John was one of the many Catholic Londoners who refused to fight in the first world war. When conscripted in early 1916, John would have faced difficult questions at the Tribunal. As a CO whose religion formed the major part of his objection, John would have been asked what a “higher authority” in his denomination said about the war. This would have been hard to answer as many Catholic authorities on both sides of the conflict were pro-war, despite the pacifist nature of their religion! John applied to the Shoreditch tribunal, but was quickly turned down and had been arrested, tried and handed over to the army by June 1916.

His time with the army shows us that John was an absolutist conscientious objector. Arriving under armed escort at the Stratford recruiting depot, he refused to sign any papers that would confirm his identity as being “Private Walsh”. Though John had been sent to the Non-Combatant Corps, a section of the army set up for Conscientious Objectors who refused to kill in warfare, he would still have to acknowledge that he was a soldier. With this seemingly small stand, John was in fact making a powerful statement that he totally refused to even acknowledge the legitimacy of the Military Service Act - saying to military authorities that he was not and would not become, a soldier.

For this small act of defiance, John was taken before a court martial and charged with the offence that most conscientious objectors would face at some point in their wartime experiences: “When on active service disobeying a lawful command given by his superior officers”. This description is so wide and so commonplace for COs that it could refer to just about anything, but in John’s case we know that he was ordered to scrub the guard room floor and replied: “as an objector, I refuse to do it or to obey any other military order”. At his court martial, John continued to refuse to acknowledge the military authorities and did not give either evidence or defence in his favour.

For John and the six thousand other Conscientious Objectors in his position, this court martial meant the beginning of a prison sentence. For this first offence, John was released from a sentence of Hard Labour after 112 days and transferred back into the army. Of course, as a committed CO, John again refused to obey orders. Not long after his transfer to the 9th Eastern Battalion of the Non-Combatant Corps at Newhaven barracks, he was again in front of a Court Martial and subsequently re-imprisoned. This pointless cycle, showing the inability of both the military and civil authorities to understand the position of absolutist conscientious objectors, was repeated in 1917 and John served three sentences of hard labour. He was eventually released, still determined to resist war, in late 1918 after serving three sentences and more than two years in prisons around the country.