A pacifist in Budleigh Salterton: H.G. Wells (1866-1946)

Not too many Budleigh people know that a great literary figure known as ‘the father of science fiction’ stayed in the town. Even fewer know of him as a pacifist. Budleigh Salterton was renowned in the past as a favourite retirement place for military types as well as a health resort.

It was during a cycling holiday in Devon that H.G. Wells and his wife stayed in April 1897 with author George Gissing and his sister Margaret at 4 West End Villas – now 14 West Hill – in Budleigh. Ten or so years older than Wells, Gissing is thought to have been attracted to radical pacifist and anti-imperialist ideas partly derived from his reading of Russian literature, particularly from Leo Tolstoy.  Later, Wells himself is likely to have been influenced by pacifist and socialist ideas through his membership of the reformist Fabian Society.

Wells’ most famous science fiction novel The War of the Worlds anticipates the role of devastating modern weapons with the Martians’ use of heat-rays and toxic gas against humans. The novel’s publication in 1898 came at a time when the desire for world peace was in the news. On 29 August, 1898, Czar Nicholas II of Russia issued an invitation to all nations to confer over the limitation of armaments, observing that ‘the intellectual and physical strength of nations; labour and capital alike, have been unproductively consumed in building terrible engines of destruction’.

Wells' book Little Wars, published in 1913, was seemingly an explanation of rules for conducting a war game with toy soldiers. In reality it reflected the author’s view of how such activities could replace actual wars. ‘How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real Thing!’ he wrote. ‘Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster — and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated countrysides.’  

Another novel by Wells which appeared in the following year was The World Set Free. Set in 1956, it described the effects of a devastating world war fought with atomic bombs, ending with the establishment of a ‘World Republic’

As World War I approached, Wells became more and more focused on the threat to world peace posed by what he saw as German militarism.  His 99-page pamphlet The War That Will End War, published in 1914, proclaimed:  ‘This is now a war for peace. It aims straight at disarmament. It aims at a settlement that shall stop this sort of thing for ever. Every soldier who fights against Germany now is a crusader against war. This, the greatest of all wars, is not just another war — it is the last war! England, France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and all the little countries of Europe, are heartily sick of war; the Tsar has expressed a passionate hatred of war; the most of Asia is unwarlike; the United States has no illusions about war.’

A second pamphlet, The Peace of the World, appeared in 1915. A year later saw the publication of Wells’ novel Mr Britling Sees It Through, composed ‘at a time of universal barbarism and cruelty’ in the words of Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who described the work as ‘the finest, most courageous, truthful, and humane book written in Europe in the course of this accursed war’.   

In the post-war period, on 15 April 1929, Wells delivered an address entitled The Common Sense of World Peace to the Reichstag German Parliament in Berlin. It was published by the Hogarth Press. But by 1933 the Nazis were burning his books.

H. G. Wells is pictured here one day before his 60th birthday, on the front cover of Time magazine, 20 September 1926.

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A pacifist composer’s debt to Budleigh’s Richard Rodney Bennett

The oratorio Or Shall We Die? was commissioned from author Ian McEwan and composer Michael Berkeley by the London Symphony Orchestra Chorus.

Michael Berkeley, otherwise known as Baron Berkeley of Knighton, was born in 1948, son of the composer Sir Lennox Berkeley. As a chorister at Westminster Cathedral, he frequently sang in works composed or conducted by his godfather Benjamin Britten, who was noted for his pacifist views. 

Berkeley studied composition, singing, and piano at the Royal Academy of Music and in his late twenties began to concentrate exclusively on composing, studying with Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, whose East Devon upbringing in Budleigh Salterton is well known, and who had also studied under Sir Lennox Berkeley at the Royal Academy of Music. 

Along with composing, Berkeley has had a long career as a broadcaster on music. In 2013 he entered the UK's House of Lords, where he has consistently spoken in support of music and music education.    

Or Shall We Die? was first performed in 1983, the year in which US President Reagan declared that a nuclear conflict in Europe was not only thinkable, but winnable. It was the year in which cruise missiles came to Britain, and which saw the founding of the organisation Musicians for Peace and Disarmament (MANA), of which Michael Berkeley is a Patron. 

‘For more than thirty years we have been in a position unprecedented in our history to destroy ourselves as a species. There are now more than sixty thousand nuclear warheads primed and programmed for their destinations, and each year more sophisticated systems are planned and deployed,’ wrote McEwan and Berkeley at that time. 

Going on to describe the origin of Or Shall We Die?,  the pair explained: ‘This oratorio grew out of the conviction that the responsibility of the survival of our species is not limited to governments, but is collective, involving every single one of us. It is as if we had been set a simple test of maturity; we either pass it, or perish, for it seems unlikely that we can muddle through forever with this array of weapons.

