Over 2 million men were conscripted into the British armed forces between the end of the Second World War and November 1960; the last of them were demobilized in May 1963. In addition to this, hundreds of thousands jumped before they were pushed and volunteered for regular service. Many such men regarded themselves as conscripts in all but name. Every man born between 1928 and September 1939 was affected – either because he was called up, because he failed the medical (itself sometimes a disturbing experience) or because he sought to avoid service. Evasion became easier in the late 1950s but no one was certain that they had avoided it until they saw the newspaper headlines saying that the last man had been called up.
Conscription bit into the lives of tens of millions of people. On board a troopship – the Dunera – in May 1951 Lt Colonel Andrew Man drafted a brief account of how the national servicemen who made up over half of his own battalion, the 1st Middlesex, had acquitted themselves in the Korean War. He began: ‘It is probably true to say that no subject receives greater attention in the English home today than the National Service Act and its repercussions upon the growing son, who must one day and for a time become subject to military law.’1 For some families the intrusion of national service was particularly violent. Thirty-one soldiers from the Middlesex did not come back from Korea – several were recorded as having ‘no known grave’.
National service seems, as a former conscript mused in 1996, ‘more than a generation ago’.2 The world in which young men submitted themselves to the, usually, petty humiliation and brutality of peacetime conscription appears, oddly, more remote today than do the two world wars. The British value institutional continuity and their perceptions of the post-war years tend to emphasize things – such as the creation of the National Health Service or the ‘permissive’ legislation of the 1960s – that seemed to change society in a permanent way. National service, by contrast, belongs to that part of post-war Britain that was improvised and jerry-built. Almost no one thought that peacetime conscription could, or should, be permanent.
Even at the time, national service was ‘foreign’ in the sense that it formed no part of British tradition. Conscripts were ubiquitous but also, so far as certain sorts of public discussion were concerned, invisible. Books on the ‘youth culture’ of the 1950s and early 60s depict a world of espresso bars and jazz clubs but servicemen pop up only when there is some, otherwise unexplained, reference to a man who has recently come out of the forces.3 Furthermore, a significant minority of conscripts served abroad. Many men had never been more than a few miles from their home and regarded travelling on escalators on the tube as they passed through London as an adventure in itself. They might then be packed off to countries they had never heard of. Men served in Aden, British Cameroons, Cyprus, Egypt, Germany, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Kenya, Libya, Malaya, Malta, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. They passed through South Africa and Sri Lanka. A few fortunate men went to the Allied Control Commission in Trieste or to NATO headquarters in Fountainebleau. Some were unlucky enough to experience trench warfare in Korea or to endure the heat, dust and bitter local hostility of the zone around the Suez Canal.
Men on troopships would spend four weeks getting to the Far East – in March 1954, there were 13,000 British soldiers ‘in transit’. In an age of full employment, this might be the longest period of relative inactivity that a working-class man would have until he retired in the 1990s. Other ranks lived in conditions of appalling squalor on ships but, once they had recovered from seasickness in the Bay of Biscay, the mind-boggling novelty of what they saw sometimes struck them more forcibly than physical hardship. Men remembered flying fish and the lascars on the boats – sometimes the first non-white people they had ever seen in the flesh. A soldier might wake up one morning, look out of a porthole and spot an Arab riding a camel along the banks of the Suez Canal: ‘like a picture in an early geography book come to life’.4 In Malaya, national servicemen fought alongside Gurkhas from Nepal. In Hong Kong, they turned a blind eye as refugees crossed from the Chinese mainland. In Korea, they were treated for their wounds by doctors from an Indian parachute field hospital. In Aden, a pharmacist drafted into the RAF was required to learn a couple of hundred words of Arabic – so that he could treat men from the locally recruited Levies – and spent part of his time administering buckets of Epsom salts to sick camels.5 In Libya, conscripts met Greek sponge divers who had crossed the Mediterranean in small boats.6
The peacetime armed forces were, in some respects, ‘foreign’ even for men who never left mainland Britain. Conscripts learned to understand alien customs and languages. They picked up an understanding of military dialect – part bureaucratic formulae, part obscenity and part Hindustani slang. They learned that old soldiers called bayonets ‘swords’ and that second lieutenants had to be addressed as ‘Mr’. They learned elaborate drills designed for infantrymen in the eighteenth century and they learned not to ask why such drills were necessary for men who were being trained as clerks in the Royal Army Service Corps. Those who became officers went through rituals in the mess that sometimes seemed odder than those of the headhunters who led some national servicemen through the Malayan jungle.
