9

Officers

Is that hurting?

Yes.

Yes, what?

Yes, a little bit.

Yes a little bit WHAT?

Yes, a little bit, sir.

Conversation between conscript private
and army dentist (officer), 1946¹

Post-war conscripts began their military careers, at least nominally, on the lowest rung of the ladder (as privates or as the equivalent ranks in the air force or navy). Unlike regulars, national servicemen could not proceed straight to officer training academies.² However, unlike wartime conscripts, they were divided quickly, and almost definitively, into those who would be commissioned and those who would stay in the ranks. Within a few weeks of reporting for duty, most men knew whether or not they would be officers, and many of the best-connected national servicemen knew before they even received their call-up papers that they were likely to be commissioned.

All three services commissioned conscripts. Getting into the navy at all was hard, and public schools seem to have discouraged their boys from undertaking their national service in the navy because they believed that commissions were easier to obtain in the army.³ Some national service naval officers were recruited because they had degrees in engineering and the rest were often self-confident or highly educated. The navy valued academic distinction more than the other services and two of its national service officers – Jeremy Wolfenden and Peter Jay – vied for the distinction of being recognized as ‘the cleverest man in England’. National service officer cadets in the navy were known as ‘upper yardmen’ – a Hornbloweresque title that evoked the days when thirteen-year-olds had climbed the rigging. They were selected after a short period of basic training and sent to train on ships at sea: training that included some hard exercises in navigation.

National service naval officers were almost always drawn from relatively privileged backgrounds, but they often commented that social class counted for less in the navy than in the army. This was in part because many regular naval officers had been educated at Dartmouth and were thus less preoccupied by the hierarchy of public schools that so interested army officers. It was also because naval officers generally lived on ships and were not required to indulge in the expensive entertainments that were sometimes expected of officers in smart regiments. Most importantly, officers who might be required to guide a destroyer into Valletta harbour, for example, placed a higher value on technical competence than social polish.

The RAF commissioned larger numbers of men than the navy. It also ran officer selection in a more systematic and centralized fashion than the other two services. From 1951, the air force identified potential officers at their Ministry of Labour medicals. They were defined in largely educational terms and included ‘all recruits with the basic educational qualifications of School Certificate or its equivalent’.⁴

Between 1951 and 1955, potential officers among ground crew were all sent to RAF Hednesford, where they underwent the same basic training as ordinary recruits. During the first four weeks, ‘every effort [was made] to avoid giving to the recruits any suggestion that presupposes that they will be commissioned’. Eventually men were invited to fill in forms stating whether they wanted a commission, and, if not, why not. After six weeks, potential officers were interviewed and some were sent to the air force selection board, which would determine whether or not they should be commissioned.⁵ From 1955, potential officers were spread around a variety of bases, those identified as suitable being sent to a ground crew officer selection centre. The RAF also interviewed graduates before they were called up to determine whether they were suitable for a commission, and offered them a chance of being sent to another service if they were not.⁶

At first commissions were rare for national service airmen. In 1950, over 50,000 conscripts were posted to the air force, of whom the vast majority were ground crew. Of these, 700 were commissioned, and a further 300 were trained to fly as officer cadets.⁷ That year there were just 811 national service officers in the air force.⁸ Officer numbers expanded quickly in the next few years – perhaps because of the active approach that the service took to commissioning and perhaps too because the RAF, drawing many of its recruits from grammar schools, was particularly affected by the Butler Education Act of 1944. By 1953, there were 3,393 officers and 73,637 other ranks among national service airmen.⁹ After this, the proportion of officers declined again – though it never fell back to its 1950 levels.¹⁰ Apart from the small group of men who actually flew planes, RAF officers rarely led glamorous lives: many were posted to departments concerned with secretarial work or catering.¹¹

Many national service airmen who could in theory have been officers did not put themselves forward for commissions – in 1951, 50 per cent of those who were educationally eligible for commissions did not wish to be considered for them.¹² In part, this reticence was due to the fact that a large proportion of airmen had left school at sixteen: such youths met the minimum education qualifications for a commission but may in practice have believed that they were unlikely to get one or that they would not feel comfortable as officers. Of those who chose not to apply for commissions in the mid 1950s, 20.4 per cent said that they felt personally inadequate to hold a commission. Another 27.5 per cent cited their belief that holding a commission would be too expensive – an odd view in light of the fact that an RAF officer would not usually have expensive social obligations and recruits tended to overestimate how much officers were paid.¹³

Some who went into the RAF were in effect trading the chance of a commission for a relatively comfortable and interesting life. A senior officer in the service recognized that graduates – he seems to have meant graduates in technical subjects – who were not preselected for commissions ‘still prefer the RAF to other services (not always from the highest motives admittedly)’.¹⁴ A study of airmen revealed a group who deliberately turned away from obtaining commissions in favour of acquiring skills in trades that might be useful for their future careers. This was particularly true of men who had served apprenticeships before joining up. Investigators were struck by the fact that some skilled workers were uninterested in social status, or at least in the kind of social status offered by the officers’ mess. About a third of men who did not apply for a commission hoped, instead, to learn a trade; more than one in ten of them wanted time for study.¹⁵

Aircrew, especially pilots, were different. Flying was attractive to many young men; it offered the prospect of serving in the ‘teeth arm’ par excellence and all pilots were potential officers. The chance of a flying commission was the one thing that attracted upper-middle-class men into the air force. The selection of pilots was more scientific than that of officers in any other part of the armed forces. Medical standards were ruthlessly enforced. No one with slow reactions, poor eyesight or a nervous disposition was allowed to fly a Meteor, even if his father was Air Chief Marshal. Men rejected for flying commissions usually understood that they had been through a rigorous but necessary process.¹⁶

Most national service officers were in the army. In August 1954 there were 5,869 officers and 207,022 other ranks among national servicemen in the army.¹⁷ Given that no one could be commissioned until he had spent at least six months in the ranks, that some men took considerably longer and that others, officers especially, were released early so that they could go to university, it seems likely that something between 3 and 4 per cent of all national servicemen were commissioned at some point.¹⁸

After a few days in the army, recruits were interviewed by a personnel selection officer (PSO), who advised them about, among other things, whether they should seek a commission. Some young men were identified as potential officers, or other rank 1 (OR1), at this stage. Educational level was the most important element in determining who became an OR1 – but the army did not make decisions on educational grounds alone. In 1951, about a third of all graduate national servicemen from England were not rated OR1.¹⁹

Most army units separated OR1s from the bulk of their comrades after a certain time (usually about two weeks). Sometimes, the OR1s were sent to a special squad in the same training depot or to a separate unit that might exist to train potential officers for a whole corps. For the first three years after the war, training regiments for ‘leaders’ mixed men who were expected to be commissioned with men who were expected to serve as NCOs. From 1948, the separation between a potential officer and those destined to stay in the ranks was sharper. Special units were often officially described as being for ‘junior leaders’ but recruits knew that they were really for potential officers.

Soldiers identified as potential officers received the same basic training as other privates, though the atmosphere in units for potential officers could be competitive, and the most ambitious demonstrated an enthusiasm for spit and polish that exasperated their comrades.²⁰ Some NCOs who commanded potential officers resented the privileges that their charges would enjoy,²¹ but most were helpful, occasionally because they were running sweepstakes on the results.²²

After a few weeks, men would appear before a Unit Selection Board (USB), usually convened by the commanding officer of their training unit, to determine whether they should be put forward for a commission. Almost all men who attended an USB were OR1s. In the early 1950s, the army encouraged USBs to reject larger proportions of men partly in order to ensure that more of those who got through this stage managed to pass the later tests.

