7

Basic Training

No, not worried, just miserable.

Motor fitter from London,
undergoing basic training in the RAF, late 1940s¹

National service, at least in the army, usually began on a Thursday – so that training units had time to get men settled in before the weekend – and it usually started with a train journey. Every conscript was sent a railway warrant and instructions about the base to which he was to report. The journey itself could be exciting. To many eighteen-year-olds, trains were still glamorous and exotic. Most youths had not travelled much and some had never been more than a few miles from their home. A few had never been on a train and had no idea how to buy a ticket.² John Waller had never left West Auckland before he was called up. He asked the station master how he would know when his train arrived at the regimental depot of the Durham Light Infantry and was told, correctly as it turned out: ‘there will be a big bastard there shouting’.³

Men were collected at stations and taken to their depots. The process did not always run smoothly. Among the young men disgorged from a three-ton truck at the depot of the Buffs in 1958, one was even more disgruntled than the others. It turned out that he was a civilian who had been standing on Canterbury station when the NCOs had swept him up with the recruits.⁴

Once at their barracks, men queued for their kit, packed their civilian clothes to be sent home, and collected a variety of objects with perplexing names: ‘eating irons’ meant a knife, fork and spoon; ‘housewives’ meant sewing kits to maintain their uniform. Recruits often remembered the moment when they realized that their civilian life was over. For some, it came when the lorry drove into the barracks: ‘The wooden gates slammed and we had entered, for eight weeks, a prison.’⁵ For John Barkshire, it was when he sent his civilian clothes home: ‘And so your link with the human race outside disappeared in a brown paper parcel.’⁶

The exact timing of the transition from civilian to serviceman was often remembered for years afterwards. One soldier wrote a memoir devoted to the 3 February 1949. This was the day on which he reported to Oudenarde barracks in Aldershot as a trainee driver in the Royal Army Service Corps. Between two in the afternoon and half past nine in the evening, 1,250 recruits had been churned through the army’s mill, and several had already gone absent without leave.⁷

The real terror for many recruits came with the first night of national service. The requirement that lights should be turned out at a certain hour rubbed in the loss of adult dignity and freedom. Undressing in front of other men was often a painful experience. Lights-out removed whatever fragile protection against bullies might have been provided by the oversight of non-commissioned officers.

Some men were used to sleeping away from home. Many of those from the upper-middle class had been at boarding school since they were seven. The urban working classes had often been evacuated during the war. Some had spent periods in various forms of institutional care. Some came from families that were so poor that the very notion of privacy would have been meaningless – one recruit said that the first night of basic training was the first time, apart from during a long stay in hospital, he had had a bed to himself.⁸ There were, however, some conscripts who had never slept a single night outside their own bedroom. Many recalled that their dominant memory of the first night of national service was that of listening to one of their comrades crying himself to sleep.

Going to bed raised awkward questions about how far men should observe the rituals associated with home life. Should they brush their teeth? Should they put on the pyjamas that had been carefully packed by their mothers or should they jump into bed in their underwear, which seemed, at least until the forces began to issue pyjamas in the 1950s, to be what most recruits did?

Christians steeled themselves to say their prayers on the first night. Well-meaning clergymen had sometimes told them that the armed forces was a lions’ den, in which their faith would be tested. Bruce Kent, later to become a Catholic priest, accomplished his act of ‘heroic witness’ and was disconcerted to find that an Anglican boy in the same hut was also saying his prayers.⁹ Some of those who said their prayers were subjected to – usually gentle – mockery.¹⁰ Often they were treated with courtesy.¹¹ John Hodgson, on his way to ordination, read the Bible during his basic training with the Durham Light Infantry. His comrades expressed bewilderment at first, then began to listen to him: ‘Bereft of their home background anything that smacked of home normality was appealing.’¹²

Basic training was relatively short. Sailors spent just two weeks learning to drill on shore before being posted. Most soldiers received six, eight or ten weeks, as did airmen. Those who were sent to theatres of real fighting were usually given extra training. Some were also given specialized training as, for example, vehicle mechanics, which might last for several months. Memories about how long basic training lasted were often vague – partly, perhaps, because recruits were confused and shocked when they underwent it. One thought, forty years after the event, that his basic training had probably lasted six weeks but ‘it seemed like six months’.¹³

Conscripts, especially during the early years of national service, were often horrified by the conditions of their camps. Money was short in the aftermath of the Second World War and the armed forces had to mend and make do. Many men believed that their barracks dated back to the Great War, the Boer War or Crimea. Some were put in Nissen huts or the ‘Spiders’ that were built out from a central point. Heating came from a single stove. There were sometimes no mirrors, which presented problems for men who were expected to be smart on parade. Food – never notable for its quality in any part of the British armed forces – was revolting.

Bathrooms were sordid beyond belief: ‘20 basins for 120 people, 1 plug between them – the rest stuffed with bog paper.’¹⁴ There was sometimes no hot water. At Catterick, one recruit, an old boy of Stoneyhurst, became so desperate that he went to a Catholic church and asked the priest for a bath; the favour was granted with, one assumes, much urbane Jesuit humour about the ‘monastic’ quality of army training.¹⁵

The ‘Shinwell winter’ of 1946–7 (when Emanuel Shinwell as Minister of Fuel and Power was blamed for having failed to manage coal supplies properly during bitterly cold weather) was a particularly bad time to go through basic training. One soldier believed that army camps could only be kept open if one latrine remained unfrozen and that his own camp, just, met this condition.¹⁶ William Rees-Mogg wrote of his time in the air force: ‘For most of those who lived through it, 1947 was one of the most unpleasant years of their lives.’ He and his comrades ‘burned anything we could lay our hands on, except the snooker table, in an effort to keep the hut warm; we failed’.¹⁷

Conditions for national servicemen got better in the 1950s. This was partly because of greater prosperity and partly because the armed forces made a conscious effort to improve the lives of servicemen, especially as the end of conscription came into view and they knew that they would have to attract more regular recruits. By the early 1950s, men who had been brought up on the horror stories of their elders sometimes found that the barracks were less bad than they expected. One wrote home: ‘It might surprise you – it certainly did us – but we actually have two white sheets to sleep on.’¹⁸

The first days and weeks of national service involved a succession of unpleasant experiences. Sometimes men were victims of real violence; more frequently they suffered humiliating abuse. One recruit recalled that ‘verbal brutality felt physical’.¹⁹ Ill-fitting uniforms chaffed and heavy boots blistered feet. Most men felt that they did not get enough food – though, purely in terms of quantity, servicemen were usually better fed than civilians. No one got enough sleep. Many fell ill. Servicemen were injected against various diseases – a bored national service member of the Medical Corps might give 25,000 injections in the course of his service.²⁰ The injections often produced a short-term fever. In theory, recruits were given time to recover; however, this rule was frequently disregarded. In any case, reporting sick was complicated and unpleasant and carried the terrifying risk that a conscript might have to endure part of his training again.

