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MEN WHO SAID NO | ROAD TO CONSCRIPTION | OBJECTION | PRISONS | SENTENCED TO DEATH | TRIBUNALS | WIDER CONTEXT | |
SIDNEY COLLINS 1892 - 1983 | |||||||||
Sidney Collins was born in 1892 and lived in Leicester, working in a warehouse for the locally prevalent boot and shoemaking trade. As a humanitarian, he opposed the First World War, and when conscription was imposed in 1916 he applied for exemption as a conscientious objector. The Leicester Military Service Tribunal allowed him only exemption from combatant service, meaning that he would be called up into the Non-Combatant Corps (NCC), guaranteed not to use or even handle weapons, but nevertheless part of the Army. Sidney ignored the notice of call-up, leading to arrest by the civil police, being brought before Leicester Magistrates’ Court on 24 May 1916, fined £2, and handed over to a military escort. He was taken to Glen Parva Barracks, outside Leicester, depot of 3 Northern Company of the NCC, attached to the Leicestershire Regiment. He began disobeying orders, such as to put on a uniform, entailing being held in the guardroom, and was transferred about 23 June to the mediaeval castle at Richmond Castle, still used by the Army as a depot for the NCC. There on 6 July he was court-martialled and sentenced to 112 days imprisonment with hard labour. He was taken to Northallerton Prison, North Riding, Yorkshire, and then on 31 August to Wormwood Scrubs Prison, London, where the next day he was interviewed by the Central Tribunal, sitting at the prison. He was found to be a “genuine” CO, after all, and was offered the Home Office Scheme, which he accepted, although there was some delay while he was sent to Durham Prison, eventually going to Warwick Work Centre, under the Home Scheme, in November 1916. In spring 1917 he worked for six weeks on a farm at Peatling Magna, Leicestershire, then at Princetown Work Centre, Dartmoor, for some 14 months. Under the Exceptional Employment extension of the scheme, he worked at a saw mill in Bristol for three months, and finally at Cadbury’s chocolate factory, Bournville, Birmingham (as a Quaker firm, Cadbury’s welcomed COs), before being discharged in April 1919, when the Home Office Scheme was wound up. After the war, Sidney set up as a corn merchant in Bristol in 1920. In retirement, he moved to Exmouth, Devon, in 1981, and died there in 1983.
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