Sex before marriage was the natural female complement to the male frenzy of killing. If millions of men were to be killed in early manhood, or even boyhood, it behooved every young woman to secure a mate and replenish the population while there was yet time.

.

(6) George Coppard, With A Machine Gun to Cambrai (1969)

One fine evening two military policemen appeared with a handcuffed prisoner, and, in full view of the crowd and villagers, tied him to the wheel of a limber, cruciform fashion. The poor devil, a British Tommy, was undergoing Field Punishment Number One, and this public exposure was part of the punishment. There was a dramatic silence as every eye watched the man being fastened to the wheel, and some jeering started. Lashing men to a wheel in public was one of the most disgraceful things in the war. Troops resented these exhibitions, but they continued until 1917, when the War Minister put a stop to them, following protests in Parliament.

I believe that an important modification of the death sentence also took place in 1917. It appeared that the military authorities were compelled to take heed of the clamour against the death sentences imposed by courts martial. There had been too many of them. As a result, a man who would otherwise have been executed was instead compelled to take part in the fore-front of the first available raid or assault on the enemy. He was purposely placed in the first wave to cross No Man's Land and it was left to the Almighty to decide his fate. This was the situation as we Tommies understood it, but nothing official reached our ears. Let the War Office dig out its musty files and tell us how many men were treated in this way, and how many survived the cruel sentences. Shylock, in demanding his pound of flesh, had got nothing on the military bigwigs in 1917.

.

(7) Herbert Morrison, An Autobiography (1960)

My own view - as of the Independent Labour Party with which I was associated - remained one of opposition to the war, and there were a number of Liberals who shared this view in general. There would be no point in denying the considerable public enthusiasm for hostilities. The overwhelming majority of the people supported the Liberal Government in its declaration of war after Germany's invasion of Belgium. Every possible influence was brought to bear to create that attitude. The Conservatives were for the war. All the newspapers were in support, and there was no difficulty in whipping up public opinion to near fever pitch.

I remember an open-air I.L.P. meeting I addressed on Hampstead Heath one Sunday morning. I had given my audience our views as to the cause of the war, and expressed the conviction that the involvement of Britain in it had been wrong. My audience was very hostile. I spoke amid a great deal of violent and angry heckling. Ultimately I was dragged off the platform and taken by force to the nearby pond. There was some dispute at the edge of the pond, however, when the police intervened, and although my pince-nez glasses were flung into the water, I was not. This was a common experience among the anti-war speakers, except that some of them did get a ducking.

 

(x) Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945 (1980)

The No-Conscription Fellowship (N.C.F.) was founded in November 1914 by a young Labour Leader journalist, Fenner Brockway (1888-1988), initially at the prompting of his wife, Lilla, to mobilize men of military age against conscription. The members of its National Committee were mostly young, middle-class I.L.P. socialists such as Clifford Allen (1889-1939), its Chairman, who, like Brockway, worked for the socialist press, and Morgan Jones (1885-1939) and J. H. (Jimmy) Hudson (1881-1962), both schoolteachers. Only a few came from outside the ranks of socialist activists: the Revd Leyton Richards (1879-1948), for example, a Congregationalist who had already, unlike most British pacifists, found himself in conscientious disagreement with conscription in the form of the compulsory military training introduced in Australia in 1910, shortly before he came there to spend three years as minister of a Melbourne chapel and the philosopher Bertrand Russell, a Whiggish individualist who had espoused 'pacifism' during the Boer War but did not join the I.L.P. until 1915 and even then insisted that he was not a socialist... Its moment of ostensible failure, the introduction of conscription in 1916, was to prove its finest hour: from being a small propaganda body it became a substantial movement - though never as substantial as implied by its grossly exaggerated boast of 15,000 members in the summer of 1916 - and the acknowledged voice of the whole conscientious objection movement. In particular, it proved an efficient information and welfare service for all objectors; although its unresolved internal division over whether its function was to ensure respect for the pacifist conscience or to combat conscription by any means, sincerely "conscientious" or otherwise, had reduced it to a demoralized state by the last year of the war.

 

(x) Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945 (1980)

As a leading socialist absolutist, Clifford Allen, informed his Tribunal in March 1916: "I am a Socialist, and so hold in all sincerity that the life and personality of every man is sacred, and that there is something of divinity in every human being, irrespective of the nation to which he belongs." Like the N.C.F.'s credo, this declaration defined a position which was undoubtedly both pacifist and political: it revealed that even when inspired by political values true pacifism springs from a`moral' imperative rather than from "political" expediency.

