10

Other Ranks

Your rank?

Well. That’s a matter of opinion.

Exchange between officer and Private James Bailey

(Carry on Sergeant, 1958)

In the regular armed forces, the army especially, other ranks knew their place. They and their officers were separated by a system that a national serviceman described as ‘social apartheid’.¹ They wore different kinds of uniform, ate in different places, travelled in different classes on the railway. If they were brave, they received different medals. If they were ill, they were treated in different wards. If they were captured, they went to different prison camps. One national service officer conducting an equipment inspection discovered that his camp had pokers (other ranks, for the use of) and pokers (officers, for the use of): the former had loops on the end and the latter had knobs.² For many regular servicemen, the division seemed natural. Other ranks were drawn almost entirely from the working class – often its most underprivileged element; officers were drawn from the upper-middle class and landed gentry. Other ranks had almost all been educated at elementary school and left at the earliest opportunity with no qualifications; officers were almost invariably educated at public school to the age of eighteen.

National service blurred the social boundaries of the armed forces. The very notion that a serviceman might be a ‘potential officer’ was disturbing to a culture in which it had previously been assumed that men were born on one side or the other of the divide between commissioned and non-commissioned status. The air force, in particular, sometimes treated ‘Potential Officer Material’ (POM) as though it were a social category in itself, which bore only a tangential relation to officer status. Increasing the ‘POM requirements’ was used to ‘regulate the flow of high ability candidates’ for skilled jobs rather than as a means of getting more officers.³

Some working-class national servicemen did recognize that their natural place was in the ranks – though the mere fact that they commented on the distinction suggests that they did not take it entirely for granted. Leslie Ives was a good soldier in a ‘good regiment’ (the Green Howards) and he endured the rigours of jungle warfare in Malaya with stoicism. All the same, he never held any rank above that of private: ‘My mates and I had about as much chance of becoming officers as becoming king.’⁴

For other conscripts, used to more subtle and flexible social structures in their civilian life, the sharp divide between officers and other ranks seemed incongruous. Karl Miller recalled that ‘the Army had yet to develop a middle class, and the sergeants’ mess was no approximation to one.’⁵ To put things more precisely, the armed forces lacked much sense of the densely inhabited social borderlands that encompassed men whose origins ranged from the upper end of the working class to the middle of the middle class.

The population of these social borderlands increased during the period of national service. This was partly because the Butler Education Act meant that a growing proportion of young men had stayed on at school beyond the minimum leaving age. Some of these were highly qualified – part of the joke in the exchange quoted as the epigraph to this chapter comes from the fact that Private James Bailey (B.Sc. Econ.) would have been better educated than any officer in his training regiment, though connoisseurs of educational snobbery would recognize that he had been to the ‘wrong’ kind of university. More commonly, however, grammar schools produced youths educated to the age of sixteen and equipped with the General Certificate of Education – young men who were too well educated to fit comfortably in the ranks but not usually well educated enough to be seriously considered for a commission. The post-war years also saw an increase in the number of apprentice-trained, skilled workers and these too – men with a strong sense of the dignity and autonomy that ought to attach to skilled work – were often uncomfortable in the forces.

The complicated hierarchies of civilian life intersected with, and exacerbated, some divisions of military society. Rank, the thing that mattered most to the regular forces, cut across education, the thing that mattered most to middle-class conscripts, and skill, the thing that mattered most to many working-class ones. The role and status of NCOs was affected by the fact that so many educated men earned a stripe in return for doing white-collar jobs in the forces. The relations between the services – and within the various elements of each service – were changed by the fact that so many men valued postings that offered the opportunity to practise a skill rather than to display conventional martial virtues. Finally, the existence of national service meant that the most important division in the armed forces – one that overlapped with divisions of education, skill and respectability – often came to be that between conscript and regular.

The status attached to ‘other ranks’ varied from one service to another. Gulfs between officers and ‘men’ were sharpest in the army, especially in the smartest of regiments. Cavalry regiments, in particular, were effectively run by NCOs, and other ranks had little to do with officers.⁶ Relations in the navy varied with ship. On a minesweeper, relations were of necessity less formal and distant than they would be on an aircraft carrier.

It was in the air force that the ‘social apartheid’ of the forces was most likely to break down, and relations between officers and other ranks were largely determined by how close they got to an aeroplane. After the war, many RAF officers never left the ground, and ground officers, who lacked any obvious technical skill, seem to have had little respect for other ranks and to have commanded even less from them.⁷

Things were different when it came to men who actually flew. The rough camaraderie that had grown up during the war sometimes persisted after 1945. One airman remarked: ‘I found the ex-flying type of officer much friendlier and less rank conscious than the non-flying types.’⁸ Even those who never served as aircrew (and the great majority did not) might occasionally talk to pilot officers on terms that implied some degree of mutual respect. Radio operators and men in control towers, by definition, spent much of their time talking to pilots, who were almost always officers, and this created a strange democracy of the airwaves. Alan Sillitoe noticed that his working-class Nottingham accent mutated into something more ‘neutral’ as he spoke on the radio.⁹ Don Wallace, called up in 1952 and rising to the rank of corporal, wrote that ‘Control tower work was probably the next best thing to being in air crew, as we were involved with flying procedures and talking to the pilots, either face to face or instructing them over the R/T.’¹⁰

Flying could be a leveller, even for men who were not meant to fly. While private soldiers spent much of their forty-eight-hour leaves dozing in railway carriages or hitching lifts to get home, airmen could sometimes scrounge trips in aeroplanes. This involved a degree of complicity between officers and other ranks. Harold Evans once got from Wiltshire to Manchester in the gun turret of a Lancaster bomber on a ‘training flight’ that had been fixed up by an officer who also lived in Manchester.¹¹ Jimmy Reid, a card-carrying Communist, was surprised and disarmed when the commander of his base offered to get him flown up to Scotland to attend a wedding.¹² At a time when junior officers in the army might insist that a private in their hockey team should return to base in the back of a truck rather than sitting in the same car as themselves, an air vice marshal occasionally turned up at aerodromes and offered to give non-commissioned national servicemen a joy ride in a Harvard trainer.¹³

The distinction between conscripts and regulars sometimes overlapped with that between NCOs and privates, or men who held the equivalent rank in the other services. Most national servicemen ended their military careers as privates and most NCOs were regulars – this was especially true of senior NCOs, sergeants and warrant officers. Indeed the need to train and organize national servicemen speeded up the promotion of regular NCOs, especially from the rank of corporal to that of sergeant.¹⁴

In 1949, an army report concluded that something between 10 per cent and 30 per cent of conscripts had become NCOs by the end of their service. The careers of the majority of them stopped at the rank of lance corporal.¹⁵ Most men obtained promotion late in their service, and therefore the army expected that the proportion of NCOs among conscripts would drop as service was reduced to eighteen months.

