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20 — Interview with Henry Bullard, born 1916. He was a conscientious objector, and had to face a Tribunal:

“I didn’t tell the Tribunal I was a Quaker, so I didn’t get exemption, and I was imprisoned four times. I was in Winson Green and in Stafford on a longer sentence because I believe it is wrong to kill — this is on Christian grounds, and while I was in Winson Green I met some IRA prisoners serving life sentences for — there was a bomb in….. maybe - and the bombs were let off in Coventry and they killed civilian; this was at the beginning of the Second World War. And I met them and they said the Quaker way won’t work, ours is the other way, and I said I disagreed with them, and we agreed to disagree — they were quite bright and cheerful, they were quite happy, they had done what they thought was right. When I came out after the third time of course, the majority of people walked on the other side of the road. There are still some people who won’t speak to me, but the majority — if they wanted to come to a market they had no choice, did they?

Let’s go back to when I was in. There was a young man in the cells, we were all put together on this day after your sentence, unless you were a madman, holding forth on what he was going to do in prison. I thought he had been in, I listened and said nowt, and during the night he just went berserk and smashed the place up; after that he was going to go into the army — but he wouldn’t be any good in the army because he wouldn’t shoot anybody. I spent Christmas ’43 in prison. By then I was having an easy time... all the prison officers want to do is to get out and go and fight in the War, because they are mostly ex-servicemen you see, but there comes a time when they accept that you’re not going to do anything really, so that you then have a lot easier time. The last time I was in, the Chief Prison Officer came to me, he was having problems in the library, he had trusted one man and he had let him down, and he said will you promise not to do anything that you shouldn’t, like trying to get out? You see you are trusted if you are in a library because you have to walk about the prison…and the cell I was in wasn’t locked, it was never locked, it was impossible to lock it as far as I know, because I didn’t open the door. I was then in (with) ‘builders’ who were on what was called ‘cost plus’, and they all maintained that the men who had measured their work hadn’t done it properly, and they were in (prison) falsely, but I got on quite well with them, the same as I got on with the IRA; there was no point in me falling out with them — I could argue with them, yes, but I wasn’t going to convince them, and they weren’t going to convince me, because I mean the IRA is still the same, they haven’t changed, they want to free Ireland as they see it.�

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