out of the limelight of the courts. Even Cave asserted (in November 1917) that prosecution of pacifist literature, ‘even if successful, would not be of much value’. ⁶²

All in all, even in the last year-and-a-half of the war, when repressive measures were more readily adopted by the police and other law enforcement agencies, anti-war advocates continued to publish and circulate large quantities of written texts right up to the war's end. ⁶³ Despite all the police efforts to impede the publication of The Tribunal, the official organ of the No-Conscription Fellowship (founded in March 1916), it continued to see the light of day. ⁶⁴ As it happened, anti-war protesters managed to fool the police, and secretly operated alternative presses despite the repeated ransacking of offices, close surveillance and the arrest of activists. The Fellowship members gloried in their success and, both then and later on, told and retold the story of how they ‘outwitted Scotland Yard’. ⁶⁵ In the final analysis, however, their success was not solely the result of their ‘ingenuity’, as they saw it, but of police incompetence and manpower shortages, as well as their reluctance to adopt extreme measures.

Policing Public Meetings

Another method of promoting the anti-war cause that provoked police interference was the time-honoured political tactic of public meetings, a tactic considered by some law enforcement circles as less of a threat than the distribution of anti-war literature. Beyond the understanding that written material reached a larger audience than did oral propaganda, the former was regarded as having a greater impact than the latter. This is indicated in a four-page memo to the Home Office from Sir Archibald Henry Bodkin, a leading prosecutor who during the war advised the Home Office on the content and seizure of pacifist publications and the prosecution of pacifists. For him, there was ‘a great distinction between a speech and a pamphlet in the permanence of any mischievous ideas put forward’. ⁶⁶ A similar notion is embedded in a letter by the Chief Constable of Cardiff City Police. In it, he asked the Under Secretary of State of the Home Office to ensure that reports of pacifist speeches would not appear in widely circulated newspapers in South Wales. ⁶⁷ He was much more concerned by the ‘undesirable effect’ these had ‘even upon patriotic people’ than he was when the very same ideas were presented in a speech. Be it as it may, the invaluable benefits of public meetings to the peace movement were apparent to the growing number of anti-war societies that, especially from mid-1915, organized numerous meetings up and down the country, some convening regularly, even weekly, and every so often attracting thousands of people.

Police presence at pacifist meetings was a means of getting hold of pacifist literature in order to probe its content, ⁶⁸ as well as of ensuring that no other breach of the law or disorder was taking place. After the introduction of conscription, officers entered meetings (as well as other public events), sometimes escorted by the military, for the purpose of examining people's papers in order to find shirkers from compulsory military service. ⁶⁹ As had been done long before the war, some officers wrote down everything that was happening at meetings. Particularly vital was the job of listening to speeches likely to be of a seditious character and taking verbatim notes that the police commonly sent to the Home Office ‘to be instructed what action, if any, can be taken’; if the assessment was that there were grounds for initiating proceedings against any of the speakers, the notes would ensure that they would ‘be in a position to prove the words in court’. ⁷⁰ On occasion, even if it was a burden on the available funds, professional shorthand writers or journalists were employed to take down notes. ⁷¹

As with written propaganda, during the first year of the war, the police's actual intervention in meetings was on the whole low key. Certain senior police officers were deeply worried by statements made in the public sphere that they interpreted as ‘evidence of a concerted movement to prevent successful recruiting’, ⁷² but others seemed less perturbed. ⁷³ While here and there complaints were made that speakers who criticized the government ‘were hustled by the police’, the lion's share of police activity in this sphere was confined to surveillance and the gathering of data. ⁷⁴ However, with mounting apprehension in official circles that pacifist activity interfered with the willingness to back the war effort, especially after recruitment became mandatory, the drive to thwart pacifist messages from reaching the public increased, whether directed at written publications or speeches made at the indoor or outdoor meetings that the police now more systematically monitored. As with anti-war literature, opinions differed both with regard to the level of sedition of individual texts and the steps that should be taken, revealing the same lack of enthusiasm to resort to legal action. True, there were overzealous officials like Chief Constable Lionel Lindsay of Glamorgan Constabulary, who went to great lengths to keep an eye on anti-war meetings, and showed no qualms in identifying statements as seditious or exerting relentless pressure to bring speakers to trial. ⁷⁵ Yet, quite a number of officials, like Leonard Dunning, H.M. Inspector of Constabulary, preferred on many occasions not to invoke the law against pacifist speakers, even in the face of ‘disloyal and mischievous’ speeches. ⁷⁶ In his memo of 22 January 1918, Bodkin advised that speeches not be prosecuted ‘without considerable hesitation’ and only when ‘harm is reasonably likely to result’. ⁷⁷

