Former Senior Lecturer in the Schools of Continuing Education and Social Studies, University of Leeds. Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History. Cyril has researched and written on aspects of the history of Huddersfield and the West Riding and on issues in Labour History. He is currently Chair of the Huddersfield Local History Society.
His principal research interest is British war resisters in World War 1. This interest was first stirred in the late 1960s when Cyril met people from Huddersfield who claimed that the town had been ‘special’ during the First World War because of the strength of its anti-war community. That led him to the research on which his book, Comrades in Conscience: The story of an English community’s opposition to the Great War (New edition, 2014) was based. The search for other ‘Huddersfields’ is what has driven his last twenty years work and has now resulted in the Pearce Register of British Conscientious Objectors, a database of more than 18,000 COs which went online in May 2015 as part of the Imperial War Museum’s ‘Lives of the First World War’ project.
A new book with the working title Communities of Resistance is in preparation.