In Auckland War Memorial Museum’s Scars I exhibition, Henry Ritchie (Harry) Urquhart’s 1917 pamphlet Men & Marbles is displayed as a testament to the voices of dissent during the First World War. Written during a time of strict military conscription and widespread support for the war effort, the pamphlet reflects Urquhart’s unwavering Christian pacifism and his critique of the state’s demands on individuals. Imprisoned for his views, Urquhart’s work challenges visitors to consider the personal cost of speaking out against war, highlighting a less-explored narrative within New Zealand’s wartime history. Dr David Littlewood considers Urquhart's legacy.
‘To the Christian, no war can be holy, no war righteous, except the one he must continually wage against sin in all its many and hideous forms, with spiritual weapons only’.1
These words from Harry Urquhart’s 1917 pamphlet Men & Marbles were just asking for trouble. They appeared soon after the New Zealand authorities had introduced military conscription and commenced an associated crackdown on any form of opposition to the national war effort. Men & Marbles led to Urquhart receiving a lengthy prison sentence for sedition, which was immediately followed by another when he refused to be conscripted into the army. But despite these hardships and the many other deprivations that followed, Urquhart’s commitment to speaking out against war and militarism never wavered. Only briefly mentioned in history books, and almost totally forgotten in public memory, the inspiration he provided to others has led to Harry Urquhart being dubbed ‘the father of Christian pacifism in New Zealand’.2
Urquhart, H. R., & Fellowship of Reconciliation Auckland Branch. (1917). Men and marbles. Auckland [N.Z.] : H.R. Urquhart.
Urquhart’s journey to becoming a Christian pacifist was a complicated one. He had been attached to the University of Otago Officers’ Training Corps for two years while completing his Master of Arts in English, and subsequently obtained a commission in the Territorial Forces as Captain of the 24th Company of the Auckland Senior Cadets. But this all changed after listening to an address by visiting English Quaker John Percy Fletcher at the January 1914 Student Christian Union Conference of the University of New Zealand. Fletcher’s impassioned denunciation of war mongers and those clergymen who extoled militarism prompted Urquhart to question his own stance. Following a further year of ‘quiet thought and prayerful meditation’, he resigned from the Territorials, writing to his commanding officer that ‘I could no longer consistently retain my position as Captain and yet call myself a follower of Christ’.3 Urquhart now joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a British-based peace organisation that called for an absolute renunciation of warfare.
“Opposed to the compulsory clauses of the Defence Act 'that unjustly encroach upon the liberties which are our Christian heritage”
First Annual Meeting of the New Zealand Society of Friends, Auckland, Easter 1914. Alfred Gregory: back row 3rd from right. Margaret Lloyd: 3rd row, 5th from left. Elizabeth Rutter: bottom row (excluding children), 2nd from left, holding baby. John Percy Fletcher: bottom row (excluding children), 6th from right, holding baby. Auckland Weekly News on 23 April 1914. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections, AWNS-19140423-40-01 (photographer John Jamieson). Identification of John Percy Fletcher from this source. No known copyright restrictions.
Based on what we know of his appearance at the time, the individual seated next to John Percy Fletcher (holding child) is almost certainly Harry Urquhart. Detail from Auckland Weekly News on 23 April 1914. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections, AWNS-19140423-40-01 (photographer John Jamieson). No known copyright restrictions.
This conversion came at a challenging time for New Zealand’s peace movement. Hopes had been raised that the protests over implementing compulsory military training from 1911 meant a significant proportion of the population would reject involvement in a future conflict. Instead, the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914 was greeted with widespread public support, alongside fierce criticism of anyone who dared oppose New Zealand’s participation. What resistance did occur largely came from socialists and others on the political left who regarded the war as little more than a capitalist brawl. Yet significant numbers of working-class men enlisted in the army and the trade unions generally fell into line. The situation facing New Zealand’s peace organisations was even bleaker. A decline in membership and sustained public antagonism caused most of them to retreat into closed-door activities, or even to collapse entirely.
