AORG – Army Operational Research Group
IWM – Imperial War Museum
IWMSA – Imperial War Museum Sound Archive
LHCMA – Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives
NAM – National Army Museum Sound Archive
NAMSA – National Army Museum Sound Archive
TNA – The National Archives, Kew
1. Robert Blake, The Unknown Prime Minister: The Life and Times of Andrew Bonar Law, 1858–1923 (1955), p. 282.
2. Roger Bush, FAU: The Third Generation – Friends Ambulance Unit Post-war Service and International Service, 1946–1959 (York, 1998).
3. Geoffrey Strickland, ‘The Torture Lesson’, The Spectator, 17 March 1984.
4. TNA WO 32/17501, correspondence on this matter and in particular Soames to Emery, 12 May 1960.
5. IWMSA 26098, Benjamin Whitchurch.
6. IWMSA 18825, Joseph Roberts, reels 4, 5 and 7.
7. Andreas Whittam Smith, interviewed by Louise Brodie, An Oral History of the British Press, 2007, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C638/08, track 1. © The British Library.
8. Peter Duncumb, interview, 11 January 2013.
1. NAM 2001-07-1187-46, Andrew Man, ‘The National Service Soldier in Korea’, paper drafted May 1951.
2. NAMSA 2000-04-52, John Arnold, reel 1.
3. Mary Morse, The Unattached (1965), p. 16. A researcher arriving in ‘Seagate’ in 1960 struck up a conversation with a twenty-year-old man about subjects including his service in the navy.
4. Alan Sillitoe, Life Without Armour (1995), p. 106.
5. I. C. Taylor, ‘National Service in Aden’, The Pharmaceutical Journal, 263, 7076 (1999), pp. 1018–19.
6. IWM 614, W. H. Butler, Memoir, ‘Derby to Derna (an Account of National Service Experiences)’, p. 96.
7. Clive Emsley, Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief: Crime and the British Armed Services since 1914 (Oxford, 2014), p. 176.
8. D. R. Hurd, ‘Soldiers at Salisbury’, The Spectator, 9 August 1951.
9. TNA HO 345/13, Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, 25 May 1955.
10. IWM 7178, C. B. L. Barr, diary entries, 25 and 26 April 1954.
11. Michael Ware, Gap Year: A Saga of National Service (2000).
12. Brian Thompson, Clever Girl: Growing Up in the 1950s (2007, this edn 2008), p. 63.
13. P. J. Kavanagh, The Perfect Stranger (1966), p. 95.
14. David Scholey, interviewed by Kathy Burk, NLSC: City Lives, 1992, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C409/085, track 1. © The British Library. Scholey did national service before going up to Oxford because he ‘wanted to experience university as an adult’. It turned out that the version of adulthood fostered by a cavalry regiment was not the same as that of an Oxford college, even Christ Church, and Scholey was sent down after failing his first-year exams.
15. Ministry of Education, 15 to 18 (1959), Crowther Report, II, p. 127. In a sample of national servicemen studied from 1956 to 1958, 8 per cent had stayed at school until the age of eighteen. The figure would have been even lower just a few years earlier.
16. King George’s Jubilee Trust, Citizens of Tomorrow (1955), pp. 17–18.
17. Early release was granted systematically to men who had held university places before the extension of national service in 1950. See TNA WO 32/15743, note on meeting between AG and DPA on 14 August 1951. Early release was quite regularly granted to men after this date.
18. Raymond Leppard in Ronald Hayman (ed.), My Cambridge (1977), pp. 97–114, at p. 97.
19. Bill Rodgers, Fourth Among Equals (2000), p. 22.
20. Registrar General, Statistical Review of England and Wales for the Year 1952 (1955), text, p. 10.
21. Leslie T. Wilkins, The Social Survey: National Service and Enlistment in the Armed Forces. A Report on an Enquiry Made for Several Government Departments into the Attitudes of Young Men Prior to, and on Joining the Armed Forces (1951), p. 8.
22. David Lodge, Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962, this edn 1984), p. 32.
23. IWM 15595, David Batterham, letter to parents, 15 June 1953.
24. Gwylmor Prys Williams, Teenagers’ Problems: The Contemporary Social Background and Youth’s Reaction to It (1958), p. 3.
25. Noel Annan, Our Age: The Generation that Made Post-war Britain (1990, this edn 1991), p. 3.
26. Nottingham PRO, papers of Professor J. M. Lee, DD 393/1/3, typed note ‘The Henry Mellish Grammar School Bulwell Nottingham. The Sixth Form Leaver of 1949’.
27. Barry Supple, Doors Open (Cambridge, 2009). Supple talks of his contemporaries as a ‘blessed generation’ because they benefited from welfare and education and avoided war. The reason why Supple, born in 1930, did not perform national service is given in a footnote on p. 112 of his book.
28. This is the title for a screenplay that Osborne wrote about his early life and also of a chapter in his autobiography A Better Class of Person (1981).
29. Brian Corby, interviewed by Paul Thompson, NLSC: City Lives, 1992, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C409/012, track 2. © The British Library.
30. IWM 15595, David Batterham, ‘National Service Recalled’.
31. T. Ferguson and J. Cunnison opened their study of boys from Glasgow who had been born in 1932 and left school at fourteen with The Young Wage-earner: A Study of Glasgow Boys (Oxford, 1951). They followed this up with In Their Early Twenties: A Study of Glasgow Youth (Oxford, 1956), which dealt with the same group of men at a time when some, but not all, had been called up. Finally, they published an article that was specifically devoted to the military experience of their subjects: ‘The Impact of National Service’, British Journal of Sociology, 10, 4 (1959), pp. 283–90. R. F. L. Logan and E. M. Goldberg, ‘Rising Eighteen in a London Suburb: A Study of Some Aspects of the Life and Health of Young Men’, British Journal of Sociology, 4, 4 (1953), pp. 323–45, was based on a sample of men registering for national service. In Scotland a large-scale study of intelligence among children began in 1921. By 1947, this study had come to focus mainly on children born in 1936 and its results were published in J. S. Macpherson, Eleven-year-olds Grow Up (1958). In 1969, James Maxwell published Sixteen Years On: A Follow-up of the 1947 Scottish Survey, which contained a chapter on national service.
32. This is true of Dennis Marsden, discussed below. John Partridge was due to study classics at university when he was called up in 1953 but ‘after two years military service he felt discontented with the course of study that he had chosen, so he changed his degree to social science’. Biographical note in John Partridge, Life in a Secondary Modern School (1966). So far as I know, the only sociologist to write about his own experience of national service is David Morgan: David Morgan, ‘It Will Make a Man of You’: Notes on National Service, Masculinity and Autobiography (Manchester, 1987).
33. Madeline Kerr, The People of Ship Street (1958), pp. 29 and 188.
34. Essex University, Affluent Worker Survey, interview 44.
35. Ibid., interview 13.
36. So far as I can tell, the only explicit reference comes in one quoted interview that begins: ‘When I came out of the RAF’. John Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer and Jennifer Platt, The Affluent Worker: Industrial Attitudes and Behaviour (Cambridge, 1968), p. 34. The original of this interview can be found at Essex University, Affluent Worker Survey, interview 12. The interviewee had been an RAF medical orderly.
37. Dennis Marsden undertook national service after finishing his degree at Cambridge and it helped to transform him from a chemical engineer into a sociologist. It is not clear what unit he served with, what rank he held or where he was posted – see Guardian obituary, 23 September 2009. Brian Jackson undertook his national service before Cambridge. His biographer says almost nothing about national service but does reproduce a photograph of him ‘with native servant’ while in the forces. Kit Hardwick, Brian Jackson: Educational Innovator and Social Reformer (Cambridge, 2003).
38. Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden, Education and the Working Class: Some General Themes Raised by a Study of 88 Working-class Children in a Northern Industrial City (1962, this edn 1966), p. 184.
39. Margaret Stacey, Tradition and Change: A Study of Banbury (1960); N. Dennis, F. M. Henriques and C. Slaughter, Coal is Our Life: An Analysis of a Yorkshire Mining Community (1956); W. M. Williams, The Sociology of an English Village: Gosforth (1956); Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (1957); eid., Family and Class in a London Suburb (1960).
40. There is, for example, an autobiographical current in Peter Hennessy’s work, which is made explicit in his Distilling the Frenzy: Writing the History of One’s Own Times (2012).
41. Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet (2010), p. 119.
42. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York, 2005), p. 360.
43. See, for example, Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds.), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (1999). National Service is not mentioned in the index to the book – though one of the contributors, Peter Bailey, says in passing that his association with the Coventry jazz scene ended when he was called up and posted to Singapore: Peter Bailey, ‘Jazz at the Spirella: Coming of Age in Coventry in the 1950s’ in ibid., pp. 22–40.
44. The most eminent social historian to have written about the British armed forces is Joanna Bourke, but Bourke’s work – particularly An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth-century Warfare (2000) – is to some extent an exception that proves the rule. She has written about soldiers in the two world wars and Vietnam but not about the less obviously dramatic lives of peacetime conscripts. Her interest in military life involves mainly the most violent aspect of that life – i.e. the battlefield. Similarly, her interest in masculinity involves its most violent manifestations – rape and killing. Furthermore, she tends to be interested in individual experience when faced with existential matters of life and death. The relatively banal lives led by most national servicemen and the schools, regiments and social classes that often seemed to define those lives would not fit neatly into her analysis.
45. David Lance, interviewed by Michelle Winslow, An Oral History of Oral History, 2003, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C1149/01, track 1. © The British Library.
46. Lol Coxhill, interviewed by Andy Simon, Oral History of Jazz in Britain, 1996, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C122/339–340, track 1. © The British Library. Coxhill remarks, of his time in the air force, that it was ‘just national service, spent half my time on a pig farm so the only person in danger was me; carried saxophone around with me’. The interviewer does not follow up these intriguing remarks. John Brooks, interviewed by Bernard Attard, The Jobbing System of the London Stock Exchange: An Oral History, 1990, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C463/25, track 1. © The British Library. Brooks remarks that national service gave him ‘a bit of time to think’ between Eton and going into the City. Brian Winterflood, interviewed by Bernard Attard, The Jobbing System of the London Stock Exchange: An Oral History, 1990, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C463/09, track 1. © The British Library. The son of a bus conductor, Winterflood tells of being replaced by the Honourable Charlie Wilson ‘when I came out of the services’. The interviewer does not ask what he was doing in the services, or what the Honourable Charlie Wilson was doing for that matter.
47. Gordon Martin, interviewed by Louise Brodie, NLSC: City Lives, 1996, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C409/134, track 2. © The British Library.
48. Samuel Stouffer et al., The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life (Princeton, NJ, 1949).
49. W. G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice: A Study of Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth-century England (1966).
50. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (1976). For a specific study of military service see Odile Roynette, ‘Bon pour le service’: L’expérience de la caserne en France à la fin du XIXe siècle (Paris, 2000).
51. See, for example, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and André Zysberg, ‘Anthropologie des conscrits français (1868–1887)’, Ethnologie française, 9, 1 (1979), pp. 47–68.
52. Peter Burke, Brian Harrison and Paul Slack, ‘Keith Thomas’ in eid. (eds.), Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford, 2000), pp. 1–30.
53. Raoul Girardet, who had already published La Société militaire dans la France contemporaine (1815–1939) (Paris, 1953), edited La Crise militaire française, 1945–1962 (Paris, 1964) as a response to the Algerian War.
54. Robert Bonnaud, Itinéraire (Paris, 1962); Antoine Prost, Carnets d’Algérie (Paris, 2005); Alain Corbin, Historien du sensible: Entretiens avec Gilles Heuré (Paris, 2000).
55. Raphaëlle Branche, La Torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie (Paris, 2001) and Claire Mauss-Copeaux, Appelés en Algérie: La parole confisquée (Paris, 1999).
56. David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York, 2005); Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York, 2005).
57. John Comaroff cited in Caroline Elkins, ‘Alchemy of Evidence: Mau Mau, the British Empire, and the High Court of Justice’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39, 5 (2011), pp. 731–48.
58. See, in particular, B. S. Johnson (ed.), All Bull: The National Servicemen (1973); Colin Shindler, National Service: From Aldershot to Aden – Tales from the Conscripts (2012); Tom Hickman, The Call-up: A History of National Service (2005).
59. Sources for Trevor Royle’s The Best Years of Their Lives: The National Service Experience, 1945–63 (1986) can be found at the Imperial War Museum. Sources for Keith Miller’s 730 Days Until Demob!: National Service and the Post-1945 British Army (2003) can be found at the National Army Museum. Sources for Adrian Walker’s Six Campaigns: National Servicemen at War, 1948–1960 (1993) can also be found at the National Army Museum.
60. E. Tonkin, cited in Laura Tisdall, ‘ “That Was What Life in Bridgeburn had Made Her”: Reading the Autobiographies of Children in Institutional Care in England, 1918–1946’, 20th Century British History, 24, 3 (2013).
61. Julian Critchley, A Bag of Boiled Sweets (1994, this edn 1995), p. 31. This story is unlikely to be true for several reasons. First, the Green Jackets did not exist as a regiment at the time Critchley was called up. Second, Critchley’s school, a sort of second-flight public school, as Paul Foot put it, was not very grand by the standards of the rifle regiments, which often rejected Etonians. Third, as a national serviceman with a special interest in the matter noted, about 16 per cent of grammar school boys were circumcised.
