Ronald Skirth: First World War Pacifist From Ealing

Brought to you by:

Sam Habeeb

"Shadow MP Campaigner of Ealing North"

Ronald Skirth: First World War Pacifist From Ealing
Credit: Imperial War Museums

Ronald Skirth was a British soldier and a participant in the First World War. His experiences in the Battle of Messines and the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917 led him to resolve never to take human life, and for the rest of his army service, he deliberately made errors in the calculation of target points in the hope that it would ensure that the guns of his battery would miss their aiming point on the first attempt, thereby allowing the enemy to evacuate.

Early Life and War Service

Skirth was born in Chelmsford and brought up in Bexhill-on-Sea. He had enlisted under the Derby Scheme to serve in the British Army. He had applied for his mobilization to be brought forward, and so he was called up two months before his 19th birthday in October 1916. He became a Battery Commander’s Assistant in the Royal Garrison Artillery, calculating the settings needed to fire the massive guns of a field battery. When he argued with a superior officer over whether to use a French church for target practice, he was demoted in rank from corporal to bombardier.

Did Ronald Skirth Participate in a War?

Skirth saw action in the Battle of the Messines, in which two of his closest friends, Bill and Geordie, were killed. On the same day, he had an “epiphany” when he stumbled on the corpse of a dead German of about his age and realized that one of the shells he had targeted might well have killed him. This was to mark the turning point in his thinking about the war as he determined that he was morally responsible for his actions and their consequences, irrespective of the chain of command.

He carried out this sabotage while still in Italy, where he remained until February 1919, save for a fortnight’s leave back in England in November and December 1918. He was rewarded with the British War Medal and Victory Medal for his services in the war but declined the Military Medal, which he thought was offered as part of an attempt to hush up a fatal accident that he had tried to avert.

Did Ronald Skirth serve in the Army?

In September 1919, Skirth returned to England to start teacher training, for which he had enrolled before leaving to serve in the army. He trained in London and, after qualifying, taught briefly at a school in Bexhill-on-Sea before transferring in 1922 to a post at a school in Uxbridge.

In 1923 he and Ella Christian became engaged, and the following year, after Skirth secured a job at the Little Ealing Senior Boys’ School and found a flat they could share in Ealing, they married on 29 December 1924, at the Church of St Barnabus in Bexhill. In September 1929, their only child was born, a daughter whom they named Jean. (They had expected a boy who would have been called John.)

Following the war, he returned to Ealing with the family to Skirth and his wife Ella’s various homes throughout their life together, where he remained working as a teacher until his retirement in 1958. He died in England in 1977.

Character and Beliefs

A self-proclaimed ‘dreamer’ with romantic sensibilities Skirth was to be very loving of literature, especially poetry; a much-annotated copy of the Golden Treasury that he took along with him from the Western Front, Francis Turner Palgrave His favorite poets of course were: John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. He had immense love for all beauty which pervaded his musical and architectural or natural splendor. On the Western Front, he wrote, he was “deprived of the one thing that to me was as precious as life itself, my love of beauty”.

It has been said that though Skirth had volunteered to the Army in 1915 as an idealistic patriot, convinced that “King and Country” were causes worth fighting for, it did not take too long before he became disillusioned with the war and the army. He attributed this to a combination of his sensitive character, his Christian upbringing and sense of right and wrong, and, most significantly, the horror of his war experiences.

After the war, Skirth remained a steadfast pacifist until his death. He believed that Britain should not have declared war against Germany in 1939, and he also added that it was better for him to accept occupation than resist an invading enemy with weapons.

Publication

In 2010, it was published in book form by Macmillan as The Reluctant Tommy: Ronald Skirth’s Extraordinary Memoir of the First World War, edited by Duncan Barrett. In an introduction, Barrett wrote that he felt Skirth’s story “deserved as wide an audience as possible—and to be read in its protagonist’s own words.”.

Skirth’s daughter Jean, who had permitted for the memoir to be published, remained uncertain whether publishing the memoir was what her father would have wanted but believed that it was important that his story should be widely known.

The book carried a foreword by Channel 4 News anchor Jon Snow, in which he wrote about his grandfather, Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas D’Oyly Snow. As one of the most popular descriptions of the lower ranks, “lions led by donkeys,” Snow accepted that “If Ronald Skirth was a ‘lion’, Thom Snow was ultimately a ‘donkey’.”.

What Did Ronald Skirth Do After Retiring from Teaching?

In January 1971, after retiring from teaching, Skirth began writing a handwritten memoir detailing his conduct and experiences during the First World War, specifically his experience of disillusionment. Although he had originally conceived of a book that would focus on his marriage to his wife Ella, mentioning the war only in passing, he soon felt a “compulsion” to write more about his war experiences. He spent more than a year working on the memoir, filling five green ring binders with many hundreds of pages, and over the next few years, despite suffering two strokes, he kept returning to the material, editing, amending, and adding to what he had written.

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Brought to you by:

Sam Habeeb

"Shadow MP Campaigner of Ealing North"

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