15

Ending National Service

The Queen’s Shilling was, by 1957, wholly optional. National Service was winding down. Deferment (with the prospect of never having to serve) was there for the asking. You could get medical disqualification with a hiccup – fake or real. It was reverse Kitchener: Your Country Didn’t Need You.

John Sutherland (born October 1938)¹

National service did not end with a bang but with a series of whimpers. The last men went into the armed forces in November 1960 and emerged, having been kept in for an extra six months, in the early summer of 1963. However, interest in national service evaporated as soon as men stopped being called up and it is not clear that anyone, including the military authorities, knew exactly when the last conscript finished his service. In any case, national service had been winding down long before its formal end. No one born after September 1939 was conscripted, which meant that no one was called up at the age of eighteen after 1957. With various expedients, the Ministry of Labour slowed the rate of conscription from 1955.

The number of men drafted to the forces in 1956 – before the formal announcement of the end of national service – was 130,032, which compared to 170,384 men who had been drafted in 1952. The number drafted in 1959, the last full year of conscription, was just over 61,000. Conscripts got older, partly because the government raised the age of registration every year from 1955. Since the call-up age could not increase indefinitely, this in itself made it obvious that national service would have to end reasonably soon. Conscripts also became more plebeian – partly because educated men were increasingly keen to avoid service and the government was increasingly prone to let them do so. The notion of universal liability, which underwrote the long-term legitimacy of national service, had in effect disappeared. Conscripts themselves appreciated that conscription was a ‘dying dinosaur’.² One man, called up in October 1957, remembered: ‘it felt slightly as if they weren’t sure they wanted us and having got us were not sure what to do with us’.³

The National Service Act of 1948 had stipulated that no one born after 1935 was to be called up. This had been changed by Order in Council in 1953 to allow men born up until the end of 1940 to be conscripted. Further extension would have required new legislation.⁴ Few expected such legislation, and ministers discussed the possibility of abolishing national service years before they made a formal announcement in 1957.

For a time, between the Korean War and Suez, it seemed that conscription had settled on stable, though not permanent, foundations. The length of service was set at two years; the need for servicemen was established both by the state of relations with the Soviet Union and by the engagement of British troops in Kenya and Malaya. The Labour party had lost the general election of October 1951 and Winston Churchill formed a Conservative government. Conservative MPs had, with only one exception, voted in favour of the bill to introduce national service and Churchill personally had made much of the issue. The service ministers in the first years of the second Churchill government were unlikely to ask awkward questions about the armed forces. Harold Alexander, who was Minister of Defence from 1952 to 1954, had been Churchill’s favourite general in the war and accepted a post in the government because ‘I simply can’t refuse Winston.’⁵

The apparent stability was deceptive. Two years of service suited the forces well and it was retained after the end of the Korean War, which had been its ostensible justification, but it made conscription in Britain more onerous – especially, as critics pointed out, in comparison with the countries of continental Europe. Two-year service also underlined the fact that the purpose of conscription had changed. Men were no longer being trained to provide a reserve; rather they were being held ready to fight a potential war in Europe or being used to fight real wars in Asia. The implication of this was that national service would cease to be necessary if relations with the Soviet Union improved and/or if Britain reduced its commitments overseas.

The fact that the Labour party was now in opposition meant that left-wing backbenchers could afford to be vociferous. Freed from the responsibility of government, Labour MPs complained about conditions and length of service and hinted that national service as a whole might be unnecessary, but did not feel obliged to propose specific alternatives. Emanuel Shinwell, who, as Secretary of State for War, had introduced two-year service, now called for the length of service to be reduced, and suggested that the call-up be allowed to ‘peter out’ by 1954.⁶

In public, Conservative ministers dismissed attacks on national service but they were in an awkward position. Conscription did not fit easily with the prosperous consumerist society of the late 1950s, for which the Conservatives were happy to take credit. In 1955, the Conservative party did ‘not regard the current two years period as necessarily having come to stay’.⁷

In private, ministers sometimes recognized the difficulty of continuing national service. In 1952, Montgomery had lunch with Shinwell. Afterwards, he sent Churchill a note about their meeting. He believed that Shinwell attacked national service because he needed money – ‘his son has cost him a good bit lately’ – and such attacks made good journalistic copy. Montgomery gave Shinwell a firm talking to and believed that he had left him ‘less of a Labour politician and more of a good British citizen’.⁸

The Prime Minister – a connoisseur of Montgomery’s style – must have relished the note’s pomposity and gracelessness. In private, though, Churchill had already begun thinking about how to respond to Labour attacks on national service. He asked Antony Head, the Secretary of State for War, to prepare information that he, Churchill, could use against Shinwell,⁹ but he also asked his officials how justified Shinwell’s views were,¹⁰ and prevented Head from making a speech justifying two years service on the grounds that doing so would raise an issue that was unlikely to do the government any good.¹¹

Head was a loyal defender of army interests. Born in 1906 and educated at Eton and Sandhurst, he was commissioned into the Life Guards and for much of the inter-war period had been a dashing officer – whose regimental duties did not distract him from a career as an amateur jockey and adventurer. After distinguished service in the war, during which he rose to the rank of brigadier, he left the army and entered parliament in 1945. He became Secretary of State for War with Churchill’s return to government in 1951.

Head had always understood that national service was a temporary expedient rooted in the ‘short-term virtue of being the only way to provide enough men to fulfil our immediate overseas commitments’.¹² Almost as soon as he moved into the War Office, he asked:

Was any assumption ever made about the duration of National Service? This admittedly is a very long term thought but supposing by 1956 or 57 we got some kind of a settlement with the Russians and a certain amount of disarmament took place, and consequently a decrease in the size of the army, would National Service then be retained?¹³

By 1955, Head was seeking to build up the regular army so that, if possible, ‘we should have a chance of turning over soon after 1958 from National Service to an all Regular Army.’¹⁴

Britain’s strategic circumstances had changed between 1952 and 1955. After the death of Stalin in March 1953, the prospect of war in Europe seemed less likely. The technology of warfare also changed. The Americans tested the first thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb in November 1952 – it was much more powerful than the atom bombs that the Americans had stocked since 1945. The Russians exploded their first hydrogen bomb in 1953 and the British, largely excluded from American secrets, worked hard to develop their own version. The means by which nuclear weapons might be delivered changed too. The government authorized the development of the Blue Streak missile in 1955, though, as it turned out, the project was too expensive and the British resorted to buying American weapons.