Just as conditions for all conscripts improved during the 1950s, conditions for each individual conscript improved during his training. The first two weeks were the worst. Generally, it was during this period that recruits were not allowed out of barracks. The anticipation of their first forty-eight-hour leave became an obsession that made some men feel physically ill. In 1955, the mother of an eighteen-year-old airman wrote about her son’s basic training unit:

His letters bring out the atmosphere of stress and anxiety in which these young men live, heightened by threats of penalties, especially the loss of leave. ‘One man in our hut is so worried that he started getting up at three am to put on his equipment … Without exception everybody’s one idea is how soon they will get leave. In the lavatories the writings are not obscenities but “In two weeks and four days I get my forty-eight hours”.’²¹

After the first leave, things began to improve. Most recruits spent much of their first free weekend travelling to and from home. They found that it was relatively easy for men in uniform to get lifts, probably the first concrete advantage of military service that they discerned. A night in their own bed meant a return to a gentler world, and, reflected in the eyes of their civilian friends, they caught a first glimpse of their own military identity:

Mac commented on the changes in me – the short hair, the slim fitness, and the distracted air, as if I were slightly out of touch. I felt slightly out of touch – or different – although it was not a bad feeling. It was as though I was no longer just another lad, making his way, but that I was involved in something big, and adult, that people respected.²²

When men returned to barracks, discipline seemed easier. The most problematic recruits, the ones who suffered worst and who were most likely to draw the wrath of the NCOs on to the whole platoon, had often been discreetly removed: discharged from the forces or, in the army, transferred to the Pioneer Corps. Those that remained were knitted into a brutal solidarity. The NCOs began to seem more human. Michael Heseltine remembered that, eventually, his sergeant told a joke; it was not a funny joke but it illustrated a new climate in which it might be conceivable for both the sergeant and the men under his command to smile.²³ Also, the next batch of recruits arrived after two weeks and the sense that other people were even greener, and had even longer to serve, was reassuring.

The shouting and abuse seemed less terrifying once recruits had had time to draw breath and think things through. During his first ten days in the Royal Artillery, Anthony Hampshire asked himself: ‘why are they treating me like this? I am not a criminal.’ After this, the ‘light went on’ and he began to understand that training was a kind of ‘game’.²⁴ Another recruit, recently escaped from a monastic order, looked back on training thus: ‘In the army it can be fun to obey blindly as long as your life isn’t in danger, and there are fellows around who can share the contempt you feel for authority.’²⁵

Training got easier as recruits progressed through their courses. They got fitter and they mastered the rituals of military life. The hardships of their training had advantages. Men slept soundly at night and exercise gave them an appetite that made army food seem palatable: ‘braised heart and mash with thick gravy, bread and butter and jam and fruit and a pint mug of sweet tea which I filled up twice.’²⁶

Men often began to enjoy the very absurdities of their routines. To their own astonishment, they threw themselves into the competition to be ‘best platoon’. The passing-out parade and the evening of drunkenness that followed were memorable events. One soldier remembered how one of his inebriated comrades was hung by his heels from the barrack-room window – to prevent him from vomiting on the floor that the platoon had spent the day polishing.²⁷ If the first day of basic training was usually the most miserable day in a man’s military career, the last day of it was sometimes the happiest:²⁸ from then on, for many, national service was just a matter of counting days. The drama of basic training – the utter misery of its early stages and the perverse pleasures of its denouement – often overshadowed every other aspect of men’s service, even for those who were posted to theatres of real fighting.²⁹ Ian Martin, who served during a particularly violent stage of the Cyprus Emergency, wrote:

It was the most intense and exciting period of my life, and in many ways everything since then has been one long anti-climax. Anyone who can survive the first few weeks of basic training in the British Army (at least as it was then!) can survive anything: nothing in the rest of one’s military service or subsequently can ever be so bad again.³⁰

The world of national servicemen during the first stages of their basic training was a small one. Their lives revolved around their hut, their base and the immediate area. The Royal Fusiliers were trained in the Tower of London, which had its own sinister romance, but they were not allowed out for several weeks – so that they looked longingly at the bright lights of the city during their rare moments of leisure. Towns such as Aldershot or Catterick were, in effect, just large army camps, so it made little difference to men trained there when they were finally allowed out of their barracks.

The world of basic training was also small in terms of contact with the wider military world. After the abolition of the General Service Corps in 1948, soldiers were assigned to a particular regiment or corps. Between 1948 and 1951, infantry regiments were grouped together to operate training depots. After 1951, infantrymen were trained at the depot of their own regiment. Most infantry regiments had regional associations. Among 133 recruits being trained at the depot of the Royal West Kent Regiment in March 1953, all but thirteen lived in Kent – ten of them were the sons of men who had served in the regiment.³¹ For all the talk of regimental identity, men were quite often transferred in accordance with the army’s needs or, less frequently, their own desire. It was possible for a conscript to move through several different regiments during his first few months in the army.

Regimental identity was weaker in the artillery, signals, engineers and tanks. Soldiers here belonged to a ‘corps’ before they belonged to a regiment. In the first instance, men in a corps joined a ‘training regiment’, which existed solely for the purpose of processing recruits. Men in the navy and, especially, the RAF had wider horizons. They belonged to a service rather than a regiment or a corps.³² The Admiralty valued tradition but it also knew that no national serviceman was likely to join the navy unless he already had some attachment to those traditions – either because he came from a naval family or because he had joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. As for the air force, recruits did not need instruction in its history because much of it had taken place in the skies above their heads when they were children – though the daily life of most national service airmen was very different from that of a Spitfire pilot and some of them grew exasperated by endless references to ‘the few’.

