Red Clydeside

Key political figures of the Red Clydeside period

Military Service Acts, 1916. Certificate of exemption

Issued to James Maxton

16 Apr 1917

Despite the anti-war pact agreed by the European socialist parties at the 1912 Basle Conference of The Second International, few of the formally anti-war socialist parties of Europe were able to resist falling into line behind their respective ruling classes at the outbreak of war in 1914. The Independent Labour Party was one organisation that did resist. Its political leadership, along with the majority of its members, believed in a brotherhood of all workers and saw the war as a capitalist plot to make profit and to weaken the working classes.

In the early months of the war, ILP members were frequently attacked and beaten up, and some were prosecuted on various pretexts. When conscription came in 1916, out of some 6000 men refused recognition as conscientious objectors and sent to prison when they resisted forcible enlistment into the Army, 805 were ILP members. A few of those were among the 73 men known to have died as a result of their mistreatment.

As a political opponent of the war, James Maxton applied in March 1916 to the Barrhead Military Service Tribunal for exemption as a conscientious objector. The tribunal were minded to order him non-combatant status only, such as in the Royal Army Medical Corps, but on his insistence on absolute exemption, the case was adjourned. Maxton was arrested and imprisoned for sedition before he had the opportunity to reappear before the tribunal. Following his release in 1917, Maxton found that his application had been refused in his absence, and he therefore appealed to the Renfrew and Bute Appeal Tribunal, who referred his case back to the Barrhead Tribunal. Once again he was offered the opportunity to engage himself in work of national importance, and once more he refused to aid the war effort. He was found work with a firm of barge builders who manufactured barges for neutral countries. Maxton remained with this firm for the duration of the war.

Source: Maxton Papers, Glasgow City Archives