6

Call-up

I seem to remember, I was having this kind of fantasy or desire not to go into the army … I remember I got my money for the last term and I had something like £60 and there was a boat for sale on the Isle of Skomer, and I remember it was £60 something and I was thinking, oh, if only I can get that boat I can get, you know, I can get it, and live on it. This is a sort of obvious fantasy.

Stuart Brisley (interviewed 1993)¹

For most men, escaping the call-up was indeed a fantasy. Their first contact with the machinery of national service came when they were summoned to register at one of the 1,200 Ministry of Labour centres – registration taking place on a Saturday.² The arrival of the first envelope around their eighteenth birthday was itself an unpleasant memory for some. Robin Ollington recalled how, in January 1948, his mother had shouted that he had better get used to getting up because ‘his papers’ had arrived: ‘I remember going under the covers and dreading going downstairs.’³

A high proportion of men, at times a fifth, failed to register for national service at the correct time,⁴ but most did so when reminded – though numbers of defaulters increased in the late 1950s, as men sought to avoid being called up before national service was abolished.⁵ A small group, presumably made up of those with strong objections to military service, did not register at all: 2,387 men fell into this category between 1949 and 1960. Most of these were eventually prosecuted.⁶

In the late 1940s, the British state had great powers over its subjects. Compulsory schooling and the National Health Service meant that the authorities had a good idea where any eighteen-year-old was likely to be. The end of the Second World War made conscription easier to enforce: civilian life was more orderly, and military obligations now fell exclusively on young men. Policemen could be paid bounties for arresting deserters,⁷ and sometimes questioned boys simply because they seemed ‘of military age’. As national service came to an end in 1960, the Ministry of Labour recorded just 105 men with outstanding military obligations who were ‘untraceable’ or ‘in suspense’.⁸

Civil servants had a good idea how many men would be available in each year, though they could not be completely sure until registration had taken place. With regard to the 1952–3 intake, the authorities knew that 352,000 men had been born in 1934. They believed that 42,500 of these had died before they reached the age of eighteen, 1,500 were blind or certified insane, 6,500 had emigrated and 21,500 had joined the forces as regulars. A further 103,500 would have their service deferred. Thus 176,500 men would proceed to medicals. Of these, 29,500 could be expected to fail the medical and 2,500 would be ‘conscientious objectors etc’. A further 26,000 men joined the RAF after their medical, presumably because they hoped to avoid posting to one of the other services – 2,000 men also volunteered for the navy at this stage and 2,500 men volunteered for the army. Finally, 1,000 men emigrated after their medical. Overall, 113,000 men born in 1934 would be available for posting as national servicemen. However, 61,500 older men, who had been granted deferments, which were now about to expire, would top up this number.⁹

The power of the state was not, however, felt equally by every young man in the land. Anyone who wanted to go to university or to obtain employment in the public sector or, indeed, to obtain employment of any legally recognized kind knew that he would face the question: ‘Have you done your national service?’ Most eighteen-year-olds came from families where defying the law would have seemed inconceivable, but escaping national service was easier for men from communities that were suspicious of the police. The Census Office was, in general, confident of its ability to trace young men – though it accepted that a few – ‘possibly gypsies or young vagrants’¹⁰ – were invisible. Escape was also easier for anyone with access to work in the informal economy and anyone with family in the Republic of Ireland. Irish origins were a source of useful ambiguity.¹¹ A man who went to the Republic was safe from conscription into the British forces. When the British government declared an amnesty for wartime deserters in 1953, 400 men who had fled from the British armed forces after the end of the war, a few of whom were national servicemen, emerged from the Republic under the mistaken impression that they would be covered by the amnesty.¹² Inhabitants of Northern Ireland were exempt from national service. Irishmen resident on the mainland for more than two years were liable for conscription, and most accepted this obligation ‘without demur’,¹³ but an Irishman might claim that he was just visiting and the British state was less likely to be able to find out his real date of birth or military record. A study of naval deserters concluded that men went on the run in the summer, when seasonal work was easy to find: ‘the affectation of an assumed Southern Irish name and accent enables a man in desertion to obtain registration at a Labour Exchange without difficult questions being asked’.¹⁴

Some men contrived to live outside the formal economy so successfully that the state was unaware of their existence. Charles Richardson was established as a ‘scrap metal merchant’ and seems to have conducted his affairs in a way that did not involve much interaction with the official world – except when he was arrested. One of these prosecutions had disastrous consequences for him: ‘They noticed in their wisdom that I was nineteen, and wanted to know why I was not in khaki like other nineteen-year-olds.’¹⁵

Men who lived outside the world of tax, identity cards and fixed abode are, by definition, hard for the historian to trace. Occasionally, a court case gives a glimpse of how some men evaded military duties. Michael Charteris and Donald Muddiman met in Liverpool prison. Charteris was keen to avoid military service and Muddiman, having already been a soldier and discharged on medical grounds, suggested that he should impersonate Charteris, join up under his name and then get discharged again. The scheme failed because Muddiman deserted as soon as he received his first pay and the military police went to the house of the real-life Charteris.¹⁶ Other men were more skilful. In 1954 Paul Squires was prosecuted for driving without a licence. However, he appealed against his conviction, claiming that the man observed at the wheel of his car had, in fact, been his twin brother, an army deserter who could not be located.¹⁷

No group of fit men in mainland Britain was systematically excluded from conscription. Conscripts were members of all political parties. Regular soldiers were discharged for being Communists but there was no such rule with regard to conscripts;¹⁸ a Conservative MP insisted that men should not be prevented from obtaining national service commissions because they had, in a moment of undergraduate indiscretion, joined the Communist party.¹⁹

Some believed that black men were discreetly excluded from the call-up. It is certainly true that the armed forces did not want to recruit large numbers of non-white soldiers, but they never enforced a ‘colour bar’,²⁰ and, in 1954, about seventy ‘colonial immigrants’ were called up every month.²¹ By the late 1950s, West Indians were a small but noticeable part of the conscript army. Robert Douglas served in the Ordnance Corps with Percy Lewis – ‘a diminutive Jamaican who arrived in Britain just in time to be called up’.²²