Indeed, once Allen and his fellow absolutists found themselves in prison they became more than ever convinced of the difference between pacifism, rooted in the individual's conscientious adherence to what he knew to be right, and the strategy of war-resistance which, however justified in political terms, was itself a form of coercion. By May 1917, after a year in gaol, Allen had come to realise that even by sewing mailbags he was releasing labour for the war-effort and decided to cease all co-operation with the prison authorities; yet he refused to urge others to do likewise as part of an organized campaign, since he believed that such a decision could arise only out of "profound conviction". From this perspective an organized campaign against war could itself be regarded as riding roughshod over the individual conscience in the same way, albeit not to the same degree, as conscription.

 

(x) Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945 (1980)

It must be admitted that a truly conscientious humanitarian pacifism and mere quasi-pacifism based on one's own particular qualities and sensitivity to civilized values are easier to distinguish in theory than in practice; but one of the characteristics which identified elitist objectors in the Great War was their facetiousness. When, for example, the painter Duncan Grant was asked by his tribunal whether he would push his objection to war work as far as to refuse to make a pair of boots, his response was that he "was a gentleman and objected to making boots". Similarly, although Lytton Strachey's decision to go before a tribunal (when he was medically unfit anyway) was itself a courageous gesture, the episode is only remembered for his innuendo-laden reply ("I should try and come between them") to the standard question as to what he would do if a German tried to rape a female relative of his; and in the same spirit a younger friend of his, asked why he was not fighting for civilization like most others of his age, could not resist replying: "Madam, I am the civilisation they are fighting for."

 

(x) Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945 (1980)

Siegfried Sassoon... on leave between August 1916 and February 1917, during which time he was influenced by meeting a number of pacifists and by reading H. G. Wells's novel of stoical disenchantment, Mr. Britling Sees It Through. Returning to the front, he was wounded within two months; and it was when he found himself back in an English hospital, in April 1917, that he resolved, with the help of Bertrand Russell, Middleton Murry and Francis Meynell, to make his dramatic protest. After publishing his declaration he drew back, however, accepting psychiatric treatment from the pioneering neurasthenia specialist Professor W. H. R. Rivers, which Robert Graves arranged as the alternative to a court martial, and later returning to the front. As in 1936, when he agreed to be a Sponsor of the P.P.U. (though he never attended a single committee), Sassoon seems to have been not a pacifist but a pacificist with an unusually acute hatred of war compounded of a poet's sensibility towards the tragedy of war, a nostalgic aristocratic fear such as also motivated Lord Lansdowne's similar protest published in the Daily Telegraph on 29 November 1917 that the war was destroying the pre-1914 social fabric, and a lifelong political innocence which caused him to oversimplify the problem of securing peace by negotiation.

Although the circumstances of Max Plowman's protest were remarkably similar - like Sassoon he was a wounded poet who was briefly treated by Professor Rivers and who ultimately escaped military punishment-his objection to war was, in contrast, based on a profound and unshakeable pacifism. Even before the war Plowman had taken risks for his convictions, leaving his father's brick factory to eke out a precarious living as a writer. And, as a socialist, he had always had doubts about the war: he did not volunteer until December 1914, and then only for ambulance work. The first sign that his views on war were being clarified' was his decision in July 1915 that there was no difference in principle between combatant and non-combatant service. At first he decided to fight and was commissioned into an infantry regiment, reaching the front in August 1916. In January 1917, however, he was concussed and invalided home, never to return to the trenches. It was during his sick leave that he gradually discovered he was a pacifist; and it was under the influence of Tagore's Nationalism that, in January 1918, after a year away from the front, he took the step of resigning his commission on the ground that his hatred of war `has gradually deepened into the fixed conviction that organised warfare of any kind is always organised murder. So wholly do I believe in the doctrine of Incarnation (that God indeed lives in every human body) that I believe that killing men is always killing God. He was fortunate not only to escape with a simple dismissal from the army, but also, because of delays in the conscription procedure (to which he was now liable as a discharged volunteer), to avoid prison as an absolutist. He used his liberty to write an explanation of his position which was published in 1919 as War and the Creative Impulse and which defined the classic socialist pacifism which he unwaveringly asserted for the rest of his life. Although similar in most respects to the Christian socialism of, for example, Wilfred Wellock, it was clearly "political" in that it was inspired not by any appeal to supernatural authority but by a mystical, almost anarchist, conception of socialism which Plowman had long admired in his literary hero, William Blake.