From 1939 to 1945, the entire population had been mobilized for war. After 1945, by contrast, there was a clear separation between men in the forces and the civilian population. The former were subject to different rules and the sense of living under externally imposed constraint was particularly strong for young conscripts – men who had not chosen a military life and who, usually being at the bottom of the hierarchy, felt the force of discipline especially hard.
After 1945, national service took men into a kind of nether world. They were trained for war but rarely saw any fighting. Most of them were being prepared for a conflict with the Soviet Union that everyone devoutly hoped would never happen. Even those sent to theatres of real fighting might never see an enemy soldier. For most men, national service meant one of the huge camps that once dotted Britain. Tens – or even hundreds – of thousands of men were churned through the RAF bases at Padgate, Cardington and West Kirby. The Royal Artillery kept four training regiments at Oswestry in Shropshire. Catterick near Richmond in Yorkshire was the largest, and probably the least attractive, camp in the British Isles. It was a training depot for the signal and tank regiments. Conscripts remembered the signs at the station: ‘Signals to the Right; Armoured Corps to the Left’. By the mid 1950s, 16,000 soldiers – mainly national servicemen – were stationed there. It was so large and chaotic that it was possible for a soldier to disappear entirely; a signalman charged with desertion turned out, in fact, to have stayed in the camp hiding in the toilets and stealing food. He had lived like this for six months.7
Douglas Hurd, returning from reserve service in the artillery, wrote about how army camps disfigured Salisbury Plain and how future archaeologists might suppose that such camps had been built by the Saxons to protect Wessex: ‘who in the future will believe that Englishmen of the twentieth century were so foolish as to snatch for the purposes of war thousands of acres of beauty and fertility from the heart of a country which has seen little war since Alfred beat the Danes?’8 Barracks could seem bizarre places. Sometimes they were huge, old, brick buildings that dated back to Crimea; sometimes they were made up of huts that had been thrown up, usually during the war, on patches of ground that soon turned into seas of mud. Some civilians had no sense of what a military camp might look like. A female member of the Wolfenden Committee, investigating ‘vice’, enquired – innocently or mischievously – whether sexual acts in barracks might be said to occur ‘in private’.9
The perimeter fence around each camp was the most ruthlessly enforced frontier that most British people encountered. Until the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, it was relatively easy to move from the Communist-ruled countries of central Europe to the West or vice versa. Some conscripts noted with alarm that Warsaw Pact armoured divisions would have to cross nothing but a white line painted on the trees of a forest if they smashed their way into western Europe. A soldier undergoing basic training, on the other hand, might have to get past barbed wire and Alsatian dogs if he wanted to go out for a bag of chips.
The frontiers between military and civilian life could be found in the oddest of places. Waterloo station was a frontier post, patrolled by military policemen and sometimes thronged with young men on their way back to garrisons in Hampshire. On troopships, soldiers – apart from officers – were kept separate from the civilian passengers. On the Empire Orwell in 1954, a national service private was posted as a ‘children’s picket’ to prevent his comrades from reaching those parts of the deck reserved for ‘first class ladies and children’.10
Some former national servicemen, perhaps with a mocking nod to the patois of their grandchildren, describe their national service as ‘gap years’.11 A few men really were called up between school and university. Some drafted applications to grand Oxbridge colleges on NAAFI writing paper,12 or while recovering from wounds in Korea.13 Men who undertook national service before university sometimes came to talk as though their experience was universal: ‘I don’t know anybody who didn’t go from school to national service and then to university.’14 In reality, only a small proportion of national servicemen would have stayed at school until the age of eighteen.15 Most boys spent several years at work before they joined the forces. Some deferred their service to complete apprenticeships, and might have worked for seven years or more between school and the armed forces. During the 1950s, the word ‘gap’ was, in fact, used in relation to national service to apply to the awkward years through which working-class boys passed between leaving school and being called up.16
National servicemen who went into the forces before university were a minority, even among the already small minority who went to university at all. Most men with university places deferred their service until after they graduated. Those who went into the forces before university were largely those who were going to the universities of Oxford or Cambridge. These men had an importance that bore little relation to their numbers. This was partly because they were so culturally influential. It was also partly because they were socially significant. The military authorities regarded them as the best source of ‘officer material’, but civil servants and politicians were also keen to ensure that military service should interrupt their educational careers as little as possible. Anyone who imagines that national service involved equal sacrifice should remember that men holding places at university were the one group regularly excused part of their national service.17