62. TNA WO 32/15604, note signed Dalton, 25 August 1954.
63. NAMSA 2001-02-397, Barry Reed, reel 1. Asked whether he had an allowance, Reed replies that he cannot remember but that, if he did have one, it would have been very small.
64. Daily Mail, 4 September 1953.
65. TNA WO 296/41, transcripts, Alan Tuppen interview on BBC television news, 3 February 1970.
1. Mike Baker, The Last Intake: The Story of a Serviceman in Singapore and RAF Changi (1995), p. 46.
2. TNA WO 384/1, ‘Abstract of Army Statistics’, 1950/1951.
3. IWMSA 18825, Joseph Roberts, reel 2.
4. IWMSA 14865, Godfrey Raper, reel 1.
5. Jeremy Morse, interviewed by William Reader, NLSC: City Lives, 1988, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C409/007, transcript p. 5/track 1. © The British Library.
6. Army List, August 1948, p. 893.
7. Ibid., December 1949, p. 598.
8. Hansard, 23 September 1948.
9. Tom Stacey in Peter Chambers and Amy Landreth (eds.), Called Up: The Personal Experiences of Sixteen National Servicemen, Told by Themselves (1955), pp. 47–66.
10. Army List, December 1949, p. 426. Emergency officers were still being commissioned into the Scots Guards up to 30 July 1949 – though this was also the date on which all the first national service officers in the regiment were commissioned.
11. Alan Sillitoe, Life Without Armour (1995), pp. 93 and 97.
12. IWMSA 21676, Alan Sillitoe. © Whistledown.
13. IWMSA 13645, interview General Forrester, Brigadier Flood, Brigadier Dawney, reel 1.
14. Henry Askew interviewed by Cathy Courtney, NLSC: City Lives, 1992, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C409/082, transcript p. 25/track 1. © The British Library.
15. IWMSA 13645, Forrester et al.
16. TNA WO 32/21720, Proceedings of McLean Court of Enquiry, 28 December 1953, evidence of Private MacCash of the Black Watch.
17. TNA DEFE 7/509, note for Mr Martyn, illegible signature, 13 November 1953.
18. Ministry of Labour and National Service, National Service (1955), cmd 9608.
19. Stephen Martin, ‘Did Your Country Need You? An Oral History of the National Service Experience in Britain, 1945–1963’ (PhD thesis University of Wales, Lampeter, 1997), p. 273.
20. Roy Ramsay, Green on ‘Go’: National Service and the TA (Harrow, 1989).
21. The Times, 19 November 1960.
22. See, for example, Mark Garnett’s article on Gow in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/47/101047318.
23. TNA WO 32/17657, Combined Record Office, 15 January 1959. ‘It has been the rule of this Office, since National Service began, not to give substantive rank to National Service Men, but I can trace no War Office instruction to this effect, except by inference, in that War Office authority exists for National Servicemen to become substantive cpls in RMP.’
24. Peter Hennessy, Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties (2006, this edn 2007), p. 80.
25. TNA DEFE 10/332, National Service Working Party, 26 April 1951. Indeed the Ministry of Defence trusted the Ministry of Labour’s figures more than it trusted those provided by the service departments under its own aegis.
26. TNA LAB 6/684, ‘The Arrangements for Bringing Call-up to an End 1957–1960 and Methods Used to Estimate Numbers of Men Available’, appendix.
27. TNA WO 384/1, and subsequent volumes of the ‘Abstract of Army Statistics’.
28. TNA DEFE 7/509, figures attached to note for Martyn, 13 November 1953, illegible signature. ‘This is based on information supplied by the Ministry of Labour and National Service. The figures are for postings and not of those who actually served for the periods mentioned. The differences are unlikely to be large and where they occur will be due mainly to premature release and to men undertaking regular engagements after call up. It is most unlikely that details of the numbers who actually served will be available in the service departments.’
29. TNA LAB 6/415, ‘Enquiries as to Men Who May Be Liable for Call-up to the Forces in 1947 and 1948 under the National Service Acts’, no date or signature. According to The Times, doctors and dentists could be called up until the age of thirty under the Acts of 1947 and 1948: The Times, 26 November 1948.
30. TNA WO 384/1, ‘Abstract of Army Statistics’, figures for June 1950.
31. Ibid.
32. Sidney Rosenbaum, ‘Heights and Weights of the Army Intake, 1951’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 117, 3 (1954), pp. 331–47.
33. Adrian Walker (ed.), Six Campaigns: National Servicemen at War, 1948–1960 (1993), introduction, no pagination.
34. Hansard, 1 August 1963.
35. Ibid., 31 January 1956.
36. Ibid., 1 November 1949.
37. Manchester Guardian, 10 January 1952.
38. NAM 2006-12-77-82, Malcolm Edward Barker, ‘The Letters and Diaries of a National Serviceman with the Queen’s Royal Regiment (1st Battalion) in BAOR 1952–1953’. Barker kept a press cutting of 1952. The article alluded to nine people killed by shell fire, drowning and a jeep crash during a recent exercise. Barker also kept an ‘unfinished commentary’ of his own. He believed that casualties on the exercise were higher than officially admitted.
39. TNA WO 384/1, ‘Abstract of Army Statistics’.
40. Karl Miller in B. S. Johnson (ed.), All Bull: The National Servicemen (1973), pp. 256–66, at p. 258.
41. Brian Goodliffe, Recollections of Gunner Goodliffe: Life of a National Serviceman in 1952 and 1953, from His Own Diaries (Harrow, 2009), pp. 28–9.
42. TNA WO 32/16277, minute DAAG to USS, 30 July 1951.
43. TNA WO 32/16277, PS to USS, 10 September 1951.
44. TNA AIR 20/8671, note signed Stephens, 20 September 1955: ‘From time to time we are approached by Mr Wigg with enquiries usually about Service statistics.’
45. Hansard, 18 June 1952, question by Fenner Brockway.
46. TNA DEFE 70/96, ‘Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution’. Undated memorandum by the War Office: ‘The venereal disease rate is low but as soldiers may now avail themselves of the easy facilities for private treatment, it gives no indication of the extent of prostitution.’
47. Harold Evans, My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times, an Autobiography (2009, this edn 2010), p. 89.
48. NAMSA 1995-05-93, Robin Ollington, reel 1.
49. TNA WO 291/1215, Army Operational Research Group, ‘The Testing of National Servicemen at Ministry of Labour Recruiting Centres’, March 1952.
50. Rosenbaum, ‘Heights and Weights of the Army Intake, 1951’.
51. IWM 66/211/1/43, Trevor Royle, J. G. Inglis, carton 1.
1. David Lodge, Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962); Alan Sillitoe, The Key to the Door (1961); Andrew Sinclair, The Breaking of Bumbo (1959); Leslie Thomas, The Virgin Soldiers (1966); Gordon M. Williams, The Camp (1966); Christopher Wood, ‘Terrible Hard’, Says Alice (1970); David Baxter, Two Years to Do (1959).
2. Daily Express, 28 July 2013.
3. IWMSA 21681, Ray Self. © Whistledown, 2000.
4. IWMSA 21676, Alan Sillitoe, reel 1. © Whistledown, 2000.
5. Terence Blacker, You Cannot Live as I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This: The Thoroughly Disgraceful Life and Times of Willie Donaldson (2007), p. 33.
6. Michael Holroyd in B. S. Johnson (ed.), All Bull: The National Servicemen (1973), pp. 136–48, at p. 144.
7. John Ferris, interview, 25 July 2012.
8. IWM 12505, T. J. Hunt, ‘Midshipman’s Workbook’. The officer correcting the logbook wrote on 31 November 1957: ‘You must spell accommodation right and “commencement” is a terrible word; why not say “start”.’
9. Leslie T. Wilkins, The Social Survey: National Service and Enlistment in the Armed Forces. A Report on an Enquiry Made for Several Government Departments into the Attitudes of Young Men Prior to, and on Joining the Armed Forces (1951), pp. 23 and 27.
10. TNA WO 32/10994, Claude Luke to Eric Merrill, 5 July 1957, enclosing an example of a letter from a soldier in Korea that included a reference to having read ‘Stargazers last knight’ and ‘took interest in this book’. The soldier’s letter was treated as evidence of poor educational standards in the army.
11. Wilkins, National Service and Enlistment, pp. 23 and 27.
12. P. J. Kavanagh, The Perfect Stranger (1966), p. 60.
13. Alan Sillitoe, Life Without Armour (1995), pp. 102–6.
14. Ibid., p. 110.
15. IWM 4102, Peter Burke, diary entry, 3 March 1956.
16. Frank Dickinson, Them Days ’ave Gone (Ely, 2008), p. 121.
17. TNA WO 32/18704. This file contains documents on army libraries.
18. IWM 15595, David Batterham, letter to parents, undated.
19. See, for example, Nottingham PRO, papers of Professor J. M. Lee, DD 393/1/1, letter from Graham Mottershaw to Lee, undated, about RAF camp library in Somerset.
20. Guardian, 24 July 2013.
21. Karl Miller in Johnson (ed.), All Bull, pp. 256–66, at p. 256.
22. NAM 2006-12-77-82, Malcolm Edward Barker, ‘The Letters and Diaries of a National Serviceman with the Queen’s Royal Regiment (1st Battalion) in BAOR 1952–1953’. Introductory note to booklet of transcribed letters: ‘With the idea of one day writing a book about his experiences as a National Serviceman he began keeping a diary in shorthand … but soon switched to writing lengthy, detailed letters to his mother and sister, with the idea that they keep them.’
23. NAMSA 2003-03-626, Lt General Peter Duffell, reel 1.
24. Nottingham PRO, DD 393/1/1, covering note with papers deposited by Professor J. M. Lee.
25. IWM 4102, Burke, diary entry, 1 April 1956.
26. Ibid., 20 February 1956.
27. Ibid., 7 May 1956.
28. Ibid., 4 May 1956.
29. Ibid., 25 June 1956.
30. Geoffrey Barnes, With the Dirty Half-hundred in Malaya: Memories of National Service, 1951–52 (Royston, 2001), p. 28.
31. NAM 2000-08-55, D. F. Barrett, diary entry, 23 August 1950.
32. IWM 3368, L. G. G. Smith, letter, Christmas 1951.
33. NAM 1995-01-164, Robert Gomme, ‘Korea: a short memoir’.
34. IWM 2118, Peter Mayo, diary entry, 9 December 1956.
35. John Hollands, The Dead, the Dying and the Damned (1956), p. 405.
36. John Crook, Hilltops of the Hong Kong Moon (1997), p. 8.
37. IWM 15316, P. J. Houghton-Brown, ‘National Service, June 1955–June 1957’, no pagination.
38. IWM 1594, B. E. Turberville.
39. IWM 2918, F. N. E. Starkey, diary entries, 20 August 1947, 10 September 1947, 6 July 1948.
40. IWMSA 12919, Michael Randle, reel 1.
41. TNA LAB 6/468.
42. Michael Billington, Harold Pinter (1996), pp. 23–4.
43. Tom Stacey, an officer in the Scots Guards, wrote an essay in Peter Chambers and Amy Landreth’s collection Called Up: The Personal Experiences of Sixteen National Servicemen, Told by Themselves (1955). He had earlier published a book, The Hostile Sun, that drew on his experiences as an officer in Malaya. Andrew Sinclair, an officer in the Coldstream Guards, published his national service novel, The Breaking of Bumbo, in 1959.
44. The association of certain kinds of national service writing – Lodge and Sillitoe in particular – with ‘angry young men’ is made by John Sutherland in The Boy Who Loved Books (2007, this edn 2008), p. 191.
45. ‘Afterword’ to the 1982 edition of Ginger, You’re Barmy (1982, this edn 1984), p. 216.
46. Cecil Blacker, Monkey Business: The Memoirs of General Sir Cecil Blacker (1993), p. 119. Cecil Blacker is the father of Terence Blacker, whose admiring biography of a very unmartial national serviceman is cited above.
47. Chambers and Landreth (eds.), Called Up, p. 181. Those who had already published books were Tom Stacey and Gabriel Woolf; the vociferous journalist was Robert Robinson.
48. Ibid., p. 83.
49. The Isis, 23 February 1955. It was said that Bingham had written three contributions to a forthcoming anthology entitled ‘Two-Year Warrior’ – only one of these contributions was eventually published.
50. Johnson (ed.), All Bull.
51. David Lodge entry in Dictionary of National Biography for (Arthur) John Harvey Blackwell, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/68443, accessed 16 October 2013.
52. Lodge, Ginger, You’re Barmy, p. 213.
53. Peter Burns/Alan Burns in Johnson (ed.), All Bull, pp. 81–9, at p. 81.
54. John Nott, Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Recollections of an Errant Politician (2002), p. 41.
55. Peter Nichols, Feeling You’re Behind: An Autobiography (1984), p. 70.
56. Ibid., p. 128.
57. Ronald Hayman, Arnold Wesker (1970), p. 9. The text of Wesker’s unpublished novel can be found with his papers at the University of Texas in Austin.