 

(x) Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945 (1980)

It was a sign of the failure of all the pacifist societies to make any real impact on the public mind in the decade following the worst war in history that the most enterprising attempt to promote absolute pacifism as a distinct alternative to pacificist half-measures was a personal initiative outside the framework of organized pacifism. This was the campaign launched in 1925 by the courtier's son and former diplomat turned Radical politician, Arthur Ponsonby (1871-1946), whose switch of allegiance from Liberal to Labour immediately after the war' had been followed by what was, in effect a conversion from pacificism to pacifism. In 1925 he published a statement of his beliefs, Now is the Time, and launched his ambitious Peace Letter-a petition committing its signatories to "refuse to support or render war service to any Government which resorts to arms". After two years he was able, in a deputation to Stanley Baldwin in December 1927, to present 128,770 signatures - a total impressively near the P.P.U.'s peak membership of 136,000. The reason for Ponsonby's sudden emergence as the leading British pacifist of the later twenties and early thirties was his belief that he had discovered a new type of pacifism which was both commonsensical in outlook and irrefutable in inspiration. Throughout what proved a long pacifist career he was concerned to stress that he had no eccentric objection to physical force used by individuals in self-defence or for the protection of the weak; indeed, when assaulted in the course of addressing U.D.C. meetings during the Great War, he had been known to punch his assailant in the face. The basis of his pacifism was his "discovery" - perhaps influenced by the growing awareness of the extent of the economic dislocation caused by the Great War-that war could be objected to, not just on religious, moral, humane or political grounds, but on the grounds of "its failure to achieve a single desirable object, whatever the gigantic cost may be".

Ponsonby appeared to believe that this amounted to a new and "objective" inspiration for pacifism-one which, unlike all previous inspirations, did not depend on prior religious or political assumptions. He seemed to assume, moreover, that on any simple utilitarian calculation the unhappiness and destruction caused by war would invariably be seen to outweigh its benefits: hence, pacifism was proved to be always the best policy. This "utilitarian" pacifism is, it must be recognized, worthy of attention as the first attempt to adapt pacifist inspirations to take account of both the increased suffering and destruction, and the dislocating side-effects, produced by modern war, which made any net benefit from fighting undeniably harder to justify. But it was not the value-neutral justification for pacifism its adherents hoped it to be. For reasons already discussed, "utilitarian" pacifism proved to be a form of what is here classified as the humanitarian inspiration for pacifism.

Humanitarian pacifism was, in fact, to prove the major pacifist innovation of the inter-war period, though it was not to come into its own until the thirties when the imminence of aerial holocausts focused attention on the pain and suffering to be expected in the next war. During the twenties attempts to calculate the relative costs of settling a dispute by war or adopting a peaceful settlement at any price were characterized less by preoccupation with the high price of the former than by complacency about the assumed low cost of the latter. Thus one reason for Ponsonby's marked failure to develop his "utilitarian" critique more systematically than he did was his conviction-to quote his Peace Letter - "that all disputes between nations are capable of settlement either by diplomatic negotiations or by some form of international arbitration". In reply to Baldwin's polite rebuttal of this Letter, he asserted even more explicitly: "We are of the opinion that unprovoked aggression is a war myth."

 

(x) Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945 (1980)

The Society of Friends was, however, insufficiently radical on social and economic issues to attract the most remarkable Christian socialist pacifist of the inter-war period: Wilfred Wellock (1879-1972), an absolutist who became a Labour M.P. in 1927. Despite starting work in a Lancashire cotton mill at the age of ten, Wellock was driven by his puritan upbringing and remarkable self-discipline to improve and educate himself. As he did so, he became preoccupied with the need to restore the spiritual element in life which, from his experience in his Lancashire factory town, he believed had been steadily destroyed by industrialization. Because the Great War seemed to him to be the apotheosis of this corrupting industrialism, he seized on pacifism as the best means of rediscovering true values. "Pacifism is simply applied Christianity", he wrote early in 1916. Although eligible for exemption from conscription as an Independent Methodist lay preacher, Wellock opted to take his stand as an absolutist; and in March 1916 he launched from his home town a Christian revolutionary journal, the New Crusader, published by "the Committee for the Promotion of Pacifism, Nelson". After he went to prison, the paper was edited and financed by a Quaker novelist, Theodora Wilson Wilson (1865-1941), who had been converted to socialism during the Great War.

