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ALEXANDER NEIL CAMPBELL 1889 - 1917  

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Alexander Neil Campbell was a 25 year old member of the Independent Labour Party who stood up against conscription as a socialist and internationalist in mid 1916.

The Tribunal reported on his case on the 26th of July 1917.

“Alexander Neil Campbell, of Glasgow, was arrested on the 13th of October 1916 and served his first sentence in Wormwood Scrubs, and his second in Ayr prison and Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow.

Prison tried him severely, and on one occastion he expressed the fear that he would be forced to give up the struggle, as he was feeling too weak to carry it on. His third D.C.M took place at Ayr on the 9th July, and some of those who were present in the Court say that he seemed to be in a state of nervous collapse. In this pitiable condition, he yielded to the persuasion of the court and consented to become a soldier.

It was not unheard of for Conscientious Objectors to be broken down by the conditions in which they were held. Prisons in the Edwardian period were designed to punish and to isolate, with mind-numbing repetitive labour, total silence and poor diet pushing some absolutist COs to consider anything, up to and including combatant service, to escape. Alexander Campbell would not have been the first CO to show cracks in his resolve under the enormous and intolerable strain of the prison system. This would only have been made worse by the relentless pressure of a District Court Martial where Military Officers would have used any and all means available to them to try to convince a CO to become a soldier, from intimidation to threats, physical and mental abuse and even, perhaps most testing of all, the promise that all punishments would be ended if the man agreed to join the army.

The implications of this pressured, agonised decision were severe for Alexander. The Tribunal report continues:

“On the Morning of the 11th July, another man was put into the Guard room beside him; there was no one else there. This newcomer proceeded to shave himself; he laid down his razor to do something in another part of the room when he heard a fall; turning, he saw Campbell lying on the floor with his throat cut. When the other soldiers of the guard came in they found him dying, and he passed away in a very few minutes without uttering one word.”

For Alexander to be driven to take his own life shows the depths of despair the ruthless punishment exerted by a government determined to make life as hard as possible for conscientious objectors, even to the point where death seemed the preferable option. Suicide was still considered a crime in 1916, but an understanding of the context and meaning of Alexander’s death is clear to see in the final paragraph of the Tribunal report:

“There is no doubt in the minds of those who knew Alexander Campbell best, that full of remorse at having, after all, yielded to the system which he had been combating all these months, he could not resist the sudden temptation of seeing the razor lying before him. Quaker chaplains who visited him in prison speak of the high opinion they formed of him, describing him as a sensible bright and intelligent young man, the sincerity of whose convictions impressed itself on them. But the long confinement and meagre diet of the prisons had done their work in reducing his physical powers and mental stamina, and his death is another terrible indictment of our penal system.”

In the eyes of the Tribunal, and those of the modern day, the culpability for the death of Alexander Neil Campbell lies not with the young man driven to a desperate act, but with the Government that imprisoned him cruelly and unnecessarily, simply for believing that war was wrong. As the Tribunal put it, Alexander’s was “Another name has to be added to the list of those broken in the fight for freedom.”

 

 

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CO DATA

Born: 1889
Died: 1917
Address: 531 Cathcart Road, Glasgow
Tribunal: Glasgow
Prison: Wormwood Scrubs, Ayr, Barlinnie
HO Scheme:[1]
CO Work:
Occupation:

Absolutist

 


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