58. Arnold Wesker, As Much as I Dare: An Autobiography (1932–1959) (1994), p. 256.
59. Antony Copley, interview, 27 February 2013.
60. NAM 2004-02-106, Simon Bendall, ‘diary’; this passage is taken from a note rather than a diary entry.
61. Cited in John Blair, The Conscript Doctors: Memories of National Service (Edinburgh, 2001), p. 14.
62. IWMSA 27184, John Akehurst, reel 1.
63. The training film, made in 1943, was entitled The New Lot. It was remade in 1944 as a commercial film, The Way Ahead.
64. Geoffrey Rosbrook, a national service gunner, can be seen ‘leaning on the desk smoking a cigarette’ in the NAAFI scene. See The NAAFI Review, spring 1955 and Rosbrook’s own papers in IWM 15608.
65. IWMSA 26097, Terrance Atkinson, reel 2.
66. Jeff Nuttall in Johnson (ed.), All Bull, pp. 17–25, at p. 22.
67. IWM 1941, H. Atkins, unpublished memoir, p. 137.
68. David Baxter, interview, 15 March 2012.
69. David Lodge, How Far Can You Go? (1980, this edn 1981), p. 51.
70. Stanley Price, ‘A Sergeant’s Tale’ (1990), unpublished typescript.
71. Stanley Price, Somewhere to Hang My Hat: An Irish-Jewish Journey (Dublin, 2002), pp. 167–73.
72. Berwick Coates, Sam Browne’s Schooldays: Experiences of a Typical Squad of Postwar National Service Recruits (Bognor Regis, 2009), pp. 3 and 5–6.
73. ‘Shiner’ Wright, Jack Strop, VD and Scar (Edinburgh, 2002, ‘refined edition’ 2010), p. 4. Italics and bold in the original.
74. Barnes, With the Dirty Half-hundred, p. 2.
75. Blair, Conscript Doctors, p. 76.
76. Cited in Huw Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-insurgency in the Kenya Emergency (Cambridge, 2012), p. 226.
77. Harry Fancy, ‘Remembered with Advantage’: The National Service Memoirs of Lance Corporal (Unpaid) Harry Fancy (Marple, 2009).
78. IWM 714, D. Lord.
79. A. M. Carr-Saunders, D. Caradog Jones and C. A. Moser, A Survey of Social Conditions in England and Wales (Oxford, 1958), pp. 247–8.
80. IWM 2918, F. N. E. Starkey, diary entry, 5 September 1948.
81. The Times, 29 April 1959.
82. IWMSA 27811, Richard Wilson, reel 2.
83. IWM 675, A. R. Ashton, ‘National Service: Royal Marine Commando Memoirs’ (1990).
84. The two most celebrated SAS authors – ‘Andy McNab’ and ‘Chris Ryan’ – are both the sons of national servicemen. Many national servicemen say that they served with the SAS. This may be pure fantasy in some cases and ‘served with’ is itself an ambiguous term. However, some national servicemen did hold commissions with the SAS – see the Army List for 1954.
85. IWMSA 21688, Richard Ingrams. At the end of an interview by Charles Wheeler in 2000 for a BBC radio programme on national service, there is a revealing comment. After the formal interview is over, Wheeler says: ‘Yes, Tony Howard told me that cello story.’
86. Auberon Waugh, Will This Do? An Autobiography (1991, this edn 1992), p. 105.
1. The Times, 5 March 1946.
2. TNA AIR 77/608, ‘Morale of the National Service Airman on Entry and During Initial Training: Report I of an Investigation into the Morale of the National Service Man in the RAF’, January 1949.
3. The Times, 7 December 1948.
4. R. J. Q. Adams, ‘The National Service League and Mandatory Service in Edwardian Britain’, Armed Forces and Society, 12 (1985), pp. 53–74; R. J. Q. Adams and Philip Poirier, The Conscription Controversy in Great Britain, 1900–1918 (Columbus, OH, 1987); Keith Grieves, The Politics of Manpower, 1914–18 (Manchester, 1988).
5. The Times, 8 November 1938.
6. TNA CAB 139/505, Lampton to Chilver, 4 December 1957. As the end of national service approached, officials often speculated on what might stimulate recruitment and whether unemployment in the inter-war years had done so – though they were unsure how much correlation there had been.
7. Kevin Morgan, ‘Militarism and Anti-militarism: Socialists, Communists and Conscription in France and Britain, 1900–1940’, Past and Present, 202 (2009), pp. 207–44.
8. Alan Sillitoe, Life Without Armour (1995), p. 76.
9. TNA LAB 6/682, ‘Outline of the History of National Service’, 1960.
10. Len Scott, Conscription and the Attlee Governments: The Politics and Policy of National Service, 1945–1951 (Oxford, 1993), p. 80.
11. Daily Express, 12 November 1955, ‘Blueprint for a New Army’ discussed proposals by the Army League that included a foreign legion and an imperial gendarmerie. Julian Amery, ‘How to Strengthen the British Army’, East and West, 1957, in King’s College London, Liddell Hart Archives, LH 15/5/163. On Amery’s views about conscription and the use of non-British troops, see David Mitchell, ‘The Army League, Conscription and the 1956 Defence Review’ (PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, 2012).
12. TNA DEFE 7/146, ‘Future Manpower Planning in the Services’, attached to letter from Jacob to Newling, 8 October 1946.
13. Scott, Conscription and the Attlee Governments, p. 41.
14. Portcullis, magazine of Emanuel School, summer 1947.
15. Mrs F. Lucas Keene, letter to the British Medical Journal, 19 June 1948, expressing the opinion of the Medical Women’s Federation that women doctors ought to be called up.
16. Nottingham PRO, papers of Professor J. M. Lee, DD 393/1, letter from Graham Mottershaw to Lee, 24 April 1951: ‘Much as I deplore many of the socialist government’s schemes, I have a better chance of release under this government than I would have under the Conservatives.’
17. The Times, 2 December 1948.
18. Ibid., 18 December 1946.
19. Ibid., 16 July 1946. In the Battersea by-election of 1946, the ILP candidate was said to have made opposition to conscription the main plank of his platform. He was not elected.
20. TNA LAB 6/569, letter from Gibson, 25 July 1949, apparently written to tribunal for conscientious objectors about James Greig.
21. TNA DEFE 7/146, ‘Compulsory Military Service’, 12 April 1945.
22. Ibid., ‘Future Manpower Planning in the Services’, attached to letter from Jacob to Newling, 18 October 1946.
23. Ibid., ‘The Introduction of a Permanent Scheme for Compulsory Military Service’ (draft), attached to note from W. F. Lamb to Neden, 25 June 1946.
24. Ibid.
25. John Kent, ‘Bevin’s Imperialism and the Idea of Euro-Africa, 1945–49’, in Michael Dockrill and John Young (eds.), British Foreign Policy, 1945–56 (1989), pp. 47–76.
26. TNA DEFE 7/146, telegram, Field Marshal Wilson in Washington to chiefs of staff, 23 November 1945. Ibid., Jacob to Ismay, 24 November 1945.
27. Victor Yates, cited in The Times, 14 June 1946.
28. Brigadier A. H. Head, ‘The Army We Need’, The Spectator, 17 December 1948.
29. TNA DEFE 7/146, ‘The Introduction of a Permanent Scheme for Compulsory Military Service’.
30. Scott, Conscription and the Attlee Governments, p. 53.
31. Ibid., p. 54.
32. C. C. S. Newton, ‘The Sterling Crisis of 1947 and the British Response to the Marshall Plan’, Economic History Review, 37, 3 (1984), pp. 391–408.
33. Scott, Conscription and the Attlee Governments, p. 113.
34. TNA PREM 8/598, Attlee to Alan Lascelles, secretary to the King, 3 April 1947. Attlee was being disingenuous in blaming the rebellion on the elderly Welshmen. As he must have known, the key leader had been the young, clever and English Richard Crossman – see Manchester Guardian, 5 May 1947.
35. The Times, 23 May 1947.
36. Ibid., 1 December 1948.
37. TNA AIR 20/8993, ‘National Service Act: Control of Intake in Relation to Services’ Requirements’, from Ministry of Defence, 14 October 1947.
38. TNA WO 216/305, AG to S of S and CIGS, enclosing report on quality of national service intake, 22 February 1947.
39. IWM 7778, K. S. J. Hill.
40. Alastair Horne with David Montgomery, The Lonely Leader: Monty, 1944–1945 (1995), p. xxi.
41. Richard Crossman, ‘The Great Conscription Muddle’, Sunday Pictorial, 14 August 1949, in LHCMA, LH 15/5/114.
42. Manchester Guardian, 1 October 1949.
43. Peter Nichols, diary entry, April 1975, cited in introduction to Privates on Parade in id., Plays: One (1987), no pagination.
44. New Statesman, 18 December 1948.
45. LHCMA, LH 13/32, Liddell Hart to Lt General Francis Tuker, 1 March 1948.
46. Ibid., Liddell Hart to Frank Owen, 24 October 1949.
47. Ibid., Liddell Hart to Pyman, 22 December 1949.
48. News Chronicle, 25 February 1949, in LHCMA, LH 15/5/114.
1. Alan Sillitoe, Life Without Armour (1995), p. 84.
2. Alan Allport, Demobbed: Coming Home after the Second World War (2009), p. 13.
3. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (2007), p. 13.
4. Denis Healey, The Time of My Life (1989, this edn 1990), p. 68.
5. Figures given in Alex Danchev, ‘The Army and the Home Front’ in David Chandler and Ian Beckett (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Army (Oxford, 1994), pp. 298–315, at p. 302. According to the War Office, the active army on 30 June 1945 contained 2,930,884 soldiers, TNA WO 73/183.
6. Harold Evans, My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times, an Autobiography (2009, this edn 2010), p. 88.
7. Jeremy Crang, The British Army and the People’s War, 1939–1945 (Manchester, 2000), pp. 59–61.
8. John Colville, The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries, 1939–1955 (New York, 1985), p. 278, 30 October 1940; see also ibid., p. 433, 30 August 1941. Churchill said: ‘ “They have saved this country.” He was referring to the RAF pilots, the majority of whom had come from the Secondary Schools [as opposed to public schools].’
9. TNA AIR 77/608, ‘Morale of the National Service Airman on Entry and During Initial Training: Report I of an Investigation into the Morale of the National Service Man in the RAF’, January 1949.
10. Cecil Blacker, Monkey Business: The Memoirs of General Sir Cecil Blacker (1993), p. 22.
11. NAM 2001-07-1187-46, papers of Andrew Man, Royal Military College, ‘Roll of Officers and Gentlemen Cadets’, August–December 1929.
12. Alan Lascelles, King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War – The Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles (edited by Duff Hart-Davis) (2006), p. 116, entry for 23 March 1943. General Bernard Paget was apparently ‘incensed’ about the use of psychiatrists who ‘subject these boys to a string of impertinent Freudian questions’.
13. Crang, The British Army, p. 52.
14. Ibid., p. 53.
15. Healey, The Time of My Life, p. 59.
16. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, p. 137.
17. IWMSA 9989, Lt Colonel Mike Calvert, reels 2 and 7.
18. Ministry of Labour Gazette, 1946, p. 92.
19. Allport, Demobbed.
20. Cited in Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, p. 221.
21. IWMSA 26546, Martyn Highfield, reel 14.
22. IWMSA 18565, James Notley, reel 10.
23. IWMSA 16719, Edward Grey, reels 9 and 10.
24. Hansard, 27 November 1946, answer by Mr de Freitas.
25. On these disturbances see TNA AIR 23/2899.
26. Sillitoe, Life Without Armour, p. 116.
27. John Saville, Memoirs from the Left (2003), p. 67.
28. Peter Nichols, Feeling You’re Behind: An Autobiography (1984, this edn 1985), p. 74.
29. IWMSA 21681, Ray Self. © Whistledown, 2000.
30. Len Scott, Conscription and the Attlee Governments: The Politics and Policy of National Service, 1945–1951 (Oxford, 1993), p. 46.
31. TNA WO 32/11578, minutes of meeting chaired by Major General Watson, 5 June 1945, minutes dated 16 June, signed Major Woolley.
32. TNA WO 384/11, ‘Abstract of Army Statistics’. In 1950, there were 59 British officers and 43 other ranks in India; there were 156 officers and 30 other ranks in Pakistan.
33. This was, for example, the case of George Cooper, who was born in 1925, commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1945 and then into the Bengal Sappers in 1946. NAMSA 1989-05-258.
34. IWM 2856, Colonel Pickard, diary entries, 19 November 1946 and 10 August 1947.
35. Harold Perkin, The Making of a Social Historian (2002), p. 79.
36. NAMSA 1991-09-1, Col. P. J. Wilkinson, reel 2.
37. IWMSA 12401, D’Arcy John Desmond Mander, reel 1. See too the obituary for Major D’Arcy Mander, Daily Telegraph, 16 April 2001.
38. IWM 3438, J. T. Nye, letter, to ‘all’, 1945, otherwise undated; letters to Mum, Dad and Dick: from Bombay, 6 August 1946; from Bombay, 3 September 1946; from Colombo, 16 March 1947.
39. Geoff Weekes in Ken Drury (ed.), Get Some In: Memories of National Service (Great Dunmow, 2006), pp. 13–16, at p. 14.
40. IWM 7778, K.S.J. Hill.
41. Lord Moran, ‘VD and Conscription’, The Spectator, 8 August 1947.
42. Roger Alford, Life and LSE (Sussex, 2009), pp. 153–63.
43. For anti-Semitic documents circulated among conscripts in Palestine, see NAM 2006-07-58, papers of Sergeant Herbert Hiscock.
