Sybil Morrison

Who was Sybil Morrison?

Sybil Morrison was a British pacifist and a suffragist as well as being active with several other radical causes.

As a young and enthusiastic suffragist, Morrison was persuaded by Emmeline Pankhurst that she was too young to go to prison. During World War I she began in 1916 to drive ambulances in London, and attributed her decision to become a pacifist to the sight of a Zeppelin being shot down over Potters Bar. In the streets of London, ordinary, decent people were clapping and cheering and dancing as though at a play or a circus……..I suddenly saw that war made yet another impact on human beings; it deprived them of their humanity. I became a pacifist then and nothing has happened since to alter my conviction that war is a crime against God and humanity.

Morrison became in 1936 one of the first women members of the Peace Pledge Union, a British pacifist organisation and UK section of War Resisters International. She served as a Campaign Organiser and Chair and wrote the first history of the PPU. In 1940 she spent a month in Holloway Prison, having spoken against the war at London’s Speakers' Corner. Morrison was an active member of the Women's International League for Peace & Freedom, being at one stage the Chair of its British branch.