Dennis Allen:  a Quaker absolutist

Dennis Allen IWM interview by Lyn Smith, 10 August 1990, ref: 11522

From Yorkshire. Middle class. Father was a publisher.

One of 5 boys.

When he was 3 his father and the nanny ran off with him. But he was brought back and returned home and was sent to boarding school at six (1926). He feels the school had a big influence on him. Left school at 16. Looks back to his schooldays as a time when “Intelligent sensitive people tried to open children’s minds.” No indoctrination, a liberal education. He remembers writing “pacifist style essays in his final year.”

“Religion was something that quite passed me by.” But after he’d forgotten all theology, he remembered the phrase ‘God is Love’.

“Our books, in children’s magazine, were full of war stories…and our heroes. “I remember feelings of horror” but it was difficult to accept the images of horror with stories of heroism.

School opened his mind to the full implications of war. Sassoon poems (the futility of war) and Wilfred Owen. Also from stories of ordinary people, not just the poets.

He enjoyed strong physical exercise and people were surprised when he became a pacifist.

Joined Cable & Wireless as a clerk and worked there from 1936-40. Donald Soper was a big influence on his pacifism. Joined Peace Pledge Union. Worked to help refugees from Europe. Knew the essence of the horrors going on. For him, becoming a pacifist in WW2 was much more difficult than it would have been in WWI, “an entirely imperialist business between Britain and Germany.”

Pacifism based on a “somewhat primitive concept of religion.”

“It seemed quite impossible to love your enemy and kill him.”

He thought Justified war and technological arguments to make “Christianity fit war” and “allow priests to bless war machine were false.”

There were several Quakers in the PPU and he became a Quaker in 1939 and “the religious duty to preserve life and to love one’s enemies, really superseded all consequences.” The first world war had demonstrated that wars do not end wars. “It was a very difficult decision to reach.” “You had to hang on to that bit of faith that one had.” “In the long run I do believe this is God’s will.”

Gandhi was a positive example.

Fenner Brockway was someone who he “respected” and “whose writing he absorbed.”

He decided not to join the the Friends Ambulance Unit as he felt that ambulance efforts “recognised the legitimacy of war.” He recognises this was an extreme position and that he was an absolutist. “I wasn’t prepared to join in the machinery of war making” to be exempt on the basis of joining an ambulance unit. For the same reason he refused to register as a CO and apply for exemption. He wrote to tell authorities he wasn’t going to register and his reasons.

“I don’t try to defend myself with logic.” “It was a kind of command which I had felt as a result of prayer and sometimes prayer leads you beyond logic.” You have to believe you are not doing this for selfish reasons but for the good of the country, a social obligation.

He was arrested in 1940 and sent to prison (Wandsworth). On release he joined a pacifist service unit that ran a shelter in London. He was arrested again after a year and sent to Wormwood Scrubs. He recalled the prison was stacked with Jehovah's Witnesses.

Eventually agreed to attend a Tribunal and was exempted in 1942 on basis of doing social work and he became a youth worker.