44. IWMSA 14786, Godfrey Raper, reel 3.
45. Jeremy Morse, interviewed by William Reader, NLSC: City Lives, 1988, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C409/007, transcript p. 6/track 1. © The British Library.
46. IWM 2717, John Wells Watson, letter to sister, 15 March 1948.
47. George Webb, Epitaph for an Army of Peacekeepers: British Forces in Palestine, 1945–1948 (Fleet Hargate, 2005), pp. 36–7.
48. IWMSA 9485, Kenneth Lee, reels 1 and 2.
49. Eric Lowe, Forgotten Conscripts: Prelude to Palestine’s Struggle for Survival (Trafford, 2006), p. vi.
50. Letter from Ivan Yates, The Times, 23 January 1946.
51. Ken Perkins, A Fortunate Soldier (1988), p. 18.
52. IWM Trevor Royle, 66/211/2(1/74), David Price.
53. IWMSA 14786, Godfrey Raper, reel 1.
54. Ion Trewin, Alan Clark: The Biography (2009).
55. Simon Raven, The English Gentleman: An Essay in Attitudes (1961), p. 12.
56. William Rees-Mogg, Memoirs (2011), p. 82.
57. James Prior, A Balance of Power (1986), p. 10.
58. Jeremy Morse, interviewed by William Reader, NLSC: City Lives, 1988, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C409/007, transcript p. 8/track 1. © The British Library.
59. John Quinton, interviewed by Paul Thompson, NLSC: City Lives, 1988, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C409/001, transcript p. 12/track 1. © The British Library.
60. Wing Commander Walker, winning essay, Trench Gascoigne Essay Competition 1947, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution May 1948, pp. 177–86.
61. TNA WO 32/15144, head of department of mathematics, RAMS, to director of studies, RAMS, signed Sisson, 9 May 1954.
62. Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, February 1948, discussion on ‘The Supply and Training of Officers’, 19 November 1947, chaired by Lord Hankey, contribution by Major General Pratt (president of RMA selection board), pp. 45–68, at p. 60.
63. ‘Lictor’, ‘The Production of Army Officers’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, November 1948, pp. 584–9.
64. TNA WO 32/11848, note signed Lambert and circulated on 8 April 1957.
65. IWMSA 12498, Alberic Stacpoole, reel 1.
66. IWMSA 19853, Anthony Denys Firth, reel 3.
67. Obituary, Daily Telegraph, 27 October 2006.
68. James Kennaway, Tunes of Glory (1956); John Hollands, The Dead, the Dying and the Damned (1956).
69. IWMSA 27184, John Akehurst, reel 4.
70. IWM 12515, Sir Peter Holmes, ‘Korean War Diary’.
71. TNA WO 71/1024. During a court martial for mutiny, held in Korea from 30 June to 3 July 1951, the defence counsel cross-examined Major Leith-Macgregor about the long-term consequences of his brutal treatment by Italians when he had been a prisoner of war. The implication seems to have been that Leith-Macgregor had been brutalized by his experiences. Note too the way in which violence in Malaya and Kenya was often initiated by soldiers who regarded themselves as having been ‘blooded’ in the Second World War (see Chapter 13).
1. IWMSA 26097, Terrance Atkinson, reel 1.
2. T. Ferguson and J. Cunnison, The Young Wage-earner: A Study of Glasgow Boys (Oxford, 1951); eid., In Their Early Twenties: A Study of Glasgow Youth (Oxford, 1956). Letter from Bryan Thwaites to The Times, 13 December 1951. Letter from B. Faithfull-Davies to The Times, 11 December 1951.
3. King George’s Jubilee Trust, Citizens of Tomorrow: A Study of the Influences Affecting the Upbringing of Young People (1955).
4. Alicia Percival, Youth Will Be Led: The Story of the Voluntary Youth Organizations (1951), p. 161.
5. Mark Abrams, The Teenage Consumer (1959).
6. David Morgan, ‘It Will Make a Man of You’: Notes on National Service, Masculinity and Autobiography (Manchester, 1987), p. 71.
7. John Blair, The Conscript Doctors: Memories of National Service (Edinburgh, 2001), p. 195.
8. John Sutherland, The Boy Who Loved Books (2007, this edn 2008), p. 149.
9. Interview with John Ferris, 25 July 2012.
10. T. R. Fyvel, The Insecure Offenders: Rebellious Youth in the Welfare State (1961, this edn 1969), preface, no pagination.
11. Ministry of Labour and National Service, Time Rates of Wages and Hours of Labour (1946), p. 72.
12. Ibid. (1947), p. 82.
13. R. F. L. Logan and E. M. Goldberg, ‘Rising Eighteen in a London Suburb: A Study of Some Aspects of the Life and Health of Young Men’, British Journal of Sociology, 4, 4 (1953), pp. 323–45, at p. 330: ‘The families of these lads seemed … to be seeking higher social status and security for their sons through the skills of engineering, rather than through the old-fashioned snobbery of white-collared jobs.’
14. TNA WO 32/10994, cutting from Northern Echo, 11 April 1957. The newspaper was reporting views expressed by Colonel Gould.
15. Census 1951: General Report, p. 149.
16. TNA WO 32/15743, ‘Note on Shortage of Officers in the North’, brigadier commanding War Office Selection Board, 27 March 1953.
17. Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Class in a London Suburb (1960, this edn 1976), p. 101.
18. Leslie Thomas, This Time Next Week (1964, this edn 1991).
19. Ministry of Education, 15 to 18 (1959) (Crowther Report), II, p. 155.
20. Ferguson and Cunnison, In Their Early Twenties, p. 4.
21. On the propensity of upper-middle-class people to talk in class terms while disparaging the use of the word ‘class’, see Margaret Stacey, Tradition and Change: A Study of Banbury (1960), p. 145.
22. Henry Askew, interviewed by Cathy Courtney, NLSC: City Lives, 1992, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C409/082, track 1. © The British Library.
23. David Cainey, interviewed by Andrew Vincent, Millennium Memory Bank, 1998, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C900/00543, track 1. © BBC.
24. IWMSA 18217, Derek Watkins, reel 1.
25. Leslie T. Wilkins, The Social Survey: National Service and Enlistment in the Armed Forces. A Report on an Enquiry Made for Several Government Departments into the Attitudes of Young Men Prior to, and on Joining the Armed Forces (1951), p. 6.
26. Hermann Mannheim and Leslie T. Wilkins, Prediction Methods in Relation to Borstal Training (1955), pp. 188–9.
27. Blair, The Conscript Doctors, p. 22.
28. Stacey, Tradition and Change, p. 31.
29. John Wain, The Contenders (1958).
30. Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden, Education and the Working Class: Some General Themes Raised by a Study of 88 Working-class Children in a Northern Industrial City (1962, this edn 1966), p. 19.
31. TNA WO 291/1510, AORG, ‘The Different Officer Potentials of Various Regions of Great Britain’, 1956, by L. J. Holman, Appendix D, ‘Shortage of Officers from the North’, by CEO [Chief Education Officer] Northern Command.
32. Stacey, Tradition and Change, p. 31.
33. Ibid., p. 71.
34. TNA WO 32/15743, ‘NS Officers – Geographical Distribution’, Appendix B, ‘Estimates of NS Officer Production by Counties in One NS Cycle’, attached to note, 18 September 1953, signed Colonel Houghton-Beckford. Oxfordshire’s production of officers accounted for 260 officers for every 100 that were needed by the Territorial Army in the county; this compared with Wiltshire, which produced 95 per cent of its needs. Oxfordshire’s surplus sprang partly from the fact that so many ‘officerly’ young men were at Oxford University, but this alone did not account for it. Cambridgeshire produced 176 men for every 100 that were needed for the Territorial Army.
35. IWMSA 26563, John Robinson, reel 1.
36. IWMSA 19632, George Lightley, reel 1.
37. IWMSA 29062, John ‘Jack’ Burn, reel 1.
38. Crowther, II, p. 109. The sample was adjusted in various ways.
39. Ibid.
40. David Glass (ed.), Social Mobility in Britain (1954), p. 4.
41. IWMSA 19993, Ernest Dobson, reel 1.
42. Manchester Guardian, 9 September 1953, ‘Old School Tie no Passport to RAF Commissions?’ The article reported on findings of Air Ministry psychologists: ‘Normally the desire for social status played a part in the decision of an individual offered an opportunity to go to a grammar school or become an officer. The apprentice, however, seemed more interested in acquiring and practising a vocational skill than in raising his social status.’ Some of the apprentice-trained men interviewed by the RAF had not sat the 11-plus – ‘success in the examination … would have conflicted with their desire to become artisans’.
43. TNA WO 32/16277, note for Under Secretary of State, illegible signature, 15 September 1951.
44. Crowther, II, p. 109.
45. IWMSA 24570, Piers Plowright.
46. Quaker Meeting House, temp mss, 914, ECM/9, Central Board for Conscientious Objectors Executive Committee, minutes, 16 January 1952. The board was told that Graham Anderson was to be expelled from the City of London School for refusal to join the CCF. It seems likely that the school relented after representations by the boy’s father, ibid., 30 January 1952.
47. TNA DEFE 13/53, Anthony Hurd to Macmillan, 2 February 1955. Hurd believed that the headmaster of Bradfield College would be a useful person to consult about national service.
48. Harold Loukes, Secondary Modern (1957), p. 26.
49. Crowther, II, p. 150.
50. Jim Riordan, Comrade Jim: The Spy Who Played for Spartak (2008), p. 28.
51. Ronald Hyam, My Life in the Past (privately published, 2012), pp. 77–8.
52. Crowther, II, p. 14.
53. A. N. Oppenheim, ‘Social Status and Clique Formation among Grammar School Boys’, British Journal of Sociology, 6, 3 (1955), pp. 228–45.
54. Roy Lewis and Angus Maude, The English Middle Classes (1949), p. 238.
55. H. T. Himmelweit, A. H. Halsey and A. N. Oppenheim, ‘The Views of Adolescents on Some Aspects of the Social Class Structure’, British Journal of Sociology, 3, 2 (1952), pp. 148–72.
56. W. D. James, Hamptonians at War: Some War Experiences of Old Boys of Hampton Grammar School (1964).
57. Alan Wood quoted in Jeremy Crang, The British Army and the People’s War, 1939–1945 (Manchester, 2000), p. 29.
58. TNA LAB 19/319, Herts County Council Employment Service, Dacorum Division, Services Open Evening, 28 November 1952. The grammar school boys had attended en masse on an evening in May. None came on 28 November.
59. John Hills of Bradfield College, letter to The Times, 8 October 1949.
60. Max Poulter in Ken Drury (ed.), Get Some In: Memories of National Service (Great Dunmow, 2006), pp. 30–36, at p. 34.
61. Nottingham PRO, papers of Professor J. M. Lee, DD 393/1/3, typed note, ‘The Henry Mellish Grammar School Bulwell Nottingham. The Sixth Form Leaver of 1949’.
62. Daily Express, 20 January 1949.
63. TNA LAB 19/298, London County Council, ‘Unemployment of Boys Aged 17 – Effect of Impending National Service’. Report, signed John Brown, 11 September 1953.
64. King George’s Jubilee Trust, Citizens of Tomorrow, p. 73.
65. Head of Daniel Stewart’s College quoted in The Scotsman, 7 October 1954, cited in Ferguson and Cunnison, In Their Early Twenties, p. 5.
66. Crowther, II, p. 147.
67. Ferguson and Cunnison, In Their Early Twenties, p. 14.
68. Logan and Goldberg, ‘Rising Eighteen’.
69. Lord Moran, ‘VD and Conscription’, The Spectator, 8 August 1947: ‘Recently the Chairman of a Juvenile Employment Committee put it on record that … boys are restless; they will not settle to anything; they do not want to become apprentices, and they do not want to learn to become craftsmen or technicians.’
70. Gwylmor Prys Williams, Teenagers’ Problems: The Contemporary Social Background and Youth’s Reaction to It (1958), p. 3: ‘Quite a number of youths go in for apprenticeships or the Merchant Navy because it affords a way of dodging National Service, and the status of apprenticeship has deteriorated to some extent.’
71. Ministry of Labour and National Service, Report on the Enquiry into the Effects of National Service on the Education and Employment of Young Men (1955), p. 10.
72. IWMSA 17819, Alan Sandland, reel 1.
73. M. E. M. Herford, letter to The Times, 19 December 1956.
74. IWMSA 26853, Thomas Hewitson, reel 2.
75. Ministry of Labour and National Service, Effects of National Service, p. 10.
76. Ibid.
77. TNA AIR 77/608, ‘Morale of the National Service Airman on Entry and During Initial Training: Report I of an Investigation into the Morale of the National Service Man in the RAF’, January 1949.
78. Ken Lynham, interviewed by Michael Cos, Food: From Source to Salespoint, 2005, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C821/165, track 3. © The British Library.
79. TNA WO 32/15604, point 9, ‘Age of Call-up’, attached to letter from H. A. Dilley, 26 June 1955: ‘The Ministry of Labour point out that in the case of almost all apprenticeships the last year is already spent “working on the job”.’
