RECENTLY mair nonsense has been uttered in the name of Keir Hardie than in ony’s barrin liberty and Christ. One of the many things to admire about Robert Duncan’s timely study of Scottish war resisters is that it rescues Hardie from contemporary political agendas and puts him back in the context of his own time.

The cover features artist Alistair Gow’s impression of a famous photograph of Hardie addressing a peace demonstration at Trafalgar Square in 1914, and the book opens with two extracts from speeches Hardie gave in 1910. He warned that action to prevent war was needed “before war fever... maddened the blood of the people” and advocated co-operation with the German working class and a general strike “to make statesmen think before sanctioning its outbreak”.

Hardie’s perspicacity notwithstanding, when war arrived it did so at breakneck speed and those who opposed it were ill-prepared. By late 1914, war fever had set in and was taking its toll. Harassed by pro-war advocates at meetings in his Merthyr constituency and shunned by some former Labour colleagues, Hardie had less than a year to live and “was now speaking sadly of Gethsemane and crucifixion”.

In Scotland it fell to others, from the Independent Labour Party and beyond, to oppose the war. Some of them – Maxton(s), Maclean, Gallacher – would join Hardie in the pantheon of the Scottish left. However, Duncan, to his immense credit, has uncovered a host of lesser voices that would otherwise have been forgotten. Many of them are retrieved from the transcripts of tribunals which decided whether to exempt objectors from military service on religious or moral grounds.

Conscientious objectors were routinely labelled cowards or shirkers, but the petitioners quoted by Duncan are clearly courageous and eloquent. A 19-year-old tailor from Edinburgh, for instance, told his tribunal: “I am prepared to be shot for my principles.” Robert Nichol, a teacher from Glasgow, refused to kill anyone in combat or be assigned to the Royal Army Medical Corp “to be trained to help people who the governments responsible wilfully intend to be murdered or injured five or six months hence.”

Journalist Malcolm Muggeridge drew flak for arguing that wars were popular when they started as they offered males a break from domestic relationships and the routine of daily life. Duncan doesn’t address that directly, but he does make it clear that resisters and objectors had the odds stacked against them from the beginning. Hardie’s hope that the working classes of Germany and Britain would combine to thwart a capitalist war collapsed when the German Social Democratic Party capitulated to the needs of national defence in late 1914. The Defence of the Realm Act permitted surveillance and harassment, and the tribunals before which objectors had to make their case were staffed by local worthies and, crucially, military representatives. Duncan characterises them as “extensions of the state war machine”.

Many ended up in labour camps but prison was the more likely destination for leaders or so-called “absolutists” who opposed any alternative service that supported the war effort. Duncan follows his Scottish objectors to camps and jails around Scotland and into Wormwood Scrubs, where at least 70 Scots were held. It was, of course, mostly men who were confined in this way, but the book includes an interesting section on the Women’s Peace Crusade and a portrait of Glasgow’s Helen Crawfurd, who was a close associate of Emmeline Pankhurst. Crawfurd resigned from Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union over its pro-war stance and went on to play a leading role in peace activism and the 1915 rent strike.

This is the first book by the publishing arm of Common Weal and the only thing it lacks is rigorous editing to reduce the number of convoluted sentences, replace missing words and ensure consistency of spelling. Ramsay MacDonald, for instance, is sometimes Macdonald. More importantly, Duncan reminds us of the courageous anti-war politician MacDonald was before the National Government of the 1930s defined his career.

War resisters got the wrong kind of attention in their day and haven’t had enough attention since. Duncan’s fascinating study will certainly help address both issues. Even the photographs he retrieves from personal archives are worth lingering over. Count the symbolic layers in a picture of a group of frozen conscientious objectors on the Cruachan estate who are gathered around a huge snowball. The snowball has the single word “Socialism” carved into it.

Objectors and Resisters: Opposition to Conscription and War in Scotland 1914 to 1918 by Robert Duncan, Common Print, £7.99