16

A Cold-blooded View

Let me have cold-blooded factual view.

Note by Winston Churchill asking his officials
for advice about national service, 1952¹

To be cold-blooded about it, one should begin by saying that national service was never intended to have a benign effect on young men or on British society. It was an expedient designed to provide the forces with men at a time when it was hard to recruit regulars. Judged in these terms, it was a success. From the end of the Second World War to the late 1950s, most British servicemen were either conscripts or regulars of national service age on three-year engagements, who were widely regarded as conscripts in all but name.

Without these men, the British armed forces, and Britain’s place in the world, would have been very different. It is hard to say whether the balance of power between the Soviet Union and the western alliance in Europe would have changed if Britain had had smaller forces. The American contribution to the western alliance overshadowed that of its allies, and in any case nuclear weapons overshadowed conventional forces. It is, however, certain that, without conscription, Britain could not simultaneously have kept forces in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, and could not have attempted to reanimate its empire after 1945. More generally, the sense that the British governing classes had that they were still presiding over a ‘great power’ owed much to their capacity to deploy conscripts. The decisions behind all this, however, were not entirely ‘cold-blooded’, and one effect of national service was to blur the focus of British strategic thinking and to prevent a clear audit of the resources to sustain a strategy.

There were really four different rationales for peacetime conscription. First, it was maintained because Britain needed to police areas that had fallen under its aegis during the last stages of the war. Second, it was maintained in order to train large numbers of reserve troops who could be deployed in a future conflict. Third, it was maintained to provide full-time soldiers who might be ready for immediate deployment. Finally, it was used to provide men who actually did serve in Britain’s various wars of decolonization.

Like the owners of an ancient manor house, politicians and generals built on top of existing structures without completely demolishing them. Thus soldiers continued to be required for reserve training, even when national service was being justified mainly as a means of providing men for immediate deployment, and the use of national servicemen in colonial conflicts was an addition to, rather than a replacement for, the deployment of forces that might be ready to fight the Red Army in Europe.

The end of the Second World War left Britain with military commitments all over the world at a time when its capacity to pay for such commitments was particularly low. A cold-blooded analyst might have said that the solution to this was retrenchment, which would have included a quick withdrawal from colonies and a brutal appraisal of the forces that Britain could spare to support its allies. The ability to draw on conscript soldiers was one of the reasons why Britain was able to avoid such retrenchment – it is easier to deploy men if they cost only 28s a week and if the majority of them are too young to vote. British planners were not forced to present a realistic balance sheet of what their defence policy cost – such a balance sheet would have allowed, in particular, for the 300,000 fit young men who were taken out of the economy at any one time, during a period of labour shortage.

In the early 1950s, Britain spent around a tenth of its gross national product on defence. This was high when compared both to other periods of British peacetime history and to other democratic European countries of the time. It looks even higher when we remember that this was also the period when the effects of national service bit most deeply and that, indeed, Britain was conscripting a larger proportion of its population than its allies.

The Macmillan governments of 1957 to 1963 did to some extent rethink British defence policy and Britain’s place in the world. The decision to end national service was part of this rethinking. Iain Macleod – the minister who most disliked conscription and also the one who did most to dispose of Britain’s remaining colonial possessions – was the most radical proponent of change. At the other extreme was Lord Salisbury – the minister who did most to resist the abolition of conscription – who resigned from the government in 1957, ostensibly in protest against the release of the Cypriot leader Archbishop Makarios but in reality because of a more general disenchantment with British retreat from world power.

There were, however, limits to the radicalism and extent of British rethinking. As is frequently the case, this can be highlighted by comparing Britain with France. The French too rethought their place in the world and in particular their defence policy between 1958 and 1962. Their rethinking produced the dramatic and, for many, painful decision to abandon French Algeria.

The British transition was less dramatic. Withdrawal from Algeria provoked mutiny, assassinations and executions. Macmillan’s reforms meant mainly that pensioned-off majors – forced out of the army by the Sandys Defence Review – grumbled over their pink gins in golf clubs. In some ways, the very success of the post-war British armed forces concealed the extent of British decline. British soldiers left Malaya and Kenya on their own terms and in their own time. There was no single dramatic humiliation that forced the British to face the fact that they were no longer a great power; even Suez could be presented as an unfortunate mistake rather than a symptom of something larger.

The end of national service was accompanied by other reductions in defence commitments. Overall, however, conscription in the 1940s and 50s had established a precedent that continued to influence British defence policy. It was assumed that the armed forces should consume a large share of British resources. Throughout the period from the Second World War to the abolition of national service, the service chiefs and their political allies used conscription as a bargaining chip – insisting that its abolition would have to be accompanied by the provision of new resources in other areas. Not surprisingly, regular soldiers were particularly keen on raising regular pay. Simply reducing the defence budget across the board was ruled out.

The result of all this was that in the early 1960s, British spending on defence (as a proportion of gross national product) was only slightly smaller than that of France, which was fighting the Algerian War, and was larger than that of West Germany, which had the Red Army on its doorstep. The simple fact of conscription was not what set Britain apart – most countries in continental Europe had it and, indeed, retained it for longer than Britain. The important point was that Britain’s relatively brief resort to conscription took place at precisely the time when relative economic decline might have been expected to make governments aware of their reduced capacity to act as a great power.