80. IWMSA 22606, Harry Sanson, reel 2.
81. Albert Balmer, A Cyprus Journey: Memoirs of National Service (2008), pp. 16–17.
82. IWMSA 18439, Albert Tyas, reel 1.
83. NAM 2003-08-61, Jack Gillett.
84. Brian Bushell in Eric Pegg (ed.), The Royal Engineers and the National Service Years, 1939–1963: A Military and Social History (2002), pp. 129–30, and Patrick Sumner in ibid., pp. 409–13.
85. IWMSA 14145, Richard Faint, reel 1.
86. IWMSA 26559, Leigh Parkes, reel 1.
87. Mannheim and Wilkins, Prediction Methods in Relation to Borstal Training, pp. 190–92.
88. IWMSA 29895, Paul Croxson, reel 1.
89. IWMSA 21582, David Davies, reel 1.
90. IWMSA 20802, Jack Coley, reel 1.
91. IWMSA 18825, Joseph Roberts, reel 1.
92. Leslie T. Wilkins, Delinquent Generations (1960).
93. TNA AIR 77/608, ‘Morale of the National Service Airman on Entry and During Initial Training’.
94. Royston Salmon in Peter Chambers and Amy Landreth (eds.), Called Up: The Personal Experiences of Sixteen National Servicemen, Told by Themselves (1955), pp. 140–50, at p. 141.
95. Alan Sillitoe, Life Without Armour (1995), p. 40.
96. Ibid., p. 51.
97. IWM 6431, E. A. Dorking, ‘Some Recollections of My Life During the Years 1930–1955’.
98. Geoffrey G. Field, Blood, Sweat and Toil: Remaking the British Working Class, 1939–1945 (Oxford, 2011), p. 219.
99. IWMSA 10925, Bruce Kent, reel 1.
100. IWMSA 28361, Julian Thompson, reel 1.
101. IWMSA 22347, Edmund Bruford-Davies, reel 1.
102. A. E. Morgan, Young Citizen (1943), p. 51.
103. TNA AIR 77/608, ‘Morale of the National Service Airman on Entry and During Initial Training’.
104. TNA AIR 20/12136, ‘Morale of the National Service Airman (an Account of an Investigation Covering the Period October 1947–September 1950)’, by A. S. Anthony, 24 July 1951. The same report can also be found in TNA AIR 77/270.
105. Logan and Goldberg, ‘Rising Eighteen’. See also The Times, 7 December 1951. An enquiry among 200 boys and 198 girls who had left school in the summer of 1950 concluded that 70 per cent of boys and 74 per cent of girls had settled into employment.
106. Ministry of Labour Gazette, January 1957, p. 23.
107. E. R. Braithwaite, To Sir, with Love (1959), p. 179.
108. Leslie T. Wilkins, The Adolescent in Britain (1955), p. 31.
109. TNA LAB 19/222, Director of Education to Ministry of Labour and National Service, signed H. S. Magnay, 4 November (no year but seems to be 1950).
110. Ministry of Labour and National Service, Effects of National Service, p. 19.
111. Logan and Goldberg, ‘Rising Eighteen’.
112. Letter from Ewen Montagu to The Times, 24 January 1949.
113. TNA LAB 19/298, minute sheet, from Parker to Taylor, 14 January 1949 at start of document but 5 April 1949 at its end.
114. James Maxwell, Sixteen Years On: A Follow-up of the 1947 Scottish Survey (1969), p. 67.
115. Riordan, Comrade Jim, p. 31.
116. TNA LAB 19/298, London County Council, ‘Unemployment of Boys Aged 17 – Effects of Impending National Service’. Report, signed John Brown, 11 September 1953.
117. Ferguson and Cunnison, In Their Early Twenties, pp. 70 and 72.
118. Ibid., p. 71.
119. Arnold Wesker, As Much as I Dare: An Autobiography (1932–1959) (1994), p. 257.
120. Ferris, interview, 25 July 2012.
121. Fyvel, The Insecure Offenders, p. 40.
122. A. J. Leoni, letter to The Times, 8 May 1954.
123. TNA CAB 128/29/33, Cabinet, 22 September 1955.
124. Gwylmor Prys Williams, Patterns of Juvenile Delinquency: England and Wales, 1946–1961 (1962), p. 22.
125. IWMSA 26097, Terrance Atkinson, reel 1.
126. Ken Lynham, interviewed by Michael Cos, Food: From Source to Salespoint, 2005, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C821/165, track 4. © The British Library.
127. IWM 1598, A. Cole, letter to family, 18 March 1959.
128. IWMSA 22261, Peter Whiteman. © Whistledown, 2000.
129. IWM 1779, I. W. G. Martin, extract from letter to Martin (dates from 1958 but not clear exactly when it was written or by whom): ‘the Greeks, mostly Teddy boy types, are paying off a few old scores’. IWM 15316, P. J. Houghton-Brown, undated letter to mother, from Cyprus: ‘It is the Teddy boy types that you have to watch.’
130. TNA INF 6/812, on the making of the film.
131. Basil Henriques, The Home-menders: The Prevention of Unhappiness in Children (1955).
132. TNA LAB 19/319, ‘So You’re Being Called Up’, March 1954.
133. Ibid., Youth Employment Service – Southern Region, illegible signature, 9 August 1955, responding to a request for frank views of speakers.
134. Wilkins, National Service and Enlistment, p. 13.
135. Ibid., pp. 36 and 37.
136. NAMSA 2003-04-2, Field Marshal Sir John Chapple, reel 1.
137. IWMSA 9911, Samuel Osborne, reel 1.
138. TNA LAB 21/8, minutes of meeting of controllers, 10 June 1953.
139. King George’s Jubilee Trust, Citizens of Tomorrow, p. 66.
140. TNA WO 32/16714, correspondence on this matter.
141. The Times, 2 March 1950, letter on ‘young hooligans’ from Elinor Birley, the wife of the headmaster of Eton.
142. King George’s Jubilee Trust, Citizens of Tomorrow, p. 20.
143. Ibid., p. 18.
1. Stuart Brisley, interviewed by Melanie Roberts, NLSC: Artists’ Lives, 1996, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C466/43, track 2. © The British Library.
2. TNA LAB 19/319, National Joint Advisory Council, 26 October 1955, ‘Minister’s Quarterly Review of Certain Aspects of the Work of the Ministry’.
3. NAMSA 1995-05-93, Robin Ollington, reel 1.
4. TNA DEFE 10/332, Working Party on National Service Intakes, 18 May 1951. Roberts drew attention to the numbers, around 22 per cent, who might fail to register on the correct day.
5. TNA LAB 6/655, letter to Vivien, illegible signature, 2 April 1958. It was reckoned at this stage that around one man in seven was failing to register.
6. TNA LAB 6/692, this file contains statistical tables relating to failure to register or submit to medical examination.
7. TNA ADM 1/21985, head of Naval Law to Treasury Solicitor, 13 February 1951. By this date, the Home Office seems to have discouraged the payment of bounty.
8. TNA LAB 6/692, ‘Analysis of Action by MR1 on Reports of Failure to Register or to Submit to Medical Examination from 1st January 1949’, undated.
9. TNA DEFE 10/332, Working Party on National Service Intakes, 16 January 1952, Appendix IV.
10. TNA RG 28/165, ‘Notes on RX Operation Instituted to Assist the Ministry of Labour and National Service’, 28 September 1948.
11. TNA WO 71/1261, court martial for mutiny at Shepton Mallet detention centre, 28 April to 1 May 1959. Matters were made all the more complicated because some ‘real’ Irishmen had lied about their origins when they joined the British army. During a court martial in April 1959, a soldier from the Royal Army Service Corps disputed his own criminal record, which stated that he had been born in Lancashire. He claimed to have been born in County Donegal.
12. Hansard, 1 April 1953, statement by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe.
13. TNA HO 45/24214, ‘Extract from Cabinet Working Party on Eire’, undated.
14. TNA ADM 1/26594, ‘Detention in the Royal Navy’, the Commodore Royal Naval Barracks Portsmouth, 1 January 1956.
15. Charles Richardson, My Manor (1992), p. 87.
16. The Times, 26 January 1960.
17. Ibid., 20 October 1954.
18. Hansard, 9 November 1954, reply by Head.
19. Ibid., 21 March 1956, Anthony Marlowe.
20. TNA WO 32/15144, Brigadier Sandars to Reader of Civil Service Commission, 3 December 1953. Sandars suggested removing explicit reference to ‘colour bar’ from a document and substituting the stipulation that candidates for commissions for Sandhurst should ‘fit into the corporate life of the Service’.
21. TNA DEFE 10/332, Working Party on National Service Intakes, 27 October 1954.
22. Robert Douglas, Somewhere to Lay My Head (2006), p. 254.
23. TNA BD 24/168, Sir Ifan ab Owen Edwards, ‘The Welsh National Serviceman’, report for the Council for Wales and Monmouthshire, June 1954.
24. TNA WO 32/15025, ‘Report of the Welsh National Service Committee’, signed Dalton, 13 November 1956. This is responding to a private report (presumably the one referred to above).
25. TNA BD 24/168, Sir Ifan ab Owen Edwards, ‘The Welsh National Serviceman’.
26. TNA BD 24/167, minute, 19 February 1954, illegible signature.
27. IWM 1601, J. M. T. Grieve. See also TNA LAB 43/154.
28. TNA LAB 43/2, ‘Treatment of Conscientious Objectors’, unsigned and undated but seems from surrounding documents to be by Barnes and to date from 2 January 1947.
29. The Times, 13 December 1960.
30. Ibid., 7 October 1955.
31. Roger Bush, FAU: The Third Generation – Friends Ambulance Unit, Post-war Service and International Service, 1946–1959 (York, 1998), p. 103.
32. TNA LAB 6/692, ‘Failure to Attend Medical Examination under the National Service Act since January 1949’, and ‘Analysis of Action by MR1 on Reports of Failure to Register or to Submit to Medical Examination from 1st January 1949’. Both documents are undated but seem to have been produced in late 1960.
33. The Times, 8 July 1952. The Court of Appeal decided that Borstal was ‘the least appropriate sentence for the offence in question’ and substituted a four-month prison sentence.
34. Ibid., 16 June 1949.
35. TNA LAB 6/573, Lt Colonel Donovan to Under Secretary of State for War, 2 November 1951.
36. The Times, 22 October 1959.
37. Gabriel Newfield in Peter Chambers and Amy Landreth (eds.), Called Up: The Personal Experiences of Sixteen National Servicemen, Told by Themselves (1955), pp. 241–56, at p. 255.
38. Daily Express, 29 September 1960.
39. Hansard, 7 February 1956. Victor Yates claimed that Roger Hobbs, who had become a conscientious objector after completing his full-time service, had been paraded outdoors in his underpants. Hobbs was eventually excused further service.
40. TNA LAB 6/468, letter from housemaster, 2 June 1949; letter from headmaster, 27 July 1949.
41. TNA LAB 6/470, letter from the Labour Manager, Belliss and Morcom Limited, 9 September 1949.
42. Stephen Martin, ‘Did Your Country Need You? An Oral History of the National Service Experience in Britain, 1945–1963’ (PhD thesis, University of Wales, Lampeter, 1997), pp. 60 and 65.
43. Peter Duncumb, interview, 11 January 2013.
44. IWM 15595, David Batterham, ‘National Service Recalled’: ‘I think that this thumbs down stemmed from having stood up to my interviewers’ disparaging views. I think that I pointed out that one had to be quite brave to go against the grain of the system. After all I had failed that test myself!’
45. Interview with Lloyd by Alan Macfarlane, 7 June 2005, http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/DO/filmshow/lloyd1_fast.htm.
46. In 1952, a lawyer appealing against a sentence remarked that rejection of his client’s initial claim ‘was almost inevitable as he did not belong to any religious organization of known pacifist views’. The Times, 8 July 1952.
47. The Times, 2 December 1952.
48. TNA LAB 6/496.
49. Hansard, 25 April 1950, question by Dr King.
50. Birkbeck College, papers of Bernard Crick, 1/3/3, typed statement to ‘Ministry of Labour and National Service or the Tribunal for Conscientious Objectors as the Minister shall determine which body is relevant’. I am grateful to the literary executors of Sir Bernard Crick for permission to quote this document.
51. David Hockney in B. S. Johnson (ed.), All Bull: The National Servicemen (1973), pp. 243–7.
52. Newfield in Chambers and Landreth (eds.), Called Up, p. 255.
53. TNA LAB 6/499, case of Anthony Barrington Risley.
54. Methodist Youth Department, Another Kind of National Service (1957).
55. Bush, The FAU, p. 103.
56. TNA LAB 6/573, case of William Moulton, letter from Harold Cole, Sunday School teacher, 2 December 1951.
57. Bush, The FAU, p. 104.
58. IWMSA 10116, David Morrish, reels 1 and 2.
59. IWM 15595, David Batterham, ‘National Service Recalled’.
60. TNA LAB 21/167.
61. The Times, 30 August 1957.
62. TNA LAB 6/696, Bryan Reed to Chair of Appellate Tribunal for Conscientious Objectors, 20 March 1962.
63. The Times, 13 December 1960.
64. TNA LAB 6/349, note, 21 January 1957.
65. TNA LAB 6/684, ‘Outline of the History of National Service’, 1960.
66. John Palmer, Obituary of Ken Coates, Guardian, 29 June 2010.
67. Leslie T. Wilkins, The Social Survey: National Service and Enlistment in the Armed Forces. A Report on an Enquiry Made for Several Government Departments into the Attitudes of Young Men Prior to, and on Joining the Armed Forces (1951), p. 12.