The tendency to see national service as something that happened between school and university goes with a tendency to downplay it. For most educated men, conscription meant a few weeks of fear, followed by around eighteen months of mild boredom. In the long term, it was often just a backdrop against which the more agreeable aspects of their lives could be highlighted.18 Those who went on to be successful were particularly prone to present national service as an interlude. Bill Rodgers, a politician of the 1970s and 80s, wrote that his time in the army was ‘less a chapter in my life than a short story, complete in itself, with a beginning and an end’.19
In one sense, all the years from 1945 to 1963 were gap years. The period is overshadowed, on one side, by the anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s and the Second World War and, on the other, by the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Even the Attlee governments of 1945 to 1951 are often presented as the culmination, or sometimes the betrayal, of wartime projects. National servicemen were frequently conscious that their experience seemed in some way less important than that of both those older and those younger than themselves. Partly this was a matter of demography. Birth rates in the 1930s were low. In 1952, there were 1,393,000 boys aged between fifteen and nineteen in England and Wales, almost all of whom would have registered for national service at the age of eighteen. By contrast, in the same year there were, even after the casualties of the Second World War, 1,603,000 men aged between thirty and thirty-four. Even more strikingly the national service generation was thrown into relief by the high birth rates of the subsequent period: the number of boys aged from five to nine in 1952 (all of them young enough to escape conscription) was 1,787,000.20
Low birth rates were particularly pronounced among the lower middle classes, which tended, in the inter-war period, to favour small families – the air force, recruiting largely from the children of ‘black coated’ workers, found that 23 per cent of its conscripts were only children; the figure for the army was 6 per cent.21 The national serviceman hero of David Lodge’s Ginger, You’re Barmy is an only child of elderly, lower-middle-class parents: ‘Sometimes I wondered if they had stumbled on the trick of procreation by accident’.22 The high birth rates of the late 1940s, and the consequent burst of young people who entered early adulthood in the late 1960s, increased the sense that former national servicemen were a marginal group. Lodge’s later novels are largely about men born in the 1930s, who reach early middle age in a world that seems dominated by soixante-huitard students.
The sense of being an ‘in-between generation’ was cultural as well as demographic. One defining feature of national servicemen was that they had all lived through the Second World War (no one born after September 1939 was called up) and many of them were acutely conscious that their own military experience seemed petty compared to that of their fathers or older brothers. The most educated national servicemen also reflected on the ideological conflicts of the 1930s. Even pacifism felt more passive in the 1950s than it had twenty years earlier. David Batterham, a conscript in the Canal Zone, wrote to his father, who had been a conscientious objector during the war: ‘Generally speaking pacifism is less political now than between the wars, would you say? … less idealistic and more personal.’23
Those older than national servicemen sometimes regarded them with condescension. Gwylmor Prys Williams was a statistician who wrote on the problems of teenagers in the late 1950s – he was especially interested in the effects of military service. He thought that young men of the 1950s lacked the sense of purpose that had animated his contemporaries in the 30s and then in the war. This was partly because of national decline: ‘In my early youth Great Britain was still a first-rate power. We thought we had won the 1914–1918 war and I think that most teenagers had that illusion until 1948 or 1949.’ It was also because he saw the foundation of the welfare state as marking the end of a period of a heroic political struggle: ‘To live in the aftermath of a Social Revolution is disturbing to youth, whose instinct is to alter the existing order.’24
In an influential book, Noel Annan (born in 1916) defined his generation thus:
If you had asked Maurice Bowra, the most famous Oxford don and wit of his day, how old someone was, as like as not he would have replied: ‘Our Age’. He meant by this anyone who came of age and went to the university in the thirty years between 1919, the end of the Great War, and 1949 – or, say, 1951, the last year in which those who had served in the armed forces during the Second World War returned to study.25
The Annan/Bowra definition revolves around the two wars (the second in particular) and around the formative effects of political commitment between those wars. However, post-war conscripts are conspicuous by their absence. Annan writes about John Wolfenden and Douglas Jay but not these men’s sons – both prominent members of what Annan himself would call ‘the intellectual aristocracy’, and both national servicemen. Even those post-war conscripts who were famous, or notorious, members of Annan’s Cambridge college – Neal Ascherson and Simon Raven – are not mentioned.