To men from the officer class, USB was a joke. Neal Ascherson recalled the exchange with his commanding officer in the Royal Marines:

‘I want you to think carefully: suppose you had the choice of playing football with your commando group or playing tennis with an extremely attractive blonde. Which would you do? Think very carefully about your answer.’ So in order to show respect I thought very carefully about this and said: ‘I think I’d probably play football with my men, sir’. He said: ‘That’s the right answer.’²³

Less privileged men found things more awkward and many of them felt that the USB was, even more than other parts of the officer selection process, linked to social class.²⁴

Those found satisfactory at USB spent three days being assessed at the War Office Selection Board (WOSB). Candidates were required to undergo tests of initiative and ‘leadership’, involving improbable exercises in which they were required to cross ‘rivers’ with the aid of planks and oil drums. They were also required to give ‘lecturettes’ – ten-minute talks that were designed to display self-confidence and articulacy. Apolitical, middle-brow topics – Gilbert and Sullivan²⁵ or bee-keeping²⁶ – were favoured: ‘one candidate gave a compelling account of the social history of whisky, which was much praised by a conducting officer with a face ravaged by his own research into the topic’.²⁷ Candidates were interviewed by a committee, which enquired into their backgrounds, interests and reasons for wishing to become an officer.

Those responsible for officer selection, especially at regimental level, regarded the process as an art rather than a science. They made much of ‘leadership’, ‘style’ and ‘enthusiasm’ – qualities that did not lend themselves easily to measurement, or even definition. They trusted experienced officers to judge candidates according to their own instincts, and were sceptical of formal tests. Smart regiments were centres of resistance to attempts to democratize the army. Bernard Fergusson was proud of the fact that the Black Watch, which he commanded, contained many officers whose fathers had served in the regiment. He also believed that having been captain of the boats at Eton was adequate proof of officerly qualities, and was angry that the War Office did not share this view.²⁸

Some regiments seem to have ignored the results of intelligence tests or even tests of medical fitness, if men from the ‘right’ background did badly. W. J. R. Morrison, called up in 1949, did not regard himself as ‘much of a soldier’. He had done badly in the practical tests that were administered to recruits and was described at this stage as a ‘potential clerk’ but, like most public school boys, he was posted to a potential officers’ platoon. He sailed through WOSB: ‘When it subsequently came out that I had played for English Public Schools earlier in the year I was home and dry. We only discussed rugby as far as I remember.’ He eventually won the prize for best cadet in his officer training – still, he thought, because of the rugby.²⁹ John Scurr scored badly in an intelligence test when he first arrived in the Durham Light Infantry. However, when those conducting the tests found out about his education, and thereby, implicitly, about his social background, they gave him another test and then put him in a potential officers’ platoon.³⁰ Piers Plowright also did badly in an intelligence test during his basic training but the ‘kindly sergeant’ in charge of the process said that he was probably officer material anyway and sent him to a potential officers’ unit. Plowright thought that the decision was mainly to do with class and that ‘speaking well’ and having been to public school were the key attributes sought.³¹

Those who succeeded at WOSB were sent to one of the two Officer Cadet Training Units. Those destined for the infantry, the Ordnance Corps, the Military Police, the Intelligence Corps, the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC), the Pioneer Corps and the marines (technically part of the navy) were sent to Eaton Hall in Cheshire, as were men destined for the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) until late 1954. Eaton Hall was the family seat of the Duke of Westminster. A nineteenth-century building knocked about a bit by various forms of military occupation, it was still more comfortable and attractive than most barracks. Over the staircase hung a large grubby painting – The Adoration of the Magi by Rubens – that was often the target of high jinks by the cadets. One of the instructors wrote that ‘the trappings of by-gone elegance help to lift training above the normal routine of “learning to be an officer” into the realms of “learning to lead men” ’. Cohorts of about sixty cadets arrived every fortnight for most of the year.³²

Officers in the Royal Artillery, the Royal Engineers, the Armoured Corps, REME (from late 1954), the Signals Corps and the Pay Corps were sent to Mons in Aldershot. The Armoured Corps and the artillery spent their whole sixteen weeks at Mons; other corps and regiments spent six weeks there and were then sent for more specialized training. Mons took more students than Eaton Hall – about 600 at a time when Eaton Hall had 480.³³

Mons was reputed to have a harsher training regime than Eaton Hall – perhaps because it was in a town where everything revolved around the army. For much of the national service period, Mons was also the home of Regimental Sergeant Major Brittain, known for having the loudest voice in the British army. Brittain was the most famous of the sergeant majors who drilled cadets as they passed through Officer Cadet Training Units – so famous that even soldiers who never got anywhere near being officers had heard of him.³⁴ The others were Copp (of the Coldstream Guards) at Eaton Hall and Lynch of the Irish Guards (who succeeded Copp). Former cadets often made a cult of these NCOs. Oxford undergraduates formed a Copp dining club. Autobiographies recall a selection of bons mots – ‘there’s nothing in the world I like better to see than a young ensign fairly cutting about in front of his platoon’ (Lynch); ‘I’ve had enough of your San Fairy Ann attitude’ (Copp) – the more erudite cadets guessed that this was a rendition of ‘ça ne fait rien’ that had been picked up from an Abbeville tart in 1916 and passed down through generations of men in the sergeants’ mess.³⁵

There was, however, an element of artificiality about the relation between officer cadets and their NCOs. The power of the latter was only temporary. The metaphor of theatre – so often applied to national service – was especially apt with regard to officer training. Kevin O’Sullivan said that Catterick, where he went through basic training, was ‘kitchen sink drama’ but that Eaton Hall was ‘high comedy’ – ‘an arena for the theatrical display of military values’ in which Lynch was the ‘producer, director and compère’.³⁶ The performance of RSMs was not, underneath its outward forms, an entirely dignified one. Visiting dignitaries at Mons often paid homage to Brittain, but he was a parade ground soldier: though he had joined the army in 1917, he had never seen active service. Privately some cadets despised Brittain: ‘big, fat, noisy, vulgar man’.³⁷ The end of Brittain’s career was sad and must have taught him, if he had ever had any doubt on the subject, about the ruthlessness of the officer class. Shortly after his retirement, he was evicted from his army quarters.³⁸

National service officers were taught tactics, map-reading and the handling of weapons. Occasionally they had an uncomfortable glimpse of what real war might be like: one was told by his instructor that his revolver, the symbol of officer status, was useless for real fighting and that on the battlefield he should pick up a ‘dead man’s rifle’.³⁹ Cadets were required to play sports and often were made to box. The last of these ordeals was remembered with horror by many men. A report on officer training in the Signals recognized that compulsory boxing was controversial but that it was ‘a guide as to the character of the participants and whether an individual possesses “guts” ’.⁴⁰

Outright failure at cadet school was rare. In 1950, 7.94 per cent of cadets at Eaton Hall were held back for further training and 2.61 per cent were returned to their units; even then, some would come back and take commissions later.⁴¹ In 1955, fifty-eight candidates were returned to unit from both cadet schools. Of these thirty-five were ‘lacking officer qualities in most respects’, and twenty-three lacked some technical ability.⁴² For most cadets, ‘failure’ by this stage usually meant failure to get into a prestigious regiment. An instructor at Mons remarked that the worst cadets would be sent to the Catering Corps ‘where their powers of leadership would not be strained’.⁴³

As the military authorities themselves recognized, the award of commissions favoured certain categories of men. The first distinction was regional. Men from the south of England were most likely to be commissioned: 66 per cent of national service officers came from this region, which contained 40.5 per cent of the total national population. The north of England, by contrast, provided 28.5 per cent of national service officers while containing 49 per cent of the population. Scotland had just over 10 per cent of the country’s total population and provided just over 5 per cent of national service officers.⁴⁴ Recruitment into the Territorial Army exposed the scale of the problem. The TA took most of its officers from those who had held national service commissions but, unlike the regular army, it had to work on a regional basis so that most soldiers were posted close to their home. This created problems when some areas contained more officers than others. A study of 1952 showed that the Territorial Army could meet less than half of its requirements in Scotland. By contrast, the eastern and southern areas (excluding Cornwall) had a surplus of officers. London and its seven surrounding counties needed only a little more than a quarter of all TA officers but produced almost half of them. Surrey, the ‘stockbroker belt’, was the most ‘over-officered’ county in the United Kingdom – its production of officers accounted for almost seven times its needs. Most northern and Midlands counties, by contrast, were ‘under-officered’.⁴⁵

