Stephen Henry Hobhouse (5 August 1881 – 2 April 1961) was an English peace activist, prison reformer, and religious writer.
He was the eldest son of Henry Hobhouse, a wealthy landowner and Liberal Party MP from 1885 to 1906, and Margaret Heyworth Potter.
Both sides of his family included a number of reformers and progressive politicians: Stephen Hobhouse was brought up as a member of the Church of England.
At a tribunal in August 1916, he was granted an exemption from military service so long as he joined the Friends Ambulance Unit.
He ignored a notice to report to barracks, was arrested by the civil police, brought before a magistrates' court, and handed over to the military.
[8] In 1917 Hobhouse wrote:[12] Nearly every feature of prison life seems deliberately arranged to destroy a man's sense of his own personality, his power of choice and initiative, his possessive instincts, his concept of himself as a being designed to love and serve his fellow-man.
His mother, Margaret, was a supporter of the First World War, in which three of her four sons served: the youngest Paul Edward was killed in March 1918.
[15][16] She was determined, however, to save her eldest son Stephen's life and to draw attention to the predicament of 1,350 war resisters then being held in prison.
[24] In prison Hobhouse met Fenner Brockway, a "fiery socialist" and fellow anti-war activist.