Military Service Tribunals were the product of legislation that, in venerable British fashion, represented a decisive step taken tentatively. Conscription, though not unprecedented in the nation’s history, was sufficiently novel in 1916 to require the expenditure of enormous political energy to introduce in such a way as not to (or seem not to) traduce the principles for which, ostensibly, Britons were fighting. The result was ambiguous: a compulsory system of military enlistment that nevertheless provided a mechanism allowing deferral of, and even release from, the obligation. That mechanism’s human face – the Tribunals – comprised thousands of men (and the occasional woman),...

The overwhelming response to the call to arms during August and September 1914 represented the high-water mark of British voluntarism. Thereafter, with the German retreat from the Marne and the coalescing of semi-permanent front lines, the pace of recruitment fell steadily. By mid-1915, enlistments averaged approximately one hundred thousand per month, by which time just over two million men had gone to the Colours.² In the same period, government’s calculation of the resources necessary to prosecute the war successfully had moved from envisaging the creation of a thirty-division army to one of seventy.³ Given the scale of battlefield losses to...

Of the hundreds of thousands of men who appeared before the Tribunals, the relatively few who claimed exemption upon the ground of conscience have attracted the most, and the most subjective, attention. Modern empathy with pacifist principles has made almost mandatory the depiction of the conscientious objector as a victim of, and even martyr to, the thenprevailing spirit of militarism. By the same token, posterity has judged the Tribunals’ record almost exclusively upon their treatment of such men. Coloured by the early propaganda of the No-Conscription Fellowship and No More War Movement, and by the preconceptions of subsequent commentators, the...

Northamptonshire Tribunals’ treatment of, and attitudes towards, the boot and shoe trade are difficult to place in a national perspective. No other manufacturing industry dominated an English region so markedly that was not also afforded comprehensive reserved occupation status. For that reason, the steel, coal, shipbuilding and chemical sectors offer unsatisfactory benchmarks. In terms of what it supplied to the war machine, Lancashire’s cotton industry might be considered a reasonably close equivalent, yet the similarities are largely illusory. At the war’s commencement, cotton lost a significant number of men to Derby’s recruitment of the ‘Pals’ regiments, but the industry was...

By the outbreak of the First World War, the nation grew enough grain to provide for the population for just 125 days in a year, or, as one commentator put it, ‘from Friday night to Monday morning’. The production deficit was caused in part by a long-term depression in agriculture that had resulted in a 48 per cent reduction in the area devoted to cereal production in England and Wales since 1874. In that year, arable land had fed some 26 million Britons; by 1914 it was able to feed only 16 millions. Corresponding figures for Northamptonshire were 286,000 tilled...

Following the call to arms in August 1914, many businessmen responded enthusiastically, forming recruitment and drilling leagues, or joining bespoke units of like-minded men ‘in a way of business’. In Leeds alone, a 1200–strong battalion principally comprising members (of all ‘ranks’) of the business community was formed, while the four battalions of the Liverpool Pals and the eight battalions of the Manchester Pals were drawn predominantly from their cities’ commercial middle classes (as was one of the four battalions raised in Hull).² These were, however, headline initiatives, idiosyncratic in the manner of so many other initial reactions to the...

Extant biographies of Northamptonshire tribunalists (as given in Chapter 1) reveal an overwhelming prevalence of men of substance and standing in their communities. At the county level, the Appeals Tribunal hosted a representative selection of some of Northamptonshire’s most distinguished public servants and gentry, with a leavening of genuinely aristocratic blood. Clearly, theirs was not a homogeneous group; tribunalists came from widely different backgrounds and enjoyed markedly dissimilar expectations of themselves and their immediate society. Nevertheless, most might be characterized as being of ‘rank’: that is, of a degree of status that distinguished them from a majority of those who...

The fifth ground for exemption laid out in the Military Service Act, 1916, and its successors was the demonstrable ill-health or infirmity of the applicant. Though the median fitness of the British male had been an obsessive concern in some quarters since the South African War (during which large numbers of volunteers had been rejected as physically inadequate to the task of soldiering), the peacetime Army, a small, professional force, had been able to maintain its strength from an adequate reservoir of fit young men between the ages of 19 and 30. However, the massive wave of volunteers reporting to...

Born in the early days of the war from the widespread urge to ‘do something’ to protect the homeland from a German invasion, the Volunteer Training Corps, or VTC, had a protracted gestation. The early proliferation of small, independently organized groups, the heterogeneity of opinion regarding their role, the enduring conviction of the War Office that they represented both a diversion of men from fighting units and an expensive frivolity ensured that ‘something’ long remained an undetermined quality. A degree of early consolidation and rationalization took place under the leadership of Lord Desborough of Taplow, who became President of the...

Between January 1916 and the Armistice, some 2.5 million Britons went to the Colours, of whom 1.35 million were taken via the mechanism of successive Military Service Acts.³ Of the latter, it may be assumed that an indeterminable number would have enlisted eventually without compulsion; of the remainder, many went into uniform with varying degrees of reluctance but did not apply for exemption. The total number of applications made to the Tribunals during the conscription period cannot be calculated, owing to the early destruction of the greater part of the database. During the early months of the conscription period, it...