MEN WHO SAID NO | ROAD TO CONSCRIPTION | OBJECTION | PRISONS | SENTENCED TO DEATH | TRIBUNALS | WIDER CONTEXT |
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MEN WHO SAID NO | ROAD TO CONSCRIPTION | OBJECTION | PRISONS | SENTENCED TO DEATH | TRIBUNALS | WIDER CONTEXT | |
| WILLIAM CROSS |
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| William Cross was one of the First Conscientious Objectors to accept the conditions of the Home Office Scheme. When conscripted in early 1916 he was working as a gardener in Hammersmith and, as a 21 year old single man, he would have been in the earliest group called up under the Military Service Act. His application to the Hammersmith Tribunal failed to gain exemption and by June 1916 he was in prison as an Absolutist CO. In mid-1916 however, the government had begun to balk at the numbers of COs undergoing hard labour in prison and had arrived at a solution in the form of the Home Office Scheme (HoS). The HoS was intended to provide COs with an alternative to long prison sentences, effectively trading a promise of compliant behaviour and taking up "useful" work in exchange for better conditions and a release from the confines of prison. William moved from Winchester Prison to Dyce Camp in August 1916 to find that this, the first of the Home Office Centres was, if anything, worse than prison. Dyce Camp was both an administrative and humanitarian failure. COs worked in quarrying, wearing inadequate clothing in terrible conditions. Sleeping in tents rejected by the army in driving rain and subsisting on food below the standard of prison rations, many COs began to fall ill. After the death of one young CO, Walter Roberts, the camp was closed after an enquiry. William went on to work in Wakefield and Dartmoor camps, where large numbers of COs guaranteed better organisation and treatment.
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