

In the winter of 1916 the conscientious objector Harry Millward wrote to his wife Lizzie, maintaining a determinedly jaunty tone.

“The unexpected has again happened. We are going to Dartmoor Prison tomorrow ... We are all in good spirits but as you must know Dartmoor is indeed a place I never in the past days expected to get there. There is some great history attached to this place and many daring escapes have taken place.”

Millward would not escape. The 23-year-old Yorkshire millworker had already been arrested, jeered as he was frogmarched through the streets of his village, and imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector who refused to sign up for the Great War.

His first world war records have now been placed online by the Imperial War Museum (IWM) to mark Conscientious Objectors Day, along with those of 16,500 others who refused to serve. Their names have been resurrected through 20 years of work by Cyril Pearce, a former lecturer at Leeds University, and together with the letters, photographs, tribunal records and diaries, now comprise the world’s most comprehensive archive on the first world war objectors.

There are heartbreaking stories in the archive, including William Harrison, a teetotal vegetarian and Christian pacifist, who was arrested in 1917, sentenced to hard labour in Wormwood Scrubs and Newcastle, and not freed until six months after the war ended, in April 1919. Joseph Alfred Pearson from New Brighton, who abandoned his beliefs after brutal treatment while he was held at Birkenhead barracks, was sent to France and died near Ypres: his mother refused to accept his death-in-service memorial scroll and plaque.

A scathing contemporary view of conscientious objectors during the first world war. Harry Millward had been jeered as he was marched through his village to prison. Photograph: Imperial War Museum

Dan Snow, the historian, said the war had touched the lives of millions including those who refused to fight. “They made very brave decisions to stand up to the politicians and generals, and reject their call to arms. Now the IWM is quite rightly putting conscientious objectors on its fantastic and ambitious Lives of the First World War. Their inclusion is vital if we’re to get a real snapshot of society as a whole.”

Millward tried to remain upbeat in his letters home. “Dont worry Lizzie, keep smiling for we are fighting the great fight for humanity. There are now 600 men there so there will be plenty of company for me. I don’t know when I shall see a town again, because as far as I understand it is in the centre of the greatest moor in England,” he wrote.



However, he soon found life at Dartmoor as bleak as its reputation. Within weeks he wrote: “A terrible place, indeed the worst prison I have been in ... terribly cold and bleak and foggy on the Dartmoor and wild ponies are very plentiful. Last night the wind howled around the prison and snow began to fall pretty heavily.”



As well as the letters, during and after the war Lizzie kept a scrapbook of postcards, cuttings, a Christmas souvenir drawing of the objectors in prison, photographs of cheerless Victorian interiors, and a watercolour by a friend in the prison showing the grim buildings under an icy moon.

“May we look upon life as a thing sacred beyond all possible human conception and may I look into your eyes fearlessly and honestly even when silver streaks blossom in your hair,” her husband wrote. “Very few people can do this Lizzie, & may we have God’s blessing & a sufficient amount of moral courage.” As if to remind himself, “moral courage” is underlined twice.



He was released in 1918, became active in Labour politics in Bradford and died of pneumonia in 1926, aged just 33. He never saw his daughter Greta: Lizzie only discovered she was pregnant a few weeks after his death.

Among the pieces she pasted into her scrapbook, probably in the 1930s, was a newspaper cutting about the prison: “Dartmoor will not be the same when the famous prison is there no longer … By a sort of poetic justice Dartmoor prisoners themselves will gradually demolish the grim buildings and no new jail will be built there.” More than 80 years later, although the prison authorities have announced that the site is to be sold, the grim buildings still stand.