During their first weeks, most national servicemen saw only a small part of the spectrum of military hierarchy. Senior officers usually spent their time at training depots shut in offices wrestling with the paperwork that was generated by the waves of recruits and this was a dispiriting experience. Martyn Highfield had served in the Far East during the war and reached the rank of major (at the age of twenty-five) in 1945. He returned to Britain, dropped a rank (he would claw his way back to major by the time he retired) and went to Oswestry, where the Royal Artillery maintained a whole brigade of training regiments: ‘we took 400 men in on a Thursday and discharged them thirteen days later on a Wednesday. There was not much to do in this initial two-week period except drill.’ Highfield spent eighteen months from 1948 presiding over what he called ‘this sausage machine process’.³³ Ken Perkins was another captain in an artillery training regiment in the late 1940s. Perhaps because he himself came from a humble background, he sympathized with the recruits, who resented ‘brutal and pointless discipline’, and recognized that ‘a good deal of what the national serviceman was required to do seemed open to question and he had the inclination to seek answers’.³⁴ Perkins sought every possible relief from boredom and eventually got back into action by volunteering as a spotter pilot.

Cecil Blacker was a more successful soldier than Highfield or Perkins and would rise to the rank of full general; he had had an exciting war in Europe and had won the Military Cross. After 1945, he turned away from serious soldiering for a time to devote himself to show jumping, but, in the late 1950s, he accepted command of a training regiment in Catterick. It was not a job that he enjoyed. He recognized that ‘a kind of love–hate relationship grew up between the military and civilian worlds’ and that his own role was largely confined to trying to ensure that ‘regimental friendliness got down to the teenagers shivering in the Nissen huts’.³⁵ Blacker was not very successful at percolating ‘regimental friendliness’ because even keen soldiers got the impression that the training regiments at Catterick regarded handling national servicemen as an ‘irksome chore’.³⁶

Soldiers were interviewed by a personnel selection officer who was meant to help direct them to an appropriate posting during their military service, but many of them remembered this as a formulaic encounter that gave little sense that they would have any real choice. Most men’s contact with officers was confined to the second lieutenant who was in nominal command of their platoon. However, these officers (often national servicemen themselves) touched the lives of private soldiers remarkably little: ‘At this time, I couldn’t begin to tell you the name of my platoon commander … [he was] … a bit of a nonentity to me’;³⁷ ‘I found officers to be uncaring, snobbish or real upper class twits, but harmless.’³⁸ Every now and then, there was an awkward moment when the civilian world seemed to cut across military hierarchy and, for example, a private realized that he was going up to the same Cambridge college as his officer.³⁹

Officers themselves did not always know what they were meant to be doing in training depots. Cyril Williams wrote, shortly after he was commissioned: ‘As we are in the Holdings section no one really wants us; we are given to trainee squads but we have very little to do and it is very boring indeed when we are with them.’⁴⁰ NCOs were the real powers in the lives of trainees. The NCOs at training depots were usually regulars. They had more experience than the junior officers who were nominally above them. Some national servicemen were told, more or less explicitly, to disregard anything that the officer said.⁴¹

Sergeants – with handle-bar moustaches and booming voices – loomed large in the mythology of national service, but even these men did not necessarily have much to do with the daily life of new recruits. Corporals and lance corporals gave most of the orders. These were not elevated ranks – many regulars were made junior NCOs comparatively quickly so that they could be used to train conscripts. Indeed training national servicemen came to be a consuming activity for much of the regular army, and not one that did much to improve the morale or quality of regular soldiers. John Chapple, who began military life as a conscript and finished it as a field marshal, said that virtually all regular NCOs were involved in training and that this ‘treadmill’ meant that no one ever got ‘above a certain standard’.⁴²

In basic training, corporals and lance corporals were small, malevolent gods. Leslie Ives, who trained with the York and Lancaster Regiment before joining the Green Howards, wrote: ‘out with your battalion a lance corporal’s whims are not taken too seriously but in basic training he is a very superior being’.⁴³ Recruits often came to hate their corporals. Sometimes they drew a distinction between sergeants – relatively remote figures who might even seem fatherly and who were often believed to have distinguished war records⁴⁴ – and their corporals – sadistic, peacetime soldiers who compensated for their numerous inadequacies by inflicting misery on recruits: ‘Our corporal is a b … but our sergeant is not too bad until he loses his temper.’⁴⁵

A former airman, presumably an officer, who had served at a ‘square bashing camp’ explained the problems of basic training thus:

Authority has thought fit to entrust the body and soul of the new recruit, during his first eight weeks of service, to the tender care of an unintelligent and often semi-literate corporal ‘drill instructor’. During this conditioning period the bewildered and frightened newcomer is thoroughly bullied, but fails to complain to Authority for fear of dire consequences. This fear is one of the first and most important things instilled into the impressionable mind: fear of the sergeant, fear of the officers, who are portrayed as demi gods, fear of the guard room, but, above all, fear of the corporal himself.⁴⁶

The air force itself recognized that ‘The NCOs in charge of men in initial training fail in many cases to carry out their duties in a satisfactory manner.’⁴⁷ The kind of behaviour that aroused fear among recruits emerged in court martials. A corporal in a training regiment of the Royal Signals at Catterick was tried in January 1955. He admitted that he had called a national service private a ‘horrible little man’ and that he had ‘straightened him up the best way I could by placing one hand on his back and lifting his chin with my other hand’. The recruit said that he had been throttled by the collar until he almost blacked out. The corporal was acquitted.⁴⁸ A trained soldier of the Coldstream Guards was court-martialled in March 1953. He had held a red-hot poker close to the bare stomach of a recruit: the recruit turned away and was burned. The trained soldier was convicted.⁴⁹