Unlike their counterparts in the states of continental Europe in the late nineteenth century, the British military authorities rarely faced problems with men who did not speak the national language. About 3,800 Welsh speakers reached national service age each year,²³ but only 250 of them spoke no English and most of these were excused from service because they worked in agriculture. The Wrexham recruiting office reckoned that only one or two monoglot Welsh speakers entered the armed forces each year.²⁴ The occasional Gaelic speaker also surfaced in the armed forces – though most of them too would have been excluded as agricultural workers. Those who presented themselves as spokesmen for Welsh interests believed that lacking complete mastery of the English language was a disadvantage for Welsh conscripts and sometimes tied this to a wider sense of Welsh identity: ‘Wales is a land of mountains and was, until comparatively recent times, a pastoral country. When attacked by professional armies, the natural tactics of the Welsh were to withdraw into the mountains, driving their beasts before them and resorting to guerrilla warfare. Wales has known little of professional soldiering.’²⁵ Officials recognized more prosaically that ‘Welsh National Servicemen who are to varying degrees bi-lingual can be put at a positive disadvantage in the Army because they tend to think more naturally in Welsh and find it hard to adjust themselves to an environment in which English is the main language.’²⁶ The navy and air force simply excluded men with imperfect English; the army made sure that there were Welsh-speaking testers to interview them at Ministry of Labour medicals.

Scottish and Welsh nationalists sometimes objected to serving in what they regarded as a foreign army – though the influence of both groups was limited in the period of national service. John Grieve – son of the poet and nationalist Christopher Grieve, who wrote under the pen name of Hugh MacDiarmid – declared himself a conscientious objector in 1950. He did so partly on political grounds – arguing that national service was contrary to the Act of Union – though he also claimed to have an absolute opposition to war. His appeal was refused – partly, it seems, because the tribunal believed that he would be willing to fight against England.²⁷

Between 0.3 and 0.5 per cent of men called up claimed to have conscientious objections to military service.²⁸ Objectors appeared before one of seven local tribunals, composed of up to five people, presided over by a judge or barrister. There were four possible outcomes. Some men were granted release from service without conditions. (This was rare – though it was the only outcome some pacifists would accept.) Some were required to perform military service in a non-combatant unit, such as the Medical Corps. Some were required to work outside the armed forces in some area recognized as being of particular value. Finally, some had their appeals denied and, if they refused to serve, were sent for trial. Between January 1949 and June 1960, 8,284 men passed before tribunals. Of these, 3,275 were set to appropriate civilian work, 1,653 were assigned to non-combatant service in the forces and 197 were granted an unconditional discharge; 3,159 applications failed. Men who objected to a decision could appeal to one of the two appellate tribunals. In 1959, 227 men did so and 102 of them succeeded in attaining some change to the original decision.²⁹

Those exempted if they undertook specified civilian work were required to do this for two months longer than they would have served in the forces; the extra period was designed to match the reserve obligations that would have been attached to military service. A few obtained easy civilian postings. A dentist was required to treat school children for two years;³⁰ an accountant worked in his father’s firm – his father was a solicitor and seems to have known the chairman of the tribunal in question.³¹ The Friends’ Ambulance Unit employed conscientious objectors and service in the FAU could seem remarkably like service in the armed forces. Leaders in the unit were chosen, at least initially, largely from among those who had been prefects at Quaker public schools. Men were put through a period of training that included morning runs, route marches and lights-out at ten. Alcohol was forbidden, but many men, like their contemporaries in the armed forces, began to smoke during this period. Finally, they were ‘posted’ and the lucky ones got to travel – some to Iran and Southern Rhodesia.

Some men disregarded the verdicts of tribunals and did not attend preliminary medical examinations for national service; a few refused to make any concession to military authority and simply failed to turn up for medicals without making a formal claim to be conscientious objectors. Such men were tried and sometimes sentenced to successive terms of prison as they repeatedly refused to attend medicals. Between 1 January 1949 and 30 September 1960, 4,792 men failed to attend medicals. Of these 1,150 were successfully prosecuted; the remainder, presumably, had a good reason for non-attendance. On first prosecution, penalties ranged from fines, imposed on 291 men, to imprisonment for more than a year, imposed on twenty-one men. There were 342 further prosecutions, which resulted in 125 fines and 217 prison terms, six of them of more than one year.³² An objector had the right to make a further appeal to a tribunal after he had served three months in prison. The Ministry of Labour did not always find it easy to secure what it regarded as the appropriate punishment for conscientious objectors. Magistrates pointed to legislation that discouraged sending men under twenty-one without previous convictions to prison. Some sent convicted men to Borstal, which objectors disliked because it meant that they were denied the chance of appeal they would have enjoyed if sent to prison.³³ One magistrate remarked that he could see no reason to imprison a man of previously good character and imposed a small fine.³⁴

Some men confronted the armed forces even after they had been posted. Private William Moulton, for example, first applied for registration as a conscientious objector in 1948 but his service was deferred, presumably so that he could complete an apprenticeship, and he did not appear before a tribunal until March 1951. The tribunal decreed that he should be registered but compelled to perform ‘non-combatant duties only’. He did not accept this verdict and refused to obey orders when he arrived at the depot of the Pioneer Corps. He was court-martialled and sentenced to four months in a civilian prison.³⁵ Rex Dunham was sent to prison for a year in October 1959 after he had refused the direction of a tribunal that he should take hospital work in lieu of military service. He said that ‘he could not obey the dictates of man’.³⁶