To a great extent, the sheer occurrence of public meetings had for long depended on police discretion. ⁷⁸ Wartime regulations provided the police with greater powers to cut the number of meetings. On 19 April 1916, an Order-in-Council was made under DORA (Regulation 9A) empowering the police (and other officials), duly authorized for the purpose by the Secretary of State, to prohibit the holding of a meeting when there was reason to think that it ‘will give rise to grave disorder, and will thereby cause undue demands’ upon the police or military forces. ⁷⁹ If a meeting was held, ‘or attempted to be held’, in contravention of this prohibition, it was lawful to take steps ‘to disperse’ or prevent it.

In practice, especially under Asquith's premiership, meetings were routinely permitted. ⁸⁰ In a discussion in Parliament on the topic of public meetings, Home Secretary Samuel, who was severely censured both for being ‘too lax in using DORA’ and, by radical liberal colleagues, for failing to defend civil liberties, ⁸¹ explained the notion that guided him: ‘that an Executive Government in a democratic country such as this ought not, even in time of war, to assume to itself the right of determining when the opposition to its own policy should be allowed to be expressed and when it should not be allowed to be expressed’, adding, though, that ‘the right to hold public meetings is not absolute and unqualified’. ⁸² Indeed, even avid supporters of the anti-war cause recognised that Samuel was ‘extremely sparing in his use of the powers given to him’ by regulation 9A. ⁸³ Admittedly, following the coming into effect of the first conscription act and the passage of Regulation 9A in the spring of 1916, and certainly under Cave, the police prohibited and broke up more and more meetings, ⁸⁴ sometimes with a good deal of aggression. ⁸⁵ On the whole, however, the police did not resort to a massive prohibition of pacifist meetings. The result was that, despite all the proscriptions and harassment, pacifist meetings and demonstrations continued to take place throughout the war, allowing peace agitators to carry on disseminating oral propaganda. It appears that officers often opted to work in the background to make it difficult for campaigners to advertise their ideas from a public platform. While it was not rare for owners to refuse to let halls to war opponents, police pressure was also responsible for such refusals. ⁸⁶ What reduced the need to ban or disperse meetings was the determination of the jingoistic public to disrupt public gatherings and diminish their impact.

Managing Disrupted Meetings

Past history had taught the police that the holding of meetings in public space when one party expresses ‘views which are objected to by other parties’ was likely to cause ‘trouble’. ⁸⁷ Physical assaults on public meetings had long been a feature of popular politics in Britain, including peace meetings during the Boer War. ⁸⁸ Although, for the first few months of the war, most meetings took place ‘without interruption’, ⁸⁹ quite a large number of anti-war gatherings increasingly faced the kind of opposition that called for police intervention. Since the police had considerable discretion in deciding how to act, their performance at such events throws much light on their attitude towards peaceful protesters. It was a critical test of their impartiality for it was almost always evident who the aggrieved party was.

Anti-war meetings held indoors, with limited space, were particularly prone to turmoil, following a typical pattern. The disturbance would begin when people congregated outside the proposed venue, intending to foment unrest and raising the temperature of the gathered assembly. ⁹⁰ At a certain point, sometimes after several attempts, the increasingly impassioned crowd would force its way into the meeting place, joining people who had managed to get inside from the start. ⁹¹ Stirred up by the anti-war messages, the rioters would smash whatever was in their way, causing considerable damage. ⁹² Whether the meetings were indoors or outdoors, the attackers’ principal targets were the speakers. Although at times members of the crowd conducted friendly conversations with those addressing the meeting, ⁹³ more often they were resolute in not letting the speakers be heard, by hurling things at them and shouting them down every time they began to speak or moved to another place, occasionally throwing them off the platform. ⁹⁴ Many a time, the speakers had no choice but to succumb to the logic of superior force and stop speaking. ⁹⁵ As events unfolded, the anti-war activists time and again found themselves in real danger. Not only were they prevented from speaking, insulted and pushed about, but they had to take flight, being maliciously attacked while escaping. ⁹⁶