Former national servicemen also use the word ‘generation’ when talking about their own experience, but they use it less frequently and with less confidence than their elders. In some ways, national service actually undermined men’s sense of generational identity. The pattern of peacetime conscription encouraged men to think of their ‘contemporaries’ in narrow terms. Among themselves, conscripts regarded a man of twenty-two as being old. When one historian assembled the letters written by his friends, he described them as the ‘generation of 1949’ and regarded the experiences of those who left his Nottingham grammar school and were called up in that particular year as being quite different from those of men who were just one year older or younger.26
Though national service lasted for eighteen years, a single conscript was rarely in the forces for more than two years. The conditions in which men served changed enormously. Those who lay under rough blankets and broke the ice on their barrack-room latrines during the bitter winter of 1946 were worse off than those who were called up in, say, 1958 – though civilian conditions improved more quickly than those of the armed forces and it may, therefore, be that the conscripts’ sense of relative deprivation actually increased. Early conscripts still lived in a world that was overshadowed by the war and, for that matter, by the threat of another war that seemed to go with the Berlin airlift. Conscription seemed more legitimate and necessary to them than it did to men who came ten years later.
The rhythm of call-up and demobilization encouraged men to think of themselves as belonging to a cohort that changed every two weeks as new recruits arrived or left. ‘Get some in’ – one of the phrases most associated with the memory of national service – was used by conscripts and applied to those of their comrades who had been called up just a few months later than themselves.
If men born from 1928 to 1939 think of themselves as having something in common, then this sense tends to come from civilian experiences – education and post-war prosperity – rather than military service.27 If such men refer to military experience, they generally assume that the defining characteristic of their generation was the fact that they escaped from conscription during the war and were thus, in John Osborne’s words, ‘too young to fight, too old to forget’.28
National servicemen were overshadowed by those who were younger than them as well as those who were older. The sharp rise in birth rates that began in the late 1940s went with social changes that produced more confident and vociferous representatives of ‘youth’. This was especially true of those who were academically able. Children born around 1948 gained most from the Butler Education Act of 1944, which increased the number of free grammar school places, and the Robbins Report of 1963, which expanded universities.
Britain, or at least London, is often presented as a place in which the 1960s were lived with particular intensity – the French historian Michel Winock describes them as ‘les années anglaises’. One effect of this was to relegate the preceding decade to a kind of long Victorian age. Significantly, this (1963 to be precise) is the moment that conscription ended – though, also significantly, historians rarely allude to this fact: they are more likely to make Larkinesque reference to the Lady Chatterley trial or the advent of the Beatles. National servicemen were aware that they did not fit into the culture of the 1960s: ‘Our ambitions then were probably more lined up to 1930 values than perhaps to 1960 values, but that was perhaps inevitable because in a sense the country had gone into a sort of hiatus in the early 1940s.’29
Though the culture of the 1960s did not have much of a place for national servicemen it did, curiously, have a place for their elders. The 1960s saw increased interest in the two world wars and in the ideological struggles that lay between them. The First World War was presented as important because it epitomized the tragic futility of conflict (the musical Oh! What a Lovely War was first produced in 1963). The Second World War and the anti-fascist crusades of the 1930s were held up as examples of ‘good wars’. The result of all this was that the 1950s appeared as a valley of quiescence wedged between mountain ranges of political commitment. More specifically, national service came to seem like a parody of real war that had all of its farce and none of its tragedy. In generational terms, it was as though the radicals who were twenty in 1968 were conducting a conversation with the radicals who had been twenty in, say, 1936, but conducting it over the heads of the generation, made up of men born in the 1930s, that stood between them.
The idea that national service was laughable came to influence national servicemen themselves. In 2007, when David Batterham deposited his national service diary and letters in the Imperial War Museum, he appended a note: ‘For many years after I left the army, the question “Where did you do your National Service?” was a common greeting among all young men. I last heard it, after a long gap, from a pompous pub bore in about 1975.’30
There are some specifically academic reasons for the neglect of national service. The end of national service overlapped with the beginning of the golden age of British sociology, but sociologists took oddly little interest in the armed forces. A few researchers exploited the information about young men provided by conscription, but these researchers usually thought of themselves as specialists in ‘public health’ rather than sociology, as it was coming to be understood. Often their studies had started looking at a particular generational cohort before they reached national service age, or even before conscription had been introduced in Britain, and simply followed their subjects as they were called up. Sometimes such work had begun with assumptions that were starting to seem old-fashioned by the late 1950s.31 The sociologists who were appointed to newly created or expanding university departments in the early 1960s usually showed little interest in national service. This is all the more striking because many of these sociologists had themselves been national servicemen – indeed some seem to have turned to sociology partly as a reaction to their military experience.32
Sometimes, national service seems a gaping hole in works of sociology. In her study of Ship Street in Liverpool, Madeline Kerr gives information about the work of every one of the 120 adult males in the area and then adds: ‘The boys in between 18 and 20 are of course doing national service. Twelve of the boys below this age are in Borstal or some other approved school.’ Kerr later mentions in passing that some men refused to come back home after their national service.33 These are the only references to national service in the whole book. A later section on ‘going away’ is about prison.
