Thomas Alexander Dow was an Absolutist Conscientious Objector - one of 8,000 COs who refused all compromise with the military and as a consequence were condemned to successive prison sentences. From Dunkeld, Perth, and working as an Electrician in Edinburgh in 1916, Thomas was conscripted in March 1916 as the Military Service Act came into law.

He appeared before the Edinburgh Tribunal on the 28th of March, arguing for exemption as a Conscientious Objector on political grounds. Disagreeing with both the war and the right of the state to Conscript individuals, his application was not successful, and he was passed “Exempt from Combatant Service Only”, the most common verdict that Tribunals gave. ECS was unacceptable to Thomas, as it would have seen him sent to the Non-Combatant Corps, firmly part of the army.

Instead he refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Tribunal or Conscription, and refused to report to barracks. Under the Military Service Act, this was a crime - and Thomas was arrested and tried at Edinburgh police court as an absentee from the army on the 25th of April. A brief legal reprieve meant his conviction was postponed until May 1916, but from there he was taken under guard to the Hamilton barracks, where he was expected to obediently accept conscription into the military.

Instead, refusing any and all compromise, Thomas decided to defy orders, quickly leading to trouble within the inflexible and intolerant military system. By the 26th of May he was in front of a court martial and sentenced to six months in prison. It was the first of two sentences in gaol Thomas would serve. After the six months - commuted to two, he was released. But release made him a free man - once more eligible for conscription. By late July he was back in the hands of the military - and this time sentenced to 18 months in Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow.

There, he was sent in front of the Central Tribunal which met to judge suitability for the Home Office Scheme. The Central tribunal judged him a “Class A” CO, one with a long standing and genuine objection to warfare. Instead of securing his release, this merely made him suitable for the Home Office Scheme, the government’s plan to remove COs from prison and put them to ostensibly useful work. Thomas accepted the Home office Scheme in October 1916, and was transferred to Ballachulish camp, before a final move to Wakefield in August 1916. Work on the scheme was often punitive in nature, with backbreaking or tedious manual labour being the order of the day, though living conditions were undoubtably better, and significantly more free from restriction, than those the COs who took up the scheme left behind in prison.

He was most likely released from the scheme to return home in 1919, on one of the waves of demobilisation in the spring and summer of that year.