Army pay, even for regular sergeants, was low and NCOs sometimes exploited recruits in direct ways. Some soldiers were encouraged to buy presents for their sergeant. A sergeant sold recruits padlocks to protect their possessions against thieves and repossessed the locks after the ten weeks of training was over – he was eventually busted down to the ranks.⁵⁰ T. C. Sparrow’s NCO sold the recruits an electric iron and ‘needless to say’ sold it back again to the next intake.⁵¹ The Daily Express (not an anti-military newspaper) ran an advice column about ‘Your Son and the Call-up’. One parent asked why soldiers were made to pay to have their name and number engraved on metal identity disks. The newspaper replied: ‘The army pays. If the man is charged for this job, then there is a private “racket” going on.’⁵²

To survive basic training, recruits were first required to pay obsessive attention to the cleaning, polishing and correct arrangement of kit. Every article of kit – including blankets, razor, shaving brush and eating irons – had to be laid out for inspection in a particular way. Men were introduced to the button stick – designed to allow them to get the correct shine on the buttons of their uniform without getting polish on the uniform itself. Piers Plowright recalled ‘all those army smells’, of which polish was the most important. His sergeant’s hand was stained with a mixture of nicotine and Blanco.⁵³

Drill came next. Recruits learned to march, stand to attention and present arms. Drill mattered most to infantry regiments and especially to the Brigade of Guards, for whom it was a raison d’être. Men who went into the air force particularly resented drill and disliked the brief period in which they were treated as though they were infantry soldiers. The most telling complaint airmen made about their training was that it was too much like the army’s.

Conscripts were introduced to weapons. Almost every recruit learned to fire a Lee Enfield .303 Number 4 Rifle, which had been used in the British army since 1941, and which was itself a modification of a rifle that had been used since 1895. They also learned something about the Bren gun, an effective light machine gun, and the Sten gun, a sub-machine gun that was mainly dangerous to those who used it. Many national service memoirs repeat the story of the recruit whose Sten gun stuck so that it continued firing as he turned, spraying bullets all around, to ask his instructor what to do.

Boots became the subject of a surreal drama. The required sheen could often be achieved only by ‘burning’ them, which would also ensure that they ceased to be waterproof and were thus useless for serious military purposes. Burning boots was forbidden, though every sergeant in the British army must have known that it was done. Peter Burke – looking back on his own training at Catterick through the prism of his career as a cultural historian – wondered whether boot burning was not a form of initiation into the differences between formal and informal rules in the army. It taught men that they might be required to do things that were in theory forbidden. Burke wondered whether such training might have affected, say, attitudes to the interrogation of prisoners.

The most sinister aspect of basic training involved the bayonet. Soldiers were taught:

If your second opponent is out of range, punch forward ‘on guard’, advance on him, and thrust again. If he is so close that you have no room to come ‘on guard’, withdraw from the first thrust, point your bayonet at him, make another thrust, and advance. If there are more enemy, kill them in the same way.⁵⁴

National servicemen charged at straw dummies with fixed bayonets. Bayonet training became a staple of writing about national service: ‘UP into his guts … And HATE him.’⁵⁵

The playwright Arnold Wesker recalled his time in the RAF: ‘The central dramatic moment for me during training was the unacceptable order to snap a bayonet into the end of our rifles and run screaming at a hanging sack of straw.’⁵⁶ Wesker refused to charge and then, after some subtle bullying by his officers, agreed to do so. The dramatic tension of the moment was resurrected in his play Chips with Everything (1962).

A few found bayonet training a useful way to let off steam⁵⁷ or simply found it absurd. Mostly, though, even hardened soldiers came to hate it. A marine commando recalled being told ‘imagine he is a six foot Russian bastard bearing down on you’. He and his comrades trained with bayonets until their ‘fingers bled’.⁵⁸ Michael McBain believed that bayonet training in the moat at Fort William, inflicted on the potential officers in his own intake, was the worst aspect of his training.⁵⁹

The function of bayonet training was psychological as much as military. It hardened men to the prospect of killing in a way that shooting at distant cardboard cut-outs on the rifle range could not. John Arnold enjoyed shooting and was good at it but he wondered ‘could I really shoot a fellow human being?’ Since he was sent to learn Russian, he never got the chance to find out. Bayonet practice, by contrast, did not lend itself to abstract musing about the morality of killing and Arnold said that his faith in human nature was strengthened by the fact that his fellow recruits ‘all hated bayonet practice’. Bayonet training could be so traumatic that it haunted men even on the front line. Benjamin Whitchurch, who was only 5ft 3in tall and who had had to make a special request to stay with his company when it went to Korea, had some nasty memories as he fumbled with trembling fingers while the Chinese overran the position that his regiment were trying to hold: ‘the order came towards the end of the battle to fix bayonet, the one thing I dreaded because … I had always been killed in training’.⁶⁰

Perhaps the most brutal testimony to the effectiveness of bayonet training in inuring men to violence came from the fact that conscripts so often used the weapons against themselves or each other. During his training at RAF Bridgnorth in 1959, one airman wrote to his family that he had attended the funeral of a comrade who had been killed by a bayonet thrust – he did not say whether the death was suicide, murder or an accident.⁶¹ A Scots Guardsman was detained after stabbing himself with his bayonet. His suicide attempt was apparently provoked by having been put on a charge for having a rusty bayonet.⁶² In Glasgow during the early 1960s, gangs fought with bayonets that had been liberated from Highland regiments by enterprising national servicemen.⁶³

The armed forces took men from almost every kind of background. Later they might be divided by rank, but for the first few weeks of their service everyone served on the lowest rung of the military ladder as a private, aircraftman or naval rating. There was supposedly no privilege, privacy or patronage on the first day of national service. For some children of the Butler Education Act, being called up into the armed forces was like being put through the 11-plus backwards. Suddenly they found themselves back with boys they had known at primary school. One former conscript described the army as a ‘huge 18+ comprehensive school … [which] had a very unifying effect on the nation’.⁶⁴