The proportion of national servicemen who became NCOs was changed, first, by the Korean War. This had a direct effect on some regiments. In the summer of 1950, over half of the 1st Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment were national servicemen, but among these only two men had reached the rank of full corporal.¹⁶ The regiment’s posting to Korea brought rapid change. The intensity of fighting required NCOs with quick wits rather than with the more ponderous qualities of regulars who were used to presiding over parades and kit inspections. D. F. Barrett, one of the men eventually promoted to corporal, wrote in December 1950: ‘the situation within the platoon is that our Regular Army mentors are literally fading away before our eyes’.¹⁷ Even in Korea, however, there were limits. Barrett believed that it was impossible for men in his own regiment to rise beyond the rank of corporal.

The effects of Korea were felt even by conscripts who never went to the Far East. In response to the war, national service was extended to two years in September 1950 and this meant that men had more time to get promoted. Furthermore, the average age of conscripts increased in the 1950s, partly because the age at which most men were registered crept up and partly because increasing numbers of men came into the forces after having deferred to complete apprenticeships or to complete their education. In the late 1940s, almost all conscripts had been eighteen (because those who deferred had not yet completed their apprenticeships). By February 1956, about a quarter of all national servicemen (but almost half of all national service corporals and over half of national service sergeants) were over twenty-one.¹⁸

By the mid 1950s, when they made up about half of the army, national servicemen comprised almost a tenth of sergeants and between a quarter and a third of corporals. They were times when most lance corporals were conscripts. On the whole, men did not get promoted to these ranks until relatively late in their service. Most national service lance corporals held the rank for around a year and most corporals did so for about nine months. The excruciating slowness of army bureaucracy could mean that: ‘in the case of national servicemen it often happens that, by the time a promotion is finalized, the soldier has left the Army’.¹⁹

The army made NCOs out of some unpromising material. The authors of a War Office study were disconcerted to find that 8 per cent of national servicemen who had been referred to psychiatrists during basic training because of perceived defects in personality or intellect subsequently became NCOs. A big, breezy man who had worked in a timber yard and was semi-literate became a lance bombardier. The army found it curious that men graded 3 for ‘emotional stability’ had been promoted more frequently than those graded 2 and that NCOs included those who had been deemed to ‘lack even the normal aggressive vigour which would have been thought necessary for the control of men by an NCO, even in peacetime’. The authors of the report discounted the possibility that ‘unstable men and negative weaklings are more likely to be chosen as NCOs’ – though their own survey suggested that the ‘colourless stable’ group performed better than some ordinary soldiers and that a simple ability to stay out of trouble was enough to get a man promotion in some non-fighting units.²⁰

In the early stages of training in the army, some men were rated as Other Rank 4 (OR4), which meant that they were seen as potential NCOs. Between 1952 and 1957, the proportion of recruits in this category increased from about one fifth to just under a third. (See Appendix VIII.) The army did not break down this figure into regulars and national servicemen – though the great majority of those joining in any particular year would have been the latter.

There was, however, not a simple relation between initial rating and promotion, and the number of men who actually became NCOs remained more or less stable as the number who had been rated OR4 increased. This is all the more surprising because, as national service was run down in the late 1950s, an increasing proportion of conscripts would have been close to the end of their service and ought, therefore, to have been ripe for promotion. The reason for this disparity seems to lie partly in the fact that many national service NCOs had a particular kind of trajectory. Most regular NCOs rose slowly through the ranks, passing from lance corporal to corporal to sergeant. Many national service NCOs, by contrast, were relatively well-educated men – who had probably been rated as potential officers (OR1) rather than potential NCOs (OR4) when they first arrived in the army. The social origins and educational level of national service NCOs and national service officers were not always very different. The RAF increased the number of conscripts it commissioned in the early 1950s and, at the same time, reduced the number of its national service sergeants. This seems to have meant in effect that they commissioned men doing jobs, especially in education, that in the army would have attracted a sergeant’s stripes. In 1953 there were just forty-one national service airmen who held the rank of sergeant or above; at roughly the same time there were almost 3,000 national service sergeants in the army.²¹

In the army, a large proportion of national service NCOs, sergeants especially, held their rank because they did some particular job that brought an automatic promotion, rather than because they had risen through the ranks. Few of them exercised direct authority over other servicemen in the way that a platoon sergeant would, and many of them were in non-‘teeth arm’ units. Of the 1,101 national service sergeants in the army in late 1958, 187 served with the Medical Corps, seventy-six with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, 134 with the Pay Corps and 554 (i.e. just over half of the total) with the Royal Army Educational Corps (RAEC).²²

The Educational Corps was, unsurprisingly, the best educated element in the army. Of men admitted into the corps in the first six months of 1956, forty-seven were graduates, seventeen had some higher education, eighty-four had A levels and seventy-three had GCEs. Men of education level 5 and below – who made up the great majority of recruits in every other unit – were entirely absent.²³ Men were not usually admitted directly from civil life. Rather they joined other units, usually infantry regiments, transferred at the end of their basic training and were sent to the RAEC depot at Beaconsfield for a few months of further training in how to teach and how to behave as an NCO. Shortly after passing out, members of the RAEC were promoted to acting sergeant.