A few men developed, or expressed, conscientious objections only after having arrived in their units or even after having completed the bulk of their service. Gabriel Newfield decided to present himself as a conscientious objector after having completed his full-time service, which he enjoyed, and at a time when he had only fairly light part-time duties to discharge. The War Office helpfully explained that he would have to serve three months in detention before he could appear before a tribunal. He turned up at his camp and refused to wear uniform, the most common disciplinary offence committed by men who wanted to express objections to service. Eventually, he managed to persuade the military authorities to court-martial him and was sentenced to ninety-six days – the ideal sentence from his point of view. He served his time in the camp prison – reading books and talking on first-name terms with the national servicemen set to guard him. At the end of his time, he appeared before a tribunal, which accepted his objections as legitimate and discharged him.³⁷

Newfield was lucky. He served in a unit – the Medical Corps – that was not famous for brutal discipline and that, in any case, contained many conscientious objectors. Furthermore, he was articulate and had held the rank of sergeant during his own service. John Whitely, who became a Quaker while undertaking national service with the Grenadier Guards, had a harder time.³⁸ It was often alleged that men who refused to wear uniform had been made to stand naked.³⁹

Conscientious objectors were unusual but not, so far as one can tell, unpopular with the public or their own contemporaries. Many of them provided character references, which were usually sympathetic to the individual, if not to the notion of conscientious objection. Harold Pinter’s former housemaster at Hackney Downs School wrote:

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, 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 whatever to doubt his sincerity.

His headmaster added that Pinter had been prone to ‘discard the drab, the unattractive and the difficult’ and that any alternative service imposed on him ‘should be of a nature which will compel him to exercise much self-control and self-discipline … which … will have a high value in moulding Pinter’s character’.⁴⁰

Sometimes support for conscientious objectors could be expressed by unexpected people and in moving terms. A manager of a Birmingham engineering firm wrote to the appellate tribunal about a Jehovah’s Witness who had cancelled his apprenticeship in order to pursue his religious life: ‘he was so earnest in his desires and prepared to make the sacrifice, we felt it unwise to force him to carry on his apprenticeship … he left with our best wishes for his future.⁴¹

Ordinary conscripts sometimes resented men who were seen to have evaded service in some dishonest way, but not many imagined that conscientious objection was an easy way out. A few former conscripts seem to have regarded conscientious objectors as ‘unmanly’ but more common was the one who said: ‘I think you would have had to be very brave to be a conscientious objector.’⁴² Peter Duncumb was an RAF national service pilot. His brother had been a conscientious objector during the war and had been sent to Burma with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. Duncumb had a high opinion of his brother, who had ‘seen more real war than I ever did’.⁴³

Some servicemen had doubts of their own about the morality of war, or at least the kinds of wars for which they were being trained; many felt, especially during the hellish weeks of basic training, that a willingness to stand in the way of the military juggernaut required heroic courage. David Batterham volunteered for parachute training – which meant being trucked to an airfield with a group of tough young men singing ‘they scraped him off the tarmac like a lump of strawberry jam’ and undertaking the terrifying first jump from a tethered barrage balloon. All the same, he felt that his father, who had been an objector during the war, was braver than himself. He seems to have failed to gain a commission partly because he pointed out to the selection board that pacifism required a degree of moral courage that he himself lacked.⁴⁴ Geoffrey Lloyd was another upper-middle-class boy who had flirted with claiming conscientious objection but who eventually, having exhausted all possibilities of deferment, was called up shortly after having been elected to a fellowship of King’s College, Cambridge. He was set to scraping caked filth from a urinal with a bayonet and decided that life in the officers’ mess would be more agreeable – presumably, unlike Batterham, he kept quiet about his anti-militarist feelings when he appeared before the selection board.⁴⁵

At first, conscientious objection was almost exclusively reserved for those whose objection was religious⁴⁶ and for those who stated an opposition to all war, rather than opposition to the particular tasks that they might be set by the British government. Quakers, Christadelphians, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists were all likely to be pacifists, as were some Methodists – though there was no theoretical impediment to a member of any Church stating that he had religious objections to war.

In 1952, Richard Pankhurst, the son of the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, had his application to be registered as a conscientious objector rejected because he said that he would have been willing to fight against Hitler but objected to participating in the colonial war against Mau Mau in Kenya.⁴⁷ Harry Wolfe Lipschitz began his appeal against military service by citing Thomas Masaryk’s claim that his race was ‘the human race’ and went on to say that he was not a pacifist and would have fought against fascism ‘because the evils of fascism were greater than the evils of war itself’. His appeal was refused,⁴⁸ as was that of a man who said that he would only be willing to serve in an army of ‘the world federation’.⁴⁹

As time went on, tribunals became more prepared to respect secular objections and more willing to allow for the possibility that men might object to particular kinds of war, nuclear or colonial. Bernard Crick, born in 1929, avoided the call-up with a succession of educational deferments and foreign research fellowships. However, he returned to Britain in 1955 to find that the government had recently raised the age of eligibility for call-up to thirty-five, and that he was thus still liable. He then drafted papers, in which he said that he had previously been an unconditional opponent of war but that his position had changed: ‘while I have no ultimate objection of conscience to being part of a conscript army so long as it appears to be in the undoubted national interest and to be a possible deterrent to total war, yet I would refuse to take part in any lesser wars’.⁵⁰ He was not attracted to the public displays of opposition that his friend Gabriel Newfield made and it is not clear whether his claims to conscientious objection were upheld or whether he avoided the call-up in some other way.