As with other police engagements with pacifist dissent, the steps taken varied from force to force and with the circumstances. In some instances, the police took pre-emptive steps and prepared for the event in advance. An exemplary case is the conference of the National Council for Civil Liberties and the open-air counter-demonstration that were held on 11 November 1916 at and near Cory Hall in Cardiff. Although the demonstrators did not ask for police protection or assistance of any kind, Head Constable D. Williams, estimating that the counter-demonstrators ‘might resort to acts of extreme violence and wanton damage’, made contingency plans and had a methodical course of action at the ready. ⁹⁷ Dozens of uniformed and plain-clothes officers were to be stationed at various strategic points, some assigned to pass details of the unfolding events both in the hall and outside it to senior officers who could give instructions to act at any given moment. ⁹⁸ A large force of patrol and mounted constables were in readiness ‘as an additional measure of precaution’. Still, notwithstanding the meticulous arrangements and the heavy police presence, the occasion followed the pattern described above, ending up with belligerent rowdies taking full control of the hall.

Such incidents attracted significant publicity. Alongside criticism that anti-war meetings had been allowed to take place at all, ⁹⁹ voices in the press and in Parliament would now and then join activists and their sympathisers in condemning the police for failing in their duty to safeguard protesters and meetings from violent disruption. ¹⁰⁰ In this case, it was the Home Office under Samuel that requested an explanation for the ‘state of commotion’ and the vandalism that occurred in Cardiff. ¹⁰¹ The fourteen-page report written as an answer by the Head Constable is most revealing of the mindset of a chief of police who was well prepared for any event. Whether he believed in it or not, he presented the outcome of the meeting as a great achievement, the best that could be accomplished in the circumstances. His line of argument was that, had the police not reacted effectively and ‘with diligence and tact’, probably ‘something far more serious than the breaking up of the Conference would have happened’. ¹⁰² Beyond forestalling greater material damage to the surrounding buildings, ‘The discreet course adopted by the police prevented any injury to life’ as well as ‘grave disorder’. ¹⁰³

It is difficult to gauge the extent of police bias against anti-war campaigners, but clearly, it existed and played a part in the police's choice of measures, as was the case with the previously mentioned Chief Constable Lionel Lindsay of Glamorgan Constabulary. The timing of police intervention in meetings is a notable indication. The police repeatedly arrived late, not when called, and even when on the spot from the start, frequently stood aside watching, turning a blind eye to the disorderly behaviour of the rioters before making any serious move. Pacifists commonly complained that the police ‘made no effort to protect them’. ¹⁰⁴ Some even got the impression that the police enjoyed ‘the discomfiture’, ¹⁰⁵ feeling that this ‘little entertainment from the crowd [would] be ample punishment to teach them’ a lesson. ¹⁰⁶

Evidently, the police were willing to tolerate a certain amount of ‘grave’ disorder even if it reflected badly on their professional image. To draw on the rhetoric of Williams, the destruction of property and the human injury inflicted at these meetings appeared to be within the scope of a reasonable price for the pacifists to pay for giving vent to their controversial ideas. A number of senior officers actually admitted that relying on ‘local organized effort to break up’ meetings, even if it caused ‘considerable excitement and trouble, and possibly disturbance’, was a deliberate police tactic. ¹⁰⁷ In Cave's view, it was more effective than prosecutions. ¹⁰⁸

Furthermore, to encourage counter-demonstrations, the police secretly came to an arrangement with jingoistic elements to provide them advance notice of upcoming anti-war meetings. New Scotland Yard under Thomson had put this arrangement into practice with the inflammatory Daily Express, ¹⁰⁹ as well as with the National War Aims Committee, a semi-official parliamentary and government-funded organisation established in June 1917 with the aim of boosting patriotic fervour, by helping, among other things, to stage rival meetings. ¹¹⁰ The police were also accused of encouraging bellicose behaviour and even of joining the attackers in the perpetration of violence. ¹¹¹

Behind the laxity of the police in shielding pacifists from the wrath of the crowd and their active efforts to disrupt meetings also lay a certain resentment at having to spend their precious time – professional as well as private – on policing pacifist events, ¹¹² especially as officers were occasionally struck by stones or were otherwise victims of violence. ¹¹³ Such sentiments may have been aggravated by the uncooperative and provocative conduct of quite a few protesters. ¹¹⁴

