No-Conscription Fellowship. The main organization helping COs was the NCF. It was formed in November 1914 by Fenner Brockway and Clifford Allen, two members of the Independent Labour Party, and consisted entirely of men of military age, most of them radical socialists and pacifists. With the introduction of conscription its members were liable to be called before tribunals, conscripted, arrested, and otherwise harassed. As a result non-members came to be responsible for the day-to-day running of the NCF, since only these "associate" members were not liable to conscription. Chief among them was Catherine Marshall, who had come to the NCF from the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies where she had been one of its leading strategists. In the face of continual harassment by the authorities, she built the NCF into a well organized and highly effective pressure group. In the face of the Military Service Act, Marshall set about recruiting other "associates" to help run the NCF against the time when Allen and the other leaders would be in jail. BR was, at first, reluctant to commit himself, but in the end Marshall's entreaties were impossible to resist. He joined with others to form the Associates' Political Committee, which was to make propaganda on behalf of COs. By the end of 1916, Nicholas Griffin comments, BR had changed from being "a dissident academic into one of the leaders of an organization that the government regarded as subversive" (SLBR 2: 55–6). See Thomas C. Kennedy, The Hound of Conscience: A History of the No-Conscription Fellowship 1914–1919 (Fayetteville: U. of Arkansas P., 1981).