David Hockney went before a tribunal in Leeds in September 1957. His objections to service had nothing to do with religion and sprang mainly from distaste for colonial wars. He remembered that the panel asked ‘no really wise … and no really stupid question’. Hockney’s case was accepted – perhaps because the panel sensed the iron will that lay under his diffident manner or perhaps because national service was running down. He worked in a hospital and finished his time on a general medical ward, where he acquired an intimate acquaintance with death that few serving soldiers would have had.⁵¹

The machinery of conscientious objection worked best for those who were articulate and able to express some philosophical position with regard to military service, those who were, as one objector put it, ‘the verbally adroit’;⁵² though the man who told the chairman of the tribunal that his question was ‘both ungrammatical and incorrect’ did not advance his cause.⁵³

It was sometimes taken for granted that conscientious objectors would be educated men: one guide for Christian pacifists described the career of ‘Tony’ who ‘hopes one day to be a classics master in a grammar school’ but was, for the time being, a ‘bricklayer helping to relieve the housing shortage’.⁵⁴ The Friends’ Peace Committee Conscription Group told an official committee on tribunals in February 1956 that they should make more allowance ‘for the unintellectual boy’.⁵⁵ A Sunday School teacher, trying to make a case on behalf of a working-class boy who belonged to the Open Brethren, wrote: ‘I know that he is not blessed with great fluency of speech and that although his understanding of things is firmly implanted in his own mind and heart, he has great difficulty in transmitting his mind coherently and lucidly to others.’⁵⁶

Quakers had advantages in dealing with the tribunals. They were a recognized and well-established body with a tradition of objection that extended back into both wars. They had lawyers, publications and an organization. Their argument with the military authorities was conducted in a language that both sides understood. The Quakers went out of their way to help other objectors, and educated men, who found it easy to adapt to the culture of Quakerism, were particularly likely to take advantage of this help. Quaker boarding schools were important in creating leaders who could interact with their counterparts in the Anglican middle class. In some ways, the tribunals functioned like the War Office Selection Boards for potential officers and both favoured school-prefect types who could stand up straight and give clear answers in an unwavering voice. Thomas Green (headmaster of Bootham’s, the Quaker school, from 1944 to 1961) told his charges who were due to appear before tribunals that ‘one only had to mention Ackworth [another Quaker school], Bootham and Quakers and you would be all right’. Roger Bush remembered: ‘Although I could not claim to be a convinced Quaker, the tribunal clearly took the view that ten years at Quaker schools had rendered me unfit for anything other than the alternative service option.’⁵⁷

David Morrish was a good example of the kind of man who was well received by tribunals. He grew up in Plymouth during the 1930s with conventional patriotic opinions. In his late teens, however, he began to question both his Anglican background and his military patriotism. He went to Exeter University partly because it would give him time to sort his ideas out before conscription. He acquired a Quaker girlfriend and began to attend meetings of the Friends. He took a teaching course and then managed to fund his way through two years of a postgraduate degree before taking a fellowship in Wisconsin. When he came back in 1956, at the age of twenty-four, he finally decided that he should face the tribunal as an objector. He recognized that he had a relatively easy time – partly because he was supported by the Quakers, partly because he was willing to serve in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit and partly because national service was coming to an end anyway. The tribunal recognized that he could probably have claimed further exemption as a teacher and that he should be given credit for moral courage.⁵⁸

As with many aspects of national service, class mattered when it came to being recognized as a conscientious objector, and some men associated with the Friends came, in a Quakerish way, to worry about the privileges that they enjoyed: ‘It was said that Quakers presenting themselves to the board were always nodded through but that if one was a Jehovah’s Witness, who apparently hold similar views about killing people, it was more difficult to get exemption. I think this must have been a “Class Thing”.’⁵⁹

Jehovah’s Witnesses certainly had a more awkward time in front of tribunals than Quakers. Francis Mackay, a part-time labourer who sold Bibles and editions of The Watchtower, and was therefore regarded by his own Church, but not by the state, as a minister of religion, told a tribunal that he was not a pacifist because he would fight if ordered by God to do so. He could not imagine the circumstances under which God would give such an order but ‘God will take everything into his own hands.’ Mackay eventually escaped prison or conscription by taking a job as a coal miner.⁶⁰ Other members of his Church did not escape at all. In 1957, when the end of national service was in view, a magistrate complained about his continuing obligation to send Jehovah’s Witnesses to prison.⁶¹

Bryan Reed, a Quaker and a member of the Central Board for Conscientious Objectors, sought to put apocalyptic theology into terms that lawyers might understand: ‘As you are no doubt aware, the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe in the coming of a theocratic government, but have, in the meantime, no interest in changing one form of temporal government for another.’⁶² The chairman of the London local tribunal said that he and his colleagues had difficulty in granting applications of Jehovah’s Witnesses because ‘they often seemed unaware that the belief of their own Church was that Jehovah had told his chosen people that they might fight for Palestine with carnal weapons’.⁶³ In 1956, thirty-four out of thirty-nine men prosecuted under the National Service Act were Jehovah’s Witnesses.⁶⁴

Apart from those with conscientious objections to national service, certain groups were excused from conscription – technically, their call-up was deferred until they reached an age at which they were no longer liable. The list of ‘reserved occupations’ was, however, smaller than it had been in the Second World War and it was progressively reduced as the immediate needs of post-war reconstruction were met. Agricultural workers were more or less automatically deferred until November 1951; after this date they could apply for deferment and quite large numbers were granted it. Coal miners, fishermen and merchant seamen were allowed to defer – the last were expected to join the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

After the war in Europe ended, men were no longer compelled to work in mines but until February 1947 they could still volunteer for mining as an alternative to military service.⁶⁵ After this date, a man could escape from military service by becoming a miner but he would be called up into the forces if he left the industry before he was twenty-six. A few men took jobs as miners because it provided them with a means of escaping military service. Ken Coates worked in the pits of Derbyshire and Nottingham from 1948 to 1956 because he did not want to join an army that was fighting an imperialist war in Malaya.⁶⁶ However, movement was more marked in the opposite direction. As soon as the war ended, many men left the pits and often regarded even long engagements in the regular army as preferable to mining. In 1951, only 1 per cent of national service soldiers had been ‘mining workers’ but 16 per cent of army volunteers belonged to this category.⁶⁷

In 1951, the government tried to persuade men who had been miners and were now in the forces to return to the pits. It expected to recruit around 1,000 miners per year at national service medicals.⁶⁸ Men were also released from the forces if they agreed to return to mining. Not many seem to have taken the offer. At the end of 1951, only three ex-miners in the air force had applied to return to their former profession.⁶⁹ Even men serving on the front line in Korea – where ex-miners were valued for their toughness and digging skills – were rarely tempted to go back.