A report by the Chief Education Officer of Northern Command suggested that the regional basis of recruitment was partly a matter of tradition and culture. Men from the south were most likely to have relations who had already been officers. The north was sometimes associated with ‘pacifist’, which in this context presumably meant nonconformist, beliefs. The middle classes of the north were also believed to be more ‘inward looking’, less interested in events outside their own region and more likely to have a ‘technical’ rather than ‘general’ education.⁴⁶ The army believed that national service itself had begun to erode this difference as boys from the north were increasingly likely to gain military experience and then influence their younger relations. Welshmen were under-represented among those who were commissioned. The army defined Wales as part of the ‘north’ and admitted that the chances of obtaining a commission for a Welshman were about one quarter less than the chances of any other ‘northerner’.⁴⁷

Accents mattered in the army. Personnel selection officers seem to have discriminated against men who were held to have ‘strong’ regional accents. The officer-training wing of the Signals Corps, which attracted some men of relatively plebeian origin, engaged an expert on speech from Leeds University to teach its cadets how to talk. Some national servicemen believed that having a Yorkshire accent could get a man removed from a potential officers’ squad.⁴⁸

Scotsmen were less likely to be commissioned than men from England. The army itself believed that the under-representation of Scots sprang from the nature of the Scottish education system, the fact that fewer men attained the necessary educational levels and the fact that there were few Scottish public schools.

It also seems, however, that some Scottish soldiers (at least those from outside Glasgow) escaped from the constraints of the English class system. Scottish accents did not disadvantage candidates for commissions in the way that regional English accents did.⁴⁹ The very fact that public schools in Scotland were rare may have meant that attendance at an academic day school in Scotland was more acceptable than attendance at a grammar school would have been in England or Wales. William Purves was offered a commission in the smartest Scottish regiment of the line in spite of the fact that he came from a comparatively humble background. Ronnie Cramond, commissioned into the Royal Scots, claimed that he was one of three Scottish cadets who arrived at Eaton Hall in November 1949 and that he, a bursary pupil from George Heriot’s School in Edinburgh, joined fifty-seven others – ‘all from the Guards Training Depot and virtually all from top English public schools such as Eton, Rugby, Winchester’.⁵⁰

Regional origin, by which the army set such great store, related to social class. Indeed, the expression of a regional identity was itself a statement about class because the grandest members of the grande bourgeoisie thought in national, rather than regional, terms and based their lives around institutions – Oxford, Cambridge, the Inns of Court, the Stock Exchange – in the south east of England. The most secure members of the officer class wore their regional affiliations lightly – a man might serve in the Welsh Guards when his brother held a commission in the Scots Guards.

A public school education was the single most important asset for a potential officer, and the kind of education that a man had received mattered more than its extent or academic distinction. The War Office divided schools into three categories: public schools, grammar schools and ‘others’. Young men from public schools stood by far the best chance of being commissioned. There were some straightforward reasons why public school boys were at an advantage. Almost all of them had been members of the Officer Training Corps or Combined Cadet Force. Housemasters wrote references for the selection boards and gave advice to boys about, for example, the relative advantages of the guards, the ‘RB’ (Rifle Brigade) and a ‘county regiment’.⁵¹ Officer selection panels sought qualities that tended to go with a certain type of schooling – enthusiasm for team games and a display of ‘social graces’. Simply getting on with other potential officers was important, so anything that provided men with a common culture was useful. David Bentata recalled: ‘Eaton Hall came at just the right time in my life. My main sport was long-range .303 rifle shooting and I was keen as mustard to be in the army, and to gain a commission, since I felt that was what my education at Blundell’s had prepared me for.’⁵²

It was no secret that family background mattered. Sons of generals or cabinet ministers were rarely rejected.⁵³ Having a father or brother who had been an officer was an advantage.⁵⁴ A colonel who chaired WOSB compared the selection of officers to the breeding and care of cavalry chargers, an image that itself says much about the social assumptions of the British army:

The commanding officer of an ABTU [Army Basic Training Unit] once wrote concerning one of his potential officers. ‘He’s all right. I knew his father who was in the regiment, and his grandfather was in it before that.’ The selectors found themselves in agreement with this verdict, but, and this is important, not without examining form as well.⁵⁵

Officer selection procedures were not, however, rigged in a blatant way. It was possible for men who appeared to have all the right connections and attributes to fail. There were public school boys, and even the sons of regular officers, who served out their whole two years as privates.

An army study of June 1954 examined the qualities of men who had the minimum qualifications to be officers.⁵⁶ Men from the south of England, who were also the ones most likely to be commissioned, were young (two thirds of them were younger than nineteen and a half), only one tenth were graduates and over half of them had studied ‘arts’. In the north, more than half of men were aged over twenty, one fifth were graduates and over half had studied science. Of northerners, around a quarter had attended public schools against four in ten of southerners. In the south around a quarter of men had fathers who had been officers; in the north the figure was one in ten.⁵⁷

If northern grammar school boys with scientific degrees from redbrick universities were commissioned at all, they tended to go into units that required particular technical expertise. The Medical Corps was one of these, and the figures for Scotsmen commissioned look even lower when one remembers that almost a quarter of all Scottish national service officers were in fact doctors or dentists.⁵⁸ REME drew a larger proportion of its officers from the north than any other corps of the army. Some educational courses led directly into technical branches of the army: almost all graduates in forestry from the University of Aberdeen in the 1950s seem to have been commissioned in the Royal Engineers.⁵⁹ A manager at ICI told a War Office enquiry into national service that engineers from the company had an easier time than chemists because the latter did not have a specialty that was of particular use to the forces and were rarely commissioned.⁶⁰ Generally, the army seems to have assumed that men with scientific qualifications were suited for particular technical functions but that the overall ‘officerly’ qualities required by the artillery, Armoured Corps and infantry (the most prestigious units in which to be commissioned) were more likely to be found among eighteen-year-olds from public schools.

The brigadier commanding the War Office Selection Board wrote in 1953:

a) There is a general tendency in the North towards earlier specialization, which does not foster officerly qualities. So many technicians from the North have no interests whatever outside their own narrow line of study.

b) Deferrents for technical training are higher in the heavy industrial areas of the North and Midlands. The effect of this is that by the time they come into the Army many men are too set in their ways to be adaptable to Army Life.⁶¹

Occasionally, the army broke down the education of its recruits by the kind of subject they had studied as well as the level attained. In the second half of 1951, 1,068 graduates were called up, of whom 685 had degrees in science. Of the remainder, 293 had degrees in arts subjects and ninety in economics or commerce. These men were distributed in a revealing way. Both the graduates who went into the Foot Guards had studied arts, as had eighteen out of twenty-eight in the infantry of the line. Science graduates were concentrated in REME, which took 219 of them, and the Royal Engineers, which took 236.⁶² Among those who entered the army having left school at eighteen, 2,181 had specialized in arts, 1,667 in science and forty-three in economics. Men who had studied arts dominated all the prestigious ‘teeth arm’ units – even those, such as the artillery or the tank regiments, that might have been supposed to require some technical competence.⁶³ National service officers were themselves struck by the disdain for technical expertise. One said, in retrospect, that more recognition should have been given to the fact that every man in the armoured corps was a ‘technician of some kind’.⁶⁴

Viscount Weymouth remembered being told that having achieved the lowest possible score on mechanical tests did not preclude a commission in the Life Guards, which was, supposedly, an armoured regiment: ‘it was soon to be impressed upon me that the Household Brigade was virtually independent from the rest of the British army. The tests that were devised for others did not necessarily apply to ourselves.’⁶⁵