In one sense, conscription was just one aspect of a British illusion of great power status – an illusion that few people outside Britain, and perhaps few people outside the British governing classes, believed in or cared about. However, the prospect that Britain’s rulers could have adjusted to a more modest position in the world after 1945 is itself fanciful. The British empire had created a political culture that took ‘greatness’ for granted and victory in the Second World War had reinforced this, even as it eroded the resources with which great power might be supported. Leaders of both political parties shared this culture as did most of the officials who advised them.

Oliver Franks – wartime civil servant, British ambassador to Washington and one of the men behind the foundation of NATO – summed up this kind of thinking in his Reith Lectures of 1954:

There are some who suggest that the future of Britain lies in making a break with the past and giving up the traditions of greatness. The thing to do is to withdraw from world affairs and lead a quiet life on our island, democratic, contented and reasonably industrious. This is impossible. Geography and history alike forbid it. For us there is no middle way. Nor do most of us really think there is, except in the world of make-believe.²

Policies designed to secure Britain’s military power were, in fact, part of the post-war ‘consensus’; indeed ‘consensus’ – a word most commonly applied to welfare or economic policy – exercised the greatest influence over foreign policy and defence. National service was part of this consensus. It was to a large extent discussed outside the arena of party politics, or at least outside the arena in which the major parties confronted each other. Some Labour left-wingers opposed it and almost all Tories supported it, but the matter was never the object of a straight conflict between the two parties. Indeed it was a Labour government that established national service and a Conservative one that abolished it. Consensus did not mean complete harmony. The parties jostled to see who could extract electoral advantage from the issue, even when they did not come into direct conflict. There were also disagreements that pitted service chiefs against civilians and officials from different ministries against each other. The Ministry of Defence, concerned with what it perceived as military efficiency, was frequently at odds with the Ministry of Labour, concerned that conscription should seem as fair as possible. The disagreements about national service were, however, usually resolved in the private corners of English public life. The making of policy with regard to national service illustrated the propensity of the great and the good to exercise subtle influence. In 1955, Henry Fairlie popularized the term ‘Establishment’ to describe ‘the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised’. The management of national service illustrates the operation of this matrix. Bishops, professors, heads of Oxbridge colleges and public school housemasters proffered advice and sought inside information.

Industry, or at least a certain kind of industry, fitted into the national service consensus. Large employers – especially those that were state-owned or that derived much of their business from state contracts – found conscription relatively easy to deal with. Some of them continued to make pension contributions – even occasionally to pay money – to employees who were in the forces.³ Often it seemed that large companies, agencies of the state and business associations all involved similar kinds of people who were united by a shared social and political vision as much as by the pursuit of economic interests. This unity of vision was exemplified by the British Association for Commercial and Industrial Education, run by Major Scott, which often discussed national service. One group, however, were conspicuously excluded from this world. Official inquiries paid almost no attention to the interests of small businesses and particularly not to the self-employed or the proprietors of family businesses, men who could sometimes have their enterprises destroyed by a call-up notice.⁴

Organized labour became an important, if sometimes junior, partner in post-war consensus politics. Trade union leaders were consulted about national service – their influence was particularly important during the Attlee governments of 1945 to 1951. After 1951, there was less direct consultation, but even Conservative ministers tried not to offend the unions and recognized that, for example, the training of conscripts in new trades could not be undertaken against their opposition. Theoretically, men of national service age working in industries – such as coal-mining – that conferred effective exemption from national service would be called up if they went on strike but, in practice, the authorities avoided anything that might look like ‘industrial conscription’.⁵

Trade unions, understandably, focused on the impact that conscription had on their own members and this meant that they devoted most energy to the effects it had on adult men. The shipbuilders’ union, for example, agreed to allow more apprenticeships in their industry, thus increasing the pool of skilled labour, only if their employers pressed the government for deferment of national service for those workers who were already qualified.⁶ For some young men – trying to negotiate the passage, via apprenticeship, into the tightly regulated world of skilled work – it could feel as though their employers, their union and the armed forces were just different faces of the same leviathan of adult authority.⁷ Generally, trade unions began to turn against conscription in the 1950s but their turn was probably less sharp than that of the political left generally.⁸ Those who called for outright abolition of national service in the mid 1950s believed that most members of the Labour party supported their cause but that it was impeded by the power of the trade union block vote.⁹

Bringing national service into the picture of post-war consensus makes it seem less benign. Civil servants, politicians and trade unionists may all have consented in the making of policy, but young men conspicuously did not consent to be called up. Some men had tolerable, even enjoyable, experiences of national service and this may have disposed them to look on the post-war consensus favourably.¹⁰ However, for many, their most important contact with ‘the state’ came through the drill sergeant rather than the National Health Service.