Fathers who worked underground were often keen for their sons to escape from mining and regarded military service as a small price to pay in return for this. David Wilson was the son of a miner from the north east. His father urged him not to go down the pit and he took an engineering apprenticeship before being called up.⁷⁰ Ernest Dobson came from a similar background. His father ‘didn’t want us to go to pit’. However, Dobson’s attempt to get a job as a bricklayer failed and for a time he did work in a mine. After a couple of years he resigned: ‘the best thing I ever did … never felt safe … me dad being in all the falls and that’. He worked in a cosmetics factory for nine months before his call-up.⁷¹

A variety of more esoteric requests were made for exemption from, or deferment of, national service. A group of musicians, notable among whom was Dame Myra Hess, pointed out the damage that could be done to a musician’s career by call-up.⁷² Winston Churchill intervened to defend the interests of apprentice jockeys.⁷³ Theological students presented another kind of problem. Men in holy orders were usually exempt from national service but men preparing for ordination were not. The Church of England felt that national service would be an advantage for its clergy and actively discouraged them from seeking to avoid it. Nonconformist churches objected to the imposition of military, or at least combatant, service on theological students. The Catholic Church objected to the calling up of theological students on the practical grounds that it would disrupt their long training programme. The government was keen to avoid too much discussion of the matter and seems to have operated a discreet policy that allowed students to defer until the moment of their ordination and then secure exemption.⁷⁴

Notions as to what constituted work of national importance that might justify deferment of military service changed in the period from 1945 to the late 1950s. During the Second World War, large groups of men had been kept out of the forces because they were doing civilian work that was vital to the war effort. The National Service Act of 1948 aimed to do away with such large-scale exemption. Industrial workers were not exempted and neither at first were men with particular scientific skills. Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s scientific adviser, urged the government not to make potential science students waste their time on the parade ground,⁷⁵ and some research scientists escaped national service – usually being deferred to the point at which their call-up became impractical. In theory, the maximum age of call-up was raised to thirty-five in the mid 1950s to catch men who had deferred for educational reasons or studied abroad. In practice, the authorities were not very assiduous in pursuit of evaders by this stage.⁷⁶ Increasing numbers of deferments were granted for research scientists, for science teachers and eventually for science graduates working in private industry. Deferments were also sometimes granted to skilled workers involved in technological projects seen as being of particular national importance. The service departments sometimes protested about these concessions – though the Admiralty also asked for deferment to be granted to civilian workers on its own projects. In practice, the general improvement in education meant that the forces still received a larger absolute number of science graduates until 1957.⁷⁷

After registration, men were called for a preliminary examination conducted under the aegis of the Ministry of Labour. The length of time between registration and examination varied, partly because the authorities sometimes used delays as a means to slow down the rate of intake of men to the forces. This tactic was employed in the late 1940s,⁷⁸ and again ten years later as national service moved towards its end.⁷⁹ In some cases, men had waited for over a year after registration without hearing anything further.⁸⁰

Potential conscripts were called to gloomy municipal buildings – exuding ‘the faintly salty smell of damp concrete and stale cigarettes’ – to be inspected. By 1955 there were ninety-five boards in sixty-one centres across the country, which had, by this stage, examined 2 million men and passed 1.5 million fit for service.⁸¹ Officials, and conscripts themselves, talked of ‘medical boards’ – though, in fact, the inspections were concerned with more than physical health and no one appeared before a ‘board’ in a formal way. Men were examined by a doctor and, usually, took a written test. They also talked to a ‘military interviewing officer’, most of whom were retired officers and rarely men of much charm.⁸²

From 1948 onwards, men were classified according to the PULHEEMS test – the acronym stood for physical capacity, upper limb function, locomotion, hearing, eyesight (with one rating for each eye), mental capacity (intelligence) and stability (emotional and mental). Functions were graded on a scale of 1 to 8 – though, in fact, the full range of grades was only used for eyesight – so that, for example, the only possible grades for physical capacity were 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8. The only possible grades for mental capacity and stability were 2, 3 and 8. With regard to everything except eyesight, it was suggested that qualities 1 and 2 should imply fitness for ‘full combatant service in any part of the world’; 3 implied ‘restricted service in any part of the world’; 4 and 5 meant ‘full combatant service in temperate climates’; 6 meant ‘restricted service in temperate climates’; 7 meant ‘service in the United Kingdom’ and 8 meant ‘permanently unfit for service’. Each man was then given an overall grade of between I and IV. Men in grade IV were hardly ever used, except for doctors and dentists, who could perform physically undemanding tasks as medical officers.

Assessment of intelligence and mental stability depended on written tests. Men were divided into M.2, who were considered ‘able readily to assimilate ordinary forms of instruction and to act on their own initiative’; M.3, ‘Men of a lower standard but who can be expected to assimilate simple instruction and to discharge their duties without close supervision’; and M.8, men who would require close supervision or be unfit for service. Those who failed to obtain the minimum score were interviewed and, unless there was strong evidence to the contrary, were to be regarded as of ‘lower intelligence’. Evidence of intelligence beyond the test might be revealed by ‘school record, literacy, the nature of employment since leaving school and wages earned’. In 1950, on one of the occasions when the army thought, wrongly, that it would be able to abolish the Pioneer Corps and thus reduce the admission of ‘dull’ soldiers, the Ministry of Labour introduced a new test of intelligence (the R 50). Men who performed badly on the tests were interviewed and divided into three categories: ‘satisfactory’, ‘borderline dull’ and ‘definitely dull’. From November 1950 to April 1951, 71,458 men were tested; 13,786 of these scored less than 25 and were interviewed. Examination of a sample of those who were interviewed showed that 40.1 per cent were put in the first category, 58.5 per cent in the second and 1.4 per cent in the third.⁸³ The tests were presented to recruits ‘in a precisely standard way, known as the patter’.⁸⁴ The authorities understood, however, that the examination was not entirely scientific. It was hard for interviewers to distinguish ‘intellectual defect’ from ‘personality defect’ or apathy.⁸⁵ Medical boards tended to interpret ‘sub-normal’ as ‘bordering on mentally defective’.⁸⁶

