Joseph Handel Williams was one of very few Conscientious Objectors to have the sad experience of refusing conscription in both world wars. Born in 1899, he was old enough to be caught up in Conscription in 1917 and young enough to refuse it again in 1942.

Joseph’s experiences as a conscientious objector were a neccessary result of his religious background. A member of the International Bible Students Association (IBSA, now Jehovah’s Witnesses), Joseph’s religious beliefs made it impossible for him to be part of the war machine in any way. For an IBSA CO, war was both a violation of Jesus’ teachings and an example of the civil government trying to take precedence in their lives over God’s law - and they would staunchly refuse to participate.

It was this position that Joseph took before the Llanelly Tribunal on the 8th of March 1917, which passed him “Exempt from Combatant Service”. This decision, which would have seen Joseph sent to the Army as a non-combatant soldier, was unacceptable to him as it would have firmly violated his stand of no cooperation at all with the military system. Rejecting the verdict and therefore leaving himself with no exemption whatsoever, Joseph was arrested after refusing to report to barracks and taken to the Llanelly Police Court, considered to be an absentee from the Army. He was tried, found guilty and fined the standard amount of 40 shillings, and then, forcibly made a soldier, he was handed over to the Army under guard.

By the 29th of May 1917, he had been sent to the Cardiff barracks where, resisting all orders and refusing all cooperation, he faced a court martial and was sentenced to one years hard labour. By 1917 the system of court martial and prison sentence was well established, and Joseph would most likely have been processes swiftly and even with a minimum of abuse. The army sought to remove COs from their system as quickly as possible - stubborn, principled and in opposition to everything the Army stood for, COs were, from mid-1916 transferred to civilian control as quickly as the army could handle their cases.

Joseph was sent to Wormwood Scrubs where he served his prison sentence in the harsh conditions of Edwardian gaols. After spending eight months in prison, he was brought before the Central Tribunal, which met in Wormwood Scrubs to decide the suitability of Joseph for the Home Office Scheme. Hearing his case, they decided that he was a “Class A” or “Genuine” CO, and though this would not secure his release from prison, it would qualify him for a place on the Home Office Scheme, a compromise between CO and Government where for a promise of “good behaviour” and the agreement to work, men could be let out of prison into designated Home Office camps.

Conditions on the Home Office Scheme were better than prison, and Joseph was sent to Wakefield where he would meet several hundred other COs from around the country. He entered the Home Office Scheme on the 21st of August 1917, and likely stayed working within the scheme for the rest of the war. Though conditions were still harsh and the work punishing, Joseph seems to have found this compromise acceptable, and though most likely shuffled around several work centres during his time on the scheme, there is no record of his return to prison for refusing to abide by its rules. Joseph, along with the other 3,000 COs who took up the scheme was most likely released and formally demobilised from the Army in June-September 1919.

By the time of the introduction of Conscription for the Second World War, Joseph was too old to be called up into a fighting or support unit. Instead, it is likely that he refused to be conscripted into an ancillary service operating in his area. While membership of many services such as the ARP and Fire Brigade was voluntary, several First World War COs saw themselves conscripted to provide war-essential support to local efforts. Refusing conscription whenever and wherever it came, they became some of the very few men to have the unfortunate duty to stick by their consciences in both wars, no matter the cost.