On June 16 1949 Pinter appeared before the London local tribunal chaired by His Honour Judge Sir Gerald de la Pryme Hargreaves.
The tribunal found unanimously against him. Decades later Pinter told his biographer Michael Billington he was “deeply disturbed” to find in a transcript he was sent of his spoken evidence the suggestion that “in the event of war I wouldn’t defend my sister. I was on record as having said something which I never said and which I didn’t believe . . . It was a terrible distortion of the truth”.
The typed digest in the file makes no mention of a sister. But there is this: “I would never defend innocent people who are attacked. I consider myself a human being. Other people do not seem to realise their responsibilities as human beings.” And this: “As to defending innocent people who were being attacked I think it would be degrading myself to defend them. People in the army are stupid.”
Supposedly, then, Pinter twice said he would not defend the innocent. But in his second statement he said there had been a misunderstanding: “The findings say that I would never defend innocent people. This is an unhappy mistake.”
The file, however, shows the transcript exactly copies the scribbled notes of Judge Hargreaves, so if anyone made things up it was not some faceless bureaucracy but Hargreaves. This is hard to credit — he hardly had the time, for one thing — and it’s a strangely transparent kind of corruption that allows its victims to put the record straight.
Pinter’s appeal was heard by the southern division of the Appellate Tribunal for Conscientious Objectors on August 23, 1949. At this second hearing, he said later, there were “a lot of colonels with moustaches”. This is a caricature, reminiscent of Roote, the retired colonel of Pinter’s play The Hothouse. There were no army men, with or without moustaches. Headed by the lawyer Sir Michael McDonnell, it had only two other members, Dr CK Allen, warden of Rhodes House, Oxford, and John Thomas Scoulding of the TUC, a former dockworker.
To balance the weight of the tribunal, applicants were allowed to take along an authority figure — a lawyer, teacher, priest or rabbi — to speak up on their behalf. Pinter, with what Billington calls “bare-faced chutzpah”, preferred to take his school friend Morris Wernick.
The person who faced the tribunal just before Pinter — a working lad from Peckham, southeast London, called Roy Hamerton — was completely on his own. Pinter had seen Hamerton before, in June, when he too had come up before Hargreaves. Hamerton’s statement is personal, poorly punctuated and curiously moving: “No person has the right to kill, or use force against another person, and the only way to a peaceful and happy world is for people through their own will and conscience to have the courage to abandon all methods of force.”
There was a meekness about Hamerton. The flavour of his cross-questioning comes across in the notes kept by Hargreaves: “It’s bad to kill. I am not a vegetarian. Food is for people to eat. I am not much good at reading. I would not use the police force. Gangsters have got to be controlled. International gangsters must also be controlled by force.” The impression is of rhetorical rings being run round Hamerton. It is like the haranguing of the put-upon Stanley by Goldberg and McCann in The Birthday Party.
Pinter, by contrast, talked of his beliefs in religious terms — the sacred, the soul — though he professed later to have had no religious beliefs by then. A puzzle of the Pinter file is the presence of two letters about him on the notepaper of Hackney Downs school. Pinter has never mentioned these letters. Has he blanked out all memory of them? Or did he know nothing about them at the time? Pinter’s parents, Jack and Frances, frantic with worry that he might go to prison, turned to their son’s friend, mentor and English teacher Joe Brearley. Pinter later said: “He came round one afternoon and my father said, ‘Can you talk some sense into this boy? He’s likely to go to prison. He’s crazy’.” Brearley apparently said, “If he wants to go to prison, it’s entirely up to him.”
But someone, Brearley or Jack Pinter, then approached TO Balk, holder of the Military Cross and headmaster of Hackney Downs, and James Medcalf, Pinter’s former housemaster. Both wrote in support, but their comments may have done him more harm than good. Balk praised Pinter’s “maturity of thought and attitude” and was “confident that he has given the matter serious thought”. But he did not “profess to the ability to judge whether his scruples in the matter of military service are genuine”.
Medcalf assured the appeal tribunal that Pinter was intelligent, reasonable and pleasant and he had “no reason whatever to doubt his sincerity. He has always been reflective beyond his years . . . I should think his scruples (at the first tribunal) were very probably genuine”. But he added: “I hold conscientious objectors in no very great esteem, and I think that a spell in one or other of the services would do Harold Pinter a world of good.”
Pinter’s intransigence, however, paid off. He did not do National Service. He next refused a medical check, was twice hauled before the magistrates and fined — a total of £125 according to Billington, £30 according to earlier biographers. After that the problem went away.
With hindsight, 1948-49 was a lenient interlude in the enforcement of conscription. Imprisonment was discouraged for offenders under 21. That December the Ministry of Labour and the Home Office reached an understanding whereby the courts would “impose fines on young offenders (including men who refused to undergo medical examination) instead of sentencing them to imprisonment”. That exactly describes Pinter’s case.
National Service ended in 1960, the year Pinter became internationally known as author of The Caretaker. The next year he was in Who’s Who. Many years later he described his objection to call-up as his first major political act. “I was sort of smelling a rat about the way these structures were conducted,” he said. “These political structures. I wouldn’t put it much higher than that. I really smelt a rat.”
© Nigel Lewis, 2005