The political framework of their military service was opaque to most conscripts, partly because the regular officers, who exercised immediate control over their lives, often regarded civilians, even Conservative politicians, with disdain and sometimes espoused ferociously right-wing opinions.¹¹ The armed forces, the army especially, were intrinsically political institutions. Their primary purpose was to fight Communism, and many officers considered that one of the army’s potential functions was to suppress internal unrest and, if necessary, to break strikes,¹² which, indeed, they occasionally did.¹³

In spite of this, officials and politicians insisted that open political propaganda must not be directed at conscripts. The chairman of the Army Education Advisory Board said any publication addressed to conscripts should ‘keep within the Army’s constitutional limits’ and not be a ‘political or anti-Communist tract’.¹⁴ In March 1953, the Director of Public Prosecutions was asked whether an offence had been committed when men registering for national service were handed a pamphlet entitled ‘Cut the Call-up’. Since the men concerned were not yet servicemen and since they were being asked to petition for a reduction in service rather than refuse to serve, the answer to this question was ‘no’. The DPP added that the pamphlet was a ‘mild and perfectly legitimate form of protest’.¹⁵

It would be naive to suppose that servicemen, in any country or at any time, share a clear view of the political structure in which they are meant to fit. Post-war conscription in Britain, however, posed particular problems. During the Second World War, servicemen had at least known the enemy that they were meant to be fighting. Some of them probably understood their struggle as part of a broader fight against fascism and perhaps as a means to build a new social order at home. Post-war conscripts, by contrast, were required to serve in forces that were fighting, or preparing for, several different conflicts at the same time. The Communist guerrillas in Malaya were different from the soldiers of Communist North Korea and both were different from the nationalists in Kenya or Cyprus – the latter were strongly anti-Communist. Men who considered registering as conscientious objectors were in an awkward position because so many of them objected to some, but not all, of the uses to which the armed forces were being put. Some national servicemen seem to have thought about the political significance of their actions – at Suez or in Malaya – only years after the event.

Most national servicemen had grown up in a period when there were no great ideological divisions, in Britain at least. They were mostly young and the forces provided them with little in the way of political education. Many of them went overseas without having much idea of what they were being sent to defend. Leslie Ives remembered two lectures on the troopship taking him to Malaya. One, inevitably, was about VD. The other

seemed to imply that we were leaving good old England at exactly the right time, as general conditions and austerity measures were going to worsen there. A great deal of political unrest was forecast and the prophecy was made that we might never recover our pre-war influence and standing in the world.

Years later, Ives recalled that the political lecture was ‘still a puzzle in terms of what impact it was supposed to have on us’.¹⁶ The one group of men with a clear understanding of why they were doing national service were Communists, who had been told that their ‘duty was to become a conscript and spread the gospel of peace, brotherhood and socialism among working-class conscripts’.¹⁷

The political significance of national service was rendered all the more intangible by the fact that most conscripts never fought and that one conflict for which they were supposedly being prepared was so terrible as to be almost unthinkable. War with the Soviet Union – what military planners sometimes referred to as the ‘great war’ rather than the ‘cold war’ – would have meant the use of atomic weapons. By the spring of 1955, a committee set up to consider the matter concluded that a single megaton bomb would wipe out any British city except London; ten such bombs would kill half the British population.¹⁸

Some conscripts were trained to deal with the aftermath of nuclear attack,¹⁹ but the training was so strange that it often made the prospect of nuclear war seem more remote. Some conscientious objectors cited nuclear war as their reason for refusing to serve, but systematic opposition to British nuclear weapons began only in the late 1950s, as national service was ending. A few conscripts dipped their toes into the anti-militarist culture that was beginning to develop but they rarely associated this with any broader reflection on their own military role: one supported CND during his leaves but was a well-behaved sergeant when he was in uniform.²⁰ Some of those who joined the anti-nuclear Aldermaston marches had served in the British armed forces without apparent disquiet. The majority of servicemen seem hardly to have thought about the matter. Bernard Palmer said that his duties as an officer in the ‘queasy post-Hiroshima’ days of the late 1940s never made war seem ‘more than a remote lark’.²¹

The fact that all-out war would have been so destructive, and so unlike anything that had gone before, also made it seem unreal. The Royal Engineers managed, by burning large amounts of oil, to contrive a plausible mushroom cloud that hung over one exercise in North Germany. The local population viewed it with understandable alarm but British soldiers were amused.²² War ‘games’ did indeed seem to be almost ‘playful’. When an officer asked one man what side he had been on during a war game, he replied: ‘The winning side, of course.’²³ Practising for war could expose the absurd routines of a peacetime army. A national service NCO in Germany was charged with destroying secret documents if the Russians attacked. During an exercise, he tore open an envelope marked ‘secret’ and found details for the birthday party of an officer’s son.²⁴

Army officers introducing themselves to conscripts were advised to tell them the British preferred the term ‘national service’ to ‘conscription’: ‘because that is what it is – service to the Nation. Each national serviceman contributes towards giving the Nation a strong and efficient army.’²⁵ Judged in an international perspective, however, the most striking thing about national service is that it was not actually very national. Unlike Third Republic France or Imperial Germany, the British state never tried to instil patriotism through conscription. The military authorities were reluctant to call up those from, as a War Office report put it, ‘a social group that is poorly integrated in the Nation. For example barrow boys, Gipsies, the racing community, Liverpool Irish, foreign communities in London, the Glasgow Communities from which the “gangs” are recruited etc.’²⁶

Conscription was never applied in the part of the United Kingdom where the largest number of people were likely not to feel themselves British: Northern Ireland. In Scotland and Wales, there was a small amount of overtly nationalistic opposition to fighting for a ‘foreign’ government. More important was a general sense that conscription did not fit with the social structure of either Wales or Scotland – though Welsh dislike for the armed forces, rooted in chapel-going respectability, was very different from the antipathy to army discipline that was associated with some working-class Scotsmen. Sometimes the single word that aroused most terror in the War Office was ‘Glasgow’.