Educational sergeants taught all sorts of soldiers – from sullen army apprentices at Arborfield to head-hunting Dayak tribesmen in Malaya.²⁴ Most of them were attached to regiments. This itself could be a strange experience. They lived and ate with other sergeants but their new comrades were older than them and owed their stripes to years of experience and/or performance on the battlefield. Eighteen-year-old conscripts sometimes felt awkward in the presence of their elders – though they seem on the whole to have been treated with amused courtesy. T. C. Sparrow was attached to the Green Howards, where he met Clarence ‘Lofty’ Peacock, who had joined the regiment in 1936, after having served six years with the Coldstream Guards. Peacock had won the Military Medal in Palestine in 1938 and the Norwegian War Cross in 1940. He had also won the Distinguished Conduct Medal and had, in Germany in 1945, effectively rallied an entire company at a time when almost every officer had been killed or wounded. After the war, he had served in Malaya, Cyprus and Hong Kong, and he was said to be the most decorated regimental sergeant major in the army. Peacock greeted Sparrow with the words: ‘They’re promoting them straight from the cradle nowadays.’²⁵

The job of members of the Educational Corps was to instruct soldiers in reading, writing and arithmetic. They also sometimes taught current affairs and more obviously military skills, such as map-reading. Many of their pupils were regulars – partly because educational levels among regulars were lower than those among conscripts and partly because the forces had an interest in educating regulars but were reluctant to waste time in schooling men who would be with them for only two years. The army required men to acquire certificates of education before they could obtain promotion and, indeed, required those who were already NCOs to pass exams if they wished to retain their rank. Sometimes ‘schoolies’ found themselves teaching the very sergeants with whom they messed. Not surprisingly, tests were often discreetly rigged in the candidate’s favour.

A large number of national servicemen also became corporals or lance corporals because they served as clerks. Clerks were usually men who were too well educated to stay in the ranks but too plebeian, obviously lacking in martial qualities or rebellious to become officers. Some of the best-known national service writers – David Baxter, David Lodge, Leslie Thomas – were clerks and several novels were written under the table during the substantial periods when there was not much to do in an army pay office.

A few clerks had dramatic lives. Patrick Wye was called up into the RASC in 1951. He was trained as a clerk and hoped that he might get a posting to Vienna. As it was he was attached to an army unit that was assigned to support army pilots who had, in turn, been attached to the navy. Wye ended up on board the aircraft carrier HMS Ocean. He joined it in Malta, celebrated his nineteenth birthday in the Mediterranean and then sailed to Korea, where he kept records of flying missions.²⁶ Frank Stokes was also a clerk in the RASC. He was sent to Egypt to work in an office processing claims for damages caused by British forces. He was the only non-officer in his department. He wore civilian clothes, lived in a scruffy hotel in Cairo and occasionally slept in the office when he was ‘duty officer’. He visited Haifa on behalf of the Levant Claims Commission and, like other British soldiers, moved out of Cairo quickly in 1951, when the Egyptians abrogated the treaty regulating their relations with the British. He met Armenians, Greeks and Jews and felt that he had had a ‘national service like no other’.²⁷

For most conscripts, clerking was more mundane and could, indeed, seem rather absurd to men who had been brought up on films about commandos and fighter pilots. One man spent his entire time in a tank regiment filing documents without once seeing the inside of tank.²⁸ Robert Miller was trained as a clerk after failing to become an officer. He was taken aside and told that his pre-service experience – working for the Foreign Office – qualified him for a ‘special job’. This turned out to mean writing to officers who had been posted away from the Royal Artillery reminding them to pay their subscriptions for the upkeep of the regimental band.²⁹ Not surprisingly, the great majority of conscripts, and even two thirds of grammar school boys, wanted to avoid clerical work.³⁰

Clerking probably began to seem more attractive as the realities of military life began to dawn on recruits. Clerks sat in warm offices and enjoyed predictable and on the whole undemanding military careers. One recalled that being a clerk in a training company allowed him to ‘see behind the façade of the Army and to join that privileged and small band who live between the layers of the Army’s structure’.³¹ He added: ‘Life in the barracks had settled into a very comfortable routine of 9–5. We had established our place in the Army hierarchy, we knew just how far we could manipulate the system to our advantage, we knew who to be wary of and who were our allies.’³² Alan Watson served as a corporal with the aptitude testing section at RAF Cardington. He and his twenty-five colleagues put their fellow recruits into a variety of categories, but they also understood they themselves belonged to a particular caste:

Our backgrounds were fairly similar … mostly ex grammar school boys with a few graduates doing their deferred national service. So social homogeneity and the nature of the work generated a particular group identity. That suited us well but also meant that we tended to be looked upon as if we were practitioners of some arcane rites (that is, the testing processes), were unreasonably privileged and not ‘real airmen.’³³

The British armed forces were huge organizations spread across the globe and nothing moved without documentary authorization. Clerks sat at the centre of paper webs that let them understand, and sometimes control, events thousands of miles away. Men who had never fired a rifle after basic training might have an oddly intimate acquaintance with violence. A clerk sitting in Shropshire compiled records about, among other things, the deaths of servicemen – mostly, in fact, the product of accidents.³⁴ The Virgin Soldiers contains a scene, apparently based on a real incident, in which a clerk in Singapore reconstructs the life of a dead soldier from the pages of a pay book, stuck together with blood, which he has, against regulations, carried with him into the jungle.

