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WWII Conscientious Objector Camps in the Horowhenua

Kete Horowhenua2020-03-23T16:52:50+00:00
During the Second World War, in July 1940 New Zealand introduced conscription into the armed forces. People could apply to be exempted from conscription as a conscientious objector - on political, religious or philosophical grounds. Most appeals were denied, and people who still refused to fight in the war were imprisoned. [Source: http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/conscription-conscientious-objection-and-pacifism ]

Two of these conscientious objector camps were located near Shannon.

They were a significant part of the whole detention camp system but are a little known slice of Horowhenua history.

Palmerston North researcher Margaret Tate presented her investigation into the Shannon camps – Whitaunui on the Shannon-Foxton Road near the present Moutoa Hall and Paiaka in Springs Road – to a public meeting hosted by the Horowhenua Historical Society. The sites were once part of the flax milling industry in the swamps near Shannon and Foxton.

Conscription – compulsory enlistment for military service – began in July 1940 with men between the ages of 18 and 40 facing the ballot. Objectors could appeal to district manpower committees and armed forces appeal boards on grounds of hardship, essential employment and conscientious objection.

The two Shannon camps opened in June 1942 with the first group of 104 detainees at Whitaunui and 34 at Paiaka, eventually housing 250 of the men in detention.

In New Zealand no alternative form of service was offered to conscientious objectors as in other Commonwealth countries, so the camps were the only option for the 800 men who occupied them over the course of the war.

Thirteen camps were built around New Zealand to detain the ‘military defaulters’ whose appeals were rejected and who refused to work under military control in any form.

They were Christian pacifists, humanists, agnostics and a small number of political objectors who were seen as cowards in the eyes of the public and criminals in the eyes of the law.

In his book We Said No to War! detainee Walter Lawry writes that many trades and professions were represented at Whitaunui, the largest of the Shannon camps.

“There are schoolteachers, farmers, a Hansard reporter, a lawyer, a painter of landscapes and a group with brains to spare who spend many hours daily on concentrated study. There is a general feeling that a number of these will become university lecturers or professors in due time.”

One detainee who had ‘brains to spare’ and did become a university lecturer was pacifist Thomas Henry (Harry) Scott who had trained as a school teacher and spent two years at the Whitaunui. In 1960 when Harry died in a climbing accident on Mt Cook, his son Jonathan Scott discovered of box of his father's papers, and this inspired him to find out more about what happened to his father during the war period. In 1997, Victoria University Press published Harry's Absence; Looking for my father on the mountain.

Taking inspiration from his time in detention camps, Harry continued his studies after the war, finishing a Bachelor of Arts degree and adding an MA and PhD in psychology to his teaching qualifications in natural history and agricultural sciences.

In 1957, after studying in Canada, he was appointed first head of the department of psychology at Auckland, becoming recognised as a gifted experimental psychologist, before dying aged 41 in a climbing accident on Mount Cook three years later.

He is just one of the detainees to go on to bigger and better things at the end of their for-the-duration-of-the-war) sentence.

With more information being released as 50 years has passed since th closure of the camps, more research is being undertaken.

A recent article on www.stuff.co.nz included a video clip showing one woman's discovery that she lives on the site of the Whitauni Detention Camp near Shannon - click here for the Stuff video - then Click on ( download ) to play it.

Margaret Tate’s research on the camps will feature in the August 2016 issue of the Manawatu Journal of History.