Poster of Urqhuart produced by Ryan Bodman and Marama Mayrick. 2015. Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira. All Rights Reserved.
Urquhart, now working as a schoolteacher in Auckland, was one of the few pacifists who continued to speak out. During August 1915, he published Christianity and War: A Challenge to the Churches, a pamphlet originally delivered as a lecture to the Easter Conference of the Associated Churches of Christ. In it, he lambasted the pro-war stance of the clergy in New Zealand and Britain, and particularly the notion that people owed their ultimate loyalty to the state. He called on all Christians to instead embrace God’s word and the brotherhood of man, asserting that ‘those who love their Bibles most, those who best understand the spirit of His teaching, realise that all they have learned from the Master is utterly at variance with the spirit of war and all for which that spirit stands’.4 This questioning of the national cause earned Urquhart public condemnation and nearly cost him his job as Senior English Master at Seddon Memorial Technical College.
In some respects, however, Urquhart got off lightly. As declining volunteering rates raised the prospect of the army running short of recruits, the government began to contemplate compelling men to serve via conscription. The likelihood that such a step would prompt a upswell of resistance caused official attitudes to harden against any criticism of the war effort. While Urquhart received no sanction for Christianity and War, the authorities did order a police raid on the offices of the Auckland Freedom League in October 1915, followed by £50 fine being levied on one of its leading members, Egerton Gill. His crime had been to advise fellow Quakers to write on the cards issued under the 1915 National Registration Act – widely perceived as a preparatory step to conscription – ‘I could not for conscientious reasons take part in military service, in employment necessitating the taking of the military oath or in the product of materials the purpose of which is the taking of human life’.5
“The Shirker’s Last Refuge”. Observer, Volume XXXVI, Issue 43, 1 July 1916, Page 16. No known copyright restrictions.
Matters became even more fraught during 1916. The passage of the Military Service Act on 1 August made all men aged between 20 and 46 liable for conscription, thereby raising the prospect that opponents of the war would be forced into the army. So dismayed was he at the willingness of government ministers to compel men to fight that Urquhart resigned from his teaching job on the grounds he could no longer work for such people. Official concern about the prospect of resistance to conscription also prompted the issue of even stricter War Regulations in December 1916. These extended the definition of sedition to include inciting disaffection, disorder, or class hostility, as well as interfering with recruiting or discouraging the prosecution of the war to a victorious conclusion. Nonetheless, the early months of 1917 witnessed several strikes and go-slow actions by coal miners and waterside workers.
Page 12 Advertisements Column 7, Auckland Star, Volume XLVII, Issue 311, 30 December 1916, Page 12. CC-BY-NC-SA. No known copyright restrictions.
Such was the charged atmosphere in which Men & Marbles appeared. It was originally meant to be delivered as a public address under the auspices of the Fellowship of Reconciliation at Auckland’s Globe Theatre on Christmas Eve 1916. But permission to hold the event was withdrawn at the last moment by Auckland’s Superintendent of Police. Surprisingly, the authorities in Wellington then intervened to allow the address to be rescheduled for 28 January 1917, with its text subsequently being published as a 46-page pamphlet by Edwin Sayes of The Reliance Printery. The title referred to the method of balloting men for conscription, whereby the selection of a first numbered marble from a revolving drum denoted one of 233 drawers, before the selection of a second marble indicated which of the five hundred eligible men’s registration cards contained in that drawer was to be chosen. Urquhart likened this process to a sinister game that was ‘gambling away the lives of men by means of cards and marbles’.6 He also critiqued how conscription and the War Regulations were seeking to reduce the population to a machine-like uniformity and stifle any prospect of individual expression. Yet, just like in Christianity and War, he reserved most of his ire for clergymen who were whipping up hatred of Germans and encouraging their flocks to serve the war effort in the name of religion. For Urquhart, the churches were just as guilty as the government in propagating the ‘false and therefore unchristian’ assertion that the state’s demands should trump the need to serve God. Pro-war rhetoric was teaching people ‘that the only way to better things is the way of slaughter’ and imploring ‘them to commit racial, moral and spiritual suicide’.7
Portrait of the senior magistrate Mr E. C. Cutten. Supplement to the Auckland Weekly News, 15 June 1922, p.42. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections AWNS-19220615-42-04. No known copyright restrictions.