‘Our manly civilisation with its emphasis on aggression, competitiveness, objectivity, the mastery of nature, will need to become more womanly if it is not to destroy itself; more compassionate, nurturing, intuitive in its best sense.’

McEwan and Berkeley acknowledge their debt in Or Shall We Die? to the ideas of the Romantic poet and artist William Blake, arguing that only if we have the strength to bind feeling to the intellect shall we survive. ‘Blake is the presiding spirit of the work,’ they write.  

Images of Lord Berkeley, top left and Sir Richard Rodney Bennett from Wikipedia

A full account of Or Shall We Die is at https://www.michaelberkeley.co.uk/works/choral_with_orchestra#or_shall_we_die

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Professor Alan Emery, pacifist

Professor Alan Emery is one of Budleigh Salterton’s most eminent residents. A British medical geneticist, known for his study of muscular dystrophy, he is also a poet and a painter, and a pacifist. In the following article which appeared in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, he reviews the book Wellington’s Doctors: the British Army Services in the Napoleonic Wars, published in 2002.    

‘For many years I have been a pacifist and only in extreme circumstances do I see any justification for acts of aggression. Perhaps naively I always hope that political discussion can avert war. Clausewitz's philosophy that war is merely an extension and continuation of politics is chilling. However, few would doubt, at least here in Britain, that Napoleon's advance across Europe had to be stopped. And of course this was achieved by Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. 

'But at what cost in loss of life and suffering on both sides? In his well-written and well-referenced book, Martin Howard details the organization of the British Army medical services during the Napoleonic Wars, concentrating on the role of the physician and more importantly the surgeon in caring for the wounded and sick at the battle front.

'From 1808 the British Army fought numerous battles against the French culminating in Waterloo. Casualty figures during these wars were around 5500 officers and 84 000 other ranks killed or wounded. The overall fatality rate for those serving was around 1 in 20. Dr Howard describes in much detail the way in which British field hospitals were organized to take care of casualties. 

'Transport of the wounded was very difficult. The French, mainly through their great military surgeon Dominique Jean Larrey, introduced triage and are credited with developing a form of ambulance service. On the British side such transport was often left to local Portuguese or Spanish peasants who could offer wagon carts and the like. The conditions were very uncomfortable and the wounded were often exposed to the elements. Furthermore the hospitals were frequently primitive in the extreme. 

'Drinking water was unavailable and sanitary conditions were appalling. From statistical tables in the book it seems that in nearly three-quarters of those who died in regimental and general hospitals the cause was an infectious disease such as dysentery or typhus. Such conditions had changed very little by the Crimean War, when Florence Nightingale famously visited the military hospital at Scutari in 1854. Tolstoy described similar conditions in the Russian Army in War and Peace.

'But it is when Dr Howard details the wounds inflicted and their treatment, often quoting from contemporary sources, that one realizes the real horror of the conflict. On occasion civilian doctors helped. One such was Charles Bell, the famed surgeon and anatomist who had no passport but at the port of entry merely showed his surgical instruments to officials. Many of his water-colour paintings of the wounded, some of which are reproduced in the book, are exhibited at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. A quotation from Bell gives the flavour:

‘At six o'clock [in the morning] I took the knife in my hand, and continued incessantly at work till seven in the evening; and so the second and third day. All the decencies of performing surgical operations were soon neglected; while I amputated one man's thigh there lay at one time thirteen, all beseeching to be taken next; one full of entreaty, one calling upon me to remember my promise to take him, another execrating. It was a strange thing to feel my clothes stiff with blood, and my arms powerless with the exertion of using the knife.’

'There were of course no anaesthetics. The pain of an amputation must have been excruciating. Speed was therefore of the essence and none at the time matched the speed of James Syme, an Edinburgh surgeon, some years later, who could amputate a leg in little more than a minute. A surgeon during the Napoleonic Wars was more likely to take half an hour. The mortality rate among those undergoing a primary operation at the battle site varied from 5% for a forearm to 35% for a thigh. Most serious head wounds were not considered for treatment at all.

'An interesting sideline to this commentary on the medical services at the time was that overuse of alcohol was almost the rule among the troops. This was encouraged by the prevailing views that it actually gave protection against disease and was important for maintaining morale. As a reflection on contemporary health and nutritional standards in the communities from which recruits came, around one-third of applicants were considered unfit to serve on medical grounds.

'This detailed analysis of the British Army medical services in the Napoleonic Wars will provide a rich source of information for medical historians. A suitable epitaph might be taken from Wellington himself, who, after Waterloo commented:

“Well, Thank God, I don't know what it is to lose a battle; but certainly nothing can be more painful than to gain one with the loss of so many of one's friends.”

'Many even today would agree with these sentiments.’