Clerks could be powerful. David Baxter noted how every man in his battalion depended on the goodwill of a pay clerk and how the sergeant in charge of his office had a ‘social round like a duke’.³⁵ A conscript recalled his service in the Ordnance Corps in Eritrea, where a warrant officer in the ledger office ‘really ran the Depot’ with the aid of a corporal ‘who had the form filling all sewn up’.³⁶ Robin Ollington, in the depot of the Warwickshire Regiment, learned to forge the signatures of his officers and was thus able to authorize payments when they had all gone to the races. One day a regular attacked Ollington, who had been sent to arrest him for desertion. When the regular emerged from detention, the regiment was making up a draft of men for Hong Kong. Ollington switched a couple of bits of paper and his enemy was dispatched to the other side of the world.³⁷ A clerk in Malaya intercepted a message that some soldiers might be eligible for leave: ‘it transpired that I was the only person interested’.³⁸ A national serviceman in the RAF records office ran a lucrative criminal enterprise – hinting to men that he could arrange their posting to places near their home if they paid him a few pounds.³⁹

An intelligent man in an office might come to understand the workings of the armed forces better than senior officers. In early 1955, Bernard Barr, a lance corporal in Japan, was stenographer at a meeting of officers to discuss how they would run down forces in Pusan in Korea. A brigadier presided over the meeting and most of those attending were majors and ‘half colonels’. Barr reckoned, however, that his own position had given him a better understanding of what was going on than most of those present at the meeting had. He also seems to have produced a crisper summary of the meeting than the New Zealand major who had acted as its nominal secretary was able to do.⁴⁰

Some clerks exercised a cruel Pinteresque control over their officers. Ageing captains could stay away from the horror of seeking civilian employment only if they kept their paperwork at bay and they could manage this only if some supercilious nineteen-year-old showed them how to do it. Sometimes clerks ran their own world with little interference from their nominal superiors: ‘Officers generally figured very little in our lives, but occasionally they gladdened our hearts by doing something that was monumentally stupid.’⁴¹

Like clerks and army teachers, men in the Intelligence Corps were often given non-commissioned rank and, independently of rank, the corps had special prestige in the eyes of some national servicemen – perhaps just because those whose lives had revolved around the 11-plus were fascinated by the word ‘intelligence’. Seeking to find out why some men did not want commissions in the army, the War Office asked a sample of educated men whether they would prefer a ‘special job’ as a sergeant in the Educational Corps or a private in the Intelligence Corps to being an officer: a significant minority of candidates said they would prefer a ‘special job’.⁴²

Intelligence was, like the Educational Corps, a place in which grammar school boys often mixed with those from public schools who had failed to become officers. Paul Croxson had left grammar school at the age of sixteen and spent two years training as a librarian before being called up into the RASC. He asked to be posted to the Intelligence Corps and repeated this request even when he was told that there was no chance of its being granted. Eventually, to his surprise, he was sent to Intelligence, which was ‘paradise after the Service Corps’. He believed himself to be the least well educated of the recruits in his new unit, and marvelled that their instructor sometimes referred to them as ‘gentlemen’. They were taught cryptography and, as part of the course, were made to do the Daily Telegraph crossword. He went to Germany and was assigned to trying to work out Warsaw Pact orders of battle by listening to radio call signs.⁴³

Some members of the Intelligence Corps were trained in ‘interrogation techniques’ that came close to torture,⁴⁴ and some were posted to areas – Cyprus and Malaya – in which it was said that the security forces sometimes extracted information from captured guerrillas by means that would not have been sanctioned by the Geneva Convention. There is no evidence that members of the Corps were themselves involved in such interrogations, which seem to have been carried out mainly by policemen or by soldiers from ordinary regiments. Indeed members of the Intelligence Corps – usually young, highly educated men who felt ill at ease with conventional military values – often disapproved of the brutality they saw or heard about.

The elite of those who worked in intelligence, which did not just mean those who were members of the army Intelligence Corps, were those who learned Russian. This programme recruited from all three services. It was ferociously difficult. Men who failed to learn fast enough were returned to their unit and even among those who passed there was a division between those considered good enough to be ‘interpreters’ and those who were merely allowed to become ‘translators’. The rewards for those who survived the course were high. Drill was almost forgotten. Students escaped the ordinary drudgery of service life. They were taught by Russian émigrés – ‘refugees and dissidents who had been existing in London bed-sitters until this opportunity to teach their wonderful language arose’.⁴⁵ Some of them performed Russian plays under the direction of actors who had worked with Stanislavsky.

John Ockenden passed out of his linguists’ class at Bodmin and was sent, still as a private, to provide translation services for the War Office in London, where he was allocated to a shadowy agency – MI3(d) – and charged with briefing English and American officers. He wore civilian clothes, commuted from home and entered the War Office by an obscure entrance – the one opposite Horse Guards Parade being apparently reserved for men holding the rank of brigadier and above. Since he and his comrades had no official existence, they had to go to the London Assembly Centre at Goodge Street underground station to receive their pay. The great drama of his military career came in March 1953 when Stalin died and he read black-edged editions of Pravda as his superiors tried to guess the meaning of sinister troop movements around Moscow. Ockenden drew the relatively unknown Khrushchev in the office sweepstake over who would succeed Stalin.

The Russianists subverted conventional military culture in several ways. This was partly because soldiers, sailors and airmen trained together and their sense of being associated with other linguists was often stronger than their sense of belonging to their own service. More importantly, it was because of rank. Some Russianists were commissioned, but in practice rank did not count for much among the linguists. For them hierarchy had more to do with their scores in language tests than with the pips on their shoulder. Officer training, when it did occur, was fairly cursory. John Arnold and some of his comrades were put through a truncated course at Mons – where, he claimed, they were taught how to attack but not how to retreat.⁴⁶

Some men tried hard to get on the Russian course and even walked out of potential officer squads in their enthusiasm to do so. An air force study of men who were educationally eligible for commissions but did not want them found that many wanted instead to be Russianists. Of 198 men who were asked, eleven wanted to be ‘interpreters’ or ‘learn a language’.⁴⁷ As time went on, and perhaps as the purely military aspects of national service came to seem less relevant, many men – even among those who had been officers in smart regiments – expressed regret that they had not learned Russian.