Final decisions about men’s suitability to serve were made by the medical boards. From 1950 until 1953, tests and interviews were administered by servicemen.⁸⁷ Indeed, some of the testers who appraised potential recruits were themselves conscripts who became ‘sergeant testers’. Not surprisingly, the quasi-civilian life of attachment to the Ministry of Labour was regarded as an attractive posting.⁸⁸ Such positions were reserved for men who had deferred their own call-up and who were, therefore, older than most of the men they would test.⁸⁹

The Wanstead Office employed three sergeants and tested about 4,000 recruits in eight months. One of them recalled that some of those they interviewed were ‘pathetic’. Asked what he read, one of them replied: ‘Bread, carrots, potatoes – same as everyone else’; another, apparently in the grip of ‘serious physical and neurological disorders’, told his interviewer that he had been born on ‘April Fool’s Day’.⁹⁰ The testers believed that some men who failed tests suffered from the educational disruption of the war and that others had not had regular schooling because they were the sons of ‘bargees and showmen’.⁹¹

Emotional stability was the most obviously subjective judgement that medical boards were required to make. Interviewers examined men’s records at school and work. They looked for evidence of: ‘Personality disturbance shown by excessive resentment, suspicion, multiple grievances or false ideas or any difficulties at home, school or work’ as well as for physical symptoms – including stammers, bed-wetting or ‘silly inappropriate laughter’. They were also to look for evidence of mental illness in the family, broken homes and records of commitment to mental hospitals or convictions for criminal offences.⁹²

Sometimes information about young men was circulated without much regard to their privacy. At a meeting to inform the public about national service, two parents told visiting officials that their sons suffered from conditions (a damaged foot in one case and ‘underdevelopment’ in the other) that they would not wish to disclose at their medical.⁹³ In both cases, the information was passed to the board. After a medical in 1952, the authorities called in Roger Hall’s father, a butcher, to complain about the fact that Roger was a vegetarian.⁹⁴

There were many complaints that Ministry of Labour medical boards passed an excessive number of men as fit.⁹⁵ Occasionally recruits with undiagnosed conditions died during their service.⁹⁶ More commonly, they were thrown out during later medical inspections, particularly at the beginning of basic training, or because they proved unable to stand the pace of training – though, occasionally, it was also alleged that training sergeants had ignored Ministry of Labour medical classifications and subjected men to demands that were beyond their capacities.⁹⁷ Of 1,726 men examined when they first arrived in one command in the first quarter of 1956, forty-two were immediately discharged because of poor eyesight.⁹⁸ Terence Morris was discharged from the Ordnance Corps in 1953. He was partially sighted, had attended a school for the blind and carried a blind person’s free transport pass: the medical board had placed him in grade II.⁹⁹ Dick Langstaff was passed even though he told the doctor that he could not see the test chart let alone read any of the letters on it – he was discharged after twenty-three days.¹⁰⁰ Around 1 per cent of men who passed Ministry of Labour medical boards in 1952 proved unfit to serve within their first few weeks in the forces,¹⁰¹ some after a single day of service. A War Office report of 1956 suggested that medical boards were so concerned with preventing the ‘shrimshanker getting away with it’ that they let unfit men through.¹⁰²

Perhaps doctors on the Ministry of Labour medical boards were keen to give young men the benefits of service or to punish those whom they regarded as reluctant to serve.¹⁰³ There is not, however, much evidence that unfit men were passed as a matter of policy. Ministry of Labour statistics show three things. First, that the proportion who failed the medical varied from year to year. Second, that the overall trend was up and failure rates became very high in the last three years of national service. Third, that failure rates for men who deferred their service, and therefore underwent their medicals some years after registration, were sometimes higher than failure rates for men who underwent their medicals soon after their eighteenth birthday. For example, among men born in 1929 who underwent their medicals by the end of 1948, the failure rate was 13.5 per cent; in 1950, the failure rate for men born in 1929 was 27.4 per cent – meaning that deferred men were failing in larger numbers than those who had been inspected when they were eighteen. At first glance, this is surprising. One would expect – and officials did expect¹⁰⁴ – that men who had deferred to complete their education or apprenticeships would be fitter than those who entered the forces at the age of eighteen. Increasing failure rates may have owed a little to better techniques of investigation, such as the systematic use of X-rays.¹⁰⁵ More importantly, though, the authorities seem deliberately to have used medical requirements to slow intake during the 1950s when they had less need of recruits.

Sometimes, the forces discussed controlling the national service intake through medical examination in explicit ways. During the Korean War, they took men from categories that would previously have been rejected¹⁰⁶ and, as demand for recruits dropped in the late 1950s, they rejected whole categories of men. Sometimes the variation was achieved in more discreet ways, by changing the numbers placed in each category rather than varying the categories that were accepted. Thus, the proportion of men placed in grade III increased from 5.4 per cent in 1948 to 16.4 per cent in early 1960.¹⁰⁷

Testing national servicemen revealed some patterns. The ‘harvest’ was better in the second half of each year than in the first. The autumn entry contained a disproportionate number of men who had deferred their service to complete their education or to finish apprenticeships. Of those entering the armed forces in September 1951, 26.4 per cent had completed an apprenticeship before they joined up,¹⁰⁸ while the overall proportion of men who came to the forces after having completed apprenticeships seems to have been rather less than 15 per cent in that year. The RAF talked of an ‘academic flush’ at the end of the school summer term¹⁰⁹ and reckoned that the average IQ of men admitted from August to November was 104, while that of men admitted from February to June was 96. One report suggested: ‘the actual numbers available for the more highly skilled trades are almost double as many in a good week in November as in a poor week in March’.¹¹⁰