The portrait of Professor Emery is by Budleigh artist John Washington. Alongside it is ‘The Field of Waterloo, as it appeared the morning after the memorable battle of the 18th June 1815’, by the Anglo-Scottish artist John Heaviside Clark (c.1770-1836).

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A pacifist in Budleigh: George Gissing (1857-1903)

Not too many Budleigh people know that a great Victorian literary figure, considered in the 1880s as one of the three greatest novelists in England, stayed in the town. Even fewer know of him as a pacifist, for Budleigh Salterton was renowned in the past as a favourite retirement place for military types as well as a health resort. 

And yet, at around the time he was writing his novel The Crown of Life, a desire for peace was in the news. On 29 August, 1898, Czar Nicholas II of Russia issued an invitation to all nations to confer over the limitation of armaments, observing that ‘the intellectual and physical strength of nations; labour and capital alike, have been unproductively consumed in building terrible engines of destruction’. In a letter that Gissing wrote the following year to his German friend and writer Eduard Bertz, he described the novel as containing ‘a rather vigorous attack on militarism’.

According to Gissing’s biographer Jacob Korg, these radical ideas were derived from the author’s reading of Russian writers such as Leo Tolstoy, whose sympathy with the dissident Spiritual Christian group of militant pacifists known as Doukhobors is well known.  Gissing felt that Russian spirituality could serve as an antidote to British Imperialism. 

Gissing and his sister Margaret had spent the spring of 1897 staying at 4 West End Villas – now 14 West Hill – in Budleigh, a town which he had discovered in February 1891 when living in Exeter. They would be joined there by the author, journalist and fellow-pacifist H.G. Wells and his wife. No doubt Czar Nicholas’s invitation would have been one of their subjects of conversation, perhaps contributing to Gissing’s thoughts as he composed The Crown of Life, which was published in 1899.

The novel attacks the role of the press as a fomenter of war. It is notable for its character Lee Hannaford, an inventor of destructive munitions, described by one expert on Gissing as ‘a grotesque, a ludicrous demon’ with ‘near mad Strangelovian inclinations’. Hannaford is used by the author to fix attention upon ‘a sinister aspect of industrialisation at the end of the nineteenth century’.

Here is Gissing’s depiction of the sanctum in which Hannaford works: ‘hung about with lethal weapons of many kinds and many epochs, including a memento of every important war waged in Europe since the date of Waterloo. A smoke-grimed rifle from some battlefield was in Hannaford’s view a thing greatly precious; still more, a bayonet with stain of blood; these relics appealed to his emotions. Under glass were ranged minutiae such as bullets, fragments of shells, bits of gore-drenched cloth or linen, a splinter of human bone – all ticketed with neat inscription. 

'A bookcase contained volumes of military history, works on firearms, treatises on (chiefly explosive) chemistry; several great portfolios were packed with maps and diagrams of warfare. Upstairs, a long garret served as laboratory, and here were ranged less valuable possessions; weapons to which some doubt attached, unbloody scraps of accoutrements, also a few models of cannon and the like.’

By contrast, the novel’s character John Jacks yearns for the day when a new world statesman appears: ‘I want someone to talk about Peace – and not from the commercial point of view,’ he tells us. ‘The slaughterers shan’t have it all their own way… civilization will be too strong for them, and if old England doesn’t lead in that direction, it will be her shame to the end of history.’

Sadly for the idealistic Gissing, it was a time of growing militarism and eventually a bloody war which consumed one of his two sons. Rifleman Walter Gissing died in a hail of shellfire on the first day of the Battle of the Somme at Gommecourt, aged 24; his body was never identified or buried in a marked grave in the ensuing chaos.

Photo of Gissing c.1880, from Wikipedia

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Otterton's pacifist connection: A.A. Milne

Just a few miles from Roger Conant’s birthplace of East Budleigh is the village of Otterton, home to one of Britain’s best known charities for helping the disabled.

Set up in memory of the late Clare Milne, granddaughter of the writer A.A. Milne, it seems only too appropriate that the charity includes helping injured armed forces veterans.

A.A. Milne himself, seen here, is celebrated today for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh, along with his children’s poetry. Yet at a serious level he is known as the pacifist, revolted by the slaughter of WW1.

‘Tell the innocent visitor from another world that two people were killed at Sarajevo, and that the best that Europe could do about it was to kill eleven million more,’ he wrote in his book Peace with Honour, published in 1934. 

‘I want everybody to think (as I do) that war is poison, and not (as so many think) an over-strong, extremely unpleasant medicine,’ he explained.

Written six years later, his book War with Honour seemed to be a retraction of that pacifist thinking, faced with the rise of fascism and its evils. 

In one of his letters at this time, he declared himself a ‘practical pacifist’, writing: ‘I believe that war is a lesser evil than Hitlerism, I believe that Hitlerism must be killed before war can be killed.’

If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at 

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