Abstract
When in August 1914 the British government declared war on Germany in response to its disregard for Belgian neutrality, the German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg claimed that they did so over ‘a scrap of paper’.2 This offhand reference to the 1839 Treaty of London, the European agreement supposed to protect Belgium, provoked much protest from the British establishment, who were struck by the disregard for law and honour that the phrase ‘a scrap of paper’ seemed to symbolise. David Lloyd George focused on these words as he mocked Bethmann-Hollweg’s claim:
Have you any £5 notes about you? I am not calling for them. Have you any of those neat little Treasury £1 notes? If you have, burn them; they are only ‘scraps of paper’.3
Treat the Conscription Act as a ‘Scrap of Paper’!1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Nicoletta F. Gullace, ‘Sexual Violence and Family Honor: British Propaganda and International Law during the First World War’, American Historical Review, 102:3 (1997), 717–47 (p. 720 ).
See Thomas C. Kennedy, The Hound of Conscience: A History of the No-Conscription Fellowship 1914–19 ( Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1981 ).
Stephen Hobhouse and A. Fenner Brockway, English Prisons To-Day: Being the Report of the Prison System Committee (London: Longman, Greens and Co., 1922), p. 161. Emphasis in the original.
John W. Graham, Conscription and Conscience: A History 1916–1919 ( London: Allen & Unwin, 1922 ), pp. 266–67.
See Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 51–52 for a brief discussion of imprisoned COs and prison libraries.
Stephen Hobhouse, ‘The Silence System in British Prisons’, Friends Quarterly Examiner, 52 (July 1918), 249–63.
Hubert W. Peet, ‘112 Days of Hard Labour’, in These Strange Criminals: An Anthology ofPrison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War, ed. by Peter Brock (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 38–49 (p. 44).
Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). See also King, Chapter 8, this volume.
T. Corder Catchpool, On Two Fronts ( London: Headly Bros., 1918 )
Corder Catchpool, Letters of a Prisoner: For Conscience Sake ( London: George Allen & Unwin, 1941 ).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Catherine Feely
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Feely, C. (2015). Only a ‘Scrap of Paper’: The Prison Reading of British Conscientious Objectors, 1916–1919. In: Towheed, S., King, E.G.C. (eds) Reading and the First World War. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137302717_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137302717_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57059-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30271-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)