National service raised questions about what the word ‘national’ might mean in Britain. Many conscripts conceived their identity in largely regional terms and the importance of ‘county’ regiments probably increased this propensity. However, Britain was a small and relatively homogeneous country and few national servicemen, at least among those from England, thought of their regional identities as being at odds with their national one.

In formal terms, the loyalty of the services was to the sovereign rather than to a nation. Monarchy became intertwined with the lives of some conscripts because George VI died in 1952. Geoffrey Barnes recalled hearing the news in the Malayan jungle. His radio operator crept up and muttered: ‘King’s dead.’ He thought at first that this meant Sergeant King of his own regiment. When he understood, he gathered his platoon and toasted the new queen with ‘dark army rum’.²⁷ Men were pulled out of their units to attend the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. The East Yorkshire Regiment put its representatives for the coronation parade on a boat at Singapore. They spent four weeks at sea, followed by six weeks drilling in preparation for the day, then four more weeks on the boat back to Singapore.²⁸ In Korea, soldiers fired salvoes of shells containing red, white and blue smoke before sitting down to eat ice cream provided by the Americans. For some officers in the Household Division, the coronation was the most significant event of their post-1945 military careers. A national serviceman in the Life Guards stationed in Germany reckoned that two thirds of the regiment had been sent back for the coronation.²⁹

Not many national servicemen were republicans, but many felt that there was something odd about the emphasis on archaic ceremonial that they associated with the forces. Asked how he felt about fighting for crown and country in Korea, Jim Laird said: ‘The Crown didn’t come into it – when the Bull stopped – only survival, and possibly anger.’ He was flown back to a British military hospital in June 1953 – arriving to find the nurses absorbed in watching the coronation on their ‘new, miracle television sets’. Laird had suffered wounds that would leave him paralysed from the chest down.³⁰

Some have justified national service on the grounds that it produced social benefits: that it made men better disciplined, more mature or better able to mix with others. Such arguments had a powerful appeal. Arnold Wesker wrote a bitter play about his national service, but forty years later was gripped by a ‘dark, heretical suspicion that conscription kept crime and violence to acceptable levels’.³¹

The argument that national service had social benefits is, however, usually a retrospective one. At the time, many commentators believed that such social effects as it had were negative: that it increased instability and juvenile delinquency among boys before they were called up and encouraged them to waste time while they served. The young men whose behaviour was ‘best’ from the authorities’ point of view – i.e. those who stayed in the same job, completed apprenticeships, undertook further education – were usually most hostile to the call-up. Those men who might have been ‘improved’ by service, such as illiterates or juvenile delinquents, were often excluded from conscription – usually on ‘medical’ grounds – or put in special units. Furthermore, national service was necessary, at least in part, because the services found it hard to recruit regulars and because those men who did volunteer for service were often poor and badly educated. Far from being an institution that took ‘bad lads’ and exposed them to the brisk regularity of military life, national service often took ‘good boys’ and exposed them to a world of profanity, petty crime and almost pathological enthusiasm to avoid hard work.

National service did not create a more homogeneous and disciplined society – on the contrary, it worked partly because Britain, mainland Britain at least, was already relatively homogeneous and disciplined. Changes in British society in the 1960s would have made it increasingly difficult to call men up, even if the government had wished to do so. Would that substantial group of men of Irish origin living in mainland Britain have been called up during the Northern Irish Troubles? What would the forces have done about non-white immigrants? Black Britons were not excluded from national service but, given how rare such men were, it is significant that they were quite common among those that officers regarded as ‘difficult’. The British army recruited 2,000 West Indians in 1960, partly to make good the shortfall that sprang from the imminent end of national service. However, the authorities decided that ‘coloured’ soldiers should not make up more than 2 per cent of the strength in any corps.³²

The most enduring myth of national service is that it mixed men from different social classes. Richard Pole remarked that national service introduced him to ‘a wonderful cross section’ of society. Pole’s account of his own service was self-deprecating but his use of the term ‘cross section’ seems to have involved no deliberate irony. This is striking because he was an officer in the Coldstream Guards – a regiment that separated potential officers and other ranks from the first day of their service. Like many officers in the regiment, he was an Etonian. His father, uncle, grandfather and father-in-law had all been Coldstream officers, as had the men who married both his sisters.³³

Sometimes, social class impinged on the workings of conscription in farcical ways. When Iain Macleod proposed measures that would in effect have excluded skilled workers from the call-up, he worried that this might provoke objections from the unions that represented the unskilled, but other ministers were concerned for a different reason. They feared that it would produce a lost generation of latter-day Raymond Asquiths and Julian Grenfells as upper-class boys died heroically at the front while the working classes skulked in their factories:

There was a danger that if men were granted deferment from national service on grounds of technical skill and usefulness to industry the future Reservists would include a large proportion of the future governing class of the country and if there were to be another war this would lead to the same destruction of the country’s elite as there was after 1914.³⁴