The impact of this mixing can, however, be overstated. Middle-class men often commented on the social heterogeneity of the intake into the armed forces – perhaps because, sometimes for the first and last time in their life, they found that men of their own background were in a minority. Working-class men, however, meant something else when they talked about the way in which the early stages of national service threw different kinds of men together. For them, the striking element of this mixing was regional rather than social: ‘Included in our ranks were Jocks, Taffies, Paddies, Geordies, Scouses, Brummies and Cockneys.’⁶⁵ Even within the training depot for the Home Counties Group, recruits commented on regional origins: ‘They came from far and wide, some from all over Kent, others from London, Sussex, Surrey and Middlesex.’⁶⁶ Regional accents were still marked in the 1950s and many youths had barely moved outside their home town before they were called up. Not surprisingly, they defined themselves by where they came from – ‘I’m a Scouse Pa’ what are you?’⁶⁷ – and spent the first few days of national service trying to find men who shared their origins.⁶⁸

Regional origin was often the main identifying feature that men discerned in their fellow recruits during basic training and often formed the basis of the nicknames by which they called each other. Sometimes an apparent reference to regional origin was a reference to social position too. Some men from the south associated Liverpool and Glasgow with a criminal lumpen proletariat,⁶⁹ and an educated soldier might be called ‘Oxford’, even if his education amounted to having five GCEs and a less pronounced West Country accent than most of his comrades in the Dorset Regiment.⁷⁰ In many cases, though, working-class conscripts seemed unaware of, or uninterested in, the fact that their barrack rooms contained men who were more socially privileged than themselves. This may have been in part because middle-class men refrained from saying anything that would draw attention to their social origins and sought to ‘slip out of their middle class backgrounds’.⁷¹ It may also have been because working-class men simply had no reason to care about social differences unless those differences had some direct impact on their lives.

Middle-class conscripts, and working-class men whose education had brought them close enough to see the middle-class world, were interested in class. Educated boys were most likely to be aware of class, which was a matter of near obsessive discussion in the literature of the 1950s. In addition to this, schools and universities were themselves important – to some eighteen-year-olds the most important – gatehouses on the social frontiers. Educated recruits found that they had a succession of ready-made categories into which they could put each other – ones that implied understanding if not mutual respect. Brian Goodliffe remembered that there were seven men from his own school (Charterhouse) with him as he went through basic training for the Royal Artillery at Oswestry.⁷² He identified almost every middle-class soldier he subsequently met partly in terms of the school they had attended – Whitgift, Bancroft’s, Tonbridge, Harrow, Wellington, Haileybury, Marlborough, Downside. The narrator of David Lodge’s autobiographical novel of national service (conscious of his own grammar school and redbrick-university origins) sums up a particularly smug fellow recruit as ‘Oxford … PPE … hockey blue’.⁷³ A Harrovian recalling the other ‘potential officers’ he encountered in basic training said that grammar school boys were ‘on the same ladder but a couple of rungs down’.⁷⁴

To see how social class looked on the various steps of the social/educational ladder, it is worth examining the Rifle Brigade. This was a prestigious regiment that recruited boys from grand public schools, who would generally obtain commissions, and also working-class Londoners, who would stay in the ranks. There were limits to the social mixing of the Rifle Brigade and some conscripts had been picked for commissions before they even arrived at the regimental depot.⁷⁵ However, unlike the guards, of which more below, the Rifle Brigade did not separate potential officers and ordinary private soldiers from the very beginning of their service and they allowed at least some grammar school boys into potential officers’ platoons.

Someone at the top of the ladder would have a clear view of the social hierarchies involved in all this. Christopher Hurst was called up into the Rifle Brigade in 1948. He understood the prestige of his regiment and also the fact that a man such as himself would probably obtain a commission. He wrote: ‘It never occurred to me, any more than it evidently did to those who controlled our destinies, to wonder whether I was truly “officer material”.’⁷⁶ Hurst, however, also admitted that it would have been hard for a man like himself to serve in the ranks in the Rifle Brigade because so many of the officers were fellow Etonians.

A rung down on the ladder was Stanley Price, a doctor’s son with a place at Cambridge who had been to the Perse school, which in social terms was ‘basically a direct grant [grammar] day school’. At first, everyone, ‘toffs and toughs’, trained together. The former included the Gordon-Lennox twins, who parcelled up their civilian clothes and sent them to the Duchess of Richmond, their mother. ‘Blimey,’ said the corporal, ‘blokes here sending their clothes home to a boozer.’ Price was then put in the potential officers’ platoon, of which he wrote: ‘If the first four weeks were an initiation in filth and squalor, the next six weeks were an introduction to the subtle gradations of the British class system.’⁷⁷ Men from the upper-middle class, or those whose education had put them on the verge of entering that class, were struck by the importance of school for potential officers in the regiment ‘and the school, I was rapidly informed, was Eton’.⁷⁸

Ordinary grammar school boys of the kind who did not have places at university were rarely so interested in the subtle gradations of the upper-middle class. Derek Seaton was such a man and his understanding of the class system in the British army was not sufficiently good to appreciate the prestige attached to the Rifle Brigade – he had wanted to go into the Coldstream Guards, because his girlfriend liked the uniform. He did, however, understand that broad social divisions mattered when it came to choosing who might be commissioned:

In those days the British Class System reigned supreme … and all University graduates were automatically offered such a course [as potential officers], as were children of aristocratic families or of the landed gentry or of (Conservative Party) politicians. Grammar school boys – I was one – were allowed at least to ‘have a go’ to make up the numbers and, after all, the aforementioned had to have someone to beat – or is my prejudice showing?⁷⁹

Divisions within the officer class, as opposed to the broad separation between the officer class and other ranks, mattered little to men such as Seaton. Indeed a notable feature of national service writing was that men from lesser public schools often recall their first encounter with Etonians,⁸⁰ but that those whose own social origins lay a long way from the public schools never mentioned the subject.⁸¹

For the working-class boys who made up the majority of entrants into the Rifle Brigade, rankings of regiment, class and public school meant almost nothing. Ron Cassidy was called up in 1951 – ‘ambushed into it by the government’, as he later put it. He came to enjoy the army, signed on as a regular and eventually rose from the ranks to become a major. However, he did not even mention the potential officers’ platoon when recalling his national service, and presumably he would have understood that the prospect of an immediate commission was never going to be held out to a man such as himself. As for the prestige of his own regiment, he thought vaguely that it might be ‘akin to the fire brigade’.⁸²

It was rare for units to include anything like a genuine social cross-section of young men. A large part of the ‘rough’ working class was put in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, the Catering Corps and the Pioneers. Large numbers of grammar school boys were conscripted into ground trades in the air force and this was their natural home as much as the Rifle Brigade was that of the Etonians. Graham Mottershaw wrote from his RAF training unit: ‘the talk consists of filth and blasphemy which surprises even a vulgar person like me; more sensitive and sheltered natures must suffer hell’. However, his hut was hardly filled with the lumpen proletariat. Out of twenty-one men in it, seven had their school certificate – a high proportion in the England of the late 1940s.⁸³

Finally, such social mixing as did occur in basic training was short. Most regiments separated ‘potential officers’ after a few weeks. Even men who subsequently failed one of the officer selection boards would often be made NCOs and given some position, usually as a clerk, that would keep them apart from ordinary private soldiers.

