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Name: David Ralph Spreckley
From Born in India, raised in England.
Tribunal: October 1940
Result: Rejected, ordered to do land work on appeal. Imprisoned for ignoring order.
David Ralph Spreckley was the son of a Gurkha, born in India during the First World War. David was orphaned when the troop ship carrying his parents sank.
He was adopted and received a military education t the Royal Naval College and the Royal Military Academy, in Sandhurst. David resigned from the Army in 1936 and became a pacifist, joining the Peace Pledge Union. He went on to pursue theatre. He contributed to the Peace News publication, in 1939 expressing the fear that other pacifists were, "in their scramble for peace", finding "some questionable allies".
Having registered provisionally as a conscientious objector at his local Employment Exchange, the objector then had to send a written application to the Local Tribunal.
After submitting his written application to be officially registered as a conscientious objector by a Local Tribunal in March 1940, David Spreckley had to wait seven months before being called to appear before the Tribunal.
Here, taken from a letter, is his own account of the Tribunal hearing, which took place in October 1940:-
"Three of them sat at a table. I walked towards them with my hands in my pockets. The chairman told me to take them out. I said that I didn't feel that the position of my hands could affect, one way or another, their attempt to judge my conscience. I went on to point out that they were sitting down and I was standing up and suggested that it could help their search for knowledge if we all sat down together. The titter that went round behind me saved them from having to work out an answer to that one. The chair asked me a perfunctory question about my agricultural expertise. I looked at them and said that I had a great knowledge of pigs. The chair requested me to stand down. The great search for my conscience had taken three minutes flat." David Spreckley, recalling the Tribunal hearing in 1988.
The tribunal rejected David Spreckley and directed his name to be removed from the register of conscientious objectors. He would be obliged to fight...
Although the Local Tribunal had rejected his case, David Spreckley had the right of appeal. At the end of October 1940, he sent this form to the Southern Appeal Tribunal, based in London.
In April 1941, the Appeal Tribunal heard David Spreckley's case, and granted him conditional exemption - ordering him to carry out land work.
Although Spreckley refused to do land work, and eventually in 1944 that he was arrested and sent to prison
After the war, he married and had three children. His jobs included a librarianhe started a company building caravans, which he passed on to be owned by the workers. He served as a councillor on Huntingdonshire County Council, Huntingdon and Godmanchester Borough Council and Huntingdonshire District Council between 1957 and 1982, and on St Neots Town Council. While serving, he made it possible for the public to sit in on meetings, aiming to make them more open and democratic. He also ran for parliament as a Liberal three times. He campaigned against a new airport in Bedfordshire and against nuclear weapons.
David Spreckley died in 2013, aged 98. Read Obituary.
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