This image is of Clifford Allen, agnostic socialist, and quietly charismatic chairman of the No-Conscription Fellowship – before his imprisonment for refusing military
service. He served three prison sentences including many weeks of solitary confinement on bread and water diets, at the end of which he was a frail and emaciated thirty year old, who looked twice his age, weighed less than eight stone and was suffering from the onset of tuberculosis.
Catherine Marshall was instrumental in the struggle for women’s suffrage and then devoted 
herself to the cause of the conscientious objectors in WW1.
When the young men in charge of the No-Conscription Fellowship were arrested for failing to report for military service, she and Bertrand Russell pretty much took over the running of the organisation. She was indefatigable, meticulous, and highly inventive at circumventing the probing and prying of government and the military.
This is Fenner Brockway, founder of the No-Conscription Fellowship, a crucial organisation supporting COs during WW1, and which constantly challenged and harried the government and the military for
fair treatment of COs during the war. Continue reading
Michael Mears 