During the first few months of their work the Tribunals ‘panicked at the large numbers coming before them’ and ‘many flatly asserted that they would never give absolute exemption to anyone’. The vagueness of the surviving Huddersfield MST records for the period before July 1916 doesn’t assist in challenging this view, but thereafter the Tribunal was evidently neither anxious nor narvous about granting absolute exemptions. In September 1916 absoulute exemptions were granted to more than 107 of the month’s applicants, and remained only a little below that level until the end of the year. The figured for 1917 were much lower. None of these exemptions, however, were given on grounds of conscience; they were for illness, and a whole range of occupations. The Tribunal was happier dealing with applications on those grounds but consistently baulked at matters of conscience. When faced with such applications its members preferred to look elsewhere. For example, both of the Huddersfield COs who were given absolute exemptions in 1916 were considered to be physically unfit for military service. When prominent ILP anti-war activist Wilfrid Whiteley applied for absolute exemption on grounds of conscience, in July 1916, the case was deflected by his employer’s insistence that his work was essential to the war effort. Consequently, he was given a temporary exemption which, from then until the end of the war, the Tribunal never hesitated to renew. — p 137

Mayor: They are fighting against England. [Arthur] Gardiner: No. They are not fighting against me. Mayor: Well, you are a unit of this Empire. Gardiner: No. I don’t think my name has been brought up at all in the German Reichstag. — Arthur Gardiner and Mayor Joseph Blamire, p141 (from Appendix 3; Sat March 25 1916 The Worker “Scenes at a Tribunal: Exciting incidents at Huddersfield application by a well-known socialist. Tribunal impressed and policy changed”)