Local Military Service Tribunals of the Holme and Colne Valleys 1916-1918

Even from a distance of over one hundred years, the ‘problem’ of the Local Military Tribunals of the Great War, remains a vexed one. Their reputation and their remembered legacy had been established in the years immediately following the war by the writings of many of the men who had opposed them from the start. These men, either conscientious objectors themselves or members of the various anti-war, anti-conscription movements, had no reason to look favourably upon a system that they felt had discriminated against them and their principles by subjecting them to conscription. Military authorities of the time equally criticized tribunals but from the opposite side of the argument – the tribunal system failed, they said, because it didn’t subject enough men to conscription. There has been a more sympathetic approach by some historians more recently who have argued that the difficulties encountered and presented by the tribunals were more the fault of the system than of the personnel involved. Adrian Gregory, David Littlewood, James McDermott, John Rae and Cyril Pearce have all added to the debate. Nonetheless, there remains a residue of a sense of coercion of working-class men by state-sponsored representatives of the middle-class.
On the evidence provided by the nine tribunals investigated here this study rejects that view. It argues instead that the Local Military Service Tribunals of the West Riding were part of a system of local government that was traditionally distanced from a centralized, controlling state. Members of the local Tribunals were respected by the communities they served and that far from being simply a part of the ‘military machine’ in the process of conscription they were viewed as representatives of that community, able and willing to represent the interests of its citizens.
This study looks in detail at the men and women who made up the Tribunals in the Holme and Colne Valleys as well as the men who made the appeals. It provides an analysis of those
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appeals and in doing so places Local Military Service Tribunals firmly at the heart of the community they served.