Health also varied by region. Army medical statisticians noted, for example, that a conscript from Glasgow was almost three times as likely to have respiratory disease as one from East Anglia.¹¹¹ One study of Glaswegians born in 1932 – who had been ‘cradled, therefore, in the lean years of the early ’thirties, years when the shadow of unemployment lay heavily over Clydeside, and nurtured largely during the war of 1939–45, years of storm and disorganization’ – showed that a third of them, compared to just less than a fifth of the national population, had been rejected for service.¹¹²

The Royal Air Force aimed to reject about 20 per cent of men who put it down as their first choice but it fixed the level at 25 per cent for certain counties. It had no fixed target for Kent – presumably because this was an area where the RAF believed young men to be healthy and well educated. The army studied scores for general intelligence, education level, mechanical ability and physical ability. Men with the highest educational scores made up 10.1 per cent of the total entry but 13.7 per cent of those from the Home Counties and 4.4 per cent of those from Glasgow and south west Scotland. Those from the suburbs did better than those from the country and small towns who, in turn, did better than those from the middle of large towns.¹¹³

Some men tried, with varying degrees of determination, to fail their medical and recounted colourful stories of how they had smoked a cigarette with crushed aspirin, gorged themselves on butterscotch or affected a chronic limp. Many thought that they could fail the medical if they were ‘diagnosed’ as homosexual. Michael Parkinson considered imitating a friend who had gone to the medical wearing his sister’s underwear and his mother’s perfume.¹¹⁴ The novelist Paul Bailey said to the examining doctor, ‘I think I may be a homosexual.’ He was told, ‘we have failed you anyway’ and sent to see a specialist.’¹¹⁵ In fact, Ministry of Labour instructions gave no specific guidance on what to do with homosexuals – though it may be that examining doctors would simply have regarded this as one form of ‘instability’. The air force specifically ruled out homosexuality as a reason for rejection, even when a national service recruit ‘presented to the Recruiting Officer a doctor’s certificate describing his homosexual tendencies with a view to being excused Service’. Regulars would be dismissed for homosexuality but ‘there is no authority for exemption from National Service on similar grounds’.¹¹⁶

Most youths, even if they were unenthusiastic about military service, did not try to fail the medical. Few eighteen-year-olds wanted to be told that they were unfit, and failing the medical occasionally seems to have undermined their confidence so badly that it disrupted their civilian careers. It was presumably disheartening for a man to hear (in this case fourteen years after the examination) that he was prone ‘to attacks of depression often as a reaction to home difficulties’ and was also liable to ‘psychosomatic complaints’.¹¹⁷ Results of medicals were communicated to the Post Office, which wanted to know about the health of its employees, and the Australian immigration authorities until the mid 1950s.¹¹⁸ Even in the late 1960s, men seem to have felt that having failed their medical disadvantaged them with regard to life assurance policies, employment or permission to emigrate to South Africa.¹¹⁹

At their preliminary interview, men were invited to say which of the services they wished to join. Their chances of getting what they wanted were, in fact, uneven. The army’s need for conscripts was greater than that of the other services and most men would go into the army regardless of their preference. In terms of first preference, the navy was bound to be the most oversubscribed of the services simply because it took so few men. The result was that, for much of the period of national service, only those with a family link to the navy or men who had already served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve stood much chance of becoming sailors.

The air force took more national servicemen but it was still oversubscribed. In May 1951, the number of men registered for national service opting for the RAF was slightly greater than the number opting for the army. When the second preferences of those who had made the navy their first choice (a little less than 10 per cent of the total) were taken into account, almost half of them wanted to join the air force, but it would take only 38 per cent of them.¹²⁰ The attraction of the air force sprang in part from the fact that its discipline was known to be less harsh than the army’s. Opportunities for technicians were greater in the air force than in the army and consequently it attracted more educated men. Conscripts in the air force were, in general, more educated than those in the army and it took very few men from the lowest educational categories. In the early 1950s almost half of air force conscripts (compared to around a third of those in the army) had some formal qualifications and 42 per cent of airmen (against 16 per cent of soldiers) had stayed at school beyond the minimum leaving age. A little over 40 per cent of airmen (against 12 per cent of soldiers) were educated at grammar school.¹²¹ However, the air force attracted comparatively few men from the highest social categories. The wealthy 24-year-old baronet Sir Henry Shiffner, who served as a clerk in the aptitude testing office at Cardington and occasionally gave his friends lifts across the vast base in his Lagonda, was a rare exception.¹²² Public school boys who expected to obtain commissions were unlikely to join the air force, unless they were admitted as trainee pilots. The air force was the natural home of grammar school boys – especially those from the less prestigious schools and those who had left school after the minimum leaving age but before they were eighteen. By the late 1950s, after an increase in the educational level of the overall population, just over half of national service airmen had stayed at school beyond the minimum leaving age of fifteen; just under a quarter of the army sample had done so.¹²³ The pull of the air force for such men became a circular process – the more of them joined up, the more attractive the air force became to others like them.

The hierarchy of the services was obvious during the official discussions about the distribution of the national service pool. The RAF usually creamed off the best men: when the services, faced with the Korean War, admitted an extra 10,000 men from medical categories that would previously have been rejected, the RAF took only 1,000 – the rest went to the army.¹²⁴ There were acrimonious exchanges between officials – as the Ministry of Labour complained about the ‘unjustifiable waste of everyone’s time’ involved in having men interviewed and then rejected by the RAF, and the air force itself complained about ‘constant nagging’ and the fear ‘that the RAF is getting away with something’.¹²⁵

The same hierarchy was impressed on conscripts themselves at the Ministry of Labour centres. After they had undergone their medical examinations, men who had opted for the RAF were interviewed by an air force representative and passed to the army only if they were rejected. Sometimes this meant that the army inspections of those who had put it down as second choice could not be completed by the end of the day.¹²⁶

Recruits were asked if there was a unit they wished to join or a trade they wished to pursue in the forces. Men going into the army after 1948 were recruited into a particular corps and regiment. The allocation was not final. Many corps and regiments took some men after they had completed basic training in other units.