Most of all, perhaps, the Russian course subverted class hierarchies or at least those that mattered in the armed forces. The Russianists understood that they came from different backgrounds. Indeed the difference between the naval coders, generally upper-middle class, and the air force conscripts, largely lower-middle class, was an object of sub-Nancy-Mitford satire in the house magazine of the Russianists. Airmen, apparently, said ‘serviette’ and wrote home: ‘Bill what was in the same form as me at grammar school, was in the last intake.’⁴⁸ In reality, however, more than any other servicemen, the Russianists led lives that revolved around educational ability rather than social class. A study of working-class grammar school boys found that one had rejoined the forces after national service specifically because he wanted to get on the Russian course. He seems to have found being a Russianist comfortable because it placed him in ‘a kind of social no man’s land’.⁴⁹

The linguists were the least martial of all national servicemen; most of them barely touched a gun during their service. Their lives were more like those of hard-working undergraduates than those of soldiers. In other ways, however, the linguists were more closely associated with real warfare than were other servicemen. Their comrades in ‘teeth arm’ units spent most of their time drilling and polishing kit and, except in Korea, even those on ‘active service’ often barely saw their enemy. Linguists, by contrast, were in constant contact with the armies of hostile forces. Those in Europe listened to Warsaw Pact radio traffic, translated Russian documents or thought about Soviet military plans. Some of them were uncomfortably aware of the one thing that most conscripts barely thought about: what would happen in a real war. John Waine went straight into the Russian course after just five days kitting out at Padgate. He never even endured basic training, but felt ‘This wasn’t playing at soldiers. This was for real.’ The Russian émigrés who taught Waine talked about the ‘liberation of the Soviet Union’ and he himself felt ‘should there ever be military action on Soviet territory, one would be there’.⁵⁰ Russianists piled into the Cambridge Arts Cinema on Saturday mornings to watch Soviet films – including documentaries featuring real footage of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. Occasionally, they went on exercises, in which they were, for example, required to translate a diary that was badly written in Cyrillic, dropped in a river and stained with blood.⁵¹

Russianists represented a very small proportion of national servicemen (probably one in 400) – though they were significant because they enjoyed great prestige among other educated men of their generation. Some of them became famous in later life and produced influential, often highly coloured, accounts of their experiences. They were also, with the possible exception of RAF pilots, the only group of men who always looked back on their national service as having been worthwhile.

Skilled working-class men made up a large proportion of conscripts and, towards the end of the 1950s, they probably made up the majority of them. Skilled men, more than any other group, saw national service as an unwelcome interruption of their lives. This was partly because such men tended to defer and hence to enter the forces relatively late, and partly because conscription often interrupted careers at a point when a man might expect to start earning good money. It was also for less tangible reasons. In civilian life, a skilled worker would be treated with respect and exercise a certain control over his working day. The call-up, however, stripped away all the hard-earned privileges of a time-served craftsman. Tools were often a symbol of these privileges, because craftsmen owned their own tools, but conscription hurled them into a world where they did not even own their clothes. A pattern maker remembered that he spent his last afternoon before joining the army cleaning and greasing his tools before hiring a taxi to take them home and stash them in his parents’ spare bedroom.⁵² A national service airman in the late 1940s objected to the fact that the RAF provided cheap tools: ‘Why can’t we buy our own, then we’d be proud of them and look after them.’⁵³

Not surprisingly, skilled workers had strong views about what they wanted to do in the forces and the first desire for many was to stay out of the army. The navy took a few hundred lucky men from among ‘apprentices who were completing their deferment since these would, in general, be eligible to enter into the artificer trades in which there is at present a severe shortage’.⁵⁴

For most, the air force was a more realistic option. The RAF attracted men who wanted to work with machinery, many of whom were skilled workers. In the late 1950s, 48 per cent of RAF conscripts, compared to 32 per cent of those in the army, had undertaken craft apprenticeships; 78 per cent of those in the RAF, compared to 41 per cent of those in the army, had undertaken vocational courses since leaving school.⁵⁵ Relations between the RAF and its skilled conscripts were not always smooth. The sheer number of skilled men joining meant that appropriate jobs could not be found for them all and many had unrealistic views about the possibilities that would be open to them. In addition to this, the RAF noticed, more than any other service, that there was a conflict between a military hierarchy based on rank and a civilian status based on skill. A report of 1948 put it thus:

Many aspects of life in the RAF are resented, not because they are irksome but because they involve either a threat to or a direct assault upon the status of the men concerned. Unfortunately the rank system does not exactly parallel the status system. This means that in the eyes of the man and his fellows it is possible to be of lower rank yet of higher status, than another. There are many examples – the most obvious is that of the skilled fitter who may be an LAC or Corporal yet must take a heavy load of responsibility when compared with the Sergeant or even the Warrant Officer who is doing an office job.⁵⁶

The clash between ‘status’ and ‘rank’ was often one between national servicemen from the skilled working-class and regular NCOs who lacked any specific skill.

The RAF tried to improve its handling of skilled men. It put them in front of panels to determine what skills they had and whether those might be of use during their service. Many men hoped to get into the RAF because it seemed to offer the best chance of pursuing their civilian occupations. Sometimes this became a self-defeating process as the RAF attracted more skilled men than it needed and those who had invested high hopes in their posting were disappointed, particularly when the RAF reserved certain positions for men who signed on as regulars. Nonetheless, the proportion of postings that required technical skill was higher in the air force than in the army. From the early 1950s, the RAF organized recruits into three categories. ‘E’ stood for ‘engineer’ and described men with some specific technical skill, which usually meant apprentice-trained workers. ‘N’ stood for ‘non-engineer’ and designated men, presumably for the most part grammar school boys, who did not possess a specific skill but who were of generally high intelligence and/or educational level. ‘O’ stood for ‘orderly’ and designated men who could perform unskilled jobs.⁵⁷

Within the army, there was a hierarchy of units and postings for other ranks, which was not the same as that for officers. For an officer, the most prestigious posting was usually to an infantry regiment. Many working-class men, by contrast, saw the infantry as the military equivalent of unskilled labour – something that would be an anathema to anyone who had undertaken an apprenticeship. In October 1960, the public relations office of Northern Command issued a press story about Private Birkin, who was then serving with the Sherwood Foresters in Singapore: ‘It did not take him long to decide that Army life was the one for him and he signed on for 22 years.’ Birkin wrote an indignant reply:

You could not have insulted my intelligence more by saying that I would sign on for 22 years in an infantry mob. I hate the army as an institution but if I were to sign on at all it would be in a corps. I am a National Service man and proud of it.⁵⁸

The Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) was probably, so far as most skilled workers were concerned, the best unit – one described it as the ‘elite trades thing of the army’.⁵⁹ Precisely because such units were attractive to working-class men, regulars, who usually had first choice of unit, sometimes snatched up places in them. However, conscripts often came to dominate military postings that required particular skills, usually ones that had been acquired in civilian apprenticeships. In 1954, national servicemen composed 92 per cent of telegraph mechanics in REME, 88 per cent of line mechanics in the Signals and 80 per cent of draughtsmen in the Engineers.⁶⁰ The ideal for many working-class conscripts was to wear an overall rather than a uniform and to operate a machine rather than be ordered around by a sergeant. Unlike their officers, other ranks held technical specialism in high esteem; nothing was more damning than the verdict that a conscript was fit only for ‘general duties’.

Few men learned new trades during national service, and unions lobbied to prevent the ‘dilution’ of skilled work by men who had been trained in the forces. One ‘trade’ was particularly coveted by working-class conscripts: at times, around 40 per cent of recruits told the authorities that they wanted to be drivers. ‘Lorry driving is the most popular occupation with all Service intakes, and is particularly popular with the army samples.’⁶¹ Some young men from the less respectable end of the working class had worked as drivers’ mates or ‘van boys’ before they were called up, and a few of them had already picked up an ability to drive before they were old enough, or wealthy enough, to take a driving test.

For an unskilled but ambitious working-class boy, driving might fit into practical plans for the future. In the 1950s, some considered lorry-driving to be the ideal job. It offered the chance of travel without having to live away from home and it offered the chance to work outdoors without having to endure the hardship of physical labour.⁶² Most of all, lorry-driving meant escaping from the factory or the warehouse. A survey of industrialists in the north Midlands in 1954 discovered that ‘many men who had taken up motor driving in the army, found it difficult to settle down to their pre-service job, refusing to be confined within four walls and seeking a lorry driving job or some out-door equivalent’.⁶³

The sharpest social distinction in the armed forces was often that which separated conscripts from regulars. Just under half of the army and about two thirds of the Royal Air Force was composed of regulars for most of the period of national service. Regular servicemen were often drawn from tough backgrounds and they frequently behaved in ways that offended civilian notions of respectability. Some regular officers used the term ‘old soldier’ as a by-word for laziness, poor educational standards and delinquency,⁶⁴ and contrasted the regular other ranks unfavourably with conscripts. Peter de la Billière, a future lieutenant general who joined up as a private in 1951, wrote:

At that date the quality of the regulars tended to be very low: people volunteered for the army only if they could find no other employment, and many of those who did join up could not read, write or even sign their names. The National Servicemen, on the other hand, embraced all types, and included many with first-class brains.⁶⁵

The commanding officer of an infantry battalion believed that the difference between conscripts and regulars sprang from the fact that the former had plans for their career: ‘This is a great advantage, particularly over the regular soldier, who so often has drifted into uniform and who often has so few ideas about his future.’⁶⁶

The gulf between conscripts and regulars was particularly marked in the toughest of units – the marines and the Parachute Regiment. Both recruited comparatively few conscripts, but for this reason they could afford to be selective and appear to have chosen mostly conscripts with a relatively high level of education – sometimes the kind of men who could have become sergeants in the Educational Corps or even officers. They seem to have done so in part because they needed a certain number of relatively educated men who could read maps, operate radios and handle paperwork.

A regular officer in the marines remembered: ‘In many cases it [national service] rather overshadowed some of the regular marines, who on the whole were not as well educated as the NS men.’ He said that conscripts were often ex grammar or public school boys who were going to university and that they were ‘very high calibre’.⁶⁷ A. R. Ashton, a national serviceman who served in the ranks with the Royal Marines Commandos, was from a minor public school. He was encouraged to join partly because his friends told him that it had ‘none of that army bull’. He remembered his national service comrades as being ‘accountants, printers, management trainees, all from broadly middle or lower middle class backgrounds’.⁶⁸ By contrast, Keith Jessop – a working-class boy who, as a rock climber and later diver, had attributes that one might usually associate with commandos – had difficulty in persuading recruiters to accept his application to undertake his national service in the marines.⁶⁹

The small number of national servicemen who became paratroopers were also relatively well educated. It was, presumably, only during national service that paratroopers might be expected to take time off from assault courses and ‘murderball’ to attend art classes in Farnham.⁷⁰ Owen Parfitt believed that there were only four or five other national servicemen in the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment in 1956. The conscripts behaved well because they did not want to do anything that might damage their education or work prospects when they were demobilized. They were different from the regulars – some of whom were ‘aggressive criminals’.⁷¹ A group of senior officers from the Parachute Regiment said that they had used national servicemen to fill posts in signals and intelligence. They contrasted the conscripts with the regulars who were, as they drily recalled, ‘very live wires’ requiring ‘careful handling’.⁷²

Young conscripts were sometimes more tolerant than senior officers of regular soldiers. Some found regulars to be glamorous or interesting. This was true of men who had fought in the Second World War. Sergeants were relatively old men by army standards and had usually, at least in the first few years after 1945, done some serious fighting to earn their stripes. In Singapore, Peter Burke heard that two of the sergeants in his regiment had trained together and then endured a Japanese prison camp together.⁷³ Burke caught extraordinary glimpses of the life of a regular soldier. He talked to Sergeant Jacques – a kindly and eccentric figure who still used the archaic term ‘volunteer’ rather than regular. Jacques epitomized the odd mixture of smartness and delinquency that often characterized long-service men. He had once hidden in the loft over a barracks in Germany ‘where the unit forgot about him’. He had come down only to eat his meals and had spent most of his time polishing his kit – with the result that he seemed a model soldier when he finally came down.⁷⁴