68. TNA DEFE 10/332, Working Party on National Service Intakes, 24 October 1951.
69. Ibid., 18 December 1951.
70. IWMSA 28670, David Wilson, reel 2.
71. IWMSA 19993, Ernest Dobson, reel 1.
72. Letter from Myra Hess, Ralph Vaughan Williams and others, The Times, 22 May 1947.
73. TNA PREM 11/477, Prime Minister’s minute to Monckton, 3 May 1953.
74. See the correspondence on this matter in TNA PREM 8/611.
75. For Cherwell’s position see, for example, Daily Express, 7 July 1955.
76. See, for example, TNA LAB 8/2476, documents relating to the case of Anthony Kelly. Kelly would have become liable for service in 1946 but deferred to study. He took a fellowship in Illinois and returned, two days after his twenty-sixth birthday. He was technically liable for conscription but the authorities seem to have decided not to call him up.
77. TNA LAB 6/691, ‘History of the Deferment Arrangements for Science and Engineering Graduates’, 9 October 1960.
78. J. W. Parr, letter to The Times, 11 January 1949.
79. The Times, 21 October 1959.
80. C. R. Hildyard, letter to The Times, 14 October 1959.
81. TNA LAB 19/319, ‘Minister’s Quarterly Review of Certain Aspects of the Work of the Ministry’, National Joint Advisory Council, 26 October 1955.
82. TNA WO 32/17243, ‘Report on the Training and Employment of National Servicemen, 1956’. The War Office recognized that it would have been better for recruits to be interviewed by serving officers but could not spare enough men for the task.
83. TNA WO 291/1215, AORG, ‘The Testing of National Servicemen at Ministry of Labour Recruiting Centres’, March 1952.
84. NAM 2002-08-61, Colin Metcalfe, ‘Recollections of National Service’.
85. TNA WO 291/1215, ‘The Testing of National Servicemen’.
86. TNA LAB 6/370, letter from Ministry of Labour to George Turner of War Office, 23 May 1955.
87. NAM 2002-08-61, Metcalfe, ‘Recollections’.
88. Newfield in Chambers and Landreth (eds.), Called Up, p. 245.
89. NAM 2002-08-61, Metcalfe, ‘Recollections’.
90. Newfield in Chambers and Landreth (eds.), Called Up, p. 255. Newfield and Metcalfe must have served in the same office at the same time. They do not mention each other but Metcalfe’s papers contain a photograph of ‘John Newfield’. Metcalfe says that the centre processed 25,000 recruits – presumably this means that 25,000 passed through in total but that only 4,000 of them were tested.
91. NAM 2002-08-61, Metcalfe, ‘Recollections’.
92. TNA LAB 29/555, ‘Instructions for the Guidance of Medical Boards under the National Service Act’, pp. 33–5.
93. TNA LAB 19/319, Butler to Pillinger, 4 December 1952.
94. Roger G. Hall, One-Two-Three-One! (A Nutter’s Account of National Service) (Twickenham, 2007), p. 13.
95. Hansard, 28 February 1956. Marcus Lipton complained that medical boards were passing ‘crocks’ as fit.
96. At an inquest in Birmingham on a conscript who died on weekend leave from the army, his father said that the boy had been classified A1 and called up in spite of the fact that his mother and grandfather had both died from a rare condition. The Times, 24 June 1953.
97. TNA DEFE 7/509, ‘Alleged Treatment by the Army of Men Who Have Been Placed by the Ministry of Labour and National Service Medical Boards in Grade III as Only Fit for Certain Duties, but Whose Disabilities Are Ignored in the Initial Period of Training’, in briefs for minister, attached to unsigned letter from Ministry of Defence to Sellar of Ministry of Labour, October 1953 (no more precise date).
98. TNA WO 32/17243, ‘Report on the Training and Employment of National Servicemen’, 1956.
99. The Times, 29 June 1953.
100. Dick Langstaff in Ken Drury (ed.), Get Some In: Memories of National Service (Great Dunmow, 2006), pp. 39–43, at p. 40.
101. Sidney Rosenbaum, ‘Experience of Pulheems in the 1952 Army Intake’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 14 (1957), pp. 281–6.
102. TNA WO 32/17243, ‘Report on the Training and Employment of National Servicemen’, 1956.
103. Some doctors believed that service would do unfit men good. See Dr M. E. M. Herford, letter to The Times, 4 August 1953. Herford believed that only 0.7 per cent of men classed as fit by Ministry of Labour medical boards were subsequently discharged by the army.
104. TNA WO 216/305, ‘Report on Quality of National Service Intake’, enclosed with note from AG to S of S and GIGS, 22 February 1949.
105. TNA DEFE 10/332, Working Party on National Service Intakes, 24 October 1951. It was anticipated that the introduction of mass mini radiography might raise rejection rates from 17 per cent to 18 per cent.
106. Ibid., 26 April 1951.
107. TNA LAB 6/694, table, undated but obviously from 1960.
108. Ministry of Labour and National Service, Report on the Enquiry into the Effects of National Service on the Education and Employment of Young Men (1955).
109. TNA AIR 2/10934, ‘Brief for DGM on Allocation of National Servicemen to Trades’, signed Lumgair, 6 February 1956. See also TNA AIR 77/271, ‘Qualifications of National Service Personnel: Seasonal Variations in Mental Abilities of National Service Men on Entry’, signed Anthony, October 1951.
110. TNA WO 32/10994, ‘Observations on the Supply of Technical Manpower’, P. E. Vernon, May 1952, quoting a recent Air Ministry study. Though Vernon’s report was prepared for the Admiralty, it refers to all three services.
111. Sidney Rosenbaum, ‘Home Localities of National Servicemen with Respiratory Disease’, British Journal of Preventative and Social Medicine, 15 (1961), pp. 61–7.
112. T. Ferguson and J. Cunnison, In Their Early Twenties: A Study of Glasgow Youth (Oxford, 1956), p. 10.
113. TNA WO 32/10994, ‘Observations on the Supply of Technical Manpower’, P. E. Vernon, May 1952.
114. Michael Parkinson, Parky: My Autobiography (2008), p. 54.
115. Paul Bailey, An Immaculate Mistake: Scenes from Childhood and Beyond (1990), p. 128.
116. TNA AIR 2/12407, ‘Homosexuality Within the Royal Air Force’, note by DPS (PM), no date but prepared as part of submission to Wolfenden Committee.
117. TNA LAB 6/734, letter to a doctor concerning a patient of his, 4 December 1970.
118. TNA LAB 6/680, letter to Sellar, illegible signature, 11 April 1956.
119. TNA LAB 6/734. The letter relating to insurance was written on 11 January 1967 and concerned a medical of 1959; the letter relating to employment was sent on 25 March 1969 and concerned a medical in 1957; the letter relating to South Africa was written on 21 April 1967 and concerned a medical in 1958.
120. TNA DEFE 10/332, Working Party on National Service Intakes, 24 July 1951.
121. Wilkins, National Service and Enlistment in the Armed Forces, pp. 9 and 10. See also TNA AIR 77/281, ‘Educational Qualifications of National Servicemen (RAF Entrants, 1951–1952)’, 7 November 1952. The second of these surveys is more comprehensive with regard to airmen though lacks any comparative figures for the army. The most striking difference between the two sets of figures was that the air force survey suggested that over 14 per cent of national service airmen had attended technical schools, while Wilkins felt that the figure was just 7 per cent for the air force and 5 per cent for the army.
122. TNA AIR 20/8671, cutting from Sunday Express, illegible date.
123. Ministry of Education, 15 to 18 (1959) (Crowther Report), II, pp. 155, 118 and 119.
124. TNA DEFE 10/332, Working Party on National Service Intakes, 26 April 1951.
125. TNA AIR 2/10933, letter, 22 October 1954, signed by a wing commander (name illegible).
126. Ibid., undated table dealing with the period 24 September to 12 October. It was reported that men at Brighton and Blackheath had not been processed by the RAF recruiters before the buildings closed for the day.
127. IWMSA 26563, John Robinson, reel 1.
128. NAM 2000-08-55, D. F. Barrett. Barrett worked for an electrical contractor and, unusually, the interviewing officer sought to persuade him to go into the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He insisted, however, on the Middlesex Regiment. Barrett diary (this section is in fact autobiography rather than diary), vol. 1, p. 35.
129. Major General C. Lloyd, ‘The Integration of National Service with the Country’s Economic Future’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, May 1955, pp. 187–201.
130. David Hall, Fred: The Definitive Biography of Fred Dibnah (2006), p. 43. Once he had been attached to a cavalry regiment, Dibnah seems to have escaped from the cookhouse and worked mainly on maintaining the stables.
131. IWM 7778, K. S. J. Hill.
132. NAM 2003-12-7, Charlie Reading.
133. TNA WO 71/1198, court martial, 16 and 17 May 1951, plea in mitigation by Captain Mulligan.
134. IWMSA 17333, John Noble.
135. Leslie Ives, A Musket for the King: The Trials and Tribulations of a National Serviceman 1949–1951 (Tavistock, 1999), p. 1.
136. Ken Lynham, interviewed by Michael, Cos, Food: From Source to Salespoint, 2005, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C821/165, track 4. © The British Library.
137. Jack Spall, interviewed by Cathy Courtney, NLSC: City Lives, 1991, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C409/061, track 1. © The British Library.
138. IWM 161, A. E. Fisher.
1. TNA AIR 77/608, ‘Morale of the National Service Airman on Entry and During Initial Training: Report I of an Investigation into the Morale of the National Service Man in the RAF’, January 1949.
2. Daily Express, 23 July 1955. A sapper, prosecuted for not having a ticket, was released after he told the magistrate that he had never travelled on a train before.
3. IWMSA 19634, John Waller, reel 1.
4. Pat Barker in Adrian Walker (ed.), Six Campaigns: National Servicemen at War, 1948–1960 (1993), pp. 8–14, at p. 8.
5. Wes Magee in B. S. Johnson (ed.), All Bull: The National Servicemen (1973), pp. 26–35, at p. 27.
6. John Barkshire interviewed by Kathy Burk, NLSC: City Lives, 1990, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C409/057, track 1. © The British Library.
7. NAM 2003-08-67, John Lyon-Maris.
8. IWMSA 18212, Derek Burke, reel 1.
9. Bruce Kent, Undiscovered Ends: An Autobiography (1992), p. 33.
10. IWMSA 24570, Piers Plowright, reel 2. Plowright recalled ‘slippers chucked at me’.
11. NAMSA 2000-04-56, Michael Perry. Perry who served in the Medical Corps in 1951 and 1952 said his prayers every night and had no trouble. George Carey recalled that his nightly prayers in the RAF were greeted with ‘courteous silence’: George Carey, Know the Truth: A Memoir (2004), p. 28.
12. NAMSA 2000-04-55, John Hodgson, reel 1.
13. NAMSA 2000-04-56, Michael Perry, reel 1.
14. Nottingham PRO, papers of Professor J. M. Lee, DD 393/1/1, letter from Graham Mottershaw to Lee, 20 April 1949.
15. NAM 2003-08-63, Philip Firth.
16. Jeremy Morse, interviewed by William Reader, NLSC: City Lives, 1988, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C409/007, track 1. © The British Library.
17. William Rees-Mogg, Memoirs (2011), p. 80.
18. NAM 2006-12-77–82, Malcolm Edward Barker, letter to mother, 5 May 1952.
19. IWMSA 21672, Derek Johns. © Whistledown, 2000.
20. John Blair, The Conscript Doctors: Memories of National Service (Edinburgh, 2001), p. 24.
21. Letter from ‘A mother’ to Observer, 13 March 1955.
22. Tony Betts, The Key of the Door: Rhythm and Romance in a Post-war London Adolescence (Wimborne, 2006), p. 248.
23. Michael Heseltine, Life in the Jungle: My Autobiography (2000), p. 52.
24. Anthony Hampshire, interview, 15 May 2013.
25. Tom Baker, Who on Earth is Tom Baker? (1997), p. 54.
26. IWM 15608, G. J. W. Rosbrook, Rosbrook to parents, 2 April 1954.
27. Reg Martin, interviewed by Wendy Rickard, HIV/AIDS Testimonies, 1995, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C743/02, transcript p. 28. © The British Library.
28. NAM 2006-12-77-83, Malcolm Barker, ‘Transcript of the Sporadic Diary Entries of a National Serviceman with the Queen’s Royal Regiment (1st Battalion) in BAOR 1952–1953’. Barker described the day he passed out (11 June 1952) as the happiest of his life – though he added, when typing up his diary, that he was amused by his own naivety.
29. Frederick Hudson, Loyal to the End: A Personal and Factual Account of National Service in Malaya (Blackburn, 2006), pp. 41, 42, 35. IWM 9870, James Jacobs, p. 4. ‘Korea: One Conscript’s Work’, Jacobs, who went to Korea, said: ‘only those awful first few weeks of basic training are best forgotten’.