At least at first, however, strategy had little direct influence on decisions about the future of national service. The service chiefs did not know how they would fare without conscription and how its end would affect voluntary recruitment. Even the navy, which took hardly any conscripts, worried about abolition – fearing that its own supply of skilled workers might be eroded if the other services were forced to make greater efforts to recruit such men.¹⁵ One official wrote of attempts to estimate future recruiting: ‘What we in the War Office are after … is some sort of agreed guess produced by a suitable body in lieu of the many and varied guesses that have been bandied about.’¹⁶

An all-regular force of well-paid, well-equipped servicemen might attract recruits. New problems, however, would be created. Promotion would be slower for regulars when the army no longer needed so many senior NCOs to lick its national servicemen into shape.¹⁷ Furthermore, particular functions in the forces – the army especially – would be hard to fill. Infantry regiments, which subjected men to stiff discipline and left them with no skill that was useful in the civilian world, would find the end of national service difficult. As late as July 1960, officers reckoned that, by the second half of 1962, the infantry would fall short of its needs by 7,000 men: only the guards, the Parachute Regiment and the Scottish and Irish regiments – the last of these, in any case, drew many of their recruits from an area in which national service had never been applied – would be able to fill their ranks.¹⁸

The social changes of which Conservative politicians boasted in the late 1950s made it harder for the forces to recruit. Full employment and the welfare state meant that civilian life was more attractive. Better education had created a group of respectable and relatively well-paid men – the kind who rarely joined up. Some officials looked hopefully to the most economically depressed regions because they believed that unemployment had spurred recruitment in the 1930s. The only sure consolation, however, came from the knowledge that the birth rate had increased in the 1940s and that therefore, in due course, the pool of young men available for recruitment would increase in size.¹⁹

Some ministers also worried about the impact that the abolition of conscription might have on Britain’s allies. Debate was provoked by the German decision in 1955 to set service for their own conscripts at one year, but some argued that attempts to persuade the Germans to reverse this decision would make it difficult to reduce the British term. Alec Douglas-Home, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, was concerned that Australia and New Zealand had not been consulted about the end of national service.²⁰ The First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Hailsham – always prone to inject a note of hysteria into any debate – suggested that the end of national service would mean the break-up of NATO.²¹

From the political point of view, the case put by the forces was awkward. On the one hand, they insisted that they needed conscription but, on the other hand, they did not need all the young men who were liable to be recruited. They pushed for some form of selective service,²² at a time when politicians knew that national service could survive only if the fiction of universal liability was maintained. Ministers grew exasperated by the insistence of the services that they would need conscription for the foreseeable future. Head admitted that selective service based on a ballot would be best from the point of view of the army but did not think it a ‘tenable political position in the long run’:

[T]o take this course would be to admit that national service was with us in perpetuity as the only means by which the Services could be provided with the necessary technical assistance … unless the Services disciplined themselves by preparing for the end of national service, they would never let it come to an end.²³

The case against conscription was usually stated in economic and/or political terms: it was expensive and unpopular. MPs appreciated that their constituents – including ‘highly respected citizens who are known to be moderate in their views’²⁴ – were against conscription, and party leaders understood the dangers of ignoring such sentiment. Anthony Eden, who became Prime Minister when Churchill retired in April 1955, told the Cabinet in December 1955 that he hoped national service could be ended ‘during the lifetime of this parliament’. It illustrates the political delicacy of the subject that a civil servant did not record his remarks in the official minutes of the meeting.²⁵ The following year, Eden wrote to the Minister of Defence that he could see the military case for national service but did not think that it would be politically acceptable after 1958 unless international tension rose and that he did not think that selective service would be regarded as fair.²⁶

In fact, there had been a change in conscription policy in October 1955. In a bid to reduce the rate at which men were called up, while preserving, at least ostensibly, the appearance of universal obligation, it had been decided to reduce the number of registrations from four to three per year. The result of this was that the age at which men were first registered rose by three months every year. In addition to this, there was to be an increasingly long wait between medical examination and the receipt of the enlistment notice.²⁷

In the summer of 1956, a Cabinet committee was convened to discuss the future of national service. It was chaired by the Lord President of the Council, the fifth Marquess of Salisbury, a self-consciously unintellectual figure with right-wing opinions and a pronounced lisp. One suspects that his aunt, Gwendolen Cecil, might have been thinking of him when she wrote, in her biography of her father the third marquess, that the ‘general mediocrity of intelligence which the family displayed was only varied by instances of quite exceptional stupidity’. Iain Macleod, the Minister of Labour and National Service, was very different: charming, subtle and famously described by Salisbury as ‘too clever by half’. Macleod disliked ‘conscription’ – a word that he insisted on using instead of ‘national service’.²⁸ He proposed that the maximum age of call-up should be lowered so that all deferred men (i.e. those who undertook apprenticeships or further education) would in effect be excused. Eighteen-year-old school leavers, of the kind who provided the army with many of its officers, would continue to serve, at least, as Macleod no doubt muttered sotto voce, if they were too naive to see the advantages of deferment.²⁹ In economic terms, Macleod’s plan made sense because it would have spared all skilled workers. It was not, however, as Macleod quickly conceded, politically feasible, because it would not have been seen as fair and because, in any case, the surplus of young men registering was too high to be absorbed by excusing those who had been deferred.

The Salisbury Committee’s report, presented to the Cabinet in January 1957, concluded that national service should not be regarded as ‘permanent and essential’ but that it would be needed until at least 1965 and that the relatively small number of men needed during this period should be chosen by ballot. Macleod dissented from the report because he thought that keeping a small number of conscripts would cause more trouble than it was worth.³⁰

The Salisbury Report was extraordinary. The proposed date for ending national service was later than any of the provisional dates that officials and ministers had discussed during the previous six years – this was all the odder since Head, now Minister of Defence, seems to have acted as spokesman for the forces when he himself had previously complained about their reluctance to end conscription. The method proposed for selecting conscripts was the one favoured most by service chiefs but least by the electorate.

The committee’s deliberations may have been influenced by the fact that they took place against the backdrop of the Suez crisis. Service chiefs were more powerful when the country was at war. Extra troops were needed during the operation. One civil servant claimed in November 1956 that ‘a delay of at least a year had been imposed on the planned reduction of the Army’.³¹ Officials were distracted from long-term planning and Eden, who had been pressing for an end to national service, was weakened.

In the medium term, however, Suez made an end to conscription more likely. This was partly because it exposed some of the fantasies on which British pretensions to military grandeur had been based. Of more immediate importance was the fact that it brought two particularly determined ministers to the fore. Conservatives under Eden had sometimes called for ‘the firm smack of government’: the armed forces were now to find out how firm government felt.