National service is also conspicuous by its absence in the studies of ‘affluent workers’ published in the 1960s. The authors were interested in how well-paid workers in engineering factories thought about their social position. A large proportion of these men, all aged between twenty-one and forty-six, would have served in the armed forces, either during or after the Second World War. Interviewers were specifically asked to prompt workers about military service when asking about previous jobs. Their handwritten notes sometimes record extraordinary experiences; one of the workers had fought with the Special Air Service.34 Notes on interviews reflect a bored familiarity with the military world: ‘rather thick ex-military policeman (I know the type well from extensive experience)’.35 There is, however, almost no reference to military experience in the published study.36 There is, for example, no enquiry into whether service in the RAF – which recruited many skilled workers and which had been shaken by large-scale ‘strikes’ in 1945 – might have helped foster a particular kind of working-class culture.
Absence is most striking in Education and the Working Class, the beautifully written study by Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden of ninety-eight children (over half of them boys) educated at grammar schools in Huddersfield. Jackson and Marsden, born in 1932 and 1933, were both national servicemen,37 and their book contributed to a debate about educational potential that had been ignited, in part, by the Crowther Report of 1959, which drew much of its information from national servicemen. But Education and the Working Class says little about the fact that almost all the male subjects of the book would have spent two years in the armed forces. There is just one explicit, and tantalizingly brief, reference to a working-class grammar school boy who found that national service ‘offered some kind of respite’ from the aimlessness that had afflicted him after school.38
Why were the most influential sociologists of the 1950s and 60s so uninterested in national service? Partly, no doubt, the answer lies in a link between an absence of a tradition of conscription and the absence of a tradition of military sociology. The fact that the armed forces had usually been small, and made up of long-service regulars, contributed to the sense that it was a subject for specialists that could have no broader implications for civilian society. Universal military service did not last long enough to change academic assumptions in this area. Furthermore, the most influential sociological works of the period were usually ‘community studies’. Most of them involved studying a particular town, suburb or neighbourhood.39 This intense focus on an area meant that anything that took people away from it tended to disappear from view.
What of historians? The generation born in the late 1940s has been especially influential in the historical profession and its members have sometimes assumed that recent British history overlaps substantially with their own autobiography.40 This does not mean that they ignore what happened before their birth or during their youth but it does mean that they tend to focus on those things that were to have an obvious impact on their own lives – the welfare state, social mobility, meritocracy. For such people, however, national service exists only as a vague blur on the periphery of their vision.
Tony Judt recognized that not being conscripted had defined his own generation: ‘I was born in England in 1948, late enough to avoid conscription … but in time for the Beatles.’41 But the absence of conscription also came close to defining his vision of the whole post-war period:
The 1960s saw the apogee of the European state. The relation of the citizen to the state in Western Europe in the course of the previous century had been a shifting compromise between military needs and political claims: the modern rights of newly enfranchised citizens offset by the older obligations to defend the realm. But since 1945 that relationship had come increasingly to be characterized by a dense tissue of social benefits and economic strategies in which it was the state that served its subjects, rather than the other way around.42
Remarks about national service in most studies of British history are cursory.43 The subject does not fit neatly into any of the categories under which post-war British history is usually studied. Historians of grand strategy and high politics say something about government policy on conscription but not much about the experience of conscripts. Old-fashioned social historians (those on the frontier of labour history) tend to be interested in adult men who voted, worked in industry and belonged to trade unions. New-fashioned social historians (on the frontier of cultural history) tend to be interested in immigrants, women and children. The notion that it might be possible to write a social history of the armed forces themselves has been relatively slow to take hold.44
Oral history has widened the gulf between military historians and those who work on more broadly ‘social’ themes. Anyone who conducts interviews is obliged, in a literal sense, to formulate questions before they begin their research and this makes frontiers between the sub-disciplines of history more rigid. David Lance, himself a former national serviceman, did much to develop oral history when he worked at the Imperial War Museum. However, he recognized that oral history was largely conducted by people with different interests, and he felt uncomfortable among what he described as the ‘oral history establishment’ in Britain. He regarded it as having a ‘very left-wing orientation’, and he was disillusioned by the ‘dominance’ of ‘social history’ and ‘sociology’. For Lance, the Oral History Society (founded in 1973) was dedicated to ‘social history meaning the history of the working classes as opposed to other kinds of social history’. He felt that ‘I carried this Imperial War Museum label. I felt as if I had been put into a box.’45
Lance’s conflation of ‘sociology’, ‘social history’, ‘left-wing approaches’ and ‘the history of the working classes’ is not entirely fair, but it is revealing. The interviews conducted by Lance’s own colleagues at the Imperial War Museum and those conducted by those historians who are primarily interested in civilian society differ strikingly. The military interviewers sometimes pass over every aspect of civilian life – which means that they occasionally move men born in the 1930s straight from their last memories of the Second World War (usually of victory celebrations in May 1945) to the moment when they were themselves called up.