30. LHCMA, I. W. G. Martin, ‘In the Service of Queen and Country’, Plebs, 2, 2 (July 1978).
31. H. D. Chaplin, The Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, 1951–1961 (Maidstone, 1964), p. 10.
32. TNA AIR 77/608, ‘Morale of the National Service Airman on Entry and During Initial Training’: ‘In other services this identification is by tradition attached to groups smaller than the Service as a whole – the regiment, the ship etc. In the RAF, it certainly exists, among NS recruits, for the Force as a whole.’
33. IWMSA 26546, Martyn Highfield, reel 14.
34. Ken Perkins, A Fortunate Soldier (1988), p. 26.
35. Cecil Blacker, Monkey Business: The Memoirs of General Sir Cecil Blacker (1993), pp. 119 and 121.
36. NAM 2003-08-63, Philip Firth.
37. IWMSA 11138, Ron Cassidy interviewed by Charles Allen, reel 1.
38. IWM, Trevor Royle, 66/211/1(1/36), Arthur Franks, 1951.
39. IWM 15595, David Batterham, ‘National Service Recalled’: ‘I was interviewed by my Troop Officer, a conscript my own age, who was surprised to find that I had a place at Cambridge in the same college as himself.’
40. IWM 12733, Cyril MacG Williams, letter to ‘all’, January 1952.
41. IWM 614, W. H. Butler, ‘Derby to Derna (an Account of National Service Experiences)’, p. 8: ‘When the second lieutenant left the room the sergeant said “you can forget that lot”.’
42. NAMSA 2003-04-2, Field Marshal Sir John Chapple, reel 1.
43. Leslie Ives, A Musket for the King: The Trials and Tribulations of a National Serviceman 1949–1951 (Tavistock, 1999), p. 8.
44. NAMSA 2000-04-52, John Arnold, reel 1: ‘I seem to remember a sort of general impression that they [the sergeants] had all been at Arnhem.’
45. NAM 2006-12-77-82, Malcolm Barker, letter to mother, 5 May 1952.
46. N. G. R. Sanders, letter to Observer, 20 March 1955.
47. TNA AIR 77/608, ‘Morale of the National Service Airman on Entry and During Initial Training’.
48. Manchester Guardian, 8 January 1955.
49. The Times, 20 March 1953.
50. Ives, A Musket for the King, p. 16.
51. T. C. Sparrow, Tales of a Schoolie: A Story of National Service (Badsey, 2006), p. 27.
52. Daily Express, 6 March 1954.
53. IWMSA 24570, Piers Plowright, reel 2.
54. War Office, Infantry Training: The National Serviceman’s Handbook (1955), lesson nine.
55. Alan Burns, ‘Buster’ in New Writers (1961), p. 84.
56. Arnold Wesker, As Much as I Dare: An Autobiography (1932–1959) (1994), p. 299.
57. Betts, The Key of the Door, p. 253.
58. IWM 675, A. R. Ashton, ‘National Service: Royal Marine Commando Memoirs’ (1990), p. 25.
59. IWMSA 11105, Michael McBain, reel 1.
60. IWMSA 26098, Benjamin Whitchurch, reel 3.
61. IWM 1598, A. Cole, letter home, 12 April 1959.
62. Tom Stacey in Peter Chambers and Amy Landreth (eds.), Called Up: The Personal Experiences of Sixteen National Servicemen, Told by Themselves (1955), pp. 47–65, at p. 60.
63. IWMSA 15433, Peter McAleese, reel 1.
64. NAMSA 2000-04-52, Arnold, reel 1.
65. Roger G. Hall, One-Two-Three-One! (A Nutter’s Account of National Service) (Twickenham, 2007), p. 15.
66. IWM 11915, N. A. Martin, ‘The Day the Sun Stopped Shining’, p. 9.
67. P. J. Kavanagh, The Perfect Stranger (1966), p. 51.
68. Baker, Who on Earth is Tom Baker?, p. 82.
69. IWMSA 26098, Whitchurch, reel 3.
70. NAM 2003-08-29, Ronald Dominy, ‘Memoirs, 1951–1953’.
71. IWMSA 21696, Brian Sewell. © Whistledown, 2000.
72. Brian Goodliffe, Recollections of Gunner Goodliffe: Life of a National Serviceman in 1952 and 1953 from His Own Diaries (Harrow, 2009), pp. 35, 55 and 91.
73. David Lodge, Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962, this edn 1984), p. 19.
74. IWMSA 27811, Richard Wilson, reel 2.
75. TNA WO 32/15746, ‘Accepted Candidates for National Service Commissions who do not Come with the Conditions of the War Office Scheme’, appendix to letter from Stopford to Director of Infantry, 8 March 1954.
76. Christopher Hurst, The View from King Street: An Essay in Autobiography (1997), p. 115.
77. Stanley Price, ‘The Fucking Army’, unpublished chapter of autobiography.
78. Robin Chapman, A Waste of Public Money, or The Education of Charlie Williams (1962), p. 101.
79. Derek Seaton, Memoirs of a Conscript: National Service 1950–1952 (Alton, 2002), p. 5.
80. IWMSA 23213, Gordon Lawrence Potts, reel 1; IWM 15595, David Batterham, letter to parents, 12 January 1952.
81. IWMSA 18338, David Wray Fisher, reel 1.
82. IWMSA 11138, Ron Cassidy, reel 1.
83. Nottingham PRO, papers of Professor J. M. Lee DD 393/1/1, Mottershaw to Lee, 2 April 1949.
84. R. A. C. Radcliffe, The Times, 17 January 1953.
85. Kent, Undiscovered Ends, p. 31.
86. IWM 15058, R. D. Cramond, memoir of national service.
87. NAMSA 2003-04-3, ‘Mac’ McCullogh, reel 1.
88. Joe Studholme, interviewed by Cathy Courtney, NLSC: Artists’ Lives, 1996, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C466/74/02, transcript p. 6. © The British Library.
89. TNA WO 32/15746, ‘Accepted Candidates for National Service Commissions’.
90. IWMSA 21688, Richard Ingrams. © Whistledown, 2000. Ingrams was not commissioned but he was removed from the RASC and sent to the more civilized atmosphere of the Educational Corps.
91. Stacey in Chambers and Landreth (eds.), Called Up, pp. 47–65.
92. Manchester Guardian, 12 September 1953. A gunner who was about to attend the War Office Selection Board was attacked in his barracks.
93. IWMSA 20471, William Purves reel 1.
94. Len Woodrup, Training for War Games: One Man’s National Service (Lewes, 1993), p. 15.
95. Goodliffe, Recollections of Gunner Goodliffe, p. 16.
96. IWMSA 21690, Paul Foot. © Whistledown, 2000.
97. IWMSA 29895, Paul Croxson, reel 1.
98. Alan Sillitoe, Life Without Armour (1995), p. 96.
99. IWMSA 10669, Brian Vyner, reel 1.
100. IWMSA 21672, Derek Johns. © Whistledown, 2000.
101. Seaton, Memoirs of a Conscript, p. 7.
102. IWMSA 17335, L. H. Scribbins, reel 1.
103. IWM 11915, N. A. Martin, ‘The Day the Sun Stopped Shining’, p. 13. Martin recalls, of a recruit with whom he went through basic training: ‘we even had to bathe him’.
104. Robert Robinson, Skip All That (1996), p. 52.
105. IWMSA 11138, Ron Cassidy, reel 1.
106. Manchester Guardian, 19 December 1951.
107. IWMSA 19993, Ernest Dobson, reel 2.
108. IWMSA 20307, Norman Woods. See also IWMSA 23217, Ingram Murray, reel 1. Murray alludes to one of his comrades in the Royal Artillery being taken to the showers (apparently by his fellow recruits) and scrubbed with stiff brushes.
109. IWMSA 8943, Derek Blake, reel 1.
110. IWMSA 24569, John Harlow, reel 1.
111. TNA WO 291/1408, AORG, ‘Follow-up Study of Psychiatric Gradings Given at Arms Basic Training Units’, February 1954, prepared by Basil Clarke and Dr J. Penton.
112. The Times, 10 January 1957.
113. Daily Mail, 29 June 1959 and 3 July 1959.
114. LHCMA, Martin, ‘In the Service of Queen and Country’.
115. NAM 2004-02-106, Simon Bendall, ‘Memoirs of a National Serviceman’.
116. NAM 2002-08-61, Colin Metcalfe, ‘Recollections of National Service’.
117. IWMSA 26098, Benjamin Whitchurch, reel 1.
118. IWMSA 20268, Edwin Haywood, reel 1.
119. Betts, The Key of the Door, pp. 237, 248, 259.
120. IWMSA 21681, Ray Self. © Whistledown, 2000.
121. Manchester Guardian, 16 January 1957.
122. The Times, 25 January 1947.
123. The Times, 3 August 1954.
124. David Barron in Ken Drury (ed.), Get Some In: Memories of National Service (Great Dunmow, 2006), pp. 181–91, at p. 189.
125. IWM 16584, Michael Longley, letter home, 16 June 1949.
126. Manchester Guardian, 3 March 1951.
127. Ibid., 29 December 1954.
128. Ibid., 18 and 22 February 1956.
129. The Times, 1 February 1956.
130. Manchester Guardian, 27 March 1956.
1. Peter Burns (actually written by his brother Alan) in B. S Johnson (ed.), All Bull: The National Servicemen (1973), pp. 81–9, at p. 88.
2. TNA LAB 29/555, ‘Instructions for the Guidance of Medical Boards under the National Service Acts’, 1956.
3. David Morgan, ‘It Will Make a Man of You’: Notes on National Service, Masculinity and Autobiography (Manchester, 1987), p. 65.
4. Derek Seaton, Memoirs of a Conscript: National Service 1950–1952 (Alton, 2002), p. 5: ‘officers hardly figured in our lives and when they did they appeared almost effete. Against a background of the macho NCO they seemed so ineffectual.’
5. Richard Davenport-Hines (ed.), Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson (2006), p. 132, letter of 8 November 1953.
6. Patrick Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Post-war Britain (1996).
7. NAM 2003-06-9, Nigel Hensman, documents relating to training at Mons. The Kinsey Report was suggested as a topic for discussion – along with Germany as an ally, race segregation in South Africa and church parades in the army.
8. TNA WO 291/1408, AORG, ‘Follow-up Study of Psychiatric Gradings Given at Arms Basic Training Units’, February 1954, prepared by Basil Clarke and Dr J. Penton.
9. IWMSA 20471, William Purves, reel 1.
10. IWMSA 10211, Peter Beadle, reel 2.
11. Neal Ascherson in Adrian Walker (ed.), Six Campaigns: National Servicemen at War, 1948–1960 (1993), pp. 1–7, at p. 2.
12. P. J. Kavanagh implies that he lost his virginity in Japan shortly after his first experience of battle (The Perfect Stranger (1966), p. 99). John Hollands’s autobiographical novel of the Korean War also recounts a loss of virginity during post-combat leave in Japan (The Dead, the Dying and the Damned (1956), p. 275).
13. NAM 2000–1-08-55, D. F. Barrett, diary entry, 24 September 1950.
14. TNA AIR 77/608, ‘Morale of the National Service Airman on Entry and During Initial Training: Report 1 of an Investigation into the Morale of the National Service Man in the RAF’, January 1949.
15. TNA WO 291/1510, AORG, ‘The Different Officer Potentials of Various Regions of Great Britain’, 1956, by L. J. Holman. Appendix D, ‘Shortage of Officers from the North’, CEO [Chief Education Officer], Northern Command.
16. TNA AIR 77/608, ‘Morale of the National Service Airman on Entry and During Initial Training’.
17. TNA AIR 20/12136, ‘Morale of the National Service Airman (an Account of an Investigation Covering the Period October 1947–September 1950)’, by A. S. Anthony, 24 July 1951.
18. TNA ADM 1/23999, officer commanding Scotland and Northern Ireland to Secretary of the Admiralty, illegible signature, 20 December 1949.
19. Daily Mirror, 2 May 1956.
20. TNA DEFE 7/61, letter from Barrow-in-Furness, 14 July 1958.
21. TNA WO 32/15025, note on case of Private W. in the RAPC, unsigned and undated; note written on it by another officer is dated 28 February 1958.
22. NAM 2001-07-1187-46, Andrew Man, ‘The National Service Soldier in Korea and his Background’, May 1951.
23. Simon Raven, The English Gentleman: An Essay in Attitudes (1961), pp. 141–3.
24. NAMSA 2001-02-397, Barry Reed, reel 2.
25. Daily Mirror, 7 August 1953. The King George’s Jubilee Trust claimed to have consulted 1,000 ‘women with sons serving in the forces’. The Times, 21 October 1955.
26. Michael Gannon, ‘Your Son and the Call-up’, Evening News, 29 March 1954; see also the preceding articles on 22, 23 and 24 March.
27. John Hall, ‘Mother Isn’t the Best Friend of the Army’, Daily Mail, 29 July 1953. This article can be found in TNA DEFE 7/508.
28. Barbara Castle, for example, intervened in the case of an orphaned National Service reservist who wanted to be excused his annual camp so that he could look after his thirteen-year-old sister. Daily Mirror, 20 August 1955. Bessie Braddock intervened in the case of David Larder, who was disciplined in Kenya after complaining about army brutality.
29. Frederick Hudson, Loyal to the End: A Personal and Factual Account of National Service in Malaya (Blackburn, 2006), p. 35.