A retired officer suggested that the decision to ‘segregate national service officers … into special squads [had the] disastrous result of giving both groups just enough time to notice and dislike each other’s superficial faults without giving them the further time required to appreciate the virtues which lie beneath them’.⁸⁴ This was unfair. The working classes seem hardly to have noticed the public school boys among them, and middle-class boys appear to have regarded their brief sojourn among the working classes with a wistful nostalgia. Bruce Kent was a public school boy called up soon after the war when the rigid hierarchies of the army were not as well established as they would later become. All the same, he described his experiences thus: ‘For me the classless society of Hut 53 lasted only six weeks. Pip Permaine the trainee butcher and Ray Spain with the Brylcreemed hair, my first mates – where are you now?’⁸⁵

In the smartest of all regiments, the classes did not mix for even a few weeks. The Household Division ensured that potential officers were placed in Brigade Squad and separated from other ranks from the beginning. Generations of Etonians have repeated that the training to which they were subjected was ‘as hard if not harder’ than that given to ordinary soldiers – Alan Clark, who spent precisely one day as a full-time soldier, was particularly eloquent on the subject.

Many public school boys believed that they were particularly well equipped to survive the early stages of national service. They had all lived away from home. They were used to institutional life, cross country runs and all-male company. Most of all, public school boys usually had some military experience as members of the Officer Training Corps. Knowing how to drill and handle a rifle, they were less likely to be humiliated in the first weeks of training. A few men had extensive military experience before they even received their call-up papers. R. D. Cramond had volunteered for training as a pilot with the RAF in June 1944, when he was seventeen and a half. He had been sent to Oxford for six months of pre-officer training, but failed to qualify for air crew duties because of poor eyesight. He then went to Edinburgh University and joined the university branch of the Territorial Army, which was run by Colonel Buchanan-Smith, who had helped devise the War Office Selection Board. The TA arranged for him to do his basic training before he was even called up, and by this time he was being paid as a sergeant rather than an ordinary recruit. When he arrived at his regimental depot, he was twenty-two years old and reckoned that he had eight years of training.⁸⁶ ‘Mac’ McCullogh, who served with the Tank Corps from 1959 to 1961, not only had been a member of the CCF at school but also, through the good offices of his brother-in-law, who had been an officer in Malaya, had been allowed to train with 22 SAS, before he was called up.⁸⁷

Most importantly, perceptions that public school boys had of basic training were influenced not so much by what had happened before as by what happened afterwards. Joe Studholme recalled his induction into the King’s Royal Rifle Corps thus:

being flung into a platoon which was completely mixed, you know, some people like me, public school boys, and then a lot of wonderful cockneys from the East End and, you know, and Yorkshiremen and people, for whom it was the most frightful shock, to come away from home probably for the first time into a barrack room. Whereas we took it green, I mean it was, you know, slightly more uncomfortable than life at a public school, but not that much.⁸⁸

Perhaps he was right to say that the spartan conditions of public school had hardened him to army life, but the fact that the regiment had decided to try to get him a commission before he even left Eton may also have helped to sustain his morale.⁸⁹

For such men the horror of the first few days in the armed forces was made much more bearable by the knowledge that it was likely to be shortlived. One recalled that an ‘initial period of unpleasantness’ seemed a preliminary to joining his ‘rightful sphere’ among ‘fellow gents in the officers’ mess’. He was ‘always comforted by the thought, which we had had instilled in us at school, I mean I assumed that I would be commissioned eventually’.⁹⁰

Who did worst in basic training? Middle-class men who wrote about basic training were often struck by the suffering of men who came from their own social background. Famous accounts make much of young men with sheltered upbringings who were incapable of mastering military skills or getting on with their rougher comrades. Percy Higgins – the doomed young man in David Lodge’s Ginger, You’re Barmy – is a ‘slender, willowy boy whose physical appearance suggested … aristocratic inbreeding’. He is unworldly and slow-witted. Tom Stacey’s account of training with the guards revolves in part around the tragedy of ‘Teardrop’ – a middle-class man who is savagely bullied and eventually invalided out.⁹¹

There were times when middle-class men were attacked during training – particularly during the dangerous period between being identified as a probable officer and going to an Officer Cadet Training Unit.⁹² But it would be wrong to assume that basic training for national service always saw baying mobs of proletarian thugs hounding bespectacled grammar school boys. Boys from the middle or lower-middle class were not necessarily more vulnerable than their working-class contemporaries. Physically most of them would have been more robust than boys who had been born to poor families in the depths of the inter-war depression.