Old soldiers could evoke the Kiplingesque long-service army that had provided garrisons for the empire. Such soldiers were often heroically indifferent to the concerns of ‘getting on’ and ‘staying out of trouble’ that were so important to post-war civilian life. The soldier who had cheerfully remained a private for his whole career or, more probably, been repeatedly ‘busted down’ from a higher rank for disciplinary offences was a stock figure in national service memoirs. Such men really existed. Private Pannell was a regular with the Royal West Kents who, by the age of thirty-seven, had repeatedly been promoted and repeatedly busted down. When his platoon was ambushed, it was Pannell who rallied the men. He won the Distinguished Conduct Medal.⁷⁵

Serving in North Africa in the late 1940s, Frank Dickinson met Sergeant Shakespeare, who was busted down for chasing a soldier when drunk. Shakespeare had been in the army since the 1930s. When his comrades asked him what he had been before that, he answered: ‘a baby’.⁷⁶ Dickinson also got to know two regulars – Jasper and Yorkie – who had served together for years and owed loyalty to no one except each other. Jasper eventually deserted and was recaptured at Port Said. Dickinson saw him on a glass house detail and flicked him a packet of cigarettes. Jasper winked in reply.⁷⁷

Jasper and Yorkie talked in the patois of the old army, which derived partly from the languages of the countries in which they had served. Leslie Ives remembered words ‘from Hindustani – or other languages that the old sweats used to quote words and phrases from’.⁷⁸ Peter Nichols, serving in the RAF, was also struck by the private language of the long-service regular: ‘From Hindi he had got dekko, tikh hai and turda pani, from Arab bint and shufti, and from the air force increment, inventory, requisition and promulgation.’⁷⁹ Robin Ollington served at the regimental depot of the Warwickshire Regiment in 1948 shortly after the regiment returned from Palestine:

Suddenly as the overseas outposts of Empire went, all these old soldiers came back to England to us and you had, in the sergeants’ mess, these wonderful groups of men who did not even speak English. They spoke these wonderful pidgins – army, Indian, African – and they could talk to each other.⁸⁰

The glamour that was attached to some regulars in the late 1940s dissipated as the Second World War and the Raj began to seem more distant memories. The phrase ‘old soldier’ was itself deceptive. By the mid 1950s, few regulars could trace their military careers back before 1945. Most regulars, especially those – the great majority – who held the rank of corporal or lower, were relatively young. At the end of national service, the average age for a corporal in the British army was just under twenty-eight, for a lance corporal it was just under twenty-four – though men in their twenties who had been knocked around by life might seem old to eighteen-year-old conscripts.

Relations between national servicemen and regulars were sometimes tense. The very existence of conscription could create animosity. Some national servicemen found regulars helpful or sympathized with them: ‘a large majority of them hated it as much as we did’.⁸¹ Some conscripts, however, came to dislike anyone associated with military authority, and some regulars came to resent the complaints about service life and the implication that no one with a choice in the matter would ever sign on: ‘Regulars became more hostile as Nat[ional] Service was phased out and conscripts became a minority. It is fair to say that the reverse was true when my service began and regulars were definitely treated as “inferior”.’⁸² W. Findlay, who served with the Signals, said that there was ‘no problem’ with the regulars ‘but we did tend to look down on them as “thick” ’.⁸³ G. T. Kell, who served with the Medical Corps, recalled:

there were a few regulars. Some of these were sad lonely misfits. A private in his thirties had little rapport with teenagers. These regulars were institutionalized. They didn’t have the responsibility of an NCO and in many cases they had no trade qualifications. Yet they were quite happy taking orders.⁸⁴

In the eyes of many national servicemen, regulars were idle, poorly educated and from ‘rough’ backgrounds. Conscripts often regarded those who volunteered for regular service with pity or contempt. ‘They don’t do it if they have a good home’; ‘They join up just to get the easiest and laziest life going.’⁸⁵ Ray Self said: ‘Most regular RAF men I mixed with had come out of orphanages, no initiative, very institutionalized.’ He remembered a corporal in his early forties who read The Dandy.⁸⁶ Bernard Parke, another airman, recalled: ‘There was rather a gulf between the regulars and the national service men … the latter thought the others to be thick.’⁸⁷

The gulf between national servicemen and regulars in the air force was particularly marked.⁸⁸ In a service that depended on technical expertise rather than physical toughness, it often seemed that there was no job – except flying – that could not be done better by a national serviceman than a regular, and regular airmen lacked the delinquent glamour that attached to some long-service soldiers. An air force report of 1951 commented thus:

Regular and National Service airmen. Apart from certain exceptions … this consciousness of difference is general. Is it due to differences of manners and morals? This is sometimes suggested (for example, by one airman who wrote, ‘I dislike the company of regulars. I was not brought up to only occupy my mind with drink, women etc.’). … One acute example of incompatibility was observed, between NS and Regulars, where a Corporals’ Mess was used exclusively by Regulars, the NS Corporals messing with the NS men, and in this case it seemed probable that the principles of selection of the two groups had been so different as to produce antipathy between them.⁸⁹

In Gordon Williams’s autobiographical novel of national service in the RAF, a conscript sums up the world of the regular: ‘Ritchie knew the type, long service wallah compensating for lack of real possessions by buying small, expensive items like fountain pens and lighters and leather writing cases. Things that could be easily carried. Same reason Jews bought a lot of jewellery.’⁹⁰

Saying what regulars thought of national servicemen is harder because most non-commissioned regulars left no records of their private thoughts. Albert Shippen, a wartime NCO in the Durham Light Infantry who stayed in the army until 1948, suggested that national servicemen were superior to the regular soldiers who stayed on in the army beyond the war: ‘A lot of them were tradesmen. They weren’t what you would call army barmy. They didn’t demoralize you in any way. They used to make you think a bit more.’ Shippen enjoyed his conversations with national service educational sergeants and believed that national service as a whole was ‘one of the best things that ever happened to the British army and without them we would not have survived’. He thought that ‘75 to 80 per cent’ of men in administrative functions where ‘more intelligent people were required’ were national servicemen and that ‘regulars just didn’t have the ability to do these things’.⁹¹

