Fenner Brockway, MP and Conscientious Objector

Fenner Brockway 1888-1988 has a statue in Red Lion Square, the unveiling of which he attended. The following text is part of my occasional Rugby Tour which I lead in honour of my nephew, the Scotland centre Huw Jones...

Fenner Brockway, politician, born
in India in eighteen eighty-eight,
was sent to England for his education
at the Sons of Missionaries School,
Blackheath, or Eltham College as it is
today. He said, 'the only thing I learned
to do well was play Rugby Football'. When
he told the school his plan to leave at sixteen
to become a journalist, the head said
they would pay for shorthand lessons if
he stayed to represent the First Fifteen.
He joined the Independent Labour Party
(founded eighteen ninety-three) and edited
from nineteen ten its journal Labour Leader.
He campaigned to stop the First World War ,
urged conscripts to refuse and called for peace.
Despite his love of violence in sport,
he was a pacifist, a conscie, who 
three times served lengthy sentences in jail.
He took the guards arresting him to lunch.
'You're in the army now, you scum! Fall in!'
a sergeant bawled at Brockway in the Tower.
He told the man politely he refused.
'I don't respond to milit'ry commands.'
'You're for the cells!' the sergeant said and left.
The prisoner expected trouble from 
the squaddies, but the soldiers were impressed.
No Coward this refusenik, they agreed.

The prisons where he served his sentences
were Pentonville and Wormwood Scrubs,
then Chester Castle, Lincoln, Lincoln Prison,
and in Liverpool, the Walton Prison
where he edited the Walton Leader -
forty sheets of toilet roll including
articles, news, jokes, a letters page
and cartoons. Brockway was an MP twice
at Leyton East in nineteen twenty-nine
and Slough and Eton nineteen fifty.
The Greater London Council (GLC)
admired him and commissioned Ian Walters,
sculptor, for a statue in the eighties
when he was already ninety-plus.
The GLC was closed in eighty-six
and as a last defiant act unveiled
the statue with the subject still alive.
The MP Michael Foot drew back the veil
with Brockway, ninety-seven, standing by.

(The sculptor's best known subject is Mandela,
both his Parliament Square statue and
his giant head outside the RFH.)