In general, the police definitely did not employ maximum strength in protecting pacifists. However, there were occasions when the police did make special efforts yet either failed in their mission or managed to provide only partial protection. ¹¹⁵ Naturally, owing to the conflicting narratives of supporters of pacifism and their opponents, it is difficult to ascertain whether the police in such circumstances ‘could not stand against an increasing crowd’ due to intentional negligence, sheer incompetence or, as time and again was contended by officials, shortage of manpower. ¹¹⁶ Whatever the case, it should be noted that, despite the repeated failure to prevent commotion, it was not unusual for officers to save pacifists from the fury of an unruly mob or for police stations to serve as a shelter. ¹¹⁷ The contact between the two sides, therefore, was not always adversarial.

Personal Encounters

Indeed, to get a fuller and more nuanced picture of the relationship between the police and the pacifists, one needs to examine the performance of the individual officer separately from the turmoil of disrupted meetings and the monitoring of propaganda. Of course, each officer had to work within the confines of the law and police regulations, but due to his wide discretionary powers, the individual policeman could choose from a range of possible behaviours. An instructive perspective in this connection is how the highly vilified conscientious objectors experienced his conduct.

In order to enforce conscription, the police were assigned an assortment of new tasks. Once the Military Service Act passed, the police were charged with making inquiries about persons who failed to report themselves for military duty, then finding, detaining and bringing them to court. If found guilty, they were handed over to the military authorities. The police also had to search for deserters from the army. Such responsibilities put officers in new positions and human situations that were potentially combustible. Resorting to strong-arm measures in this state of affairs was therefore not surprising, especially when shirkers did not succumb peacefully and ‘struggled and fought’ the police who came to detain them. ¹¹⁸ Yet, for all that, however much police officers despised the views of men who received a calling-up notice but refused to serve, the testimonies of conscientious objectors of their encounters with officers do not by and large give a sense of a traumatic confrontation. ¹¹⁹ In fact, notwithstanding their criticism of the behaviour of the police as an institution, and despite their probably unpleasant encounters with the police as protesters, quite a few of these men chose to portray the conduct of the policeman in positive terms as fair, lenient and even cordial and kind.

There are plenty of examples. The arrest of James Scott Duckers, a solicitor, ‘was done very pleasantly and courteously’. ¹²⁰ The case of Stephen Hobhouse demonstrates that an atmosphere of trust sometimes prevailed. Two or three weeks after Hobhouse had failed to present himself for service with the colours, ‘a friendly policeman’ appeared at his house with the summons to join up, ‘taking my word that I would appear a few hours later’ at the police court. ¹²¹ The Quaker Harry Stanton recalled that the police inspector who came to take him into custody did not like the job he was doing and showed great sensitivity to Stanton's feelings in offering to walk at a distance from him, if he ‘would prefer it’, so that passers-by would not witness his arrest. ¹²² Whether the officers stopped the conscientious objector in the street or more commonly went to his place of abode, the interpersonal exchange that the process of arrest entailed was quite often conducted with mutual respect. ¹²³

While looking for absentees, officers frequently found themselves having to confront members of the family (usually a mother or a father) who tried to hide their kin or pretend he was not at home. ¹²⁴ When he was found, it was not uncommon for the parent either to put up some resistance or try to postpone the arrest. Incidents in which officers were agreeable and flexible about the timing of the arrest were also recorded. ¹²⁵

Some objectors were forced to spend a night at a police station before they appeared in court. Whereas complaints were made about a ‘badly ventilated’ police cell that reduced the inmate to ‘a condition of partial collapse’, ¹²⁶ the Quaker Fred Murphin was put in ‘an unlocked cell’. ¹²⁷ For Hobhouse, having to spend a weekend in a police cell at Hackney station was ‘an odd and unpleasant sensation, most humiliating to one's pride and dignity’ but, ‘happily’, the cells ‘were clean and moderately comfortable places, and the police were polite, even apologetic’. ¹²⁸ Especially in small communities, local policemen knew activists personally and at times said they were sorry for having to arrest them. ¹²⁹ It may be that in certain cases the close personal links pacifist leaders had with establishment figures explained the officers’ respectful behaviour. ¹³⁰ All this was in contrast to the many accounts of brutal treatment of conscientious objectors by soldiers. ¹³¹

