Dr John McCallum was a prominent local doctor in Argyll when caught up in Conscription in 1916, and his story as a Conscientious Objector speaks to the how incredibly arbitrary, wasteful and spiteful the treatment of COs was during the First World War.

Dr McCallum’s work as a doctor was not simply in providing local medical services, as, working as the TB officer for Argyllshire, he was employed at a county level in the monitoring, treatment and prevention of this deadly disease. His position was nationally important, and war did not lessen the critical importance of his work. Unfortunately, the desire to treat Conscientious Objectors as harshly as possible did - at least in the eyes of the petty-minded and vindictive Tribunal officials and politicians that were involved in deciding his fate.

The date of John’s first Tribunal appearance in Lorn county is unknown, but it must have been unsuccessful, and he was torn from the life-saving work he was doing to the barracks of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, at Stirling Depot in June 1916. There, refusing to make any compromise with the military or the system of conscription that valued the ability to destroy life more than the ability to save it, John refused to obey any orders, a choice that sent him quickly through a court martial, and then on to prison.

This was the first of three sentences that John would serve during the war. Every time he would be imprisoned for refusing military orders, serve his sentence, and be released - a free man, once again eligible for call up. This pointless and grinding cycle was a common feature of Absolutist Conscientious Objection.

By September 1916 he had been transferred to Calton prison, where he faced the Central Tribunal who passed him suitable for the Home Office Scheme, a compromise decision intended to put Conscientious Objectors to useful work in exchange for ameliorated conditions. After ten months on the Scheme, shuffled between Wakefield work centre and an Artificial Manure Manufacturer in Edinburgh, the ridiculousness of putting a qualified doctor to “Nationally Important” work of manual labour was noted in the House of Commons. Edmund Harvey, CO-supporting MP, asked on the 18th June 1917 used Dr McCallum’s example to ask if the system was really working as intended:

Will the right hon. Gentleman consider that this Committee should employ doctors for medical work in view of the great need for doctors in the country? Is it not uneconomical that they should be employed on making mail bags and artificial manures?

The answer was swift and idiotically vindictive: Would it not be better to employ as medical men doctors who are not shirkers?

Dr McCallum was eventually removed from the Home Office S Scheme after a work dispute, and sent back to prison. By January 1919 when he was most likely released, he had spent two years in prison and ten on the scheme. The desire for conscientious objectors to be punished, no matter their occupation, what they could do, or the good they could work, had deprived the country of a doctor trained in countering one of the most damaging epidemic diseases of the time. How many lives were lost as a direct result of his imprisonment? How many lives could have been saved if the legal provision for exempting men based on their occupation had been used?

Instead, in their desire to punish a man for the beliefs he held, the civil and military authorities locked John away, one more of the follies of conscription and militarism.