The first and most important man whose career advanced after Suez was Harold Macmillan. He became Prime Minister in January 1957, after Eden’s resignation. Macmillan had fought with the Grenadier Guards during the First World War and still liked to play the guards officer. He cultivated a manner of ostentatious calm and patrician assurance. He also talked frequently about Britain’s position as a great power. A national service naval officer expressed the conventional wisdom thus:

Mr Macmillan is an efficient statesman and a man to inspire confidence. [He] gives me, and I have no doubt most other people also, complete confidence in his ability to negotiate the difficulties that lie ahead; he has taken the right step of putting the mind of the country at ease, by showing us in reassuring terms that Britain is not a fast fading power.³²

Macmillan was in fact a clever, neurotic man. He had the long-term sense of historical change that sprang from a classical education and the short-term sense of Britain’s military weakness, and dependence on America, that came from having served as pro-consul in the Mediterranean during the Second World War. He also had an instinct for seizing political advantage. More than any other politician of his generation, he seemed to evoke the Edwardian world of hierarchy, tradition, duty and national greatness; yet, more than any other politician of his generation, he understood the post-war world of consumerism, rising living standards, ‘instrumental’ voting by a prosperous working class that understood its own material interests and hard-headed diplomacy by American politicians, who understood theirs. Most of all, Macmillan wanted to ensure that the Conservatives took the initiative on national service before it began to damage them electorally and had expressed this desire even when he had been Minister of Defence in 1954.³³

The second important figure was Duncan Sandys, appointed by Macmillan as Minister of Defence in January 1957. Sandys owed some of his political success to the fact that he had married one of Winston Churchill’s daughters, though the marriage was breaking down by the late 1950s. He was a brusque, aggressive man who despised conventional pieties – some believed that he was the ‘headless man’ in the Duchess of Argyll divorce case. He wanted to maintain British imperial power but was not much moved by the traditions of the British armed forces. His relations with Macmillan – who described him as ‘cassant’ – were uneasy, though one assumes that the Prime Minister, a calculating man, found it convenient to have such a figure to impose his policies on the armed forces and to take the blame for the offence that they would inevitably cause. Certainly, Macmillan gave him greater powers than had been conferred on any previous Minister of Defence.

The main product of Sandys’s tenure at Defence was the White Paper of 1957. The Sandys Review, as it became known, was drafted in breathless terms: ‘It is now only a matter of a few years before there will be missiles steered by electronic brains capable of delivering megaton warheads over a range of 5,000 miles or more … sensational scientific advances in methods of waging war have fundamentally altered the whole basis of world strategy.’³⁴ It also included some hardheaded statements. First, British power depended on an economy that was being undermined by excessive military spending. Secondly, Britain could no longer expect to fight a major war on its own. Thirdly, there was no real defence against nuclear weapons, and security must, therefore, depend on deterring war rather than planning to win it.

The Sandys review anticipated that the forces could be reduced to a total of 375,000 men – excluding, as the official documents sometimes put it, ‘boys, women and Gurkhas’. Conscription was to be abolished. Sandys had taken a more direct and brutal approach to reductions in the armed forces than any previous Conservative minister had done. He had summoned the chiefs of staff in February 1957 and told them to plan for forces of 370,000 men. The chiefs responded, as official notes laconically record, by ‘expressing serious concern’ and Sandys reminded them of who made the decisions – stating that he ‘had no desire to implicate the Chiefs of Staff in the government’s decision to cut the armed forces’.³⁵ The Sandys review anticipated wider changes to the armed forces, which included a reduction in the number of regular soldiers.

Iain Macleod was very different from Sandys but, when it came to national service, the two men were functional allies. Macleod announced in April 1957 that men born after October 1939 were unlikely to be called up. It would, in fact, have been possible to cover all the remaining need for conscripts simply by relying on men born in the last quarter of 1938 or before, who had either been deferred or who were just about to register at the time that the abolition of national service was announced.³⁶ The government, however, did not want a cohort of conscripts entirely composed of deferred men, because it would have taken too many skilled and educated workers out of the civilian economy and because it would have made it difficult to respond to ‘contingencies’. The Ministry of Labour, therefore, proposed, from April 1958, to divide the call-up lists into two – one for men who had been deferred and one for men who were registering for the first time. The last conscripts were drawn from a mixture of these two lists.³⁷ From the point of view of individual conscripts, this arrangement made it harder to predict whether or not they would be called up. The days in which every fit man knew that he would be registered around the age of eighteen and required to serve either then or three years later were over. By April 1959, there were 70,000 men (24,000 of whom had already been deferred) waiting for call-up or medical examination. At this stage, men coming off deferments could expect to wait four or five months before joining up; this period was expected to increase to six months by the end of 1959 and perhaps to nine months the year after. The complexity of the process did not hide the fact that the numbers being conscripted were falling: ‘as the number of men in the A register [i.e. that for deferred men] grows, and the delay lengthens, it will become increasingly difficult to give information without also conveying that a man is not likely to be called up before the end of 1960’.³⁸

Even when the political decision had been taken, ending national service was more easily said than done. Some Conservatives feared that they would be blamed if they did not succeed in ending conscription at a pre-announced time: ‘if only a handful of men have to be conscripted after the end of 1960 we will be regarded as having failed’.³⁹ The Prime Minister himself was not sure that an all-regular force would be achieved by 1962.⁴⁰ The Labour MP George Wigg bet Sandys that he would not manage to attract enough regular recruits by the time that national service was abolished and, since Sandys and Wigg were both notably lacking in sportsmanship, they were still squabbling about who had won the bet in late 1961.⁴¹

The scale of the call-up changed during the late 1950s, partly as the Ministry of Labour sought to reduce the number of men being posted to the forces without admitting that there had been a change in policy. Workers in industries deemed to be of particular national importance were added to the list of men who were allowed to defer their service until the age at which they ceased to be liable, as were teachers with first- or second-class degrees.⁴² Some men who had served apprenticeships were allowed to extend their training after formal qualification in ways that also made it increasingly unlikely that they would serve at all. Deferment on compassionate grounds was granted on more generous terms.