Some men asked not to be officers. A. B. Carter, in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, was sent to a potential officer wing but changed his mind, ‘and several other minds’ and ‘went non-desirous’.⁶⁶ David Baxter and David Lodge both asked to be released from potential officer status. Both recalled that the army was disconcerted by this request and that many of their contemporaries imitated them once they had made a stand. Baxter relished the fact that refusing a commission required the very qualities – initiative and leadership – that army officers were meant to have: ‘Our small attempt to decide the conditions of our service measured the inertia of our fellow potential cadets: now that the idea occurred more than half of the course resigned in the morning.’⁶⁷

Outright rebellions, in which men such as Baxter asked to be removed from potential officer squads, were rare. It was, however, relatively common for men to express themselves ‘non-desirous’ of having a commission – though the proportion of men who did so diminished in the early 1950s, as the army sought to encourage men from outside the ‘officer class’ to seek commissions. The proportion of non-desirous men increased again in the late 1950s – perhaps as the end of national service came into view and the hierarchies of the army began to seem less important.⁶⁸

Some men, who did not regard themselves as rebels against the army, decided that an officer’s life was not for them. Jack Burn was a graduate (from King’s College Newcastle) who had served in the University Training Corps. Some men from his background did become officers and he himself was encouraged to apply for a commission, but he was told by friends that mess bills were hard to sustain on the pay of a national service subaltern and that he would be better off as a sergeant in the Royal Army Educational Corps (RAEC).⁶⁹ John Kelly was from a similar background. He remembered the two public school boys in his basic training unit who displayed ostentatious enthusiasm to be commissioned, but he distinguished them from the majority of the platoon who were ‘ordinary lads’ and from his own associates who were destined for non-commissioned rank in the RAEC: ‘we graduates must have seemed oddities … with little interest in applying for commissions’.⁷⁰ T. C. Sparrow knew about the Educational Corps because of a talk at school (Prince Henry’s Grammar School in Evesham), which had identified it ‘as being particularly suitable for those with a grammar school education’. He was, against his wishes, identified as a potential officer but, after seven weeks in the army, he persuaded the authorities that the Educational Corps was his proper destination.⁷¹ Investigating the reasons why there were so few officers for the Territorial Army outside the Home Counties, the military authorities found that ‘Potential Officers were being allowed or persuaded to go into the RAEC, sometimes finishing as only sergeants.’⁷²

Men of high education frequently expressed the wish not be commissioned. And, once again, this often overlapped with regional and social differences. In Scotland, graduates made up 26 per cent of potential officers but 41 per cent of potential officers who expressed themselves ‘non-desirous’.⁷³ Graduates may have rejected commissions because those who did national service after university also tended to be grammar school/redbrick university men who were ill-at-ease with the army for social reasons.

Among those who wanted a commission but failed to obtain it, some were stoical. A few returned to their own regiments as clerks and thus saw their own papers: ‘an NCO of above average intelligence but does not appear to take the army seriously’.⁷⁴ David Batterham found out that the selection board had regarded him as a ‘half-convinced conscientious objector’.⁷⁵ Tony Dipple regarded his WOSB verdict – ‘I had no personality and could not express myself’ – as fair.⁷⁶ David Henderson had been company sergeant major in the cadet force of his grammar school. He was rated as a potential officer but failed the War Office Selection Board: ‘obviously I did not fulfil all the requirements’. He had another try later in his military career and was told that he ‘did not have a wide enough interest in things’. He accepted the decision, signed on as a regular and rose to the rank of sergeant. He felt no bitterness towards officers – even when one of them wounded him with a grenade: ‘Sir, I think I have been hit … I think that I had better lie down, sir.’⁷⁷

Rejection for a commission could, however, be painful and could raise questions in a man’s mind about his own status and background. A. R. Eaton joined the Royal Artillery and was pleased to be put in a potential officers’ course, on the strength of his Queen’s Scout Award – though he also said that life ‘with the toffs’ was less fun than in his original unit and that there were ‘no scraps on the floor’.⁷⁸ His father was keen for him to ‘get on in the army’,⁷⁹ but Eaton’s letters home reflect a growing sense that his family background, which seems to have been comparatively humble, might be a bar to a commission:

I don’t care what Dad says. You have to have one or more of three qualifications before getting the remotest chance of reaching Mons. The most important is the name of your school – a grammar or tech is almost useless. It has to be something good like Brentwood or Harrow or something. Secondly, the recent army record of brothers and fathers – if they have been commissioned of course. Also your own trade or your father’s trade – a builder is no good.⁸⁰

After facing his Unit Selection Board, he wrote: ‘Not much good news this time, I’m afraid. I’ve rather let the family down by failing to get WOSB … CO refused to put me forward after last interview … He said I just wasn’t the officer type – but I should make an extremely good NCO.’⁸¹

The fact that ‘good NCO’ could be a damning verdict says much about the class divisions of the armed forces. A conscript in a cavalry regiment heard that he had been turned down on account of ‘NCO tendencies’.⁸² Peter Mayo was perfect officer material: a rugby player and a Christian, he had been head boy of a major public school and was called up into the marines before he took up his classics scholarship at Cambridge. The only other middle-class man in his hut would have been mortified if he had seen Mayo’s diary entry about him: ‘There is one other RMFVR [Royal Marine Forces Volunteer Reserve] bloke in the hut called Terry J … very nice really but slightly authoritative, if that’s the right word, and he occasionally lays on the “good man” act a bit thick. He would make a very good NCO.’⁸³

John Green wrote to his parents in enthusiastic terms about the early period of his army training: ‘It’s all rather fun here, if you treat it as a big game’; ‘There is a good chance of a commission’; ‘If you play rugger here you can get away with anything.’⁸⁴ He was put in a junior leaders’ platoon and approved of his new companions: ‘The people here, i.e. the ORIs, are very nice all grammar and public school types – one chap in my room has a BA and has just finished a three years research studentship.’⁸⁵ Green, however, failed WOSB and went to Malaya as a private. His letters home suggest a new view of the army and his own social position:

Why do 90 per cent of officers always treat private soldiers as if they were some sort of obnoxious silage? Really some of them I would be ashamed to be seen with in England – they are really revolting in their manners. Still I shan’t meet them in civilian life.⁸⁶

In principle, men who failed WOSB were returned to their original unit and to the ranks. There was often an uncomfortable period in which the army tried to decide what to do with them. Paperwork was sometimes lost.⁸⁷ Robert Miller said that he became a ‘non-person’ after failing WOSB. He worked in the kitchens of his regiment for a while before being sent to train as a clerk.⁸⁸

The army was not indifferent to the fate of men who failed to become officers. The commanding officer of the 14/20 Hussars protested against having all men who failed to become officers returned to his unit:

The great majority of these boys are naturally disappointed and somewhat disgruntled. They therefore need careful handling and individual attention, if the best is going to be got out of them … In fairness to these young men, who must obviously be above the general National Service standard.⁸⁹

Such men were actively encouraged to make their military careers in particular units, or particular jobs, that required a degree of education and that offered some protection from the discomforts and humiliations inflicted on ordinary soldiers. The Educational Corps, where those responsible for teaching soldiers were given the automatic rank of sergeant, was an obvious destination for rejected officers. The Intelligence Corps was another – a brigadier from the corps said in 1960 that it would appeal to educated men (the minimum requirement was a GCE in English language) who had failed WOSB: ‘they would find the atmosphere congenial both in the matter of trades and the type of soldiers serving in the Corps’.⁹⁰