Although the authorities had allowed the rescheduled public address to go ahead, they were not prepared to tolerate the subsequent distribution of Men & Marbles. Urquhart was arrested, appearing before Stipendiary Magistrate Ernest Cutten at the Auckland Police Court on 27 April 1917, charged under the War Regulations with having caused the publication of a seditious utterance. During his defence, he readily admitted authorship of the pamphlet, but insisted it was his Christian duty to disseminate, and to continue to disseminate, his views on the war as widely as possible.8 Cutten was clearly uncomfortable at being confronted with these arguments by an upstanding and well-educated individual. He noted that Urquhart was ‘otherwise of good character, and is quite sincere’, and even admitted to feeling ‘sympathy’ for him. Nonetheless, the War Regulations were clear on what constituted sedition. Men & Marbles was a ‘dangerous weapon’ in the hands of disloyal people, particularly as it was written in such excellent English. Concluding that Urquhart was suffering from an ‘unbalanced mind’, Cutten sentenced him on 30 April to 11 months imprisonment without hard labour. Typically, Urquhart stated he would prefer to undertake hard labour, before thanking the magistrate for the kind and courteous hearing he had been given.9
"MEN AND MARBLES."Bay of Plenty Times, Volume XLV, Issue 6859, 30 April 1917, Page 3. CC-BY-NC-SA. No known copyright restrictions.
This sentencing would prove to be just the start of Urquhart’s ordeal. While imprisoned at Mount Eden, his name was drawn in the conscription ballot of 24 September 1917, thereby requiring him to undertake military service as soon as he was released. But like several other absolute pacifists, Urquhart believed that taking any part in the conscription process would be tantamount to recognising its legitimacy. After failing to report for medical examination or to lodge an appeal to a Military Service Board for exemption, he was arrested as a defaulter in April 1918. A court-martial followed, during which Urquhart refused to recognise the legitimacy of the court once its members had disallowed his protest over the counsel for the prosecution taking an oath on the Bible while simultaneously asserting that religious objections to military service were invalid. He further stated that he would only consent to being tried if the members promised to resign rather than ‘force a man whom you believe to be a thoroughly sincere follower of Christ to do that which he feels to be wrong and sinful’.10 The inevitable guilty verdict was accompanied by another 11-month prison sentence. Urquhart spent this ‘weeding strawberries with other objectors’ at Waikeria Prison near Te Awamutu in the Waikato.11
Waikeria Prison for WW1 objectors, c.1923 . Archives Reference: ABGU W3777 Box 11/ 149. Archives New Zealand (R18388398) CC BY 2.0
The months surrounding the Armistice then saw Urquhart’s situation deteriorate even further. On the one hand, there was growing criticism of the government’s treatment of conscientious objectors, particularly following revelations about the forced transportation of Fourteen men to the Western Front and the brutalisation of others at the Whanganui Detention Barracks. Much of this scrutiny came from the recently established Labour Party, whose leader, Harry Holland, cited Urquhart as the type of upstanding citizen who was being maltreated under the government’s pitiless running of the war effort. During an election speech, Holland specifically contrasted the use of one of Urquhart’s publications as a textbook by the Education Department with the fact the government had now determined ‘to herd him with criminals and break his life’.12 Yet the majority of New Zealanders continued to display no sympathy for those who refused to perform military service. Indeed, the call tended to be for additional punishments. Urquhart featured on a list of 273 objectors who were still imprisoned at the end of the war, only being released from Waikeria on 15 January 1919.13 But this was well before the many others who remained in confinement until September 1919, or even November 1920, due to the popular demand objectors should not have their liberty until all the soldiers had returned home from overseas. Even