In 1959, the Ministry of Labour reduced the rate of medical examination to the ‘lowest practicable level’.⁴³ There were, at one point in 1959, 62,000 men who had been born in 1937 and who were still waiting for medical examination. Most strikingly, the proportion of men who failed their medical rose; by 1959 it had reached a third.⁴⁴ Officials from the Ministry of Labour insisted that there had been no change of the medical standards applied and, indeed, that they investigated medical boards where failure rates seemed unusually high. It may have been that medical boards became more exigent without encouragement. It may also be that the armed forces were themselves applying stricter standards to men when they arrived at basic training units and the Ministry of Labour boards were simply seeking to ensure that they did not pass men who would be thrown out of the army after a few days.⁴⁵ Most of all, potential recruits themselves seem to have been increasingly ingenious and insistent when it came to drawing attention to ‘past ailments’ or ‘minor aches’ that might make them unfit for service.⁴⁶

Even before the announcement that national service would be ended, some sensed that the call-up was not being applied with much zeal and that a determined man stood a good chance of avoiding it. As early as 1955, The Times argued that conscription was being abolished by stealth:

Indefinite deferment [is] the Ministry of Labour’s euphemism for exemption from national service … It only remains for the Ministry to bring out one of its handy careers booklets for those who do not wish to serve in the forces to mark the end of universal national service.⁴⁷

The fate of the most educated men, who also tended to be the most socially privileged, was always a matter of particular concern to the great and the good. In 1956, the master of a Cambridge college made discreet enquiries about whether ‘the most likely course was a gradual reduction or a complete wiping out’ of conscription.⁴⁸

The Secretary of the Careers and Appointments Board at Nottingham University wrote:

Some of the more mathematically minded have been endeavouring to prove to their own satisfaction, if not yet perhaps to anyone else’s, that the number of other less qualified and equally eligible young men, coupled with the slow rate at which the call-up is at present being implemented, makes it unlikely that their turn will ever come.⁴⁹

The ‘mathematically minded’ students had a point, especially because graduates in scientific subjects were almost certain by this stage to be excused service. The treatment of science graduates reflected the way in which intentions to enforce a genuinely universal service had been abandoned even before the formal abolition of conscription. A Ministry of Labour report conceded that:

The history of deferment arrangement for the next ten years is one of gradual whittling away of the original intention that science and engineering graduates should not be given special treatment where national service was concerned. The concept of universal national service as applicable to those graduates gradually receded into the background … In 1949 just under 100 graduates were granted indefinite deferment for employment on priority projects, and about 600 were called up. In 1959, which was the last year in which newly qualified graduates were called up, about 600 were made available for national service, and over 3,000 were granted indefinite deferment.⁵⁰

The proportion of graduates among national servicemen had increased during the early 1950s as universities expanded. There were some reasons to suppose that it would increase even faster in the late 1950s – because intakes were increasingly dominated by men who had deferred their service, a category that included all graduates. In fact, the proportion of graduates reached 5 per cent in the autumn of 1955, but then declined to 3.3 per cent in the autumn of 1957, before increasing to 3.9 per cent in 1958 and 1959. If all other figures had remained constant, this would have meant that the chances that any individual graduate would be called up would have dropped by between a quarter and a third. However, other figures did not remain constant – the number of graduates increased while the total of all men called up dropped. The drop in the chances that any individual graduate would be called up was, therefore, sharper. Presumably, this was because the government now gave so many exemptions to educated men. By 1960, officials knew that only a small proportion of the 15,000 men who would graduate from university in that year, and who were still technically liable for national service, would be needed.⁵¹ Finally, the government announced that no man whose deferment ended later than June 1960 would be called up – this meant in effect that most students who graduated in that year, and a large proportion of those who had completed some other form of training, were excused.

The educational and social background of national servicemen changed in interesting ways in the late 1950s. In the army, which took most men and measured education in the most systematic way, the proportion of men educated to eighteen or beyond increased until the end of 1954 and generally declined thereafter – though it rose again in 1958 and 1959. The proportion of graduates peaked, as has been shown, in 1955. The proportion of men who had left school at sixteen rose for most of the 1950s and peaked in the second half of 1958. The proportion of men in educational class 5 (i.e. those who left school at fifteen but had undertaken some further training) peaked at 37 per cent in the first half of 1960. At its very end, national service seems to have fallen particularly hard on the skilled working class.

There was one simple reason why the proportion of relatively privileged men in the national service intake dropped during the late 1950s. Men had the right to request early call-up if they wished to get their military service over in time to go to university. The right was most commonly invoked by men with places at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. However, no one who reached the age of eighteen after September 1957 was liable for national service so, after this date, many of the most privileged young men had either already entered the forces or made a decision that they were going to try to avoid doing so.

There was also a broader social shift that affected national service. Military patriotism was one of those aspects of public school culture that grammar schools sometimes tried to imitate. By the late 1950s, however, the balance of power between grammar schools and public schools had changed. There were more children at grammar school than ever before and a higher proportion of them than ever before were getting to university. Clever sixth-formers began to wonder whether there was any reason to admire or imitate their contemporaries at more socially prestigious institutions. Claude Scott was a pupil at Emanuel School in south London from 1945 to 1955. In 1952–3, he resigned from the school’s Combined Cadet Force. He was not a pacifist or even particularly left-wing – he just thought that square-bashing was a waste of time. There was a small scandal and Scott’s parents were called into school to be warned that such subversive behaviour would ruin his career. He held firm and avoided the CCF, just as, because of educational deferment, he avoided national service.^*

John Sainsbury (not a member of the grocery family) was from a similar background to Claude Scott’s but a county scholarship had plucked him from Hitchin Grammar School and paid for him to go to Eton. Sainsbury was called up in 1957. Interested in military matters, he was keen to serve – though he was slightly annoyed to discover that all his old friends from grammar school had contrived to avoid service.⁵²

For some boys from the grander public schools, military service began to seem pointless and one or two of them might have started to question whether some of the other pieties to which they had paid lip-service at school might also be open to question. A Winchester housemaster wrote in 1957 that his protégés no longer got anything from national service: ‘The best of them will be positively encouraged to get exemptions and the others will feel that they’re tail-enders and the Govt will dispense with their services if a pretext can be found for doing so. No spiritual kick at all and no fun either.’⁵³ Even regular officers now sometimes advised their sons to defer in the hope of avoiding call-up, and Oxbridge colleges, most of which had encouraged men to discharge their military obligations before coming up, were now preparing for a surge of eighteen-year-olds.

The uncertainty that surrounded the end of national service was a matter of morality as well as calculations about careers and educations. By the late 1950s, the culture of official patriotism that had once surrounded military service was increasingly questioned or mocked. The farce of Suez and the brutality of soldiers in Cyprus (more widely reported than that in Kenya or Malaya) both undermined the prestige of the military.