By contrast, interviewers who are primarily interested in civilian society ask little about national service.46 The ‘City Lives’ interviews, with figures from the London financial establishment are particularly suggestive. The interviewers are drawn in part from Lance’s ‘oral history establishment’, they are all scrupulous, and they cannot in this case be accused of confining their interest to the working class: most of their interviewees are bankers and stockbrokers. All the same, they often approach national service as though they find it a perplexing episode in the lives of their subjects. Sometimes they simply pass over it and then retrace their steps when they realize that there is a two-year gap in someone’s biography: ‘I’m sorry we missed out your national service. I’d forgotten about that.’47
The relative neglect of national service as a topic for research in Britain is highlighted by international comparison. Americans have always taken the social history of the armed forces seriously – perhaps because military service so often provided a route to education and social mobility. Samuel Stouffer’s study of the American soldier put the phrase ‘relative deprivation’ into circulation48 – though the English sociologist who made most use of this concept, a national serviceman, applied it exclusively to the civilian world.49 More specifically, conscription was a topic of interest for US scholars because it became so controversial during the Vietnam War.
Even more strikingly, military service was, until its abolition in 1997, important in France. French historians, and historians of France, have always studied compulsory military service. They have examined it as an object in itself and they have studied it, as Eugen Weber famously did, as one of the means by which the state transformed ‘peasants into Frenchmen’.50 The historians of the Annales School used conscription as a source of information that could be subjected to statistical analysis.51
This interest has not crossed the Channel. The British, unlike the French, did not use military service to mould national culture. The authorities excluded from conscription anyone whose attachment to the nation seemed problematic – including the entire population of Northern Ireland. The links between military service and national identity were therefore less explicit than in much of continental Europe. As for the attempts by the Annales School to use military service as a source for social history, many of those British historians who did most to diffuse the influence of the Annales School were themselves national servicemen, but they do not seem to have thought that national service itself might be an interesting object of study. Indeed, Peter Burke has suggested that the effect of national service was to make young men who had been posted to Malaya, like himself, or Jamaica, like Keith Thomas, interested in anthropology and hence to turn them away from twentieth-century Britain towards the apparently exotic cultures of early modern Europe.52
The French interest in conscription was enhanced by the fact that so many conscripts fought in the Algerian War of 1954 to 1962. This war, and the rebellion by army officers against the decision to withdraw from Algeria, stimulated interest in the sociology and social history of the army.53 Important historians – such as Robert Bonnaud, Antoine Prost and Alain Corbin54 – served in Algeria and wrote about their experiences there. Most importantly, the perception that conscripts in Algeria had been involved in torture and other atrocities encouraged a generation of historians born in the early 1970s – notably Raphaëlle Branche and Claire Mauss-Copeaux – to interview former conscripts.55
The British colonial wars – in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus – also involved conscripts but they have not directed British attention to conscription in the same way. The number of conscripts mobilized in British wars of decolonization was relatively small – the recent burst of writing on British repression in Kenya has mainly involved regular soldiers and policemen.56 The very fact that British conscripts fought in more than one conflict meant that there was no single war that focused discussion in the way Algeria did for the French or Vietnam did for the Americans. Atrocities were less widely discussed in Britain than in France – perhaps because the British authorities did not persecute anti-colonial militants who were of European origin.