worse, the Expeditionary Forces Amendment Act 1918 resulted in Urquhart and 2,372 others appearing on a list of defaulters who were to lose for ten years the right to both vote in elections and to work for the Crown or any other local or public authority. This precluded any possibility of returning to teaching and seemed bitterly ironic at the end of war supposedly fought to protect human rights. Indeed, Urquhart remarked to one official that conscientious objectors ‘did not require four years of bloodshed to teach them the futility of war and because of their clear-sightedness you now propose to inflict a further penalty of ten years’ disenfranchisement’.14
Yet if the authorities hoped these deprivations would break Urquhart’s resolve to speak out, they were to be sorely disappointed. In June 1922, he delivered an address at Auckland’s Strand Theatre that was subsequently published as the pamphlet Pagan Patriotism. This saw him take up the cause of Alfred (Fred) Page, a former teacher at Christchurch Boys’ High School. Page had been dismissed from his position and banned from the profession for refusing to take the compulsory Oath of Allegiance to the King unless he could add the proviso: ‘So long as such undertaking continues not to conflict with what I consider to be my duty to God’.15 Urquhart restated his former insistence that duty to the state should never be held to trump duty to God and lambasted the churches for failing to insist otherwise. He also took aim at the narrow imperialism and nationalism that was being taught in New Zealand schools, instead calling for a civics education that emphasised the brotherhood of man and the unification of all peoples under God. These attitudes meant that once the restrictions imposed by the Expeditionary Forces Amendment Act were lifted a year early in 1927, Urquhart refused to take the Oath of Allegiance without the additional proviso stipulated by Page. He therefore remained barred from teaching.
Yet even without being able to enter a classroom, Urquhart acted as an inspiration to others. Among those directly motivated by his stance was one of New Zealand’s most famous anti-war figures, Ormond Burton. Burton had been a decorated and thrice wounded soldier in the Great War but underwent a striking conversion to pacifism in the 1920s. In 1936, he, alongside Archibald Barrington, founded the Christian Pacifist Society (CPS), an organisation whose membership was restricted to adult communicant members of orthodox churches who would sign a covenant rejecting all war. The CPS would be one of the most implacable opponents of New Zealand’s participation in the Second World War, with many of its members being arrested for staging public demonstrations, or for refusing any form of military service after the re-introduction of conscription in 1940. Urquhart himself was involved in the CPS and kept up a lively correspondence with the leaders of conscientious objector organisations throughout the conflict. He then went on to rail against the West’s role in the emerging Cold War – lambasting the churches for their militarism in pamphlets like The Searchlight on the Christian Churches of Today and War (1948) and The Last Chance of the Christian Churches (1957), as well critiquing the perceived excesses and war-mongering of capitalists in The Searchlight on Big Private Enterprise and Its Triple Curse: Slaughter, Slavedom, Slumdom (1946).
By the time of his death in 1963, Harry Urquhart had been speaking out against war for nearly fifty years. The stance he outlined in Men and Marbles cost him his liberty, his civil rights, and his teaching career, but he never wavered from it, or from his determination to publicly express it. His story has since slipped into obscurity – overshadowed by the brutal treatment meted out to Archibald Baxter and Mark Briggs on the Western Front, and by the dramatic war-hero to pacifist transformation of Ormond Burton. Indeed, there is no specific mention of Urquhart in the information surrounding the new Archibald Baxter Peace Garden – The National Memorial for Conscientious Objectors, which opened in Ōtepoti Dunedin in October 2021. Yet to both his persecutors and admirers alike, Harry Urquhart’s was a significant voice against New Zealand’s involvement in war.