Things the British armed forces did not do could matter as much as things they did do. In October and November 1956, west Europeans listened to the broadcasts from Budapest in which the Hungarians begged for help against Soviet invasion. Briefly, it seemed possible that Hungary would win its freedom. The more earnest kind of national serviceman was entranced. Waiting with his commando unit to go to Suez, Peter Mayo wrote in his diary: ‘wonderful news from Hungary. The rebels appear to have won.’⁵⁴ One of David Lodge’s characters, attending a pro-Hungarian demonstration, thinks for a glorious moment that he will put his national service training to good use by volunteering to fight with the Hungarians.⁵⁵ The Red Army, however, put the Hungarian rising down. The West did not lift a finger. There were sound reasons for the brutal realpolitik of NATO leaders, but their inaction made it harder to persuade idealistic nineteen-year-olds that the British armed forces existed to defend freedom. Antony Copley wrote in his diary, just before his ship arrived at Port Said: ‘I am afraid Hungary will once again retreat into the night of despair. Can we risk the destruction of the world for their sake? I am all for peace and have not the self-sacrifice to support a policy of assistance to Hungary.’⁵⁶

The result of running down national service was that the number of men being released began to exceed the number being called up. This, in turn, further diminished the need for men – because a larger proportion of servicemen were approaching the end of their service, when they were most useful, and because fewer men were diverted to train new intakes. From 1957, the forces began to institutionalize the practice of early release for men who were no longer needed. The navy and the air force were most keen to release men, partly because they had a relatively large number of regular recruits and partly because so many of their men performed specialized tasks and could not easily be transferred if the particular function for which they were trained ceased to be necessary. The army opposed early releases. It feared that they would undermine the whole principle of national service, which it still needed, and, knowing how many men preferred the air force or the navy, it was reluctant to countenance anything that might make these services seem even more attractive. However, a few hundred airmen and sailors were released early in the late 1950s, and by 1960 the army itself released men before their time was up. The policy was quite open – though the authorities were understandably reluctant to give it too much publicity.⁵⁷ The forces were probably glad to be rid of some of their delinquent conscripts. James O’Donoghue, the last of the Glaswegians who had given the services such trouble, did not report for duty until January 1961 and was put on a charge on his first day. He was discharged early after having spent his last months of duty tending an officer’s garden – he celebrated his release by methodically putting weed killer on every plant.⁵⁸

Setting a date for the end of call-up was awkward. No one wanted to be the last conscript. There was a danger that the whole system might come to an end ‘in a most ragged and unsatisfactory manner’,⁵⁹ if men knew the precise day on which it would cease to operate – especially since, as officials recognized, they would not have the resources to track down and prosecute evaders once the machinery of national service had been put in moth balls. In the summer of 1960, officials decided that the last men would join the forces on 17 November rather than at the end of the year: ‘the object being to catch unawares the man at the end of the entry queue who thinks that the normal timing of call-up will be followed and that he has, therefore, time to take evasive action’.⁶⁰

Ministry of Labour medical boards ceased to operate in July 1960 and staff at the Ministry were transferred to other duties after issuing the last enlistment notices on 3 November 1960. Throughout this time, however, the authorities sought to avoid explicit discussion of the end of national service.⁶¹

The Ministry of Defence planned a television programme to mark the end of national service. A major would go to Aldershot and watch the last 300 men arrive at their barracks. He would pick one likely looking candidate – ‘Private Bloggs’ in the television treatment – and take him back to London to be interviewed. Admiral Louis Mountbatten, Chief of the Defence Staff, would then make a speech about the value of the service performed by conscripts since 1939; the speech was to be recorded because Mountbatten had a dinner engagement on the night when Private Bloggs’s comrades were beginning to polish their boots.⁶² The Minister of Labour wrote sharply to the Minister of Defence:

I am very anxious that photographs should not be taken of the last National Servicemen to report for duty, for the reasons I explained to the Cabinet. These men will not be at all pleased to be the last to be called up. I should have thought that much the best course would be for propaganda on behalf of the services to concentrate on the new volunteers, rather than on the last conscripts.⁶³

The last cohort of conscripts may have been spared publicity, but they understood that they were special. Recruits to the Pay Corps were cheered by their new comrades as they marched across the NAAFI on their first night in the army. The last men to be called up were exasperated by their bad luck – some reflected that a single bad result in the finals of their professional exams would have earned them a deferment and almost certainly complete escape from service. They were all in their early twenties. This meant that the wrench of being dragged away from civilian life was harder than it might have been for earlier conscripts – one recently married man went quickly absent without leave. However, there were also ways in which the last national servicemen had a relatively easy time. The fact that they had almost all undertaken some form of training or education, which had kept them out of the forces when they reached the age of eighteen, meant that they were more socially homogeneous and more civilized than those men who had been called up a few years earlier. They also appreciated that there were likely to be limits to the strictness of discipline now that conscription was winding down. The last squad in the Pay Corps were older than the regular lance corporal who was set to give them orders. Because they were mostly men with some education, a large proportion of them were considered as potential officers, but many said that they preferred to stay in the ranks.^*

Richard Vaughan did go for a commission – on the grounds that ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’. His life as a second lieutenant in the Pay Corps was relatively agreeable. Posted to Salisbury, he was allowed to work in civilian clothes on some days of the week. After three months, he was sent to Germany, where discipline was more ‘regimental’, but where he personally maintained friendly relations with the national servicemen under his command. The men called him ‘sir’ on the base, but he was on Christian name terms with them when he attended their parties.

Vaughan’s most delicate task came in October 1962, when he was told that national service for the last few cohorts of men (about 9,000 of them in all) was to be extended for six months.⁶⁴ Some said that this was because of the construction of the Berlin Wall. Vaughan himself was told that it was simply because regular recruiting had not filled the army’s requirements. It may be that the last national servicemen – being skilled men – were hard to replace with regulars or that the service chiefs, having argued against the abolition of conscription, wanted to make a point to the politicians. Vaughan did not relish the prospect of having to tell the national service other ranks, but it turned out that they already knew; as was often the case, news had travelled via barrack-room gossip faster than it was transmitted through official channels.

Vaughan was demobbed in May 1963, having risen to the rank of full lieutenant. He opted to be discharged in Britain rather than Germany, which meant that he travelled home in uniform on a plane full of his comrades who were already wearing civilian clothes. At Gatwick they were met by the press and Vaughan gave the first of many interviews. As a result of this, he arrived late at his regimental depot in Winchester and found that all the offices were shut. After a festive night out, he slept at the depot and was eating breakfast when the commanding officer summoned him and said that a car would take him to Southern Television, where he would be interviewed as the ‘last national serviceman’. He never completed the normal paperwork of discharge and never returned his uniform, which, at the behest of journalists and television producers, he would squeeze into for many years to come.⁶⁵ Vaughan was not, in fact, the last man out: about fifty national servicemen remained in Germany until the end of May. These men, however, had all been detained for disciplinary or medical reasons and would not, one assumes, have provided a favourable account of their time in the army.⁶⁶ Since Vaughan was, and is, articulate and cheerful, it probably suited the War Office to have him defined as the last conscript.