 

(x) Wilfred Wellock, letter to Theodora Wilson Wilson (2nd February, 1919)

What a country, what a world is ours!... Shameless selfishness, political and commercial corruption, self-indulgent looseness in manners - in a word, brazen materialism spreading on every hand fostered by national pride, by national and personal hypocrisy, aided, alas, by a soul sold Church - and all the fault of a Holy War! Whence did righteousness make claim to such a heritage? Can figs grow on thistles? And yet the Church is looking around aghast, and wondering why the people, after their intoxication of "self-sacrifice", should show no disposition to pay tribute to formal religion and is attributing the remissness to every conceivable course rather than the true and, indeed, obvious one. In this, as in a thousand other directions, the obvious Christian truth must be proclaimed with clarion voice.

 

(x) Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945 (1980)

Although few pacifists were prepared to endorse Ponsonby's and Einstein's condemnations of Geneva, some were to take their optimism about non-violence even further. Indeed what was perhaps the most sanguine pacifist initiative of the entire twentieth century occurred in February 1932: the attempt by a trio of leading Christian pacifists to form a Peace Army of unarmed passive resisters to intercede between the combats in the world's military confrontations, starting with the one in Manchuria.

The prime mover of this scheme was one of the inter-war period's best-known woman pacifists, Dr Maude Royden (1876-1956), a former suffragist who, after joining both the F.o.R. and the W.I.L. during the Great War, had devoted herself to the cause of peace. The Oxford-educated daughter of a wealthy Liverpool shipowner (and the sister of the Chairman of the Cunard Steamship Company), she had fallen under the influence, while in her early twenties, of the unorthodox Anglican preacher, the Revd Hudson Shaw. She began work as his lay curate and fell in love with him, living for forty years with Shaw and his wife in platonic triangular intimacy, until in 1944 Mrs Shaw died and Dr Royden became his wife for the few remaining weeks of his life.

Encouraged by Shaw, she became assistant preacher at the City Temple in 1917, and in 1921 acquired her own church, the Guildhouse (in Eccleston Square, Pimlico), where she preached until her retirement in 1936. Her religious views were a non-denominational form of Christian socialism and their combination of religious and political concerns was reflected, not altogether harmoniously, in her pacifism. Her Christian impulses drew her to the strict pacifism of the F.o.R.; but her equally strong commitment to political relevance made her receptive to any non-military means of preventing war, even if sectarians might consider it a departure from rigorous pacifism. Thus only a few weeks after her Peace Army proposal had been making headlines, she was informing David Davies that she was in full agreement with
his book The Problem of the Twentieth Century - which forthrightly argued the case for all, including military, sanctions as the only guarantee for peace and security. She had, however, as she later acknowledged when she withdrew her support from Davies's New Commonwealth Society, failed to realize that an international police force would have to be armed "with the most terrible of all modern weapons".

When Davies remonstrated with her, she disarmingly confessed her difficulty: "I quite see that your reasoning is sound, but then I have really abandoned the attempt to be rigidly logical in my pacifism". For the next five years she sought to stave off the choice between pacifism and pacificism (as did many members of the W.I.L.) by professing to believe that economic sanctions could prevent war. At the time of Munich, as will be seen, she opted for strict pacifism; after the outbreak of war, however, she came to see this as a mistake. Her "much-criticised wartime vacillations" were later attributed by Vera Brittain, herself a thoroughgoing Christian pacifist, to an incomplete understanding of Christianity and an excessively political preoccupation with short-term success: only half-jokingly, she traced Dr Royden's problems back to "the chance that as an Oxford student she read Modern History and not Theology (a school closed to Oxford women until 1935)".