The survival of rigid class distinctions in the armed forces, the army especially, was striking because civilian society was more mobile in the decades after 1945. This mobility was associated with the Butler Education Act of 1944 and with an increased sense that social position ought to be determined by ‘intelligence’, which was held to be susceptible to scientific measurement, rather than by birth or by those qualities – accent, manners and access to powerful patrons – that might be associated with birth. Grammar school boys never fitted neatly into the armed forces. Indeed, a report of 1958 into how the army might recruit more regulars as national service ended suggested that a new rank be created for men who had left grammar schools at the age of sixteen or seventeen because such men did not have much in common with either officers or privates: ‘The Services should study the possibility of creating an entry (other than as an officer) which will give grammar school boys who hold the General Certificate of Education at Ordinary level suitable status, remuneration, and employment.’³⁵

One should not overstate the mobility of post-war British society, but there was at least a chance that a bright boy from a relatively humble background could – with hard work and a great deal of luck – conquer the commanding heights of the British ruling class. He might become an ambassador or a Chancery QC. The only area that was entirely closed to him was the officers’ mess of a smart regiment. A boy born into a modest background in 1935 stood a better chance of becoming a cabinet minister than a second lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards.

Some men resented the social exclusivity of the forces and contrasted it with the ‘meritocratic’ values that they believed to govern their civilian lives. The word ‘meritocracy’ was coined in 1958 by Michael Young to describe the generation of people produced by the grammar schools who believed that ‘IQ + effort = achievement’. Young did not regard meritocracy as a good thing. On the contrary, he thought that distinctions rooted in apparently objective measurement of ability would be more insidious than ones based on ancestry or inheritance. Some national servicemen, however, used the term as one of approbation. In an autobiographical afterword to his national service novel, David Lodge wrote:

The rising meritocrats produced by free grammar schools and free university education were apt to find that the old-boy network, the lines of power and influence that connected London, Oxbridge and the public schools, the possession of the right accent, manners and style, still protected the interests of the hereditary upper-middle class. Nowhere was this more evident than in the peacetime Army.³⁶

Karl Miller also presented the army in opposition to the meritocracy of the scholarship-boy educational elite from which he came: ‘it was apparent that the Army was something other than meritocratic, or at any rate that authority rested … on a highly specialized conception of merit’.³⁷

The notion that the armed forces had an entirely rigid social structure should, however, be qualified in three ways. First, the social categories of civilian life were never absent from the forces and they were especially visible during national service. Peter Burke referred to the multiplicity of hierarchies that he encountered when – as a lance corporal who had already won a scholarship to Oxford – he was posted to a locally recruited regiment in Singapore. He found himself ‘at the bottom of the rank hierarchy but at the top of the educational and race hierarchy’.³⁸

Even those at the top of the various hierarchies understood that their positions were complicated. Inherited privilege and the academic skills that were valued by meritocrats were not mutually exclusive, and one effect of national service was to take academically clever boys from privileged backgrounds into the officers’ mess. Simon Raven remarked that regular and national service officers in his own moderately smart regiment could be distinguished by the fact that the former judged men by what (public) school they had attended while the latter judged men by what (Oxbridge) college they were due to attend. No institution in Britain illustrated the celebration of undergraduate cleverness better than the television programme University Challenge (which was first screened in 1962). Its presenter, Bamber Gascoigne, was a meritocrat – he had won scholarships to Eton, Cambridge and Yale – but also a member of a privileged family, with especially close links to the Grenadier Guards, the regiment in which he performed his national service.

Secondly, the officer corps was not completely homogeneous or immutable. The smartest regiments always drew their officers from a small social pool, but things were different in the Pay Corps or the air force. Officer recruitment in the army changed over time: it had been more ‘democratic’ during the war and it became more democratic again during the 1950s – partly because of the need to ensure that there were enough officers for the Territorial Army in the industrial north and partly because the number of men with the educational qualifications to be officers increased.

Thirdly, an emphasis on the distinctions between officers and other ranks – or even between the social status of officers in different kinds of regiments – can be deceptive because it implies that this was the only way in which social class counted for national servicemen. In reality, class pervaded all aspects of national service. It even partly accounted for the fact that Quakers, usually middle class, were better treated than Jehovah’s Witnesses, often working class, when they applied to be recognized as conscientious objectors.

The separation of officers from other ranks mattered for those men who had some reason to suppose that they might be officers or whose educational or social background gave them reason to feel that they might be the equal of officers. The men who talked most about ‘class’, and certainly the ones who did so in the most resentful terms, were often lower-middle class rather than working class. This was related to both educational change, which opened up the possibility of social ascension, and military service, which often marked the limits of that ascension. Social hierarchies are most visible for those who regard them as least ‘natural’, but they exercise most power over those who accept them as a fact of life. It is also notable that lower-middle-class authors were often conscious of their disadvantages – relative to the officer class – but rarely conscious of the ways in which, say, a pay corporal might be privileged in relation to most soldiers.

Sometimes, the picturesque manifestations of class that were associated with officer status in smart regiments obscured the more mundane ways in which class structured the lives of most conscripts. Consider, for example, RAF Hednesford. Because, in the early 1950s, all airmen with the educational qualifications to become officers (regardless of whether or not they were really likely to be commissioned) were concentrated at this one camp, most of the recruits who did their basic training there would have belonged to that section of the population (about a fifth of it) that had been educated at grammar schools until at least the age of sixteen. Some of the men who passed through this camp had a particularly acute understanding of the British class system.³⁹ One of these was a sociologist, who, in an autobiographical essay on his national service, gave Hednesford the name of Goldthorpe, after a leading sociologist of class.⁴⁰ However, men who were trained at Hednesford usually thought in terms of their own exclusion from more privileged classes – they said relatively little about the social homogeneity of their own milieu in training or the privileges that they might have enjoyed relative to less well-educated recruits.