Conclusion

There is no doubt that, as the war went on, the police heightened their campaign of repression against opponents of the war. Their freedoms of expression and assembly were greatly circumscribed alongside the restriction of other traditional liberties. To be sure, police curtailment of political and civil freedoms was nothing new in modern British history and, as a matter of fact, had gained momentum in the years leading up to the war. ¹³² Yet, under the pressure of war and the extended definition of national interests by the state, the scope of oppressive action broadened significantly, with the pacifists becoming one of its key targets. As reflected in the police's handling of this type of dissent, a growing number of protest activities were criminalised and the employment of ‘un-English’ measures intensified: that is, the use of political surveillance and secret policing acquired increasing legitimacy, and the size of the surveilled population rose dramatically as did the intrusive penetration into the private lives of activists. Resorting to raids, the confiscation of propaganda material and the prosecution of its disseminators became much more common. In this new reality, the police, together with the military, had a baleful effect on the fortunes of the peace movement, on its strength and its ability to air its ideas. ¹³³ Many peace activists paid heavily for their political orientation both physically and mentally, with a good few sufficiently frightened to abandon their anti-war activities altogether. ¹³⁴

Still, although the police made extensive use of DORA's regulations and of the pre-war statute and common law, they did not apply the full might of the law to suppress anti-war propaganda, oftentimes refraining from taking any action against war resisters. As indicated above, the various police forces had an uneven record in their attitude to civil liberties. Beyond the impact of conscription, growing labour unrest, Liberal home secretaries and the formation of Lloyd George's government, police efforts against the anti-war movement were both place- and time-dependent, and influenced in different ways by other developments both at home and abroad, such as the Bolshevik Revolution. ¹³⁵ However, the sum of their performances can by no means be described as all-out repression. The anti-war organisations continued to operate, if within highly confined boundaries, and those activists who were willing to pay the price of their commitment continued to spread anti-war notions.

Notably, the bulk of the public rejected the messages of the peace movement and appeared more collaborative and supportive of police measures than prior to the war. Furthermore, even though here and there Labour and Liberal MPs raised questions about police treatment of anti-war protests, by and large, parliamentary scrutiny was not far-reaching. All this enhanced the discretionary powers of the police, giving them greater flexibility. Nonetheless, they still took heed of the limited criticism that was voiced and showed a certain restraint in exercising the powers they possessed. This was in the spirit of restraint inherent in the British police tradition, as had been moulded by the founders of the new police in an attempt to distinguish the emerging force from the ‘oppressive’ and ‘military-style’ police on the continent, and which informed both the officers on the ground and the upper echelons. ¹³⁶ Indeed, as the above examples serve to illustrate, conscientious objectors had many good words to say about the behaviour of individual officers during the process of arrest. In point of fact, even in the context of protest and propaganda control, officers were now and again commended by pacifists for the tactful, courteous and impartial manner in which they discharged their ‘difficult duties’, even when they themselves were victims of such duties. ¹³⁷ Quite a few historians maintain that the British police treated anti-war groups during the war better than their European counterparts. ¹³⁸ This type of behaviour helped to entrench the legitimacy of police action and strengthen the image of the bobby and the police as a whole as both indulgent and protective of the national interest.

In explaining police behaviour, it should also be pointed out that Dora was expressive legislation in the sense that it gave unprecedented powers to a government that could not possibly exercise all of them equally and at the same time. Given that many forces faced manpower shortages, ¹³⁹ their operational capacity was limited, making restraint a necessity, and obliging senior officers to prioritise tasks and be selective. It is evident that, at various moments of decision-making, pragmatism prevailed. Perhaps the privileged nature of the UK's geopolitical position – that the war was not on its own territory – meant that it could afford the luxury of tempering the severity of how DORA powers were understood and applied. It was arguably this approach that, in the end, saw Britain through the war, whereas the top-down control of society in Germany, with fewer outlets for dissent or popular protest, was instrumental in the collapse of morale in that country in late 1918.

In sum, although the wartime police enjoyed privileged conditions and heightened powers – powers that remained a persistent feature of law enforcement after the war ¹⁴⁰ – they made use of them to contain the opposition to the war in a limited manner. Police norms and conduct during the war might thus be characterised as repression British-style.