 

(x) Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945 (1980)

Brigadier-General Frank P. Crozier (1879-1937) was the most colourful and unlikely pacifist of the inter-war period. A former mercenary soldier, rejected by the regular army on medical grounds, he had served in Africa and Canada as well as in the Ulster Volunteer Force before the Great War gave him the chance of more orthodox soldiering. He won rapid promotion, and after the war continued to hunger for active service, working as an officer in the newly-formed Lithuanian army and then as commandant of the Black and Tans. In February 1921, however, his career was finally ended by his resignation, amid a blaze of headlines and questions in the House, on the grounds that the punishments he had ordered for men in his charge who had looted a grocery store near Trim had been counter-manded by higher authority. In view of his pre-war Ulster connection, it is likely that he had, in reality, been moved to resign less by the revulsion at barbarous military methods to which he later tended to attribute his action than by a rigid concern for strict soldierly discipline. Even after he had taken his dispute with the army to the point of campaigning for the peace movement his new colleagues wanted, in the words of Viscount Cecil of the League of Nations Union (to which Crozier had in 1929 applied for work), "to know a little more about his quarrel with Government over the Black and Tans". "I think", Cecil commented, "there must be another side to it." When Crozier died suddenly in August 1937, The Times refused to print brief tributes sent in by Sheppard and Ponsonby, and upset his widow by publishing an ungenerous obituary which baldly stated: "General Crozier, making no allowance for "political expediency", proved difficult in a series of trying situations and resigned over a question of discipline".

Unemployed and short of money, Crozier undertook what speaking engagements he could for the League of Nations Union, and when the boom in war books began late in 1928, turned his hand to writing his war memoirs with a combination of "energy and lack of subtlety" which The Times obituary believed to be his major characteristics. Published in 1930, A Brass Hat in No Man's Land made great play with the (by then) well-worn themes of cowardice and sexual licence in order to prove his contention that "war is a dirtier game than is generally known". This metaphor was apt, for Crozier seemed, indeed, to regard war as a game, albeit not for the squeamish. His views on how to prevent war, never very clearly articulated, seem to have been conventionally internationalist at this time. Early in February 1932, shortly before the announcement of the Peace Army, he had been professing to David Davies his unqualified enthusiasm for an international police force,' although a desire to be taken on to Davies's sizeable private payroll may explain this.

It was thus as an unemployed muchraker of militarism in search of a surrogate for military adventure, rather than as a convinced pacifist, that Crozier joined the Peace Army. Through it, however, he fell under Sheppard's spell - he was to act as a key organizer in his subsequent pacifist campaigns - and became an enthusiastic advocate of non-violence. The governments of the world, he was telling the Manchester Guardian by the end of February, had no answer to the Peace Army strategy: "What would they do, supposing Dick Sheppard and I were to walk with 10,000 unarmed people along No Man's Land, or if we were to send over from forty to a hundred civil aeroplanes between the opposing armies? If our people were shot public opinion would be shocked.''

 

(x) Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945 (1980)

Taking his place at the "King and Country" debate (after several other refusals) was Cyril Joad (1891-1953) who, as a result, attained prominence as an exponent of pacifism based on an identical belief (expressed in an autobiography in 1932) "that of all the evil things in the world, physical pain is by far the worst". If Nichols's sensitivity to the mutilation of young men in war can in part be attributed to his homosexuality, Joad's similarly acute aversion to suffering can be linked to the (heterosexual) hedonism and love of sensual pleasure for which he was notorious. Highly gifted, but restless and opportunistic, he was a puckish and lightweight amalgam of Bertrand Russell (who believed Joad plagiarized his ideas) and H. G. Wells, tending to the former's iconoclastic optimism rather than to the latter's Olympian seriousness. After twenty years professing to be a revolutionary I.L.P. socialist, Joad - like many others-changed his views after the 1931 crisis. After a flirtation with Mosley's New Party, Joad in 1932 set up the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals (F.P.S.I.) as an attempt-with the master's blessing - to implement the Wellsian vision of an enlightened elite of intellectuals uniting to plan rational solutions for the problems of the world.

The F.P.S.I. began with strong pacifist overtones: it declared its long-term aim to be a world government but, according to its Manifesto: "As first steps this involves (i) progressive disarmament by example on the part of this country, and (ii) war resistance on the part of individuals in the event of an outbreak of hostilities". For Joad, therefore, its significance was as a bridge from his former revolutionary socialism to the "utilitarian" pacifism for which he was best known in the thirties. Although he always saw himself as a philosophical rationalist his thinking, particularly on pacifism, was highly emotional: hence its popular appeal. Characteristic of his method was his evocation, in a No More War Movement pamphlet published in 1932, of the horror of the Great War.... Joad also ceased exclusively to consider his emotional feelings about war and began to appreciate the limitations of non-violence as a means of preventing it.