Piers Plowright was such a soldier. Educated at Stowe and waiting to take up a place at Oxford, he failed WOSB and was then posted away from the Fusiliers, into which he had initially been called up, into the Intelligence Corps, which was ‘quite often home for brightish lads not likely to be officers’ and which contained ‘a lot of failed officers’⁹¹ as well as grammar school boys. Plowright was sent to Malaya, where he enjoyed his time as a sergeant in Field Intelligence, though he had a twinge of regret when he came across the ‘very pukka’ officers of the King’s Dragoon Guards: ‘I felt a bit inferior because I had failed to be an officer.’⁹² He then went up to Christ Church, where he felt it ‘odd to be back with the officer class again’.⁹³

Even men who returned to their own units after failing officer selection often ended up in a clerical position that removed them from ordinary regimental duties and that usually brought with it a corporal’s stripes. Some saw refusing such jobs, or the promotion that went with them, as a form of rebellion. Having left a potential officers’ squad, David Baxter became a clerk but he refused any promotion above the rank of private. Andreas Whittam Smith failed WOSB and then decided that ‘if you cannot be the top, be the bottom’ – a double or quits attitude that underlay a successful later career. He refused to be a ‘poncey little pay corporal’ and served out the remainder of his time as a private.⁹⁴

A few national service officers later expressed regret that they had not stayed in the ranks. P. J. Kavanagh felt that the potential officers’ squad at the Armoured Corps training regiment was less friendly than the platoon into which he had originally entered. He wrote: ‘I’ve often wished since I’d said “No” and gone back to my friends; perhaps only because it would have been something to preen myself on. I can only admit it never occurred to me. Chiefly I wanted to get out of the eye of those infernal Policemen.’⁹⁵

At the other extreme were men who tried to become officers more than once and, occasionally, more than twice.⁹⁶ This was true of those who had been graded ‘watch’ at WOSB, and of those who failed their cadet courses but were allowed to retake part of the course or to return at a later date. The commandant of Mons wrote of men ‘whose failings cannot satisfactorily be eradicated by a prolongation of training at OCS but who may well make good if they are given a position of responsibility in their own unit’.⁹⁷ Men serving in the UK or Germany would be allowed back after eight months, or eleven months if serving with the Educational Corps. Men serving overseas could be allowed back after nine months, or twelve months if serving with the Educational Corps. It was therefore, at least theoretically, possible for a man to return to officer cadet school when he had served three quarters of his two-year term.

Some men tried to get a commission even after the full-time element of their national service was over. One went through officer training school but was returned to his unit as unsuitable and trained as a clerk. He then reapplied to go before WOSB and returned to the cadet school, where he failed again after six weeks. He finished his national service as a lance corporal but then joined the Officer Training Corps at university and was eventually commissioned, four years after his first attempt, as an officer in the Territorial Army.⁹⁸ Rodney Giesler had wanted to become a naval officer but failed the medical to get into Dartmouth naval college. He went instead to Pangbourne, a public school that specialized in preparing men for naval careers, but was then called up into the army. He failed to obtain a commission and insisted, perhaps a little too emphatically, that this was much for the best, that he had had a more interesting time in the ranks, that national service officers were ‘dreadful little pip squeaks’ and that officers from smart regiments had, in any case, recognized his ‘cut glass accent’. All the same, Giesler went to some trouble, after his full-time service was over, to transfer into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and eventually get a commission in it.⁹⁹

Background and contacts mattered most when it came to choosing regiments in the army. The smartest cavalry regiments were a world of their own.¹⁰⁰ In 1948, an officer cadet in the Royal Armoured Corps (which incorporated the cavalry regiments) reckoned that a fifth of men in his unit were fellow Etonians but that even Etonians apparently stood little chance of getting into the cavalry without family connections.¹⁰¹ Even, and perhaps especially, men whose fathers were regular officers understood that anyone without a private income should avoid the cavalry.¹⁰² Alan Bexon was a grammar school boy from a middle-class background in Nottingham who joined the 14/20 Hussars. He might have been commissioned but it was made clear to him that he would not be allowed to stay as an officer in the cavalry without independent means and he decided that he preferred his regiment to the prospect of a commission.¹⁰³

There were hierarchies between and within corps. The Royal Horse Artillery (RHA) was most prestigious for officers in the gunners, partly because of its association with the glamour of the cavalry, and only officers who passed out high at Mons could hope for commissions in the RHA. At the bottom of the scale stood units such as the Royal Army Service Corps, seen as relatively easy in which to get a commission.¹⁰⁴

Prestigious regiments had traditions of recruiting officers from privileged backgrounds. They were marked by a sharp distinction between officers and other ranks but by a relaxed egalitarianism among officers themselves. Christopher Hurst, an Etonian who was called up into the Rifle Brigade but then commissioned into a lesser regiment, wrote disapprovingly about the atmosphere of the Lancastrian Brigade training centre, to which he was briefly attached:

Few of these officers were ‘gentlemen’ – the county gentry, wherever they hailed from, normally preferred to be with their own kind in the Guards or cavalry, or in the Green Jackets and a small number of more select light infantry or county regiments, or Highland ones (the Black Watch, especially) if they were Scots. My Barton Stacey friend John Wilberforce, for example, went into the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, a battalion of which his father commanded till his death in action.¹⁰⁵

Simon Raven’s half serious analysis of the ‘English gentleman’ was partly based on his own experience – first as a conscript in the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and then as a regular officer in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, which he recalled thus:

unsmart by ‘Brigade’ [i.e. the Brigade of Guards] standards … below the Rifle Regiments but above most Heavy Regiments of the line … all the regulars (though not all the National Service officers) had been to important public schools, and some of them could boast a vague country house in their family background.¹⁰⁶

One result of this hierarchy was that some regiments ran a surplus of potential officers and exported men to be commissioned in lesser regiments after they had completed their basic training. This was true of the guards. The Rifle Brigade and the King’s Royal Rifle Corps were also difficult regiments in which to get a commission. One national serviceman, who later became a regular and rose to the rank of field marshal, undertook his basic training with a rifle regiment before being packed off to the artillery for the remainder of his service.¹⁰⁷ Denys Whatmore had initially been sent for basic training to the Highland Light Infantry but persuaded the personnel selection officer to have him transferred to the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. He and all his contemporaries were warned that they would have to transfer to other regiments on being commissioned – a decision that aroused particular resentment from the two Etonians in the cohort.¹⁰⁸ The Signals Corps, by contrast, exported almost no officers – only nineteen of 131 men from the corps who passed WOSB in 1956 went to other units.¹⁰⁹

Regiments were allowed – indeed expected – to take account of regional origins and family associations when they chose officers. In theory, the choice was made at the end of officer training and took account of the cadets’ performance as well as the needs of each regiment. In practice, all sorts of personal negotiations took place outside official procedures.

Many were commissioned into particular regiments as a result of intervention by family or friends. Anthony Howard described the circumstances under which he became an officer in the Royal Fusiliers: ‘In my case it was real jobbery. I had a friend who knew very well the colonel of the Fusiliers (she was the mother of an Oxford friend). She put in a word for me with the colonel of the regiment.’¹¹⁰

The expectation that men would have family links with a particular regiment was so strong that Howard’s friend Michael Holroyd invented a ‘Bunbury-style’ uncle to ease his own entry into the Fusiliers – a ruse that may have worked partly because, as an Etonian, he obviously came from the ‘right background’.¹¹¹ Less privileged men were made to understand that the Fusiliers was not for them.¹¹²

John Nott engineered a transfer from the RASC to a more socially acceptable regiment through his aunt, a friend of the Adjutant General.¹¹³ John Barkshire wanted to join the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment because it was famous for the quality of its rugby: ‘a cousin of my father’s was a very great friend of somebody who had recently commanded the regiment and he got me in’.¹¹⁴ Barry Reed was a seventeen-year-old when his uncle, who had commanded a battalion of the Middlesex in the war, suggested that he might join this regiment. Over lunch at the East India Club with the colonel of the regiment, it was agreed that, providing he passed WOSB, Reed would be commissioned into it. The commanding officer of the regiment received other requests to keep an eye on ‘good young men’ who had some family connection with the Middlesex.¹¹⁵

