John Battley was born in 1880 to a poor working class family in Clapham, his mother dying of overwork when he was seven. He left school at 13 to become a printer’s apprentice, but succeeded sufficiently well to set up a printing firm in 1905 with his brother George, and Battley Brothers developed  a reputation for employee benefits such as holiday and sick pay, well before they became standard.

The Boer war (1899-1902), British fighting Dutch émigrés in South Africa, motivated the development of John’s Baptist faith into pacifism, and in the First World War he joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation soon after its foundation in late 1914. When conscription came, John was able to convince the Battersea Military Service Tribunal of his conscientious objection sufficiently to allocate him to non-combatant military service, but on going to the London County Appeal Tribunal, John gained exemption from any military service, conditional upon doing Work of National Importance, which he was prepared to accept.  The Pelham Committee designated him for market gardening, beginning with digging cauliflowers at Twickenham. To a friend he wrote,

"When I tell you there are nearly 15,000 plants in cloches of 4, you can imagine my task... My arms and hands have swollen to twice their usual size and have given me ceaseless pain. My feet have been blistered (the nails on my toes turning black with pain) but I'm out to show, as I know you are, that a CO is no shirker if he is an idealist."

After the war he became active in the Labour Party, and was elected to London County Council in 1938 and was made a Justice of the Peace (magistrate) in 1940. At the 1945 general election he became MP for Clapham, but at the next election in 1950 he felt, at 70, that he should retire. One particular vote he cast, against the Labour government, was in opposition to continuation of conscription after 1948.