Bill Barrett

Bill Barrett was my father. His parents sent him to St Paul's school in London so that he did not have to join the Officers Training Corps and where instead he chose Scouts. Studies in Mathematics took him to Oxford and Paris and to a job in Aberdeen as an assistant lecturer. 

His decision to be a CO led him to seek fellow pacifists among Quakers in Esher, Surrey. At his tribunal in 1940, he was given conditional exemption and instructed to work on the land. To begin with he lived with his parents, working on a local farm where he was taunted and rebuffed for 'being a coward'. In 1944 he married a Jewish refugee from Vienna, my mother, whom he met at the refugee club that Friends ran in the Meeting House. With a fair complexion, she was widely seen as 'German' and therefore he was now regard by many as a traitor. Hoping for more understanding, they moved to an agricultural research station to be amongst scientists, but things did not improve significantly. 

After the war he found it hard to get a job without a 'war record', until he was offered a post at Leeds University, by the broadminded, sympathetic head of department. When asked what he said at his tribunal, Bill would simply say that he would never be able to live with himself if he ever killed another person. It would be an act of self-destruction. He was a man of great integrity and humility. 

Quakers remained 'home' for the rest of his life.

Ruth Todd.