The aim of my book is to use national service as a means to study a series of broader questions about modern Britain. I am interested in how national service might have affected society, and preventing change is as much of an effect as precipitating it. I am also interested in how national service reflected society as it was. I have approached the topic in a way that does not begin and end at the gate of the barracks and examined the penumbra of conscription. I have looked at what men did before they were conscripted, and what effect the prospect of conscription had on them before they were called up. I have explored the relationship between women and national service: it is significant that the armed forces often regarded the mothers of conscripts with hostility and that young women were often so indifferent to men of military age. And I have looked at who did not do national service and why the British state did not want to conscript certain categories of men.
I should explain features of my work that may seem strange to some readers. The first relates to national servicemen in the wars of decolonization. I recognize that conscripts were often involved in the administration of violence. I have not, however, entered into the wider debates about how common violence was. Furthermore, I have not touched on what one historian has called the ‘juridification of the past’.57 I mean by this that I have not attempted to determine how far violence might, or might not, have been legally defensible. From the point of view of national servicemen themselves, what mattered was the act of killing – particularly killing in the uncomfortably intimate circumstances that often marked the wars in Kenya and Malaya, where soldiers frequently fired at very close range – not the question of whether any particular kill was legal.
Second, I have not sought to write a faithful account of daily life as experienced by an ordinary conscript. A few literal-minded conscripts wrote letters or diary entries of exactly the same length on every single day of their service. Reading such documents gives the historian an uncomfortable insight into how tedious national service could be, but I have written most about those aspects of service – travel abroad, combat and, most important for most men, basic training – that loomed largest in men’s memories. Similarly, I have devoted attention to groups whose experience strikes me as significant. I have written about two conflicts – Korea and Suez – that involved relatively small numbers of conscripts (very small numbers in the case of Suez) because these were conflicts that were, for very different reasons, seen as important by many British people. Similarly, I have written at length about the social extremes. This is partly because we learn about the armed forces, and indeed British society, by looking at those whose success and failure were most marked and, in the context of national service, this means looking at the group of men (5 per cent at most) who were commissioned and the even smaller proportion who were most likely to end up in Colchester Military Detention Centre. I have also tried to take national servicemen at their word. Since so many of their accounts emphasize the social integration of a process that allegedly mixed boys from Borstal and those from grand public schools, it is worth examining these groups. Large numbers of the former were ‘direct entrants’ into the Pioneer Corps and a significant minority of the latter would have joined Brigade Squad of the Household Division. Both these groups were separated from other soldiers from the first day of their service.
The third characteristic of my work that might require some explanation relates to memory. Recent historians have tended to divide into two camps. Those writing for the general public are increasingly interested in personal recollections; some present their work as a collage of first-hand accounts. Such an approach has been especially influential in histories of national service – because, until recently, few other sources were available. Several writers have either edited collections of autobiographical essays or synthesized the memories of national servicemen.58 Keith Miller, Trevor Royle and Adrian Walker have generously deposited their sources – sometimes composed of long and striking accounts by individual servicemen – so that they can be consulted by other historians.59 On the other hand, academic historians have become increasingly prone to see problems in the use of what they call ‘ego-documents’ as historical sources. Some of them see all autobiographical accounts as a kind of ‘fiction’ based on a false notion of the unity of the self. Such scholars often believe that the operation of memory itself should be an object of study.
I have attempted to steer a middle course. I have, to quote a critic who is hostile to such an approach, used autobiographies ‘for useful facts to pick out, like currants from a cake’.60 I have treated personal accounts as I would treat any other documents and tried as far as possible to check one kind of source against another. I am aware, as many former national servicemen are themselves, that memory plays tricks and that there is sometimes a fine line between fact and fiction. Some of the best-written and most amusing accounts of national service, ones on which I have myself drawn, contain assertions that cannot be true. Julian Critchley claims to have been offered a commission in a smart regiment because an officer noticed that he was circumcised and thus concluded that he was a public school boy – one could write a whole chapter on why this story is implausible.61 It would, however, be wrong to assume that unreliable personal memoirs can be juxtaposed with a world of austere fact to be found in official archives. The service ministries compiled ‘ego-documents’ themselves because they often drew on interviews and questionnaires to examine the experience of conscripts. Furthermore, official bodies, like individuals, have personalities, which express themselves in documentary records. The brisk empiricism of the air force contrasts sharply with the more emotional and Panglossian views of the army. Most of all, Whitehall departments had interests of their own to defend. One collection of documents concludes with a revealing remark by a civil servant: ‘I understand that one of the purposes of the survey was to provide ammunition to enable S of S to deal with critics of national service.’62
Sometimes the things that men remember and forget can themselves be revealing. Working-class conscripts frequently refer to national service pay – 28s per week with deductions for barrack-room breakages. For boys who had been called up when they had been at work for several years and were sometimes earning as much as £10 per week, this was a matter of bitter resentment. Middle-class men, by contrast, rarely remember what they were paid. For boys who came straight from school, it mattered less. A few wealthy men do not remember what allowance they received from their parents (though some regiments discouraged men without such resources from applying for a commission) or even whether they received an allowance at all.63 Even the national service number tells us something. Men almost invariably remember it. During basic training they had to shout it out when asked to identify themselves – a private who told a court martial that he would answer to his name but not to his rank or number got fifteen months.64 Men who were commissioned got new numbers but they rarely remember them: an officer was identified by name rather than by number.
