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The Early Years
George Davies - a conscientious objector -
in his prison cell during WW1
During the First World War the Fellowship gave spiritual, emotional and practical support to the growing number of people who refused conscription on the grounds of conscience. By early 1915 there were 713 people enrolled in FoR and branches in London, Bournemouth, Burnley, Manchester, Leicester, Bristol and Reading. By 1916 there were 84 branches and 4,820 people enrolled, and by 1917 this had grown to 7,000.
In 1919 representatives from a dozen countries met in Holland and established the International FoR, which now has about seventy branches and groups in all five continents.
Between the Wars
Even as early as 1931, FoR members were activists against war.
It is a truism that the seeds of the Second World War were sown in the Treaty of Versailles.
Great preachers like Donald Soper addressed rallies with audiences of thousands to make the Christian case against a second world war.
The Cold War -Fifties and Sixties
Reverend Lord Soper, taken much later
Hyde Park, 1978
The use of atomic weapons against Japan raised the horror of war to a new level. Members of the Fellowship were heavily involved in the new Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, employing radical techniques of nonviolent resistance. The same techniques found new expression, and a deep spiritual and theoretical underpinning, in the anti-racist US civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, in which many American FOR members took part. Peacemaking became ever more closely linked with liberation, as in the nonviolent struggles led by radical clergy such as Helder Camara in Brazil.
