Book review: ‘Peace angel’ of World War I: Dissent of Margaret Thorp

A women’s organisation in Brisbane called a meeting at the School of Arts to support the compulsory recruitment of men into the armed forces to fight in Europe. It was 1917.

Margaret Thorp, a 25-year-old Quaker pacifist, rose to reject conscription and point out the futility of this attempt to overturn a recent national referendum that had voted against compulsory army service. She didn’t get a chance. Her comments “precipitated an uproar”, a woman tried to force her out of the room, she was set upon by others, and “the gathering resolved itself into a seething mass of struggling women”.

Thorp gamely struggled on to the platform but other women surged up and knocked her down. She was rolled on the floor, kicked, punched and scratched, finally thrown out of the hall. Undeterred, she returned with a policeman who said she had a right to address a public meeting, made two more attempts to speak but was pushed out again as the national anthem chimed in above the uproar. Once more she reappeared but was still unable to get a hearing. The resolution of the Women’s Compulsory Service Petition League was carried, conscription advocates “hurling the vilest insults at the ‘antis’”. An undaunted Thorp called for three cheers for no conscription and finally withdrew from the meeting.

This lively public episode speaks volumes about these tough, sometimes dangerous political times, the fears and strong feelings of families whose menfolk were called on to join the armed forces and face the gruesome dangers of the war in Europe, just as it recalls the courage and tenacity of conscientious objectors trying to bring about the end of war (sadly as far away now as ever).

There was almost a civil war in Australia about whether men should be forced to join up or not. “Patriotic women saw it as their duty to compel all eligible men to enlist, and were encouraged to ostracise those who failed to answer their country’s call”, Hilary Summy writes. White feathers were handed out to “shirkers” as a sign of cowardice. The controversy split churches, community organisations, even families.

This historical period also sums up Thorp’s character and her dedication to causes. When asked not to make YWCA girls disloyal to King and country, she retorted her goal was “to make them supremely loyal to the Kingdom of God!”

Margaret Thorp was born in England into a Quaker family, members of the traditionally pacifist Society of Friends. She had an early introduction to extreme poverty because the family home was adjacent to a very poor district of Liverpool where her father, a physician, worked at a medical mission and where as a teenager Margaret conducted weekly discussions. She attended The Mount Quaker girls’ school at York, and later studied peacemaking at Friends’ Woodbrooke College in Birmingham.

Early experiences led Thorp to become an ardent lifelong believer in social equality and socialism, although she condemned the violence of some revolutionary movements. In an active life she joined many organisations working for peace, social justice, women’s rights, and against racism, while retaining an interest in music and living a full life, with a number of male admirers.

She was even married for a time to Arthur Watts, who at one stage worked in Russia for the Save the Children Fund but she did not share his enthusiasm for Soviet developments and after six years or so these differences forced them apart. Summy’s lively book includes a photograph of Thorp at the age of 82 in 1974 dancing the Pride of Erin at Sydney Town Hall with the Sydney Lord Mayor when she was named New South Wales Pensioner of the Year.

The Thorp family arrived in Australia in 1911 when Margaret was 19, her parents having undertaken a two-year mission to support Friends’ anti-conscription struggle here and in New Zealand.

This was a period of great social upheaval and the young woman was soon in action on equal pay for women, trade union conflicts about control of the means of production, as well as anti-war and conscription issues. It was a rough, often brutal, time. On “Black Friday”, during the Brisbane General Strike of 1912, women led by suffrage activist and anti-war advocate Emma Miller (later a close associate of Thorp and whose statue stands in Brisbane City Square today) were attacked by mounted police brandishing batons directed by the Police Commissioner himself during a procession to Parliament House.

Then came the 1914-1918 Great War and the birth of the Women’s Peace Army in 1915, not only opposed to war but also campaigning for adult suffrage, equal pay for equal work, legal equality, improved child welfare laws, better educational standards, penal and other reforms. The English activist and her colleagues had a full agenda.

In spite of attacks on her pacifism and other concerns, Thorp never lost the religious zeal that underscored her social action. A zeal which in fact often brought her into conflict, sometimes bitter, with members of the clergy whose Christian beliefs included support for war. At one stage she decided to visit all the parsons “to stir them up”.

Being pacifist did not prevent her being very forthright in defence of her commitments and she gradually earned great respect from political opponents as well as supporters during a period of much bitterness. “Existing divisions were accentuated between Catholics and Protestants, monarchical imperialists and republican nationalists, conservatives and dissenters, as well as within these groups. It also set soldiers against civilians, women against women, and sometimes even family members against family members” Summy writes. But in 1916, when she was only 24, and had been in Queensland only one year, State Home Secretary John Huxham told Thorp he “felt proud to have such a person in Queensland”.

That same year, Thorp was in Gympie with colleagues from the WPA and Australian Peace Alliance to gain support. No-one turned up for a special women’s meeting, and the Town Council refused permission to use a licensed hall for a public meeting, so they decided on an open-air gathering.

Thorp delivered her standard speech: How can peace be made permanent? As she concluded a woman shouted “you ought to be at the wash-tub!” Summy continues “When a man came to Thorp’s defence, he was quickly set upon by the woman who bashed at his head with a bag of apples”, and later Thorp heard there’d been plans to “duck” her. It would be funny if it were not so serious. The speakers were rained off but after the shower the crowd came back and gave them a good hearing. Even so the mayor warned he would instruct the police to prohibit the holding of any meeting by this delegation in future.

This is a gripping yarn about the life of a strong and committed “Peace Angel”. It’s much more than a good read, for it tells the story of aspects of social and political life in 20th century Australia of which we hear comparatively little.

There’s an interesting historical question here. Some social activists do considerable work for the public good and receive accolades, honours, statues in their honour. Others do just as much but receive scant notice. Thorp herself wrote “Who are the real national heroes? Surely they are the men and women who do the little things of life in a big way, putting their best energies and interests into their work, and whose friendship has no boundaries”.

We should be grateful Hilary Summy wrote this story of a committed, brave, feisty woman. We should also be grateful the Centre for Peace Studies chose to publish it.

There is, however, a flaw in the editing of the book.

The natural flow of the yarn, with its incidents, emotion and at times humour, is interrupted time and again by those pesky little footnote numbers in the text forcing the reader’s eye off the ball to flick down to the reference at the bottom of the page. Not occasionally, which might make them easy to ignore, but as many as half a dozen times on a page, 494 times in the total of 124 pages. This may be necessary in presenting a doctoral thesis to prove the author has done her homework but simply isn’t necessary in a work for public consumption, especially when it has an 11-page bibliography and an index of three pages.

To be fair I mentioned this point to two other former academics and a current university student and all agreed it is an irritating and unnecessary interruption. At least the footnotes could have been collected together at the end of the book but even so only a tiny proportion of readers are likely to follow them up.

And another thing. More a question. This story is about a woman committed to social equality, particularly the problems of people out there in the general community. She belonged to the Society of Friends who do not use titles, not even Mr and Mrs, and who have no clergy, no hierarchy. Their “church” is a simple, non-consecrated room with seating in a square.

Yet the launch of the book was in the hallowed halls of The Mayne Centre at Queensland University, amid the titles and icons of privilege. I suspect Margaret Thorp would not have been comfortable. Even though it might be pushing it to suggest the launch should have been in City Square round Emma Miller’s statue, would it not have been more appropriate in the Friends Meeting House, a community hall, a trade union headquarters, a welfare organisation? That is in Margaret Thorp’s workplace?