 

(x) Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945 (1980)

A further example of an emotional pacifism which was first declared in 1932 and modified the following year was that of the novelist Margaret Storm Jameson (1897- ). Her sense of outrage at the Great War in which so many of her contemporaries ("class 1914 people"), including her brother, had been killed suddenly erupted into overt pacifism while writing memoirs of her early life - "an otherwise polite book that had every chance of pleasing by its polite simplicity", as she later described it. Brooding upon the depressing consequences of the war, she felt an acute sense of guilt at having supported it, and turned her book into an outspoken anti-war polemic.... By the end she had gone so far as to declare herself a pacifist.

 

(x) Storm Jameson, No Time like the Present (1933)

In 1932 what lying gaping mouth will say that it was worthwhile to kill my brother in his nineteenth year? You may say that the world's account is balanced by the item that we have still with us a number of elderly patriots, army contractors, women who obscenely presented white feathers. You will forgive me, if as courteously as is possible in the circumstances, I say that a field latrine is more useful to humanity than these leavings.

 

(x) Storm Jameson, Journey from the North (1969)

If this country... is got into another Great War I shall take every means in my power to keep my son out of it. I shall tell him that it is nastier and more shameful to volunteer for gas-bombing than to run from it or to volunteer in the other desperate army of protestants. I shall tell him also that war is not worth its cost, nor is victory worth the cost.

 

(x) Fenner Brockway, Inside the Left (1942)

I had long put on one side the purist pacifist view that one should have nothing to do with a social revolution if any violence were involved... Nevertheless, the conviction remained in my mind that any revolution would fail to establish freedom and fraternity in proportion to its use of violence, that the use of violence inevitably brought in its train domination, repression, cruelty.

 

(x) Fenner Brockway, Inside the Left (1942)

There is no doubt that the society resulting from an anarchist victory (during the Spanish Civil War) would have far greater liberty and equality than the society resulting from a fascist victory. Thus I came to see that it is not the amount of violence used which determines good or evil results, but the ideas, the sense of human values, and above all the social forces behind its use. With this realisation, although my nature revolted against the killing of human beings just as did the nature of those Catalonian peasants, the fundamental basis of my old philosophy disappeared.

 

(x) Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945 (1980)

Spain proved an even more damaging blow to socialist "pacifism" than Abyssinia. Striving to keep the W.R.I. pacifist, Runham Brown predicted stoically to Ponsonby on 27 September 1936: In these days of crisis may will depart from us but we shall be proved right and ultimately we shall win. Our job is to keep our Movement steady. We now have to face a more difficult position raised by the Spanish War. Some like Fenner Brockway will leave us, but we shall go on.

Spain did, indeed, complete Brockway's gradual process of realization, which had begun with the Russian revolution and was later considerably furthered by the political and economic crisis of 1931, that the absolute socialist pacifism which had led him to found the N.C.F. in 1914 was, in reality, an extreme socialist pacificism.

 

(x) Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945 (1980)

Richard Sheppard's second asset was his intellectual humility. Plowman, who had certainly been surprised (and was probably flattered) by being rung up out of the blue by Sheppard and asked whether he should quit the Church, later believed Sheppard's strength lay in being "the living contrary of the modem intellectual. He was a brilliantly perceptive and imaginative man whose active love of persons prevented him from any intense concern with intellectual abstractions"...

Equally characteristic was his attempt to define his spiritual beliefs in a note to Ponsonby on 14 May 1936: "As to my own religious faith, I am blowed if I know exactly where I stand. I am mostly a Quaker these days but Jesus Christ, man or God, (I have never wished to define him) is the hero I would wish to follow."

It was Sheppard's brilliant achievement to turn into a positive asset this notable weakness as an abstract thinker. With the Sponsors divided over what policy the P.P.U. should adopt, Sheppard's lack of defined views enabled him to devote his energies to teasing out what he thought to be their general will. Such positive opinions as he held, moreover, were middle-of-the-road: he was opposed to adopting either a collaborative orientation towards collective security, as he made clear in We Say "No", or a position of sectarian quietism, as when he whispered to Kingsley Martin, one of the guests invited to his flat to meet Gregg on 17 July 1936: "Can't you get up and tell them that we haven't time for all this intensive cultivation and that our job is to stop the next bloody war." Indeed, essential to his Christianity was his faith that a middle position could be occupied that was sufficiently pure and idealistic to stand outside the self-defeating compromises of politics while at the same time sufficiently relevant and practical to have wide-ranging regenerative power. Just as he had always called for a Church "that was in the world but not of it", he was still calling a fortnight before his for support for pacifism.