Sometimes the inconsistencies of memory can be dramatic. Consider one of the most notorious episodes of the national service period when a patrol of the Scots Guards killed twenty-four Chinese men in Malaya in December 1948. There was a major division in the way in which men on the patrol recounted the incident. Some, mostly regular soldiers, stuck to the official line that the Chinese had been ‘shot while trying to escape’. Others, mostly national servicemen, said that the victims had been murdered. Even among those who said that there had been a massacre, however, there were important discrepancies. Men disagreed about who had given them orders and about whether or not individual soldiers were offered the chance not to participate. Finally, one guardsman recognized that his own memories ebbed and flowed with time:
it’s been bothering me recently [in 1970] more than when it actually happened, or immediately after it happened … It hasn’t been comfortable. It has drifted at times, I’ve forgot about it and then television and suchlike and different things suddenly bring it back and then it goes again as quick and then arisen again as quick.65
What, then, might the historian gain by looking at national service? First, the answer to this question lies in a shift in perspective that may make recent British history appear less benign. Studying national service means turning away from the experience of the post-war baby boomers to examine the generation of men whose childhoods had been overshadowed by economic depression and war. It also means recognizing that the upwardly mobile grammar school boys, who have provided some of the most famous accounts of national service, were a minority. Many young men did not encounter the benign state of Beveridge and Butler. Their education more or less stopped with elementary school and was, at least for those of them born in the early part of the 1930s, disrupted by the chaos of war. The most important state interventions in their early lives came from evacuation or from the conscription of their own fathers. Their view of the state revolved around coercion as much as welfare.
Secondly, national service is useful for anyone who is interested in social class. Class might seem an intangible category to anyone working on civilian society in modern Britain, and many historians have begun to question whether it is useful at all, but people in the 1950s did think in terms of class. Those who talked most about class tended to do so with reference to the civilian world and they sometimes pointed out that class distinctions were becoming more fluid and permeable, which did not mean that they were disappearing. However, the armed forces had their own class system – which involved distinctions between ranks (especially the all-important distinction between officers and ‘men’) but also more complicated hierarchies involving the different services and the different units within them.
Thirdly, national service tells us about masculinity. The armed forces had explicit and aggressively enforced notions of what constituted properly ‘masculine’ behaviour. They also took an intrusive interest in the lives of recruits. Seeing how young men responded to all this tells us much about how they thought about notions such as ‘adulthood’, ‘sexual experience’, ‘homosexuality’ or, indeed, ‘normality’.
Fourthly, national service relates to Britain’s position in the world. Between 1945 and 1963, Britain changed from being the greatest imperial power that the world had ever seen into a small island that ruled over a few other small islands. It also acquired nuclear weapons and adopted a foreign policy that revolved around the containment of the Soviet Union. Usually this process is seen in terms of high policy and grand strategy, and national servicemen appear only as part of the ‘resources’ that Britain was able to deploy. Studying them shows something of how the big strategic changes affected ordinary people. Relations with empire are particularly important in this context. It was during the last years of the British empire – from, say, 1943 to 1958 – that ordinary Britons were most likely, as conscript soldiers, to go to many of Britain’s imperial possessions. Furthermore, their experiences – in the jungles of Malaya or the hills of Kenya – did not always fit neatly into the hierarchies of race and class that we usually associate with empire.
Finally, national service is worth studying because of what it tells us about the armed forces themselves. Regular airmen, sailors and soldiers (especially those who serve in the ranks) are rarely very articulate or given to recording their impressions. Often they take the codes and customs of the military world for granted and feel no need to explain them to outsiders. National service provides a rare window on to this world.