William Purves was called up in 1950. He described himself as coming from a ‘sheltered background’ in a small town in lowland Scotland. He was the only child of a school mistress and a farmer and had, until his call-up, worked in a bank. He was sent to the training depot of the Highland Light Infantry. At first, it looked as though he might suffer the same fate as Percy or Teardrop. He found himself with fifty-nine Glaswegians who were ‘tough characters’, and he reckoned that he never managed to sleep an entire night during the first two weeks of his service without being turned out of his bed. Eventually, though, he and his comrades arrived at a modus vivendi. Perhaps the Glaswegians had discerned in Purves the core of steel that would eventually cause him, as a nineteen-year-old second lieutenant in Korea, his uniform caked in his own blood, to rally two platoons and lead a retreat after every other officer had been killed or wounded. He became the only national serviceman to win the Distinguished Service Order and later one of the most powerful Taipans in Hong Kong.⁹³

Educated men had advantages even if they did not belong to that particularly privileged group that benefited from public school background or the anticipation of potential officer status. Men who read easily and understood the formal language of official communiqués were more likely to know what was going on. The armed forces needed educated men (partly because such people were so rare among regular soldiers) and quickly found uses for anyone who was at ease with the written word. When Len Woodrup arrived at an air base in 1951, he and other men with educational qualifications were put in a separate room and set to marking the tests that were set for the other conscripts.⁹⁴

Those who suffered worst during training were probably those from the least privileged backgrounds. For many such men, the early stages of their military career – which, for the uneducated, almost always meant the army – was a time of terrible confusion. Brian Goodliffe recalled that one of his fellow gunners in the early 1950s had never left his home area – he did not know the name of the county he lived in or which political party was in power.⁹⁵ The poor education of many NCOs actually made it more difficult for the least educated conscripts to follow them. Educated men might laugh at the laboured formality of military patois – never say ‘pull the trigger’ when you might say ‘depress the mechanism’ – but some conscripts found such language incomprehensible.

Accents presented problems for some working-class men. The educated sometimes worried that their speech would mark them out in the eyes of their less privileged comrades and sometimes laughed at their own inability to understand others – Paul Foot said that his own escape into a potential officers’ unit began when after ‘about five days some men came round talking in an accent I could understand’.⁹⁶ On the whole, however, a mastery of received pronunciation was an advantage in the forces. The BBC had ensured that every recruit could understand ‘Oxford English’, even if they could not speak it, and almost every NCO had to be able to speak in some version of ‘correct’ English, in order to be understood by officers. Men with strong regional accents found life harder. Glaswegians were often literally incomprehensible to their comrades,⁹⁷ and felt isolated if they served in units dominated by Englishmen: ‘hard men from Glasgow, kept together in mess and billet, distrusting everyone else for a while due to being in a strange element’.⁹⁸ Brian Vyner underwent his basic training at Barnard Castle, where, ‘in typical army fashion’, ‘public school boys from down south’ were mixed with Glaswegians: ‘We could not understand them but they could understand us. We settled down better than them.’⁹⁹ Derek Johns said that the frequent fights between recruits from Newcastle and those from Glasgow sprang in part from the fact that they could not understand each other.¹⁰⁰

Dirtiness was a trigger for abuse. Class distinctions – and especially the crucial one between the more-or-less respectable working class and those beneath them – revolved partly around hygiene. Few recruits in basic training had much chance to bathe frequently, but failure to wash at all marked men out in the forced intimacy of a barrack room. Some national servicemen remembered spectacular examples of filth – such as the man, ‘from a remote Scottish croft’, who did not change his underwear during the whole of his basic training. Apparently, or so his roommates came to believe, he was used to being sewn into his clothes at the beginning of winter and not getting undressed until the spring.¹⁰¹ The disgust that recruits felt for some of their comrades matched the feelings of NCOs, for whom dirtiness was next to ‘idleness’ in the hierarchy of military sins. Some soldiers were forcibly washed. One national serviceman recalled of a comrade in the infantry: ‘we had to scrub him because he stank’. After five weeks, the awkward recruit ‘disappeared’.¹⁰² Forcible washing revealed the ambiguities of bullying during national service. Often those who did the washing thought of their action as a matter of simple group interest and perhaps even as an act of solidarity that went with ‘helping the weakest men to keep up’.¹⁰³ One soldier remembered: ‘a tall gangling half-wit called Norris who never washed would be stuck under the showers by a lynch mob and scrubbed with floor-mops: a wonderful instance of the way persecution can be gloried when it is undertaken for the common good’.¹⁰⁴

A few soldiers had relatively benign memories of being made to wash.¹⁰⁵ Most victims felt differently. Being dragged across a barracks through a crowd of jeering men, publicly stripped, pushed under a stream of cold water and vigorously scrubbed with stiff brushes was painful and humiliating. When a national serviceman and former Borstal boy was convicted of housebreaking, after having deserted from Catterick, his mother told the court that ‘he had trouble over four soldiers who were throwing water over him and scrubbing him down with a broom’. This case gave rise to questions in parliament and an admission that other recruits at Catterick had been scrubbed with brushes.¹⁰⁶

There was also ambiguity about exactly who was responsible for such forcible washes. Ernest Dobson, who served with the Durham Light Infantry, said that one of his fellow recruits was picked on by sergeants and washed in cold water every day.¹⁰⁷ Usually ‘scrubs’ were carried out by other recruits,¹⁰⁸ but NCOs (corporals especially) seem to have encouraged, and sometimes ordered, such practices. Derek Blake was a grammar school boy who enjoyed his training with the RASC. He did not think that there was bullying in his unit but

the type of person who took a lot of stick was the person who was, how shall I put it, unhygienic and we took matters into our own hands … we used to take ’em down to the ablutions and give ’em a scrubbing. That was usually at the behest of one of the NCOs … he would imply that we should deal with matters ourselves.¹⁰⁹

John Harlow recalled that, in a training regiment of the Royal Artillery, the two biggest recruits were told to scrub the neck of one of their fellow soldiers with a ‘yard brush’, which they did until it was ‘red, raw’.¹¹⁰ Sometimes the forcible washing of recruits was condoned by the military authorities. A War Office report on problematic conscripts described the case of ‘Private R’, who had been transferred from the infantry to the RASC and was ‘a miserable specimen, thin with a lopsided head … [and] had boils and carbuncles’. R was also ‘very scruffy at first’ and ‘often had to be scrubbed’.¹¹¹ In 1957 (perhaps at a time when the brutalities of national service were beginning to be seen as less acceptable), a corporal and a lance corporal in a training battalion of the Ordnance Corps were convicted by court martial of ill-treating a recruit. They had forced an eighteen-year-old national serviceman to undress, thrown cold water over him (it was December) and scrubbed him down with a hard broom. The two accused said that they had acted on the orders of a senior NCO and in accordance with normal custom. The prosecuting counsel (a major) said: ‘The court might think it was a “regimental scrub” which was known in most regiments but in this case it went beyond the bounds of reason.’¹¹²