For most servicemen, officers lived on the far side of an impassable frontier. Distinctions among other ranks, on the other hand, could be important. The formal measurement of intelligence and academic ability did not always divide officers from other ranks – and certainly did not divide officers in smart regiments from those in more humble ones – but it did frequently divide different kinds of non-commissioned servicemen from each other. Indeed, some officers were explicit about the distinction between the qualitative tests, which should be applied to the kind of men who might become officers, and the more scientific measurements, which might be used for those who were lower down the social scale: ‘Let us keep the psychiatrist on this valuable work of sorting out the men in the mass, but let us continue to put our faith on the experienced regimental officer for the selection of candidates for both temporary and regular commissions.’⁴¹ The tests administered at Ministry of Labour medicals determined whether men would serve in the RAF or the army – men who had sat the 11-plus had by this time come to recognize the puzzles, like ‘Chinese ideograms’,⁴² of an intelligence test. The testing of intelligence and education level in the forces was even more extensive than that conducted as part of the 11-plus and this helped to change educational policy in Britain. In 1959, the Crowther Report on education concluded – largely on the basis of information about national servicemen – that a substantial number of intelligent boys had not attended grammar school, and this contributed to a move towards ‘comprehensive’ education.

Most of all, the forces were meritocratic, in a brutal way, to their least privileged recruits. ‘Scientific’ measurement of intelligence certainly mattered when it came to men who had fewest choices about their military careers. Anyone who scored low on intelligence tests or fell into the lowest educational category was likely to be assigned to the army, likely to be assigned to one of the least popular corps and likely to be given ‘general duties’ rather than a particular trade. One entire corps – the Pioneers – was kept largely for men who scored lowest on intelligence tests. Indeed, Young’s definition of ‘meritocracy’ referred to the army:

The flower of that experiment of the 1940s was the Pioneer Corps. When this indispensable body of hewers and drawers was confined to men with IQs below the line required to get them into the Intelligence Corps, the rise in efficiency was spectacular. The morale of these dull-witted men was better. They were no longer daunted by having superior people to compete with.⁴³

Young’s laboured satire was not far from the tone of real War Office reports:

National service intakes include an appreciable proportion of men who are sub-standard mentally. For political and other reasons, they cannot be excluded from the call-up. These men are generally unhappy in units of arms other than the Royal Pioneer Corps, since they tend to be relegated to fatigues and other dull duties and their morale suffers. They can, however, develop a very high standard of morale and self-respect if kept together and are capable of a high output of useful if elementary work.⁴⁴

The closing stages of national service coincided with other social changes that appear at first glance to be at odds with each other. On the one hand, this period saw what might be called the death of the British ancien régime. Life peers began to dilute the power of hereditary aristocrats in 1958, which was also the last year in which debutantes were ‘presented’ at court. The clubbable world of the City of London was shaken by the first ‘hostile take-over’.

On the other hand, this was also a time when certain kinds of social privilege seemed more secure than ever before. The Conservatives won an electoral victory in 1959, partly because they had promised to end national service. In 1945 Evelyn Waugh had published his elegy for a dead social system, Brideshead Revisited. Conscripts read it with amused interest: Peter Nichols entitled the section of his diary dealing with his return from Malaya on the lower deck of a troopship ‘Bulkhead revisited’.⁴⁵ In 1959, Waugh published a second edition of his novel, but this time he believed that he had been burying an ‘empty coffin’. One assumes that part of Waugh’s optimism sprang from the fact that his son was performing national service in the Household Cavalry, where he was relieved to find that ‘the toffs were still on top’.

There were broader reasons for the British upper-middle class to feel secure in the late 1950s. The truth is that the new world of meritocratic modernity and the old world of inherited privilege were not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the decline of some of the more colourful and obviously archaic aspects of the British class system concealed the degree to which class divisions survived. The end of national service did not end blatant inherited privilege in the armed forces (or at least in the most socially prestigious regiments of the army) but it did mean that the majority of men no longer had to have any contact with that world of blatant privilege. It may also be that their brief contact with such a world actually strengthened the belief of many men that their own privileges – earned through educational achievement – were deserved and in keeping with the ‘classless’ society that some discerned in the 1960s.

What difference did national service make to individual men? It was intended to make as little as possible. The authorities expected that men would simply go back to whatever they were doing before and employers were required to hold jobs open. The men born in the 1930s usually valued job security – perhaps because of what they knew about the experiences of their fathers – and few of them were prone to take risks. About three quarters of national servicemen went back to their previous jobs.⁴⁶ A draughtsman returned to his desk to find that his possessions were still in the drawer where he had left them two years previously.⁴⁷ A journalist reported on the men of one infantry regiment:

It is an odd interlude in a man’s life. Take Private Don Bangs. A year ago Bangs was a barrow boy with a pitch in Kentish Town Road, NW and in another year he will be a barrow boy again. Yet in the meantime he is living in a camp with a monkey and six headhunters and spending his time stalking Chinese bandits in Malaya.⁴⁸

