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Salient. Victoria University Students' Newspaper. Volume Number 39, Issue 6. April 5 [1976]

Onslaught on Rights Continues

Onslaught on Rights Continues

These regulations provided the basis for the Government's previously described onslaught on the anti-conscriptionists, as well as on the pacifists and conscientious objectors.

They were treated very harshly. Up to 12 special detention camps were set up for them in the North Island - they were held in these as well as being gaoled.

Estimates of the number of CO's gaoled and detained range from 650-800. Those who were detained were to be held for the duration of the war, with the result that very many men spent several years in camps and prisons. (Jehovah's Witnesses were banned outright and thus membership was illegal, punishable by detention or prison. In February 1941 an Oamaru man got a mere 2 months prison for shooting a Jehovah's Witness in the leg, resulting in amputation.) Their meetings were smashed up and their homes raided.

Police raided the home of Norman Bell, a well known Christchurch pacifist, on an almost weekly basis. For some the persecution was part of the family heritage.

'During the Great War six brothers of one family were imprisoned as conscientious objectors. Three of them were deported and brutally treated overseas. In this war five members of the second generation of this family, all bearing the same name, appealed as conscientious objectors. Four of them are brothers, and are nephews of the six mentioned above (their own father was not called for service because of family responsibilities), and one is a son of one of the deported conscientious objectors. All five had their appeals disallowed and have been in prison and detention camp for several years.' (This was the Baxter family - Archibald Baxter was New Zealand's most famous CO of WWI. The most recent bearer of the family mantle was the late James K. Baxter.)

Individuals stuck to their guns despite repeated persecution, (e.g. Archie Barrington and the Rev. Ormond Burton).

War was declared on September 3, 1939. On September 4 Burton was charged after police broke up a Christian Pacifist meeting in Wellington. He was also charged after another meeting was broken up by police on September 8 (the charges were usually for things like obstructing constables in the execution of their duties).

In January 1940 he was charged after drunken soldiers broke up a joint pacifist-CPNZ meeting in Auckland. In February he and a CPNZ member were given a month's hard labour after police broke up an anti-conscription meeting. In March after police broke up another Wellington meeting he was given 3 months hard labour. And so on. Burton was by no means alone in this.