In practical terms, the gap between national servicemen and regulars narrowed during the early 1950s. In February 1950, the minimum regular engagement was reduced to three years. In September of the same year, the period of national service was increased to two years. By the mid 1950s, there were 196,000 conscripts and 193,000 regulars in the army, but as a War Office report put it:

Nearly half of those who are counted as Regulars are on a 3-year engagement. Men who do not re-engage serve for a period which approximates more closely in length to the present period of National Service than to what is normally understood as the period of service of a Regular soldier.⁹²

If we assume that most three-year men were relatively young, then something between a quarter and a third of men of national service age who joined the army signed on for three years.⁹³ The Ministry of Defence recognized that many regulars would not have signed on at all if it had not been for the threat of conscription. In 1955, 85 per cent of regulars were drawn from men of national service age and the ministry estimated that reducing the length of national service by just three months would lose them 3,000 regular engagements per year.⁹⁴

Many men of national service age ‘converted’ in that they signed up for three years before they were called up; others ‘transferred’ to three-year engagements after receiving their papers. In the air force, the total number of transfers and conversions between March and May 1950 was 1,449, it increased to 2,346 in the next quarter and then went up to 7,427 and 7,662 in the two quarters after that (i.e. just after national service had been extended) before dropping back to 6,992 from March to May 1952. For a time, the number of those of national service age who entered the air force on three-year engagements was greater than the number who did so as two-year conscripts.⁹⁵ Men signed on for three years partly to get higher pay and partly because they were often given to understand that signing on for an extra year would give them a wider choice of trade.

The advantages of three-year engagements, however, were inversely proportional to the success of recruitment. The more men that accepted such engagements, the less likely each individual serviceman was to get the posting he wanted. The proportion of three-year men who did something related to their previous occupation seems to have been only minutely higher than the proportion of ordinary national servicemen who did so – though it may be that three-year men would otherwise have been in a particularly weak negotiating position.⁹⁶ In addition to this, the ambiguities created by short-service engagements did not always improve the morale of the forces. Three-year men continued to think of themselves as conscripts and were often described as such by the military authorities. Two-year conscripts, on the other hand, often became even more prone to define themselves in opposition to regulars. The air force suggested that men justified not signing up for three years by denigrating regular service ever more vigorously. The fact that three-year men often started off in the same position as ordinary conscripts highlighted the extent to which ‘volunteers’ were less free than conscripts.

Bill Butler wrote of his service in the Sherwood Foresters:

Apart from the Pioneer Corps there was nothing less attractive than the infantry, it seemed. We were a mixture of those who knew no better, those of little education, some who had had a brush with the law and a sprinkling of regulars who signed on for three years or more. The latter were regarded as completely beyond the pale by National Servicemen.⁹⁷

A significant number of working-class conscripts seem to have believed that postings to the air force and navy were reserved for men who had signed on for an extra year. This was not true – though it is likely that officers who conducted interviews at national service medicals may have found it convenient to let men think that it was. The culture of national service encouraged men to count days and to construct a hierarchy of servicemen around the length of time that men had served and that they had left to serve before they were released. Under these circumstances, a man who had signed on for a whole extra year could seem pitiable and incomprehensible. Two-year conscripts were shocked that men would give up their freedom for such pitiful messes of pottage. Robin Hems, a national service corporal in the Scots Guards and himself from a poor background, believed that some signed on for three years because they smoked and needed the extra pound a week to buy cigarettes.⁹⁸

Some men felt that they had no choice but to sign on for three-year engagements. This was especially true of skilled workers who wanted to avoid an assignment to the infantry or to ‘general duties’. A firm of shipbuilders in Gateshead reported:

Some of the apprentices complain that they are being blackmailed into serving three years. This is a very difficult position for the more intelligent apprentice as, having obtained his Higher or Higher National at the age of twenty-one, there is no hope of him having a position of real seniority if he merely goes for two years’ service. He will often find himself in the charge of longer-term servicemen who have much lower standards of mentality than himself, and he is apt to regard his service with a rather jaundiced eye.⁹⁹

The aviation company BOAC was favourable to national service and closely associated with the RAF (the head of its personnel department had been a wing commander). Though it was not obliged to do so, it agreed to hold open jobs for men who signed on for three years,¹⁰⁰ and was not hostile to men signing such engagements: ‘Generally it is not worth enlisting for more than 3 years if you intend to return to BOAC, but there is something to be said for a 3-year engagement.’ However, it also warned its employees attending national service medicals that ‘The Service Interviewing Officers will probably try to persuade you to volunteer for more than two years, but remember that you have a completely free choice whether you do so or not.’¹⁰¹

The RAF made a deliberate choice to ‘blackmail’ – or at least press – certain kinds of men into taking three-year engagements. A minute of 1957 read:

If he [the recruit] really wants a particular trade then he must think in terms of regular service, the benefits of which should be emphasized. Indeed he should be left with the feeling that he will indeed be fortunate to get the trade he wants as an NS recruit.¹⁰²

Even the institution of three-year engagements, however, did not really help the armed forces to recruit long-term regulars. Most men who did sign for three years left as soon as their time was up. Few national servicemen could be persuaded to sign on for longer periods as the end of their service approached. Indeed, the culture of conscription, and the emphasis on military service as something to be endured for the shortest possible time, seem to have made fewer men contemplate long-term careers in the forces – even men who subsequently said that they regretted not having stayed on often left as soon as their two- or three-year engagement expired. Senior officers despaired at the impossibility of getting their best conscripts to stay on. Peter Jeffreys commanded a regiment that was seen to have done well in Korea and which contained a large number of national service NCOs: ‘The tragedy is that not one single NCO was I able to persuade to become a Regular soldier.’¹⁰³