How much choice men had about what happened to them once they were in the forces depended partly on what, and who, they knew. A small number of privileged men had already met the commanding officers of the regiments in which they were to serve. John Robinson was part of the coterie of young men built up around the South Nottinghamshire Hussars (an artillery regiment of the Territorial Army) by Colonel Peter Birkin. On Birkin’s instructions, he wrote on his form that he wished to join the Royal Artillery, adding, ‘I am a serving member of the South Notts Hussars.’¹²⁷

Most national servicemen, however, had relatively little choice – partly because regular recruits were given preference when it came to choosing units. Some men wanted to serve in the infantry – either because of some local or family tradition or because they wanted to see ‘real soldiering’. Since the infantry was notoriously hungry for men, these wishes were, at least in the short term, usually gratified, even if they had skills that would have been of obvious use in a more technical unit.¹²⁸ Even within the infantry there were degrees of desirability. The Foot Guards, which were more prestigious than infantry regiments of the line, contained a large proportion of regulars.

Two kinds of units attracted a disproportionate number of national servicemen. On the one hand were corps (such as Education and Pay) that took comparatively small absolute numbers of men and required that some of their recruits had formal qualifications. On the other, were those corps (largely concerned with unskilled labour) that rarely required any educational qualifications but which were seen as unattractive and consequently rarely chosen by any soldier who had any say in the matter.

National Service (NS) Entrants to Army Basic Training Units by Corps/Arm 1954*

The army was notorious for its inability to allocate men to anything that matched their position in civilian life or their own wishes. One general reckoned that 52,000 craftsmen entered the army in 1952 and that only 6,400 were in a job that matched their skills.¹²⁹ Part of the problem sprang from the fact that there were simply not enough skilled jobs in the army and that most soldiers were allocated to ‘teeth arms’ – infantry, artillery and tank regiments – which had little use for skills acquired in, or useful to, civilian life.

Sometimes, the allocation of men to military roles was laughably inappropriate. Fred Dibnah, the steeplejack, had strong nerves, a good head for heights and some experience of handling explosives. He said that he did not care what he did as long as he could be out of doors. He was put in the Catering Corps.¹³⁰ Allocation to the Catering Corps was frequently a source of dissatisfaction – perhaps because the army was cavalier about how it fed its soldiers or because the Catering Corps was considered (along with the Ordnance Corps and the Pioneer Corps) as an appropriate place in which to dump men who were in one way or another too ‘difficult’ for posting to more prestigious units. In 1954, almost a fifth of all national servicemen went into these three corps, which took very few regulars.^* Kenneth Hill was called up in 1947. He wanted to be a driver in the Service Corps or, failing that, a store man in the same corps. His third choice was the Catering Corps, to which he was assigned. He and several other men deliberately failed their catering course in the hope of escaping their fate, but they were told that they would stay until they passed.¹³¹

Charlie Reading had undergone a five-year apprenticeship in the building trade but was assured that there was no chance of a posting to the Royal Engineers unless he signed on for three years. He refused and was sent to the Catering Corps, where he found himself trained alongside three former bricklayers.¹³² An officer at a court martial defending a soldier who had been in trouble for a succession of offences finishing with participation in a riot at a military prison explained that his client had been called up to the Catering Corps:

At this stage he was not aware of what was expected of him, but to his dismay realized that he was to be trained as a cook. This was the direct opposite to what he expected as his trade in civilian life was that of a sawmill apprentice. After a fortnight’s training at Aldershot he was posted to Woolwich to be trained as a cook. He promptly complained to a certain army officer of the Army Catering Corps that he had no interest whatsoever in cooking and that he was desirous of a transfer. He was told in as many words not to talk silly and carry on with his work.¹³³

John Noble, by contrast, was an apprentice chef who wanted to join the Catering Corps but was told that there were no vacancies. He was offered the chance of being a field cook in the Medical Corps, which in retrospect he regretted not having taken, but:

they seemed to be manoeuvring me towards the county regiments and they were saying that with the Norfolks and the Suffolks, both being in combat, one in Korea and one in Malaya, very short of personnel they felt that there was where the vacancies lay and that was probably where I would go.¹³⁴

The odd allocation of men to positions in the armed forces owed something to military incompetence. There was also an element of coercion. The services were keen to make men sign on as regulars and often used the prospect of getting a particular posting as an inducement for men to undertake regular engagements. The educated were unlikely to yield to pressure – they understood the rules and many knew that they would soon be assigned to clerical duties. Working-class men – often desperate for positions that allowed them to use their skill and to avoid the infantry – were more vulnerable. Many of them were misled. Leslie Ives, who joined the infantry in 1949, wrote forty years later: ‘I believe the Navy and the RAF got the cream – and even later am I right in thinking you had to sign on for 3 years to get in either of these?’¹³⁵

Most national servicemen still lived at home and leaving for their training units meant saying goodbye to their families, often for the first time. Many remembered the awkward exchanges among people who were unused to displays of emotion. Ken Lynham kissed his mother for the first time when he left to join the army at the age of twenty-one.¹³⁶ Jack Spall was the son of a bus conductor. He recalled the morning in 1948 when he left to join the RAF: ‘I see it clearly. It was sort of in the kitchen before I went off, and he [Spall’s father] said “Um, um, well look, um, I’ve only got one thing to say, um, just be careful of the girls who hang around camp.” ’¹³⁷

A. E. Fisher also joined the RAF and described the process thus:

On the morning of my departure, father and I had a cup of tea together in the kitchen – he was getting ready to go to work. We left the house together and walked to Westbourne Park Station. There we shook hands, because I was at that awkward stage of one’s life when one doesn’t hug one’s father. A final wave, and I caught the Underground to Euston. There were a lot of young men with brown paper parcels and tense expressions. We were among the early National Service men.¹³⁸