The process by which men were commissioned and then matched up with particular regiments involved informal guidance, pressure and unspoken understandings. John Chynoweth was a grammar school boy and graduate of the London School of Economics. He was disappointed to be called up into the RASC, and felt that his degree in economics might condemn him to a job in managing stores. He managed to transfer to the infantry and to get commissioned into a ‘good county regiment’, but was told that ‘my grammar school education and lack of private income would of course rule out the guards and the cavalry’.¹¹⁶

The authorities repeatedly denied that private incomes were required of officers,¹¹⁷ and men from humble backgrounds did occasionally manage to get commissioned in county regiments, though not in the guards, the cavalry or the Rifle Brigade. Some regiments, particularly the humbler ones, made allowances for national service officers, who were not expected to appear in mess kit or to entertain lavishly; life was less expensive in units serving overseas, especially if they were on active service.¹¹⁸ All the same, officers in smart regiments were required to spend money. Those commissioned into the 12th Lancers – an armoured car regiment patrolling the jungle roads of Malaya – were told that two mess jackets (‘to be bought from Rogers’), boots and spurs were essential.¹¹⁹

The army’s view of class was not explicitly linked to money. Many officers would have claimed to regard the son of a country parson whose family had scraped together enough money to pay the fees at Marlborough as a more desirable comrade than the son of a wealthy industrialist – though, in practice, English public schools ensured that the sons of industrialists often learned to act as if they were the sons of country parsons. Privileged boys rarely discussed money and it was left to grammar school outsiders to suggest that one needed £300 a year to contemplate a commission in the guards,¹²⁰ or that it took £6,000 of education, spread over two generations, to create an officer in the Rifle Brigade.¹²¹

In theory, regiments did not offer national servicemen commissions until they had finished their officer training. In practice, regiments had often made contact with potential officers long before this. Smart regiments, in particular, chose some of their officers before they even joined the army. In 1954, the Rifle Brigade and the King’s Royal Rifle Corps admitted that they had offered provisional commissions to seventeen men, nine of whom were still at school.¹²²

The Household Division (i.e. the five regiments of Foot Guards and the Household Cavalry) more or less openly recruited its officers from school. The official history of the Grenadier Guards was explicit about the regiment’s policy:

regimental headquarters kept files on potential officers, some of whom were put down for the Regiment at birth. Since everyone had to do National Service, there were plenty of applications to join the Regiment … The Lt Colonel Commanding the Regiment … examined the candidates’ housemasters’ reports and interviewed them at schools such as Eton.¹²³

When the guards were pressed about their officer recruitment, they explained:

There is no deliberate policy to exclude those who were not at public schools from commissioned rank in the Brigade of Guards nor is any test that is different from that applied for admission to all other regiments carried out.

The Guards spend much of their service in London. A single junior officer finds life in London on his pay most difficult and dull and can have a much better time on it elsewhere. A married officer finds it almost impossible to live on his pay in London at all. This deters candidates from applying who have not got private means. Since people who can afford to do so usually send their sons to public schools, this virtually confines entrants to those educated at public schools. The remedy is of course a substantial London Allowance.¹²⁴

This was a disingenuous – and, given the number of officers from county regiments who were enjoying free accommodation in Korea, tactless – letter. There was no formal rule that officers should have private incomes but guards officers were sometimes required to buy expensive clothes or to join the Guards Club. The regimental history of the Grenadiers explains:

mess bills on Queen’s Guard [i.e. for those undertaking ceremonial duties in London] were large, making life difficult for those who had no private income … Fathers sometimes sought the guidance of the Lieutenant Colonel on what allowance they should give their son. He would reply ‘Give him a car and enough money to run it.’¹²⁵

A few brave fathers ignored the suggestion that they pay their sons an allowance and some guards officers, especially those who served outside the UK, managed without private incomes. Martin Morland, who was commissioned into the Grenadiers, said: ‘I think they quite like sort of reasonable young men to go into what sounds like a snooty outfit where you have to be rich … You didn’t actually need a private income – you just stayed away from nightclubs and didn’t have a fast car.’¹²⁶ Morland’s definition of ‘reasonable young men’ seemed to mean those whose families belonged to the noblesse de robe rather than the noblesse d’épée (his father was an ambassador) and those who had not been to Eton (he had been to Ampleforth). ‘Reasonable young men’ were certainly expected to be well-connected: Martin Morland and his brothers were introduced to the Grenadiers by the future Duke of Norfolk, who had married a cousin of their mother’s.

Regardless of explicit financial requirements, guards officers were always drawn from a narrow social circle. One Etonian wrote to his old housemaster that Caterham – the guards depot – would be ‘rather like starting school again’.¹²⁷ There were times when almost half of the men recruited to the Household Division as potential officers were Etonians, as were twenty-five out of thirty-eight national servicemen who held commissions in the Grenadiers in the early 1950s.¹²⁸ Potential officers were recruited directly into Brigade Squad, which meant, in effect, that commissions were reserved for men who had some contact with their regiment before they were called up. There was little chance that anyone who joined a lesser regiment could transfer to the guards and no chance that anyone who joined as an ordinary guardsman or trooper (without being in Brigade Squad) could be commissioned into the guards.¹²⁹

John Milne found out about the impassable frontier that divided guards officers from other soldiers when he was called up in 1948. He asked to be posted to the Scots Guards: ‘that’s the toughest regiment there is, it’ll do me no harm to go in there’. However, after around three weeks in the regiment, he was identified as a potential officer and told to leave: ‘Because there was at that time a rule in the guards, once you’ve been a private in the guards, you cannot be an officer in the guards. And I was classified as a potential officer, therefore, “Sorry young man, off you go.” ’ Milne completed his basic training with the Royal West Kent Regiment and was commissioned into the Gordon Highlanders.¹³⁰

Men who joined the guards often had a family link with a regiment – one assumes that guardsmen made up the 2 per cent of potential officers who, surveyed about how their parents would feel if they were commissioned, answered that they would ‘take it as a matter of course’.¹³¹ Hugh Currie joined the Coldstream Guards in April 1948 after his godfather had introduced him to the colonel of the regiment.¹³² Tom Stacey’s father secured him an interview with the colonel of his own regiment – the Scots Guards – during his last holiday from Eton.¹³³

Personal and family links connected smart schools with smart regiments and grand families. Bruno Schroder, of the banking family, went from Eton to the Life Guards because his grandfather had been a colonel in the regiment. His aunt had married Geordie Gordon-Lennox, who recruited his fellow Etonians for the Grenadiers.¹³⁴ Later Schroder employed Richard Abel Smith, son of Henry Abel Smith,¹³⁵ a colonel who had apparently had a tendresse for the mother of Viscount Weymouth and who had tried to recruit Weymouth himself into the Horse Guards.¹³⁶

The preponderance of public school boys in the guards was not in itself surprising: the same would have been true of many regiments. More striking was the absence of some schools. Wellington was the most military school in the country, but, precisely because so many of its boys were the sons of professional officers who lived on their pay, they were rarely rich or used to a grand social life. Relatively few boys from Wellington went into the guards. Monmouth was the only institution in Wales that might have been defined as a public school and it had an association with the Welsh Guards – its headmaster had been chaplain to the regiment during the war. However, no boy from the school seems to have been commissioned into the guards.¹³⁷

There was a certain democratization of the officer corps in the 1950s and this was reflected in an increase in the number of northerners being commissioned between 1951 and 1954. Egalitarianism was not an end in itself for the military authorities during this period and, indeed, the main changes in officer recruitment occurred after the Conservative victory in the 1951 election: a victory that meant, among other things, that an Etonian ran the War Office. In part, the social change in the officer corps may have been a by-product of educational change. As the Butler Education Act made its effects felt, increasing numbers of grammar school boys had the educational qualifications to become officers and thus the number of grammar school officers would have increased even if the proportion of eligible candidates from such backgrounds who were commissioned stayed the same. The last few years of national service recruits were largely composed of men who had deferred their service and, because public school boys mainly went into the forces at the age of eighteen, this meant that conscript officers after about 1957 were more plebeian. The last national service officer – Richard Vaughan – was born into a prosperous working-class family (his father was a cabinet maker) and had left grammar school at sixteen to train as an accountant before being commissioned, in early 1961, into the Pay Corps.

