Court of the Conscripts
Evidence from Britain’s First World War conscription tribunals reveals a surprisingly efficient and impartial system, as Rebecca Pyne-Edwards Banks asserts in this extract from her 2015 undergraduate dissertation prize-winning essay.
A hundred years ago, Britain’s Liberal government introduced conscription. Uniquely among combatants in the First World War, the men of Britain could apply for exemption. Under the government’s Military Service Act (1916), conscripts could go before a tribunal and claim on grounds of ill health, financial difficulties, work of national importance and conscientious objection.
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