Whether national service made much difference to the long-term career of the average conscript is hard to say. It interrupted careers and took men away from civilian work and/or training for around two years. In general, the national servicemen who anticipated changing their professions after their service aimed to move up the social scale – though the social scale itself was changing in ways that made clerical work less attractive. Men who had done unskilled, semi-skilled or clerical jobs often anticipated doing something different when they left the forces; large numbers of men hoped to move into skilled work. The group who anticipated obtaining ‘professional or managerial’ jobs was smaller – though it was higher than the proportion of recruits whose fathers had held such jobs.⁴⁹

On the whole, the men who were called up between 1945 and 1960 did relatively well in financial terms. They benefited from economic expansion – the British economy did grow even if it did so less quickly than those of some of Britain’s rivals – and full employment. It also seems likely that they benefited from the low birth rates of the 1930s – there is more ‘room at the top’ if there are fewer men to fill it.

The question is not whether conscripts – or the British economy – did well or badly but whether they did better or worse than they would have done if there had been no conscription. There can be no definitive answer here,⁵⁰ but there is some suggestive evidence. First, towards the end of national service, relatively few men were called up. When they came out of the forces, they had to compete with those slightly younger than themselves who had not been called up, or with their own contemporaries who had avoided the draft through educational deferments. There is little evidence that former conscripts felt that their military experience was an advantage in these circumstances – rather the contrary: ‘the older National Service Man was regarded as being “tainted” when in competition with younger men who had escaped service’.⁵¹

Secondly, students of social mobility have concluded that it improved during the post-war period but that it improved most dramatically for those born in the 1940s rather than in the previous decade.⁵² This would suggest that men born too late to be called up did better than those who had been conscripted. This is all the more striking because birth rates rose in the 1940s – so men born in that decade did not have the scarcity value of those born in the 1930s. A correlation is not a cause. It may be that other forces for social mobility were so powerful that they outweighed both the effects of birth rates and the effects of conscription, but the correlation does at least suggest that we should regard the claims that conscription was economically beneficial with scepticism.

Surveys conducted by the forces themselves did not suggest that military service made men more productive in the civilian economy. An army survey of industrialists in the mid 1950s concluded that some industrialists believed that some workers showed more initiative after national service, but that this improvement might just have been due to the passage of time. Other employers believed that national service made men more prone to waste time and to wait for orders. Given that the report in question was commissioned specifically to help defend national service, this is hardly high praise.⁵³

The RAF was particularly interested in skilled industrial workers, who made up a disproportionate part of its own national service intake, and its internal reports painted a bleaker picture of the economic effects of national service. They suggested: ‘The NS man is critical of Service life because he believes it makes skiving too easy.’⁵⁴ Another RAF report from the same period drew attention to ‘the currency of such words as “fiddle”, “racket” and “wangle” ’.⁵⁵ A decade later, a prosperous worker recalled his national service thus: ‘Nice sort of life in the RAF – easier going … nice to have someone thinking for you all the while – but not enough freedom.’⁵⁶

Some men gained in professional terms from national service but they were probably not those for whom it fitted neatly into their civilian careers but, rather, those who felt its ‘disruptive’ effects. Educational segregation and full employment in the 1950s meant that some men’s social destiny seemed fixed before they were twenty. A man who had failed the 11-plus – or passed it but left school at sixteen – was likely to remain in the same relatively menial occupation until he retired. For a few of these men, two years in the forces provided time to read and think and, in some cases, decide to return to education.⁵⁷

Men born in the 1930s often considered themselves fortunate. Having grown up with the depression, war and rationing, they came to adulthood in an era of economic growth and expanding opportunities. National service did sometimes play a small part in this sense of being blessed – it was one of the uncomfortable features of their youth from which men escaped. One man anticipated that his national service would come to seem ‘an extensive Lent’ because ‘everything, however absurd and wasteful, will seem so jolly after the asceticism of this place’.⁵⁸

Sometimes a restrained scepticism about military culture was the most important long-term effect of national service. Philip Bell, historian and clerical corporal, said that the phrase ‘planned like a military operation’ always struck terror into his heart.⁵⁹ Robert Gomme, also a corporal, who served on the front line in Korea, became a civil servant. Looking back forty years later, he was uncertain about what his national service meant and doubted that claims about its maturing effects were well founded. The most enduring legacy of his service seems to have been a strong dislike for the military metaphors that his colleagues were prone to use: ‘it’s a minefield’, ‘ranging shot’ and ‘smoke screen’.⁶⁰

Attitudes to sex, families and masculinity also owed more to a reaction against military values than an adoption of them. Some have suggested that British men espoused a more ‘soft-edged’ masculinity after 1963 and that this was related to a decline in martial culture that went with the end of national service.⁶¹ However, it was often former national servicemen who illustrated this softer-edged masculinity. The ‘companionate’ marriages that so struck sociologists during the mid 1960s must largely have involved husbands who had undertaken military service. Conscripts may have been exposed to a self-consciously brutal, misogynistic world in the armed forces but very few of them adopted its values. On the contrary, national servicemen often seem to have come out of the armed forces valuing ‘domesticity’ more highly than when they went in. Self-mocking references to ‘virgin soldiers’ suggest that at least some national servicemen had an ironic and thoughtful attitude to their own masculinity.