The army also had pragmatic reasons for democratizing its officer recruitment because it needed to recruit more northerners to create an appropriate officer corps for the Territorial Army. Finally, the armed forces seem to have come to value technical skill (of the kind often possessed by grammar school boys) rather more. As national service came to an end, they realized that there were a few technical jobs that were particularly hard to fill and their final bids for national service officers revolved largely around men who had degrees in technical subjects.¹³⁸

The democratization of the officer corps as a whole did not touch the smartest of regiments. The Household Division remained a law unto itself. Auberon Waugh appeared before the War Office Selection Board after having been through Brigade Squad as a trooper in the Horse Guards. He recalled:

No winds of change were blowing through the regimental offices, but at WOSB we were given to understand that it was by no means automatic nowadays for ex-public schoolboys to be appointed to a commission. The interviewing officer let it be understood that he much regretted this new arrangement but I thought I detected a note of dishonesty in the sentiment and I launched into a deeply insincere harangue about the virtues of the new people coming up from the grammar schools and provincial universities.¹³⁹

At least so far as his own regiment was concerned, Waugh had no reason to be worried. Commissioning policy in the household regiments was untouched by democratization. Welsh Labour MPs, who kept a suspicious eye on the officer intake of the Welsh Guards, extracted the admission that, between 1953 and 1963, the regiment had not commissioned a single officer who had not attended public school.¹⁴⁰

The association of certain regiments with a certain social milieu or with particular families was so strong that men could feel compelled to obtain commissions. This was reflected in the case of Peter Basset, whose father had been an officer in the Welsh Guards during the war and who was himself destined for this regiment. Shortly before the end of the course at Eaton Hall, a sergeant major read cadets a list of their postings. Basset was told that he was going to the Middlesex Regiment. He insisted that there must be a mistake and, when the sergeant major repeated the posting, ‘his face went as white as a sheet’. It was revealed that Basset had been the victim of a joke – he was, indeed, to go to the Welsh Guards.¹⁴¹ However, the joke seems to have shaken Basset and shortly afterwards, during a Christmas ball, he shot himself. He had apparently left notes suggesting that he had let his family down, and a fellow cadet told an inquest that he ‘was worried about getting back into the Welsh Guards, and said it would be a way of thanking his father for all the kindness shown to him’.¹⁴²

The case aroused much interest – it seems to have inspired a scene in Andrew Sinclair’s autobiographical novel of national service in the guards.¹⁴³ A tribute to Basset was published in The Times by Field Marshal Alanbrooke – the fact that an eighteen-year-old cadet should have his obituary written by one of Britain’s most eminent generals probably illustrates the burden of expectation under which Peter Basset had laboured.¹⁴⁴

Basset’s friends and family grieved but they did not rebel against the army. Twenty years after Peter’s death, his mother edited a collection of religious writings ‘which have helped me through some sad times’. The book was dedicated ‘To my husband Ronnie and my son Peter’.¹⁴⁵ Peter Basset’s elder brother remained as a regular officer in the Scots Guards. Shortly after the suicide, the cadets were paraded in front of a sergeant major – a ‘foxy faced bastard’ – who had given Basset a hard time. He said that they needed to put the death behind them and move on. Spontaneously the cadets shuffled half a pace forward towards the NCO, but the moment passed and order was restored.¹⁴⁶ The cadets went home for Christmas and most of those who had been contemporaries of Basset’s were commissioned into their regiments within a few weeks.

Two weeks later, a second cadet – George Ellis, who had been a friend of Basset’s – also shot himself. He left a note that was read to the inquest at the request of his parents:

I have had every care lavished on me. All my life I have been unable to look after myself and I have had to rely on one asset – my personal charm – to get me through life. My body and mind are quite immature and I am not fit to live, let alone lead men. The reason for my decision has nothing to do with Eaton Hall or home. It is my fault alone. I have been in positions of authority and I am not fit to do it and I am thankful that I will not get men killed. God bless my parents.¹⁴⁷

The captain of Ellis’s platoon said that the cadet was a ‘little serious but well liked by his comrades’ and that he had intelligence but ‘lacked drive’, mainly because he was young, ‘mentally and physically’.¹⁴⁸ Ellis’s father could explain the death only as being an example of suicide spreading ‘like measles’.

The cases aroused more discussion than most national service suicides – partly because of the social position of the victims. Eaton Hall, ‘which through no fault of its own has recently come into the news’, was opened to the press in January 1954.¹⁴⁹ The suicides were the subject of questions in parliament – though the government insisted that the cases revealed no problem with officer training.¹⁵⁰ Many men who passed through Eaton Hall heard stories about Basset and Ellis, and some believed that there had been later suicides.¹⁵¹

National service officers themselves discussed suicide by their comrades. John Bingham shared a room at Mons with a man who hated the course and had been carried on to it only because of his public school background:

Then, one weekend, halfway through the course, G. went on a visit to his home. He never came back. He took a shot-gun, walked through the garden into the trees and there, in a patch of bluebells, he killed himself. He had only a few weeks more to do at OCTU.¹⁵²

Bingham thought that men such as G. should be ‘weeded out … or placed in low pressure positions’, but he opposed ‘a general softening up of training’.

‘G.’ sounds remarkably like John Julian Hurd – son of the Conservative MP Anthony Hurd and brother of the future minister Douglas Hurd, who had himself recently completed national service as an officer in the Royal Artillery. Julian Hurd had gone home to celebrate his mother’s birthday. She wrote in her diary: ‘a lovely morning – all rather late getting up – J decorated my chair with a charming bunch of flowers’. The next day she wrote: ‘Julian shot himself in the wood this afternoon.’ Anthony Hurd told an inquest: ‘He was a boy who read and liked the classical philosophers, poetry and the Bible, a boy who thought deeply for himself, and I can only feel that he must have found the conditions of his recent life unbearable.’¹⁵³

Julian Hurd’s mother wrote in her diary that her son had ‘died from what might be called an overdose of beauty after having been starved of it for so long’. Anthony Hurd met the commandant of the Mons Officer Cadet Training Unit. He refused the offer to visit Mons, thinking that such an occasion would degenerate into a ritual inspection. He sought a meeting with Harold Macmillan, when Macmillan was Minister of Defence, to discuss the interests of national servicemen.¹⁵⁴ He does not seem, however, to have made any direct reference to his son: in all his public statements, Hurd père focused on the conditions of working-class men who served in the ranks.

