Max Plowman

Mark Plowman, generally known as Max Plowman, (1 September 1883 – 3 June 1941) was a British writer and pacifist.

He was born in Northumberland Park, Tottenham, Middlesex. He left school at 16, and worked for a decade in his father's brick business. He became a journalist and poet. In 1914 he married Dorothy Lloyd Sulman.

From the beginning of the First World War Plowman felt morally opposed to the fighting – "insane and unmitigated filth" – but on Christmas Eve 1914 he reluctantly volunteered for enlistment in the Territorial Army, Royal Army Medical Corps, 4th Field Ambulance. He later accepted a commission in the 10th Battalion, Yorkshire Regiment, and serving at Albert, close to the Somme on the Western Front, he suffered concussion from an exploding shell. Deemed to be affected by shell shock, he was sent home to convalesce at Bowhill Auxiliary, a branch of Craiglockhart, where he was treated by W. H. R. Rivers, although he did not meet either of Rivers' two most celebrated patients, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. While recovering, he produced a poetry collection, A Lap Full of Seed, and an anonymous pamphlet, The Right to Live, inveighing against the kind of society that made war inevitable. Having been granted a further month's home service in January 1918, he wrote to his battalion adjutant asking to be relieved of his commission on the grounds of religious conscientious objection to all war. He was arrested and tried by court martial on 5 April 1918 for refusing to return to his unit, his trial being covered in the Labour Leader. Having been dismissed from the Army, fortunately without punishment, he was on 29 June 1918 served with notice of call-up as a conscript, but successfully applied to Hampstead Military Service Tribunal for exemption as a conscientious objector.

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