Edward Hicks: Pacifist bishop at war
G. R. Evans
Lion £9.99
(978-0-7459-5653-4)
Church Times Bookshop £9 (Use code CT656
)
Subversive Peacemakers: War resistance 1914-1918. An
Anglican perspective
Clive Barrett
The Lutterworth Press £20
(978-0-7188-9367-5)
Hell on Earth: My life in the trenches
1914-1918
C. V. Burder
New Generation Publishing* £9.95
(978-1-78507-022-8)
*www.newgeneration-publishing.com
THE first two books define "pacifism" very differently. Clive
Barrett in Subversive Peacemakers follows the classic
definition by Martin Ceadel (Pacifism in Britain, 1914-45,
1980): "the personal conviction that it is wrong to take
part in war". The subtitle of G. R. Evans's study of Edward Hicks
is Pacifist bishop at war. But Hicks was not a pacifist.
He was a peace-lover, a pacifier. As Evans points out, Hicks
opposed both the Boer Wars because "the motives for them were
corrupt and mistaken, rather than because he believed that war was
always wrong".
Who was Hicks? He was considered so important that, within three
years of his death, a substantial biography was published. A decade
or so ago, Graham Neville devoted two books to him. Evans
succinctly describes Hicks as "an able and principled person
willing to take some risks and work for unpopular or controversial
causes". He was born in 1843 into a humbler family than most
bishops. But he won an Oxford scholarship, and became a don, and
unfashionably an ordinand.
He was naturally sensitive and generous to people. In his first
parish, he helped people suffering from the agricultural
depression, campaigned against drink, created allotments and a
communal shop, and supported trade unions. Later, as vicar of a
Manchester slum parish, his heart went out to the poor, and he
worked with the Church Army and became a foe of unscrupulous
landlords.
In 1910, he became Bishop of Lincoln. In this huge diocese, he
discovered problem clergy and problematic church buildings. His
unceasing pastoral work led to two lengthy breakdowns. As President
of the Church of England Peace League from 1910, he combated the
war spirit, but when war came could not work out a consistent
position. He gave hospitality to Belgian refugees, visited troops,
defended the rights of conscientious objectors, and promoted the
place of women in Church and State. The liberal causes that he
championed became, thanks to his influence, more widely proclaimed,
not least by William Temple, who became Bishop of Manchester
shortly after Hicks died in 1919.
Hardly anyone associated pacifism with Anglicanism until the
1930s, when some well-known Anglicans such as Dick Sheppard and
Charles Raven announced their conversion. Clive Barrett in this
well-documented study Subversive Peacemakers reveals new
material, especially about the small number of Anglican COs in the
First World War.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, groups, often Quaker-led,
campaigned for arbitration instead of war. Some Anglican leaders
gave strong support. Once Germany invaded Belgium, attitudes
changed dramatically, but Temple believed that the nation needed
the pacifist witness.
A few Anglican pacifists became fairly prominent - for example,
George Lansbury, and Maude Royden, a campaigner by caravan. She
envisaged pacifists flinging themselves in front of troop trains.
Many were individualists. When the pacifist priest Bernard Walke
met 600 COs at Dartmoor he was dismayed by their variety, from
quiet Quakers to fanatics brandishing their Bibles. Nothing united
them except a refusal to fight.
The introduction of conscrip- tion in 1916 made the position of
the CO acute. Objections varied. Christadelphians would make
munitions, provided they were not under military discipline. Others
objected to this war, but not to all wars. Many would serve on
farms, in schools, and with the Red Cross, RAMC, or Friends'
Ambulance Units. Absolutists would not accept any alternative
employ- ment.
Though Archbishop Davidson, Bishops Gore and Hicks, and other
leaders defended the right of conscientious objection, some COs
were brutally treated. Barrett reproduces some of the touching
drawings by COs imprisoned in Richmond Castle. Some were marched to
France; some were sentenced to death, but at the last minute had
their sentences commuted to ten years' imprisonment.
Barrett claims, without any evidence, that the peace movement
came close to preventing the Second World War. True, pacifists
supported appeasement up to and beyond September 1939. But they
never listened to Reinhold Niebuhr's entreaty for them to develop a
realistic political expression of their faith.
When Claud Burder, a retired priest, died in 1968, he thought,
like many veterans, that he had taken his memories of the Great War
to his grave. But, 40 years later, his son, rummaging through a
trunk, discovered his father's account of his service from 1915 to
1919. Hence Hell on Earth, in paperback, but also in other
formats explained in the accompanying DVD.
After curacies, he was chaplain to congregations around the
world. When war broke out, he sailed home, feeling a duty
(unexplained) to participate. In this story of his war service, he
did not express or ponder his inner feelings about vocation, faith,
and prayer, but concentrated on vivid depictions of external
events. Offers to become an army chaplain were rejected. Without
any apparent hesitation (he showed contempt for a CO), he
volunteered as a combatant officer.
Latent malaria deepened bouts of exhaustion: once he accepted a
mouse lying on his forehead to warm itself. He experienced
extremities: two feet of mud in the trenches; a delivery from
Fortnum & Mason of tinned duck in aspic; a corpse infested with
maggots; welcome rests behind the lines. Awarded the MC, he took a
long time to recover after a wound and septicaemia. He returned to
active ministry without comment.
The book deserved better editing. There are no chapter headings,
no index or page numbers, and only one break in a book of more than
300 pages.
Canon Alan Wilkinson is a Fellow of the George Bell
Institute, University of Chichester.
