"They in the Lord Who Firmly Trust": A Friend at War with the Great War

"They in the Lord Who Firmly Trust": A Friend at War with the Great War Thomas C. Kennedy* On 18 January 1917 from the guardroom of Budbrooke Barracks, Warwickshire, Wilfrid Littleboy, recently qualified chartered accountant , future Clerk of London Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends and prospective inmate of His Majesty's prison at Wormwood Scrubbs, wrote out for his parents the words that, for him, had become "a sort of wartime motto": They in the Lord who firmly trust shall be like Zion hill Which at no time can be removed and standeth ever still. As round about Jerusalem, the mountains stand alway, The Lord His folk shall compass so, from henceforth and for aye.1 Littleboy had taken his watchwords from a Scottish metrical version of the opening verses of Psalm 125; and I, in turn, have appropriated these lines as the starting point of an inquiry into the origins of the wartime resistance of Quaker "absolutists" like Wilfrid Littleboy in such unlovely places as Wormwood Scrubbs (where, supposedly, at one point during the war the largest Friends meeting in London was being conducted).2 This resistance will be considered in the context of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century religious revival that created the "modern" Society of Friends in Britain. All the major impulses of this transformation, the so-called Quaker Renaissance, were "progressive" in both a religious and political sense and these liberal ideas greatly influenced the generation of younger Quakers to which Wilfrid Littleboy belonged, and obviously contributed to the anti-war struggle for which they have become justly famous. But the somewhat ironic conclusion of this paper is that, in the end, Wilfrid Littleboy's experience as a war resister Thomas C. Kennedy is Chair and Professor of History, University of Arkansas. 1.Wilfrid Littleboy to his parents, 18 Jan. 1917, from W.E. Littleboy's prison letters in possession of Margaret E. Nash (Littleboy's daughter) and used with her permission. Hereinafter cited as Littleboy Letters. For W.E. Littleboy's recollections in retrospect, see "1914-1918, ? remember . . .' VIII with the C.O.s in prison," The Friend, 92 (1934): 859-61. 2.W.E. Littleboy, "I remember . . .", 859 and Maude Robinson, "Lest We Forget": A Memory ofthe Society ofFriends in the War Years, 1914-1918 (London , n.d.) 21. One CO. wrote that early in 1917 there were "about 20 Friends" working in the laundry at the "Scrubbs." See James Jones to Wilfred T. Ecroyd, 8 April 1917, Wilfred T. Ecroyd Papers in possession of Henry Ecroyd. 88Quaker History and prisoner of conscience revealed the inadequacy of both liberal religion and political liberalism as guides to the twentieth century pacifist. During the 1870s "weighty" British Quakers began seriously to consider the condition of younger Friends and earnestly to express deep concern about the spiritual restlessness and dissatisfaction of many of them. Such attitudes seemed, at least in part, to be manifestations of the controversies over Darwinian evolution and the higher biblical criticism which had had a deeply unsettling effect even within the generally staid confines of British Quakerism.3 In 1875 at the suggestion of Allen Jay, an influential American evangelical minister, a youth group, the Friends Christian Fellowship Union (FCFU), was established. The fundamental purpose of the FCFU, which was organized around monthly prayer meetings and Bible classes, was to provide a social setting in which "sound" or orthodox religious principles could be effectively reenforced. But as the Fellowship grew so did youthful dissatisfaction with what to many seemed a stagnant and even irrelevant evangelical theology only slightly removed from the mainstream of dissenting Protestantism , emphasizing, as it did, Scriptural inerrancy and the propitiatory view of Christ's death as a blood sacrifice in atonement for sins. Such ideas were unacceptable and even embarrassing to some of the better-educated young Friends who had been influenced by Darwinian science and "progressive" Biblical scholarship. Thus, during the 1 880s the Friends Christian Fellowship Union proved to be "a home for the ferment" of some of the ablest younger men and women in the Society.4 Indeed, the Fellowship and its female counterpart provided a ready-made and enthusiastic audience for the...