Conscript registration in Britain

On Saturday 21 October 1939 queues of young men formed outside employment exchanges all over Britain. It was the first registration under the National Service (Armed Forces) Act, passed on 3 September, which in principle made all men aged 18 to 41 liable for military service. The government, however, had no intention of calling them up all at once. That day only men born between 2 October 1917 and 1 October 1919 registered – in other words, twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds (some of whom had already turned 22). Around 230,000 of them came forward, and more than five thousand declared that for reasons of conscience they would not take up arms.

Popular chronologies speak under this date of the registration of “all fit men aged 18 to 23”. This is inaccurate. The Act covered men aged 18 to 41, but the first registration concerned only the age groups that a royal proclamation at the beginning of October had designated as the first to be called up. The Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, spoke in the House of Commons on 11 October of the “age groups from 20 to 22”, and some studies describe this group as “men aged 20–23”. Eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds were registered later.

From militiamen to wartime conscription

For centuries Britain had relied on volunteers for its army. It first introduced conscription in January 1916, in the middle of the Great War, when volunteers began to run short, and abolished it in 1920. Throughout the interwar years universal military service was regarded as alien to British tradition, and governments gave assurances that it would not be reintroduced in peacetime. Only 1939 changed that. After the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia and the guarantee to Poland, Neville Chamberlain’s cabinet, urged on by Hore-Belisha, decided at the end of April to introduce conscription even before war broke out. The Military Training Act, passed in May, covered only a single age group of twenty-year-olds. On 3 June 1939 men born between 4 June 1918 and 3 June 1919 registered, and in July the first of them, known as militiamen, reported for six months’ training.

The outbreak of war changed the scale of the task. On the day Britain declared war on Germany, Parliament passed the National Service Act. The first wartime statute of the new War Cabinet replaced the Military Training Act, and the militiamen were absorbed into the army. The mechanism was simple: by proclamation the King designated successive age groups, whose members registered, underwent medical examinations and waited to be called up. The pace was set not by the number of men but by the capacity of the army, which was short of barracks, instructors and equipment. Hore-Belisha declared that no division would go to France until there was certainty that it could be maintained there. The government, as the minister said, was planning for a war of at least three years. Alongside the conscripts, volunteers were also accepted: by 11 October nearly 50,000 had come forward, and in September twice as many volunteers had enlisted as there were militiamen.

Saturday 21 October

Registration took place at the local offices of the Ministry of Labour and National Service – that is, at the employment exchanges – headed by the minister Ernest Brown. Clerks recorded each man’s name, date of birth, address, occupation and employer, and the registrant received a certificate of registration. He could state a preference for service in the Royal Navy or the Royal Air Force, though he was warned that his wish might not be granted. The next step was an examination before a medical board, which divided the recruits into four grades of fitness. The last, Grade IV, meant unfit for service. Then came the call-up to report to a unit.

The Act did not apply to Northern Ireland, where the government feared resistance from the Catholic population, nor to men who had been resident in Britain for less than two years. Exempt were ministers of religion, the unfit and students, who were allowed to finish their studies, and above all workers in reserved occupations. A special schedule laid down the age from which people in a given occupation were needed at home rather than in the forces. This covered miners, farmers, doctors, armaments workers and many others. Remembering the experience of 1914–1915, when skilled workers had joined the army en masse and factories had been left short of hands, the state wanted this time to preserve its industry.

On 21 October 230,009 men registered. Of these, 5,073 – 2.2 per cent – entered their names in the provisional register of conscientious objectors, those who refused military service on grounds of conviction.

Objectors before the tribunals

Anyone who signed this register remained a civilian and had fourteen days in which to apply to a local tribunal. The tribunals were chaired by county court judges (in Scotland by sheriffs), and four other members appointed by the ministry sat on them, at least one of them after consultation with the trade unions. A tribunal could register the applicant unconditionally, exempt him from service on condition that he did specified civilian work – most often in agriculture, forestry or hospitals – assign him to non-combatant duties in the army, or reject the application and place him on the list of those liable for call-up. There was a right of appeal to an appellate tribunal. In the very first days after the registration Parliament was already dealing with details, such as whether objectors in Wales could present their case in Welsh. On 26 October Brown replied that they could.

The system was much milder than in the First World War. Then, military representatives had sat on the tribunals, some 16,000 objectors had met with contempt and harassment, and those who were refused exemption and would not obey orders were brought before courts martial and sent to prison, not infrequently several times over. In 1939 the army had no representatives on the tribunals, and the tribunals were prepared to grant full exemption. This did not, however, mean equal treatment: outcomes depended largely on the views of the chairman and varied considerably from region to region. Those who refused service in the largest numbers were members of religious communities such as the Quakers or Jehovah’s Witnesses, but also socialists and secular pacifists, among them people connected with the peace movement of the 1930s.

Subsequent age groups

The proportion of objectors on 21 October proved to be the highest of the entire war. In subsequent registrations it fell: to about 1.6 per cent by March 1940, and after the fall of France and the evacuation from Dunkirk to about 0.6 per cent. Over the whole course of the war nearly 60,000 men applied, and from 1942 a certain number of women as well, once the obligation of service had been extended to them. Several thousand objectors went to prison, most often for refusing to attend a medical examination after their application had been rejected.

Registration moved slowly up the age ladder. By May 1940 it had reached only men of 27, and it took in forty-year-olds in June 1941. In December 1941 a new National Service Act extended the obligation of service to men up to the age of 60, of whom only those under 51 could be sent to the forces, and to unmarried women aged 20 to 30. From 1943 some conscripts were directed to the coal mines instead of the forces. Conscription outlived the war: in 1948 it was replaced by peacetime national service under a new Act, and the last conscripts were called up in 1960.

Its place in the war

The registration of 21 October took place in the middle of the Phoney War, when there was almost no fighting on land and the British Expeditionary Force was digging in along the Belgian border. It thus had none of the drama of 1914, when crowds of volunteers had stormed the recruiting offices. It was a calm, bureaucratic procedure, and that was its whole point: for the first time in its history Britain was raising an army from the first day of war according to plan rather than according to enthusiasm. As a result, in the years that followed it was able to put millions of soldiers into the field without stripping its factories and mines. The twenty-year-olds registered in October 1939 were the age group that went on to fight in France in 1940, in North Africa, in Italy and in Normandy.

The treatment of objectors, in turn, became one of the distinguishing features of Britain’s path through the war. In the Third Reich refusal of military service was treated as undermining the nation’s defensive strength and was usually punished by death; the first objector of this war, the Jehovah’s Witness August Dickmann, was shot in Sachsenhausen concentration camp as early as 15 September 1939. The British state, while waging total war, at the same time recognised the right to refuse to bear arms and drew up a procedure for it. Although attitudes towards objectors hardened markedly in 1940, after the defeat in France, and many town councils dismissed them from their jobs, the principle survived until the end of the war.