Many men came to look back on their national service in relatively favourable terms. Sometimes this was because it fitted into a biographical trajectory. More often, it was because time in the armed forces was an interlude that was exciting precisely because it took men away from the things they might have done in the ordinary course of their lives. A national service pilot, who had gone through the thrilling and dangerous experience of learning to fly when he was eighteen, did not sit in the cockpit of an aeroplane after leaving the air force until he and his grandchildren undertook a brief joy ride from Duxford aerodrome fifty years later.⁶² Working-class men often looked back on service in Singapore or Hong Kong as the great adventure of their lives.

There is, however, a contrast between the benign way in which national service is often remembered and the mood evoked by documents of the time. An air force survey of 1948 concluded:

It has been our impression that the very fact of compulsory service in the absence of an obvious threat of war, arouses strong resistance in many men. This seems to be overcome at first by logical and reasonable arguments and by the excitement and career possibilities of the prospect. We are not satisfied, however, that these factors dispose finally of the resistance aroused, and it may be that this is partly responsible for the swing away from co-operation which we witnessed in so many conscripts.

Finally it must be stated that of all those whom we interviewed, by far the larger number thought conscription a waste of time. Many officers agreed that ‘a small nucleus of high morale, regular service men, well paid and equipped, would serve the country better and cost less than the present RAF’, with its ‘rabble of discontented and unhappy conscripts’.⁶³

Letters and diaries of servicemen themselves, even those who later described national service in relatively positive terms, often capture feelings of frustration, boredom and the sense that life was passing them by.⁶⁴ Some of J. M. Lee’s school friends had interesting postings: to Kuala Lumpur – ‘the most beautiful city I have ever seen’ – or Austria – ‘amongst the best British stations in the world’. In spite of this, Lee’s friends did not regard his own exemption from national service on medical grounds as misfortune: ‘Believe me all the RAF or army does is to make us worse characters, to coarsen our minds, vilify our language and narrow our understanding.’⁶⁵

Every national service career ended with a written summary as an officer wrote a testimonial on the serviceman: ‘of sober and honest habits and is recommended for any position of trust’.⁶⁶ Presenting a verdict on national service as a whole is more awkward. Even those who might be expected to have the clearest views on it did not always agree with each other. Conservatives who were veterans of national service dominated British politics from 1982, when John Nott asked that his fellow national serviceman Cecil Parkinson join the Falklands ‘War Cabinet’ to counteract the influence exercised by those older men who had served in the Second World War,⁶⁷ until 1990, when John Major (born in 1943) defeated Douglas Hurd and Michael Heseltine for the leadership of the Conservative party. However, the shared experience of military service, in itself, did not give these men much in common. Nott had switched to a short-service commission and led a Gurkha platoon on active service; Parkinson had considered registering as a conscientious objector before, regretfully, serving out his time in the air force.⁶⁸ Heseltine talked much about his period in the Welsh Guards but had extracted himself as quickly as possible; Hurd had served out his full time but remarked drily of those in his constituency party who called for the reintroduction of conscription: ‘my recollections of National Service must be different from theirs’.⁶⁹

Some aspects of national service – basic training, bull, the jokes, the obscenities – feature in almost every account, but there were also huge differences in experiences and in the effects that it had on individual men. There was no ‘outcome’ to national service. There was no single conflict that ended in victory or defeat. There were none of the collective events – bonfires, parties, mutinies – that had marked the end of the two world wars. National service was ‘ending’ almost as soon as it began because individual men were demobilized every two weeks. Men went back to work – in the tight labour markets of the 1950s, some of them started jobs on the Monday after they were demobilized – marriage and families. It was not until they retired in the 1990s that most of them had much time to reflect on their youth, which is partly why national service was so little discussed in the three decades after it ended.

If they looked back, some national servicemen finished their accounts with clear verdicts. Peter Sharp wrote:

I count my two years in the Service as a wonderful experience. I would not have missed it for worlds. National Service may seem tough at the beginning – but it should be tough. Rigorous training, they say, teaches you not only Service discipline, it teaches you self-discipline. I think that is true. I’m all for it … I went in as a boy. I came out a man.⁷⁰

By contrast, Tom Stacey wrote one of the most notorious denunciations of national service:

The considered hatred I still retain for the Army which I saw … will stay with me until I or others have changed it, or at least until it is openly shown me that it cannot carry out its important duties in a manner which does not affront humanity.⁷¹

Anyone reading these two passages might be surprised to hear that they come from autobiographical essays that were published in the same volume. They might also be surprised to hear that Sharp was a working-class NCO in the RAF and that Stacey was a guards officer or, for that matter, that Stacey was standing as a Conservative candidate in a parliamentary election just a year after the last conscript left the army.

More commonly, national servicemen end their accounts with a joke. Paul Foot – whose service, after the first hellish weeks of training, seems to have been rather agreeable – said that he felt like asking the Queen for his two years back.⁷² Perhaps only a joke can capture the incongruity of peacetime conscription. Arnold Wesker’s play Chips with Everything played a joke on the audience itself. The air force band on stage played ‘God Save the Queen’. The gambit must have made theatre goers, used to standing when the national anthem was played, feel uncomfortable. Now, even the mood of this play has become hard to recapture – not just because Wesker became more favourable to national service and less favourable to this particular play, but because there are hardly any occasions on which ordinary people stand for the national anthem. The culture in which national service existed belongs to a different age.