There were more than 18,000 Conscientious Objectors in Britain during the First World War. Some of their stories are well known and in many cases, we can record their experiences in their own words. Others, however, are mysteries. Whether through pragmatic attempts to save archive space, accident, incompetence or simply through being lost to time, most records of First World War Conscientious Objection are lost to the researcher. Until material is recovered or refound, thousands of Conscientious Objectors will remain lost, with only brief accounts of their experiences.

Reginald (Reg) Hooper is one of these men. The record of his experiences as a CO is shockingly brief, but from it, much can be reconstructed. Reg lived and worked in Manchester and was a member of the Manchester branch of the No-Conscription Fellowship, one of the most active and vocal NCF branches in the country.

His Tribunal appearance where he registered his refusal to become a conscript under the Military Service Act must have been in early 1916, as by October he had been arrested as an absentee from the army. From there, he would have been tried at a Magistrates court, fined and transferred to the army under military escort.

It is possible that soon after he was in prison, where he would have faced the same terrible conditions as many other COs - deprived of food, exercise and mental stimulation, working to complete a sentence of Hard Labour under the draconian “Rule of Silence”.

After two years in prison, served either as a single sentence or multiple sentences, he grew ill. By 1918 so many long-serving COs were gravely ill that there was a move in Parliament to release them gradually - Reg was discharged due to severe illness in November 1918.

Whatever his state when he left prison, it was not an illness he could recover from, and on the 21st of November 1918, not long after the armistice was signed that would bring the war to an end, he died.

Though Reg’s story is brief, his name is widely known due to its inclusion on the CO Memorial Plaque. The Plaque records the names of 69 men who died either in prison or after release as a result of their experiences in the hands of the Government and Army. It is not a memorial in the strictest sense of the word, but a record to the aims and goals of the CO movement, an end to war and a better and more peaceful world. The Plaque carries an inscription that “it is by the faith of the idealist that the ideal comes true” - a phrase that remains true for the actions of each and every one of the British First World War COs, no matter how well their stories are known.