In 1959, a corporal in the Signals Corps was charged after a national service recruit was tied and held under a shower. An initial enquiry had ended with a light sentence being imposed on the corporal. Some of the men training with the victim had apparently written to their MPs to complain about the failure to hand down a more severe punishment (which may, once again, be a sign of the changing climate as conscription ended). It appears, though, that other private soldiers had been involved in the original brutality.¹¹³

Large numbers of national service memoirs allude to suicides – usually in basic training: ‘there were several suicides during my time, and the RSM of my basic training regiment seemed to glory in the fact’.¹¹⁴ According to Simon Bendall, a conscript in the artillery: ‘There were many rumours of recruits found hanged in the washrooms after only a few days in the army.’¹¹⁵ Colin Metcalfe, called up into the Signals, remembered: ‘Probably most intake units had a “suicide wood” in the neighbourhood where an unhappy rookie … had supposedly topped himself. We had one.’¹¹⁶

Benjamin Whitchurch, in the Gloucester Regiment, said that a man committed suicide while he was at Bulford camp – though not someone he knew directly.¹¹⁷ Edwin Haywood, who served in the Royal West Kent Regiment, said that there were ‘lots of attempts at suicide’ during training and that one or two succeeded. He recalled a man who had hanged himself from a toilet cistern.¹¹⁸ Men often tried to kill themselves in toilets: the only places in which they could hope to get a few minutes of privacy.

It is possible that a small number of cases were magnified by rumour. Tony Betts, in the RAF, found that men at each of his successive camps would tell stories about the chap who had jumped ‘from that water tower over there’.¹¹⁹ Some memoirs, however, are very specific. Ray Self was called up in May 1950. On the first night at RAF Padgate he was woken by the man in the next bed, who said: ‘there is a guy hung himself in the shithouse’. He went in and found a man hanging by a rope from the toilet cistern. It was ‘quite a stunning thing for me at the age of eighteen to find a dead body’. The commanding officer told the men not to write home about the incident, because he did not want questions in parliament. Self believed that suicides at Padgate took place at a rate of about one a week and that men frequently drank Jeyes Fluid or threw themselves from towers – though he himself never saw another suicide victim. He thought that suicides were covered up.¹²⁰

If Self was right, then there was indeed a considerable cover-up, because the RAF authorities said in 1957: ‘They strongly reject the suggestion that Padgate has been the scene (and cause) of many suicides. Of the hundreds of thousands of men who have passed through the station, three have taken their lives since 1944 and each of those it is claimed had a “psychopathic history”.’¹²¹

There was probably uncertainty about some deaths. Accidents were common in the armed forces and there must have been occasions when it could not be determined whether a recruit had killed himself deliberately or not. Suicide was a crime until 1961 and it may have been that the armed forces gave the benefit of the doubt to men who might have tried to kill themselves, or that the forces attempted to cover up suicides to spare the feelings of relatives.

There is, however, quite strong evidence that suicide was more common in the armed forces than in civilian life – partly because some aspects of military service were so unpleasant and partly because some men in an institution that revolves around killing are likely to have the means and inclination to kill themselves. Suicides among regular servicemen seem to have been frequent. A report on the inquest on a sailor who had jumped in front of a train at Portsmouth in January 1947 revealed that: ‘Three young men belonging to the Navy have committed suicide within the last fourteen days for no apparent reason.’¹²² A soldier from the Royal Artillery stole a number 113 bus from outside Edgware tube station with the intention of crashing it.¹²³ National servicemen sometimes described the suicides of regulars with ghoulish jollity. One remembered a major serving in Sierra Leone who shot himself with a Bren gun – ‘a difficult achievement’.¹²⁴ Another wrote to his parents about a regimental quartermaster who had shot himself – using a mirror to ensure that he did not miss.¹²⁵

Whatever the authorities may, or may not, have tried to do, not all national service suicides were covered up. The question was discussed in parliament, particularly with regard to the camp at Catterick. Some national servicemen were also the subject of inquests, which yielded heartbreaking details. In 1951, John Booth, who was eighteen years old, gassed himself at his home in Manchester. He had left a note saying: ‘I cannot go on any longer and I do not want to go back into the army.’ It emerged that the medical board had failed to notice that he had ‘claw feet’ and this made it agony for him to wear boots. He had been excused boots for twelve days at Colchester and ‘given treatment’ when the problem recurred.¹²⁶ On Christmas Eve 1954, William Delaney, aged twenty-one, gassed himself at home three days after he had been discharged from Woolwich military hospital, to which he had been admitted after taking an overdose of aspirin. His commanding officer in a training regiment of the Royal Engineers said that he was an ‘average soldier’ and not in any trouble.¹²⁷

In February 1956, an open verdict was recorded on Gordon Pilling of the South Lancashire Regiment who had drowned in a river. The coroner concluded that there was no evidence of bullying or horseplay. His training supervisor said that Pilling had not complained but that he had had trouble laying out his kit properly and had been ‘checked for it before’. Pilling’s father said he had arrived home two days before his death in a distressed condition: ‘His main worry was a kit inspection.’¹²⁸ A fellow private recalled that the night before his disappearance Pilling had seemed to be in a trance and had sat on his bed looking at his kit. John Hall of Leeds was found dead on a railway line a week after he was conscripted into the army, a note beside his body: ‘I am sick of being called names I wouldn’t call my worst enemy and I am sick of the food I can’t bear to look at it. I just can’t stand it any longer I would rather be dead.’ The coroner revealed that the letter ‘also contained allegations of bullying at the barracks’ (of the Ordnance Corps), but that ‘he had gone into the matter carefully and found no evidence of this’.¹²⁹

Stanley Mackie was found hanging at the West Kirby RAF camp four days after he arrived. His commanding officer, an NCO and fellow recruits all maintained that there was no bullying at the camp. One of his comrades told the inquest: ‘Mackie appeared to be worrying about everything: cleaning of brass, webbing, filling of forms and parades. He always thought he was going to do something seriously wrong. He took everything seriously. He would never laugh. We had to tell him to laugh.’¹³⁰