National servicemen passed into oblivion quickly. For one thing, there were relatively few of them. Of men born in 1938, just over 147,000 had entered the forces, as either conscripts or volunteers, by 1960. However, most of these men would have joined their units in 1956 or 1957 and been out by the time the last men were called up in late 1960. Of men born in 1939, only 63,8000 had entered the armed forces by the time conscription ended. The machinery for dealing with national servicemen was being run down long before the last conscript received his call-up papers. By 1957, there were not enough national service officer cadets in the army to justify two schools to train them. Since the estate around Eaton Hall was unsuitable for the heavy machinery that was needed to train gunners and tank soldiers, it was decided that from April 1958 all officer training would take place at Mons. Field Marshal Montgomery, who had always brought his own unique brand of melancholy farce to national service, inspected a passing-out parade at Mons, in pouring rain, in August 1960. He said that ‘he was very sorry that National Service was coming to an end … he did not agree with political leaders who said that the armed forces would get all the men that they needed. A cross section of the youth of Britain was needed in the armed forces.’⁶⁷ Montgomery gave the stick of honour for the best cadet to Peter Duffell, muttering, as he did so, ‘I never won it.’⁶⁸

National service had weighed heavily on the public consciousness at a time when many families expected their own sons to be called up, but it almost disappeared from sight as soon as this threat passed – the angry letters in newspapers about the iniquities of the call-up ceased. The detailed histories of the last national servicemen dropped out of the collective memory of the Ministry of Labour. In 1976, when the Law Commission finally proposed to repeal the legislation of 1948 that had made the call-up possible, the Ministry suggested that the documents relating to post-war conscripts should be thrown away and added that ‘the call-up ended in December 1960, with the result that whole term service effectively ceased at the end of 1962’.⁶⁹ The 9,000 men who had been held in the forces for an extra six months in 1963 had been forgotten.

For men born in the late 1930s, conscription was in an odd way more disruptive than it had been for their elders. Their late teenage years were overshadowed by uncertainty. Even men who had been registered and/or undergone their medical could not be sure when, or if, they would finally be called into the forces. Employers were under a legal obligation to give a man back his job after he returned from the forces, but, as the end of conscription approached, they were sometimes tempted to avoid employing men who looked likely to be called up – especially if they had a chequered employment record. This could create a vicious circle in which some men were increasingly reluctant to settle before national service and, at the same time, employers were increasingly reluctant to engage them. A Ministry of Labour official noted: ‘Although very few employers dismiss men because they are waiting to be called up, they tend to be reluctant to engage a man with National Service liabilities who for one reason or another has lost his former job.’⁷⁰

Leigh Parkes was born in June 1939 and left school (Haileybury) in 1956: ‘national service was hanging over one’s head and one did not really know what was happening, but when I left school I was under the impression that I was going to do two years national service’. He thought of teaching in a prep school and decided that it was not worth starting on a career. He began work in his family’s lace company but ‘I got fed up with not knowing what was happening, so I wrote to the army, asking them to make their mind up whether to call me up or not.’ Two weeks later he was summoned for his medical.⁷¹

Philip Naylor illustrates the ways that national service could disrupt a boy’s life. He was born in July 1939 and educated at a grammar school. He was, however, consigned to the ‘C’ stream and left early. He then went through a succession of apprenticeships while deferring his national service. However, ‘By the spring of 1959 my enthusiasm for foundry work had fallen to zero … despite the boss’s reminder that I’d soon find myself in the Army.’ He left but found it hard to find another job – ‘the first question asked of a twenty-year-old was “Have you done your national service?” ’ He took a few temporary jobs and went hitch-hiking around Europe. Finally, fed up with the uncertainty, he decided ‘to jump before I was pushed’ and signed on as a regular in the Royal Engineers. Though his whole youth had been haunted by the prospect of conscription, he was among the very last men to have any legal liability, and could probably have avoided it altogether if he had waited.⁷²

Sometimes, by the late 1950s, it seemed as though educated men were only called up if – through perversity, naivety or a sense of duty – they drew themselves to the attention of the authorities. Peter Duffell, born in August 1939, was not even registered until he was almost nineteen and then waited a further sixteen months without hearing anything. Finally, he wrote to The Times to complain,⁷³ and was promptly called up. Since he switched to a regular engagement and became a lieutenant general, he must have regarded this as a benign outcome; his twin brother, who was taken in the same intake, may have felt differently.

James Flynn was born in May 1939. He was a student at London University in 1959 and would almost certainly have succeeded in deferring his service until the abolition of conscription if he had not failed his exams. At this point he decided that he had an objection to some, but not all, wars. The tribunal rejected his appeal to be registered as a conscientious objector in September 1959 on the grounds that he was not an unconditional opponent of all war. Flynn himself

thought it desirable that I should be adequately trained should I ever consider it necessary to fight. I therefore attended the medical and expressed a preference for the infantry. I wished to go into the infantry as I felt that as an infantryman I would be responsible only for the action in which I was engaged: whereas in an administrative post or on general duties I would be responsible for the efficient running of the army and therefore for any action the army undertakes.⁷⁴

The army, however, decided that Flynn was medically unfit for front-line service and posted him to the Ordnance Corps as a clerk. At this point Flynn ‘refused to soldier’ and stopped shaving, a serious offence in the army. He was eventually court-martialled. His appearance at the trial aroused amused comment in the press.⁷⁵ He was dressed in civilian clothes, bearded and to all appearances a ‘beatnik’, a word that already evoked a youth culture that would soon make men who had done military service seem staid. He was sentenced to six months in prison and went on hunger strike, which he abandoned when he was forcibly fed. After this, he disappeared from view – presumably the army was happy to get rid of him once his sentence had been served.

Though the last years of national service were uncomfortable for many conscripts, in some ways they were even worse for regulars, particularly for regular officers in the army. The tone of civil–military relations changed. When the first peacetime conscripts had been called up, the army still had some of the prestige that went with victory in the Second World War and with the military traditions of the empire. John Hoskyns was the son of a soldier killed at Dunkirk and joined up himself at the age of eighteen in 1945. He believed that the army was ‘the only institution in Britain of which people did not feel slightly ashamed’.⁷⁶ This was never true but it was, at least, plausible enough for soldiers to convince themselves. In the late 1950s, however, the army itself became infected with self-doubt. Hoskyns resigned his commission in 1957 – he was one of the rare regular officers to make a successful career in the civilian world.

The end of national service was part of a broader change in the position of the armed forces that affected other democratic countries too. Missiles and nuclear bombs seemed to make conventional military skills redundant, and the wars of decolonization, particularly during their later stages, sometimes pitted soldiers against civilians. All of this was seen most dramatically in France, where conservative soldiers, who disliked the new kind of warfare, were labelled ‘military Poujadists’, and where their dissatisfaction produced the ‘generals’ putsch’ of 1961 – an episode that divided conscript soldiers from regulars.