A national service officer was generally commissioned about six months after being called up. If he was sent to the Far East, he spent a month travelling there and back and probably a bit of time hanging around and/or undergoing further training. The War Office reckoned it got eighteen months of ‘useful service’ from officers who served in Britain or Germany, that this figure dropped to between twelve and fifteen months for men who served overseas and might fall as low as nine months for men who served in Malaya.¹⁵⁵

Almost all national service officers (97.4 per cent in one survey, against 87.4 per cent of other ranks) said that they had enjoyed their service.¹⁵⁶ This may simply have reflected the fact that officer selection was designed to pick men who were likely to express positive views of the armed forces. In the summer of 1956, The Times interviewed a group of undergraduates who had just finished their national service as officers. There were ‘no chronic malcontents’ and only one of them ‘felt that most of the talk about the “good effects” of national service was nonsense’. All the same, the former officers agreed that there was much time wasted in the army, though they thought that this was a problem for other ranks – none of them suggested that they themselves had wasted their time. They also felt there was not enough real training and that insufficient effort was made to explain the purpose of national service: ‘the National Service Act, uninterpreted, makes the intelligent man rebel and the unintelligent man try to get through their two years with as little effort and trouble as possible’.¹⁵⁷

For a few national servicemen, becoming an officer was socially useful. John Sutherland described his own time as a second lieutenant in the Suffolk Regiment as conferring ‘brevet membership of the upper classes’ which seems in part to have helped him overcome the disadvantages of Colchester Grammar School and Leicester University.¹⁵⁸ Christopher Farrell was probably more typical of grammar school officers than Sutherland. He came from a middle-class family in Huddersfield and, looking back as a successful, 26-year-old salesman for a large company, he described the public school boys that he had met during his national service thus:

It was a different kind of education altogether. They’re just as intelligent as I am, but I don’t suppose they’ve got GCE in more than two subjects. They concentrated much more on sport. I share rooms with three public school boys now, and they had a well known cricketer for their coach, and he used to belt them with a cricket bat when they did anything wrong. That’s the sort of thing we should have had more of at Marburton College. My old man doesn’t believe in public schools. He’d probably say that I’m snobby about this, but he doesn’t know. As far as I can see, it’s no good coming to London unless you’ve been to public school.¹⁵⁹

Many of an officer’s duties in a peacetime army were not, in fact, so different from those of a prefect in a public school. Officers inspected parades and imposed punishments, usually doing both under the thinly disguised guidance of their sergeants, who were almost always regular soldiers. Auberon Waugh was probably not exaggerating much when he wrote: ‘If any trooper complained of the food, one would taste it delicately from his plate, roll the revolting substance round in one’s mouth and say “absolutely delicious!”, just as nannies had always behaved with sour milk in my childhood.’¹⁶⁰

Shortly after he was commissioned, P. J. Houghton-Brown wrote to his mother about the novelty of his status. He had to get used to being saluted and having someone else to press his trousers: ‘I must cultivate the army way of making a small job last a long time. This afternoon I had a little to do, did it in a quarter of an hour, and have been trying to keep out of people’s way ever since.’¹⁶¹ Officers endured the arcane rituals of the mess and watched in fascination or horror as nights degenerated into well-rehearsed drunkenness. Bruce Kent recalled the majors in his tank regiment who were ‘painfully interested in Mess games’.¹⁶²

On active service, officers and other ranks might mix quite closely – ‘you slept with your sergeant, if you see what I mean’.¹⁶³ Relations might also be reasonably close in the commandos, where officers and other ranks underwent some of their training together, and where officers sometimes drank with the men under their command. Some regiments, though, insisted on the sharpest possible divisions. An officer of the Coldstream Guards – on an exercise in the desert – was rebuked for letting his men see him bathing.¹⁶⁴

A few relations were so close that the division between officers and other ranks could not shake them. Identical twins performed their national service in the Queen’s Royal Regiment in Malaya: one as an officer and one as a private. The NCOs of the regiment, who could not tell the two men apart, saluted them both when they were out of uniform; the senior officers were said to disapprove of the fact that the brothers socialized together.¹⁶⁵ More commonly, officers got sudden, and poignant, glimpses of life on the other side when they encountered someone they had known in a former life. D. F. Barrett was commanded in Korea by an officer with whom he had undergone basic training.¹⁶⁶ Men from humble backgrounds who had been commissioned, and men from privileged backgrounds who served in the ranks, would occasionally have awkward conversations with men whose rank was different but whose social background was similar. John Hodgson was a grammar school boy from Barnard Castle who became an officer in the Durham Light Infantry, which was, to his father, ‘a social leap beyond his comprehension’. When Hodgson took a draft of men out to Suez, he found that one of them was an old friend from childhood football games.¹⁶⁷ A private in the Rifle Brigade who had spent a year at Eton before being expelled attracted the occasional perplexed glance from national service officers who thought that they recognized him.¹⁶⁸

National servicemen on both sides of the divide were less likely than regulars to regard the separation of officers and other ranks as natural. The army carried out a survey into how regular and national service officers were regarded by their commanding officers. Given that senior officers were always regulars, it is not surprising that they tended to rate regulars slightly more highly but there were only two areas in which the two kinds of officers were seen as very different. Regulars performed better when it came to ‘getting on with other officers’; national servicemen performed better when it came to ‘being approachable for the men’.¹⁶⁹

Most men, however, were struck by the social portcullis that cut across their life when officers and other ranks were divided. After he had been commissioned, Bruce Kent caught a glimpse of ‘Paddy’ – a friend of his from basic training and a fellow Catholic: ‘I felt like Black Beauty watching poor old Ginger on his way to the knacker’s yard. Our eyes met in recognition and that was that.’¹⁷⁰ John Peel claimed that his sister’s fiancé, a second lieutenant, insisted that Peel, a private, should call him ‘sir’ during family gatherings.¹⁷¹

The fact that officers enjoyed the services of a ‘batman’ or ‘soldier servant’ was often denounced as an example of ‘outdated’ class privilege in the armed forces – though, in truth, officers sometimes found that their batman was the only non-commissioned serviceman they got to know.¹⁷² One of the few friendships to flourish across the ranks was that between Anthony Howard and his batman, who was charged, among other things, with waking Howard from his afternoon siesta if the commanding officer undertook an inspection. The servant in question was John Ferris – a boy from a tough working-class background who had signed for a three-year engagement. He was hardly a typical fusilier – though he had left school at fifteen, he eventually became a lecturer in social policy at Nottingham University – and Howard, a left-wing journalist, was hardly a typical infantry officer. Howard and Ferris liked and respected each other and remained friends after they left the army, but there were limits to how far men from such different backgrounds could really know each other, and Ferris – the working-class sociologist – seems to have been more aware of these than Howard.

Even the annual ceremony when officers waited on their men at Christmas did not really mean that the system of ranks had been challenged. Peter Nichols recalled his experience in the air force:

We were served our dinner by the officers, the cruellest insult service life had to offer. These public-school boys not much older than ourselves looked as embarrassed as we felt, and carried out this repellent ritual with a show of bravado while we sat at wooden mess-tables muttering ‘thank you sir’.¹⁷³

In any case, as the more socially astute national servicemen noticed, officers ate their ‘dinner’ in the evening and were not, therefore, inconvenienced much by having to serve meals at noon. In Egypt in 1953, officers of one regiment served the other ranks before retiring to their own mess, where they resumed their normal lives: ‘The dinner ended up with a nut fight but a cease fire was ordered when a subaltern hit the 2 i/c on his bald head.’¹⁷⁴

There were many men who enjoyed their time as national service officers and some who stayed on or returned to the army after university as regulars: two of them rose to the rank of field marshal. However, many national service officers never quite accommodated themselves to the ways of the regular army. Simon Coke enjoyed being an officer in the Coldstream Guards, but, when he was offered a regular commission with the regiment, he refused because he had come to dislike the ‘anti-intellectualism and relative snobbery of the regular officers’.¹⁷⁵

Even men who enjoyed their service often came to feel uncomfortable with the life of an officer, which seemed so archaic. W. S. B. Loosmore was commissioned as a national service doctor and sent to Malaya. He had an unusually interesting time. He found a four-foot cobra in his ‘thunder box’,¹⁷⁶ limped back from a rugby game with a team from 22 SAS¹⁷⁷ and once noted in his diary: ‘I never thought that I would find myself suturing a Gurkha bottom in full evening dress on a Saturday evening.’¹⁷⁸ All the same, the rituals of army life began to grate. His commanding officer once sent him a note drawing his attention to mess rule 283, which specified that decanters should be passed ‘distal to the glass, not proximal to it’.¹⁷⁹ Most of all, though, he was anxious that he might have come too close to the world of the regular officer: ‘I am worried because this army nonsense does not seem to me to be such nonsense as it once did. I must be losing my sense of values.’¹⁸⁰