Railway Signals and Conscientious Objectors

Una Stimson’s husband was a Conscientious Objector. She met his when he was at a clinic and taking part in experiments on nutrition and medicine at the Sowerby Institute. It was work for the Medical Research Council.

They also infected them with scabies to test a cure on them!

Then they did a shipwreck diet to assess what was essential to put in the inflatable rescue boats for when people were wrecked.

Una’s husband the gardening and grew the vegetables and looked after the goat the had as well as going in for the experiments as a routine.

Una continues:-

It eventually made him ill. There were about a dozen of them there, all young men, and they had to look after themselves in the house. They were on a rota. When I got to know him I used to go there quite regularly.

I’d done some work at the Education Office and I’d got friendly with this girl and we met up with them then we started courting. It was his father’s influence that made him into a Conscientious Objector. His father supported him. I was lucky that my family took to him as well. There was nothing about “you shouldn’t be doing this.”

In 1944 we got married and it was only 5 or 6 months into our marriage that he started to be ill. He went to the hospital and they found that he had a TB abscess on his chest due to the experiments he’d taken part in. I don’t think they expected him to pull through.

My parents has a chalet bungalow in Flamborough. It was empty because the government had told us to take everything out because they may need to use them. They never did. There was this empty bungalow available at the seaside and my mother told us to go there to help him get better. This [abscess] on his chest had to be bandaged because it was suppurating all the time but an osteopath in Sheffield said if he took the bandages off and lay in the sun, the sun would help him get better. We also went on a vegetarian diet. We had a blissful summer. We were there on VJ day. It was a good time.

Before we got married I went to train as a nurse. There were 2 big hospitals in Sheffield. I liked the actual nursing but I hated the living together part. The crowding in the dormitories and at mealtimes. I couldn’t get away from the people milling about.
It really made me quite ill so I had to give up. But, of course, you couldn’t do that in the war you had to go where they put you from the employment office. I went to the employment office and I said I can’t do this job anymore. I was very emotional about it. And she [the woman at the employment office] said: “The only thing I can offer you is a ward maid” and that was going back into the hospital again I said “no I can’t do it” and she said “hang on a minute” and she went away and she came back and said “I’ve got a job as a signal woman on the railways”.

I was only 20 and think of me going into a signal box and pulling the levers on my own! You got used to it there was a knack to pulling the levers and there were 2 men — we worked in shifts and I was there at night in this signal box from 10 at night till 6 in the morning in the signal box on my own in the dark and if I wanted to go to the loo in the night I had to go down the steps at the side of the box.

In the morning the gangers used to come in for a cup of tea and a break and they used to tease me terribly about it. And one morning they told me they’d found a body on the line — a man had laid down and the train had chopped his head off. I was so glad I hadn’t gone up that way. I’d missed him

But it was alright. I learnt to do the little clicker thing to say the train had past and then you can put the signals back then.

Then I got married and still worked at the signal box but the 3 shifts were playing havoc with my digestion. But, because I was married then I could leave the job — I wasn’t tied to stay there. It was after that my husband became ill.

We didn’t have any problems with my husband being a conscientious objector. He didn’t come into any conflict with anyone. We had a friend who was in the army and it was alright.

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Genevieve Tudor of the BBC Radio Shropshire/CSV Action Desk on behalf of Una Stimson and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.'

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