There was no military putsch in Britain, but the last national servicemen often knew that their own brief military careers coincided with an unhappy period for the army. Those who regarded themselves as defenders of the interests of the army had implied that peacetime conscription was a burden for the forces and looked forward to the day when well-trained, well-paid and dedicated professionals would comprise a lean, flexible and ‘hard-hitting’ army. At least in the short term, this did not happen, and the end of conscription went with an undignified period when middle-aged officers scrambled to hold on to their jobs.

The Sandys Defence Review, which had anticipated the end of national service, also shook up the organization of the army. The importance of the regimental system was challenged, which was a shock to soldiers who thought of regiments as being like families and who were, indeed, in many cases the sons of officers from their regiment. The end of national service also raised awkward questions about why the forces were so unattractive to regular recruits. The Grigg Committee – which looked into the matter in 1958 – portrayed an army that had become remote from civilian society and that was, in particular, rooted in the culture and hierarchy of public schools.⁷⁷ There was nothing that professional officers hated more than ‘professionalization’, which implied that tradition and unspoken codes were to be swept away by a new emphasis on expertise and formal training.

The changes of the late 1950s were all the more painful because the early part of the decade had been, in an odd way, the golden age of the British infantry. In Korea, Kenya and Malaya, small groups of soldiers had fought their enemy at close quarters. Old-fashioned virtues of courage and discipline counted for something when a single officer with a revolver in his hand might lead an attack. One man epitomized the qualities and traditions of the regular officer corps. Major Archibald Wavell came from a line of soldiers that could be traced back to the Norman Conquest. His father was a field marshal. Archibald Wavell himself, born in 1916, had been commissioned into the Black Watch in 1936. During the war, he served in Burma with the Chindits – winning the MC and losing his left hand. For a time, it seemed unlikely that he would ever fight again and, after the war, he was posted for a time to the Educational Corps. Wishing, however, to return to active service, he secured a posting back to his old regiment in Kenya. Here he was killed leading a patrol that attacked a Mau Mau camp on Christmas Eve 1953. He was unmarried and the earldom that he had inherited from his father died with him – though it was clear that his death marked the end of a line in a more general sense.

During his time with the Educational Corps, Wavell had commanded some of the most ‘unsoldierly’ soldiers in the army – almost all national servicemen. A lesser man might have taken out his frustrations on these conscripts, but Wavell was an unusual kind of officer. Scholarly and self-aware, he valued education. He befriended some of his soldiers and stayed in touch with them when they went to university.⁷⁸ Perhaps Wavell’s death was just a piece of bad luck but, given how few British soldiers were killed fighting in Kenya, one wonders whether there was a degree of self-destruction in Wavell’s decision to lead an attack on a Mau Mau camp. Perhaps he felt that the country had no place for a man such as himself or perhaps the war in Kenya was being fought in ways that offended his own notions of chivalry.^*

A few years later some regular soldiers felt that the army they knew was being destroyed. General Sir Gerald Templer, the man given most credit for British success in Malaya, was Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1957. He was said to have come to blows with the Minister of Defence over the proposed changes in the army and to have told Sandys: ‘You’re so bloody crooked that if you swallowed a nail you’d shit a corkscrew.’⁷⁹

Large numbers of soldiers with years of service behind them were made redundant. The axe fell particularly on majors and senior NCOs. The Adjutant General drafted a letter of brisk condescension: ‘As always, a younger generation is coming up to carry on the tasks and traditions that have been yours, and which will remain with those still carrying on.’⁸⁰ The last paragraph of this letter was changed after it was pointed out that around half of departing NCOs were under thirty-five and not pleased to be regarded as an ‘older generation’. In fact, however, former NCOs did not do too badly in civilian life. Most of them were not proud. They were drawn mainly from the working class, often its least privileged sections. They were used to taking orders and enduring petty humiliations. Many sought comfortable jobs that required an air of authority but not much physical exertion – their presence in the porter’s lodge of colleges at Oxford and Cambridge offered some middle-class men their last glimpse of military life.

Officers found things harder. They remained unemployed for longer and were, initially at least, more reluctant to use the services of Labour Exchanges – in July 1957, 13.4 per cent of officers who left the army in the previous year were unemployed; the figure for other ranks was just 1.2 per cent.⁸¹ Their difficulties became the subject of concern that was sometimes tempered by amusement. Macleod told the House of Commons in 1957 that officers were not as well informed as NCOs and that they were sometimes unrealistic: ‘For example, in planning for the future an officer should obviously think not only of where he will live but of what he will do there. It does not follow that Camberley or Cheltenham are the best springboards for an industrial career.’⁸²

Army careers had always ended awkwardly. Only a minority of officers – perhaps just one in four – made it past the rank of major. Those who could not hang on in the army were too old to adjust easily but too young, and in most cases too poor, to retire. Many officers had been born into army families. Sometimes they had spent their early years in some corner of the empire where their father had been garrisoned, before being packed off to prep school and then to one of the institutions – Cheltenham, Wellington, Marlborough – that specialized in educating the sons of officers. Few of them had skills that were of obvious use in the civilian world. Deprived of the clerical corporals who had so often provided them with discreet assistance, some would have had trouble in reconciling a set of accounts or writing a properly punctuated letter. Friends of the armed forces had been pointing out for some time that two years at Sandhurst and twenty years in the army did not necessarily make a man very employable in any post except ‘bursar of a prep school or secretary of a golf club’.⁸³

Leaving the army was particularly hard for officers in the late 1950s. For previous generations, the transition to civilian life had been made easier by the fact that there were, especially in the inter-war period, not many officers in total – so that relatively few men were chasing the kind of employment that might be available to them. Previous generations of officers had also sometimes had modest private means which, added to their army pension, allowed them to maintain the trappings of respectability in the kind of small town to which they usually retreated.

The men who left the army in the late 1950s found the move more painful. Income tax and death duties had eaten the family money that might once have supported them. Even before they retired, majors and lieutenant colonels were struggling to pay school fees – always a problem for men who had been brought up to regard state education as little better than the workhouse. The educational standards of officers, never glittering at the best of times, had declined since 1945, at a time when more civilians were well educated. Officers felt that they no longer enjoyed the mystique that might have attached to their predecessors in the days when the army was smaller and more socially privileged. Brigadier John Faviell, of the Conservative Research Department, was speaking for many of his former comrades when he wrote: ‘Nor can the status of Regular officers and NCOs be raised, particularly in the Army, unless they cease to be regarded as individuals belonging to a bygone age, and as ordinary if not rather inferior State servants.’⁸⁴

The Sandys Review hit a particular generation. Between the end of 1954 and the end of 1960, the total number of officers in the British army dropped almost a quarter (from 28,755 to 21,017). But this was not evenly spread across the age range. The number of those aged forty to forty-four dropped by just under a third (from 5,662 to 3,857); the number of those aged between thirty-five and thirty-nine dropped by over half (from 5,810 to 2,681).⁸⁵ These were men who had been commissioned between 1936 and 1945, when Britain still had a large empire. Most of those who were over forty would have passed through Sandhurst and Woolwich when these were still fee-paying institutions training ‘gentlemen cadets’. Saddest of all, though, these men had once been real warriors. Even the youngest of them would have been in the army in time to see some action in the Second World War – probably in the brutal fighting between the Normandy landings and the fall of Berlin. The oldest would have served all through the war – young enough to be on the front line but old enough to exercise some modest degree of command. Men who spent the last years of their army careers shuffling paper had once led soldiers in battle. Some of them had been promoted quickly, at least in terms of acting rank, and then found that they were forced to drop in the hierarchy or see their progression frozen after 1945. Some had the heart-breaking experience of retiring with the same rank that they had first earned as a 28-year-old in Normandy or Burma.

