Henry Haston was a coal miner and Sunday school teacher from Stonebroom near Alfreton, Derbyshire. A deeply religious man and a practicing Primitive Methodist, he held a religious objection to war that extended from an objection to killing another person through to a strongly held objection to assisting others to kill. Accordingly, he was an absolutist Conscientious Objector who rejected his local Tribunal’s verdict that his Conscientious Objection warranted exemption from combatant service only.

Rejecting the Tribunal’s decision meant that he would be forced to report to barracks as a serving, fighting soldier and he was sent to the Derby depot of the Sherwood Foresters regiment in July 1918. His work as a coal miner had meant he was relatively safe from conscription, as mining was judged an occupation of national importance. His arrest and transfer to military control in late 1918 suggests that he was caught in the “combing out” process where Tribunals oversaw the search for each and every last man eligible for conscription left in Britain - forcing Henry into the army.

Henry’s Absolutist position did not sit well with the army and he was soon in trouble for refusing to obey orders. Faced with a court martial, he was sentenced to two years hard labour in prison and sent to Wormwood Scrubs.

Arriving at Wormwood Scrubs soon after his court martial, Henry was brought before the Central Tribunal. Conscientious Objectors from all around England were brought to the Scrubs during their first prison sentence from late 1916 onwards, with the intention that the Tribunal could hear their case and decide each CO’s suitability for the new compromise between Absolutist and Government - the Home Office Scheme. A CO judged suitable and willing to accept the terms laid out could be passed to a HoS camp, where, in exchange for undertaking work for the government, they would be granted better conditions and marginally more freedom. Many Absolutists rejected the scheme, while others found conditions in the camps to be much worse than promised.

Henry was judged to be a “CO class A” man, making him eligible for the Home Office Scheme and he agreed to be sent to Dartmoor work camp. Arriving in September, he would have found conditions poor and the CO population gripped by an epidemic of pneumonia. Only a few weeks later, he was dead, on the 25th of October 1918. His wife was sent for and had arrived only just before his death, leaving her a widow with a five week old child.

His coffin was carried from prison to the railway station by fellow Conscientious Objectors, only to be disrupted by locals around Dartmoor who threw a barrage of stones. When his body was returned to Stonebroom for burial, it was a different reception and his funeral was attended and paid for by his colleagues in both the mine and sunday school. He was only 26 years old, and a casualty, as much as any soldier, of the pointless futility of war.