A passionate plea by the student, Harold Pinter, to be exempted from national service on conscientious grounds was, unknown to him for the last 50 years, fatally undermined by wounding reports from two of his teachers at Hackney Downs school in east London, new papers reveal.

His attempt to be recognised as a conscientious objector was, he says, the first major political decision of his life and the experience shaped that obstinate nonconformity that has been the trademark of his political activity ever since.

Mr Pinter told the Guardian he had not known that his old school teachers had testified against him.

His headmaster, T. O. Balk, had told the military tribunal that Harold had "always been prone to select the pleasant, the attractive and the easy in his life and to discard the drab, the unattractive and the difficult".

His house master, James E Medcalf, was even more direct: "I hold conscientious objectors in no very great esteem, and I think that a spell in either one or the other of the services would do Harold Pinter a world of good."

The case papers in the public record office show that the teenage Pinter, then a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, was already in 1949 capable of making an eloquent and articulate case to the national service tribunal why, in the age of the cold war and the atomic bomb, he objected to being drafted into the army.

Moral rejection

"I consider that a world war at this time would be disastrous to mankind and would wreck civilisation," he wrote to the tribunal in a 400 word statement.

"It is useless speaking of policies or sentiments of defence against aggression, for all these words mean nothing in a final and eternal extinction. Besides the atomic horror, the world's situation, already disintegrating, would fall and lessen to a terrifying degree, and finally... result in world famine".

"To join an organisation whose main purpose is mass murder, whose conception of true human values is absolutely nil, speeding on the utter degradation of a prematurely fatigued man, and whose result and indeed ambition is to destroy the world's very, very, precious life, is completely beyond my human understanding and my moral conception. And finally, to take one human life is completely alien to my moral code."

Under cross-examination, he said he had read Tolstoy and Ezra Pound but that he had not read any other book against pacifism.

"As to defending innocent people who were being attacked I think it would be degrading myself to defend them. People in the army are stupid," the official record claims Harold said when questioned.

He later told an appeal hearing, according to the records, the claim that he would not defend innocent people was a distortion of what he had said and an unhappy mistake.

The tribunal, which was chaired by Judge Sir GP Hargreaves and included Professor AW Pickard of Cambridge, did not look kindly on the teenage Harold's political views

Its brutal verdict read: "The tribunal was not satisfied in this case that there was any genuine conscientious objection to either form of military service.

"This applicant was dogmatic and his statements did not show any sign of careful and conscientious weighing of pros and cons."

Harold's appeal case was not helped by two letters from his old school. Mr Balk said Harold had always shown "more maturity of thought and attitude than most boys of his age" but he could not profess to judge whether his scruples were genuine.

"I am confident that he has given the matter serious thought," wrote Mr Balk. "He has always been prone to select the pleasant, the attractive and the easy in his life and to discard the drab, the unattractive and the difficult.

"If some other form of national service is to be done by him, it should be of a nature which will compel him to exercise much self-control and self-discipline and which cannot be easily evaded. Such service will have a high value in moulding Pinter's character."

Two trials

Mr Medcalf, his house master and sixth form master at the east London grammar school, did think his scruples were probably genuine.

"I hold conscientious objectors in no very great esteem, and I think that a spell in one or other of the services would do Harold Pinter a world of good," Mr Medcalf wrote.

"But I must in justice to him say that I have always found him reasonable, intelligent and pleasant (all) above the average and that I have no reason to doubt his sincerity. He has always been reflective beyond his years."

Harold Pinter told the Guardian that "you should remember I was 18 and very firm in my convictions". He said it had been a formative political experience for him and he later faced two trials for not responding to his military call-up and was fined on both occasions.

"The war had been over for three years and if I had been three years older I would have definitely served in the army," he said.

"I was not a pacifist. But the cold war had started and I had a healthy contempt for it. I believed that to have another war then meant that millions more people were going to starve."