Trevor Hart Dyke was slightly different from the run of officers who retired in 1958 – he was older than most of them, having been born in 1905, and he had reached the relatively high rank of brigadier, which meant that he could probably just about live on his pension for the remaining years of his life. His memoir, however, catches the melancholy that afflicted many officers. Born in British India – his father commanded a Baluchi regiment – he was educated at Marlborough and Sandhurst and ‘always earmarked for a military career’. He was commissioned into the Queen’s Royal Regiment and rose quickly during the war but then reverted to his substantive rank of lieutenant colonel. He finished his career in Berlin:

By the time my three years in this post expired national service was abolished and any small prospect of promotion went by the board … How fortunate one was to have served the Empire in its zenith, to have contributed to its victory in World War II, to have enjoyed at little expense, comradeship and sport in many lands, and above all, had the privilege of commanding four battalions in war or peace. But I sometimes envy those old comrades of mine who lie in so many lands and never lived to see the decline and fall of our great British Empire, which we were so proud to serve.⁸⁶

What were such men to do? A few clung on in the army – often by accepting postings in non-combat corps that they would once have disdained. The Educational Corps was entirely staffed by officers as national service ended, and this also opened up a few opportunities for regulars. Perhaps such men were just hoping for a few more years of pensionable service; perhaps they guessed that postings away from ‘teeth arms’ were more likely to give them skills that might be transferred to civilian life.

About 8,000 officers had to retire early between 1957 and 1962, in addition to the 17,000 who would have retired during that time in the normal course of events. Retirement for officers was concentrated in the period from 1958 to 1960. In spite of the emphasis that the army had sometimes placed on its roots among the landed gentry, few took up farming. About 15 per cent planned to go abroad, mostly to the white dominions. About the same number hoped to go into teaching, and the proportion of public school bursars who were ex-officers increased sharply in the 1960s.⁸⁷ Most sought careers in industry or commerce. They did not, however, seek to set up on their own account – a fact that the military authorities, perhaps aware of how unworldly many officers were, regarded with relief. Most took comparatively junior positions in large companies – often in personnel departments, where one suspects their style did not improve the quality of British industrial relations.⁸⁸ They rarely commanded high salaries in the civilian world. About 7 per cent of retired officers accepted salaries of less than £600 a year; about a third were paid between £600 and £800; just over a quarter managed more than £1,000. To put these figures in context, John Drummond, a former national service officer who joined the BBC as a graduate trainee, regarded £625 a year as a low starting salary.⁸⁹ Roy Strong, who began work at the National Portrait Gallery at the age of twenty-four in 1959, regarded a salary of £700 a year as ‘near penury’. The ‘affluent workers’ in Luton car factories were generally earning over £1,000 a year by the early 1960s.

It was galling for a middle-aged major who felt that his whole life was behind him to share a mess with national service officers whose whole life was ahead of them and who relished the prospect of becoming civilians again. Imagine, for example, the feeling in the Royal Fusiliers – a regiment smart enough for its officers to resent menial civilian employment but not so smart that many of them would have large private incomes or family estates to fall back on. Two of the national service officers in the regiment – Anthony Howard and Michael Holroyd – must have aroused particular resentment among their older comrades. Both had a mixture of social polish and intelligence that would serve them well in civilian careers.

Holroyd played a small part in the post-Sandys defence cuts. After eighteen months in the army, he was made an acting captain – just one rank below that held by many men who had served for twenty years or more – and set, with another national service officer, to help decide which officers should be pensioned off:

Majors and colonels of all conditions would send us their forms giving reasons why they should stay or go. Sometimes they wrote in desperation, petitioning us not to fling them back into the civilian life they had never known; either that, or they would describe the joys of managing an egg farm in the Hebrides, a toy shop at Staines or their qualifications for taking the cloth. It was ironic that the breed of person who had made much of one’s life so uncomfortable over the past two years should apparently (and to some degree literally) be at one’s mercy.⁹⁰

Howard was more sympathetic about the plight of the regular officers whose careers came to an end during the late 1950s. For him, ex-officers were the ‘new unemployables’: ‘By next June [i.e. of 1958] some at least will have hung up their marching boots and have trodden in civilian shoes the down-hill road to a Bayswater third-floor back.’ He reckoned that 7,400 majors stood ‘no better than a 50 per cent chance of survival’ and would recall the day when their father had advised them not to join the army. He urged generous pensions: ‘even Victorian England realized that there were obligations towards old retainers’.⁹¹

For regular officers, one suspects, the pity of Howard would have been even more painful than the mockery of Holroyd. Men who had served for a quarter of a century and fought their way through a world war now found that they were being described as ‘unemployable’ by a man who had not even been born when they first joined the army and who had been an undergraduate at an age when some of them had been leading a company in battle. Most painfully of all, regular officers realized that their own fate was bound up with national service itself. They had complained about the paperwork and routine training that went with the continual admissions of new cohorts of conscripts but, in truth, that routine had itself become the raison d’être for many officers. Howard described the mess night of his regiment with a strangely elegiac disdain:

Pointing a denunciatory finger at the ranks of flunkeys and lackeys the Commanding Officer demands to be told how, if those politicians succeed in getting rid of national service, all this will go on.

At once the world seems lost; for the fact is, of course, that it won’t. One of the things that twelve years of post-war national service has done is to enable the professional army officer to keep himself in that state of life to which he has always been accustomed. Since 1945, the army has been enabled to live in the past by being offered every year a tribute of 120,000 men. Once that tribute is withdrawn it is difficult to see how the roulette ball will be kept rolling, the swords clanking and the beagles yapping. Without batmen to sweep up the broken glass, agricultural defaulters to repair the crushed rose bushes, fatigue men to clean down the drink-sodden cars, it is doubtful if the fun and games, the slap and the tickle would retain their traditional appeal. For the first time, in peace, the British army may soon have to face the terrible problem of living in the present.⁹²