30. ‘A National Serviceman’, ‘Band Night’, New Statesman, 13 April 1957.
31. T. Ferguson and J. Cunnison, The Young Wage-earner: A Study of Glasgow Boys (Oxford, 1951), p. 7.
32. TNA WO 291/1074, AORG, ‘Mental Attitudes of National Service Army Recruits Immediately Before Call-up’, based on interviews conducted from July to November 1948.
33. IWM 1597, J. R. Christie, letter from Lt Colonel F. J. Swainson to Mrs Christie, 16 April 1956: ‘I do not think you need have any worries about his welfare or physical well-being, but if you have, please write to me.’
34. NAM 2003-06-9-16, Nigel Hensman, ‘The Problem of Increasing the Regular Content of the Regiment’, by commanding officer 12th Lancers, November 1952.
35. TNA AIR 77/608, ‘Morale of the National Service Airman on Entry and During Initial Training’.
36. Ibid. Views of a student, a glazier from Middlesbrough and a shop assistant from Newton Abbot.
37. TNA HO 345/13, Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Wolfenden Committee, 25 May 2013. Lt Colonel Barron, ‘Nearly all of them [young soldiers] make allotments to their mothers and so on.’ On sending money home to mothers see, for example, Frank Dickinson, Them Days ’ave Gone (Ely, 2008), p. 71.
38. TNA AIR 77/608, ‘Morale of the National Service Airman on Entry and During Initial Training’.
39. TNA AIR 20/12136, ‘Morale of the National Service Airman’.
40. Stephen Martin, ‘Did Your Country Need You? An Oral History of the National Service Experience in Britain, 1945–1963’ (PhD thesis, University of Wales, Lampeter, 1997), p. 49.
41. IWM 12723, John Whybrow, letter to father, 9 February 1951.
42. NAM 1995-01-164, Robert Gomme, ‘Korea: A Short Memoir, Forty Years On’.
43. Ascherson in Walker (ed.), Six Campaigns, p. 7.
44. IWM 2118, Peter Mayo, diary entry, 9 December 1956.
45. IWMSA 21688, Richard Ingrams. © Whistledown, 2000.
46. Lord Moran, ‘VD and Conscription’, The Spectator, 8 August 1947.
47. TNA WO 32/12436, minute signed ‘DAE’, 30 March 1948.
48. Ibid., Army Education Advisory Board, amended report by subcommittee, 26 May 1949.
49. NAM 2001-07-1187-63, papers of Andrew Man, ‘Guide to Regimental Officers on the Problems of Venereal Disease’, 7 March 1947.
50. IWMSA 10925, Bruce Kent.
51. Jeremy Crang, ‘The Abolition of Compulsory Church Parades in the British Army’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 56 (2005), pp. 92–106.
52. Donald Manley, for example, was confirmed with several of his comrades during his service in the late 1940s. NAM 2004-06-64, ‘Change Here for Aldershot. Memoirs of a National Serviceman’.
53. NAMSA 2000-04-55, John Hodgson; NAMSA 2000-04-56, Michael Perry; NAMSA 2003-04-4, Mike Gilman.
54. Letter to Manchester Guardian, 24 October 1955.
55. IWM 12733, Cyril MacG Williams, letter to parents, 23 November 1952.
56. TNA WO 216/238, Chief of Imperial General Staff, conference of army commanders, War Office, 11 November 1947.
57. TNA WO 384/1–44, the ‘Abstract of Army Statistics’ gives figures for infection rates.
58. John Blair, The Conscript Doctors: Memories of National Service (Edinburgh, 2001), p. 47.
59. John Cowell, Elephant Grass (Blackburn, 2007), p. 55.
60. IWM 7178, C. B. L. Barr, diary entry, 17 May 1954.
61. IWMSA 20494, Peter Featherby, reel 1.
62. TNA AIR 20/6457, ‘Attitudes of Serving Airmen: Report of a Working Party, Oct.–Dec. 1948’.
63. Morgan, ‘It Will Make a Man of You’, p. 51.
64. Blair, Conscript Doctors, p. 94.
65. NAM 2000-08-55, Barrett, diary entry, 17 December 1950.
66. Hansard, 11 March 1954, George Thomas.
67. NAM 2001-07-1187-63, papers of Andrew Man, F. M. Richardson, Brigadier, Deputy Director of Medical Services 1 (BR) Corps, pamphlet ‘Advice on Sex’, October 1955: ‘The act is generally a misuse of an important bodily function.’
68. George Carey, Know the Truth: A Memoir (2004), p. 30.
69. Nottingham PRO, papers of Professor J. M. Lee, DD 393/1, letter from Graham Mottershaw to Lee, 2 April 1949.
70. IWM 2118, Mayo, diary entry, 6 January 1956.
71. Michael Lewis, Killroy Was Here (1961), p. 26.
72. IWM 161, A. E. Fisher.
73. Morgan, ‘It Will Make a Man of You’, p. 27.
74. TNA WO 32/12436, Army Education Advisory Board, report, 26 March 1949.
75. Douglas Findlay, White Knees Brown Knees: Suez Canal Zone 1951–1954, the Forgotten Years (Edinburgh, 2003), p. 74.
76. R. F. L. Logan and E. M. Goldberg, ‘Rising Eighteen in a London Suburb: A Study of Some Aspects of the Life and Health of Young Men’, British Journal of Sociology, 4, 4 (1953), pp. 323–45.
77. TNA WO 384/1, ‘Abstract of Army Statistics’. The precise figures were 2 per cent for privates, 2.7 per cent for lance corporals, 2.8 per cent for corporals and 1.7 per cent for sergeants. Lance corporals and corporals would have been older than most privates. Many sergeants would have been members of the Royal Army Educational Corps, and thus drawn from a class of men unlikely to marry young. Among officers under the age of twenty-five, 153 were married and 2,021 were unmarried; among those over the age of twenty-five, 386 were married and 633 were unmarried.
78. TNA WO 384/26, figures for 31 August 1957.
79. TNA WO 384/34, figures for 31 October 1959.
80. Nottingham PRO, papers of Professer J. M. Lee, DD 393/1/1, letter from Mottershaw to Lee, 2 April 1949.
81. Logan and Goldberg, ‘Rising Eighteen’: ‘Finally 4 boys had become engaged and were saving up for marriage. Their histories, however, suggested that they had not progressed through the stage of “trying out” their attitudes towards girls, but had clung to one girl from early adolescence, who seemed to satisfy immature needs for a mother substitute.’
82. TNA WO 384/12, ‘Abstract of Army Statistics’, figures for 28 February 1954.
83. NAM 2001-07-1187-63, ‘Advice on Sex’, October 1955, quoting ‘an experienced CO’s view’, p. 1.
84. TNA WO 291/1074, AORG, ‘Mental Attitudes’.
85. Albert Balmer, A Cyprus Journey: Memoirs of National Service (2008), p. 107.
86. The Times, 17 August 1956.
87. David Baxter, Two Years to Do (1959), p. 57.
88. Daily Mirror, 24 December 1957. IWMSA 21672, Derek Johns. © Whistledown, 2000. Derek Johns, who undertook his training with Wands, describes Wands and says that he committed suicide but apparently does not know the circumstances of the death.
89. NAM 2003-08-61, Jack Gillett.
90. TNA HO 345/13, Wolfenden Committee, 25 May 2013.
91. IWMSA 21675, Anne Collins. © Whistledown, 2000.
92. Richard Vaughan, interview, 23 January 2013.
93. Workers’ Educational Association and East Lothian Council Library Service, West Lothian and the Forgotten War: Experience of World War II, National Service and the Korean War (Edinburgh, 2000), p. 16.
94. IWMSA 10211, Beadle, reel 2.
95. NAM 1995-01-164, Gomme, ‘Korea: A Short Memoir’.
96. Joan Bakewell, The Centre of the Bed (2003). Bakewell mentions briefly the fact that most of her male contemporaries at Cambridge had been through national service and remarks that her first husband, Michael Bakewell, had failed to obtain a commission after expressing support for Red China to his commanding officer. Michael Bakewell’s essay was published in Johnson (ed.), All Bull, pp. 188–200.
97. Logan and Goldberg, ‘Rising Eighteen’: ‘In actual fact almost all the youths said they approved of pre-marital intercourse with a “steady” girl friend … A common inconsistency was that most said they wanted their wives to be virgins, and were also uncertain whether the sexual code to which they subscribed should apply also to their sisters.’
98. Stanley Price, ‘The Fucking Army’, unpublished chapter.
99. Sussex University, Mass Observation Archive, Sx MOA1/2/11/1/B, Borstal chaplain, diary entry, 4 March, no year.
100. Adrian Laing, R. D. Laing: A Biography (1994), p. 55.
101. NAMSA 1995-05-93, Robin Ollington, reel 1.
102. TNA WO 291/1408, AORG, ‘Psychiatric Gradings’. It was reported that a private in the RASC – a ‘small, puny man’ who wrote to his wife every day – was the biggest user of the district brothels.
103. The Wolfenden Committee was set up to investigate prostitution as well as homosexuality, but the evidence that the armed forces provided to it was exclusively concerned with the latter. The War Office told the committee that ‘Female prostitution has raised no problem in relation to members of the Forces in the United Kingdom.’ TNA DEFE 70/96, memorandum by the War Office, n.d.
104. NAM 2001-07-1187–63, papers of Andrew Man, ‘Guide to Regimental Officers on the Problems of Venereal Disease’, 7 March 1947.
105. TNA WO 291/1408, ‘Psychiatric Gradings’.
106. Peter Gaston in Peter Chambers and Amy Landreth (eds.), Called Up: The Personal Experiences of Sixteen National Servicemen, Told by Themselves (1955), pp. 35–46, at p. 42.
107. Leslie Ives, A Musket for the King: The Trials and Tribulations of a National Serviceman 1949–1951 (Tavistock, 1999), pp. 101–2.
108. Roger Alford, Life and LSE (Sussex, 2009), p. 163.
109. Cowell, Elephant Grass.
110. IWMSA 24570, Piers Plowright, reel 4.
111. IWMSA 21582, David Davies, reel 1.
112. Hugh Chesters in Ken Drury (ed.), Get Some In: Memories of National Service (Great Dunmow, 2006), pp. 101–4, at p. 103.
113. Stuart Crampin in Johnson (ed.), All Bull, pp. 126–35, at p. 127.
114. John Scurr, Jungle Campaign: A Memoir of National Service in Malaya, 1949–51 (Lewes, 1998), p. 47.
115. NAM 2000-08-55, Barrett, diary entry, 2 November 1950.
116. David Lodge discusses the difficulty of using real army language in the introduction to the second edition of Ginger, You’re Barmy. David Baxter’s national service memoir Two Years to Do (1959) used the word ‘fucking’ without causing trouble.
117. N. Dennis, F. M. Henriques and C. Slaughter, Coal is Our Life: An Analysis of a Yorkshire Mining Community (1956), p. 218.
118. Tom Baker, Who on Earth is Tom Baker? (1997), p. 85.
119. Baxter, Two Years to Do, p. 15.
120. Frederic Raphael, Cracks in the Ice: Views and Reviews (1979), p. 22.
121. Peter Nichols, Feeling You’re Behind: An Autobiography (1984), p. 122.
122. Sunday Times, 5 October 1986, quoted in Morgan, ‘It Will Make a Man of You’, p. 76.
123. Logan and Goldberg’s study of young men registering for the call-up found little relation between sexual experience and occupation except that ‘none of the students reported “adult outlets” ’: Logan and Goldberg, ‘Rising Eighteen’.
124. See ‘Pokers and Stilettos’ in Times Educational Supplement, 31 August 1956. The author, who had been a national service sergeant instructor, described teaching illiterate soldiers – many of whom were criminal and some of whom were homosexual.
125. IWMSA 14822, Rodney Giesler, reel 7. Giesler, however, recalling his own experience at Catterick, insisted that the working classes did not go into sexual detail in their letters.
126. John Boorman, Adventures of a Suburban Boy (2003), p. 66.
127. TNA WO 291/2193, AORG, ‘Likes and Interests Test: A Report of the Experimental Testing of Recruits Eligible for Consideration as Potential Officers’, prepared by Joan Harris (1958).
128. Terence Blacker, You Cannot Live as I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This: The Thoroughly Disgraceful Life and Times of Willie Donaldson (2007), p. 32.
129. NAM 2001-07-1187-63, Andrew Man, draft speech to passing-out parade of signals officers, undated.
130. IWM 2775, J. C. A. Green, letter to parents, 11 October 1952, just after he has been put in a hut for Other Ranks I (i.e. potential officers): ‘It is still feeling very nice to be among chaps who are not always moaning [and] talking about girls.’
131. Ronald Hyam, My Life in the Past (privately published, 2012), p. 92.
132. Tony Betts, The Key of the Door: Rhythm and Romance in a Post-war London Adolescence (Wimborne, 2006), p. 281.
133. Gordon M. Williams, The Camp (1966), p. 53.
134. Robin Chapman, A Waste of Public Money, or The Education of Charlie Williams (1962), p. 101.
135. John Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer and Jennifer Platt, The Affluent Worker: Industrial Attitudes and Behaviour (Cambridge, 1968). An even more revealing remark about ‘mateship’ was scribbled on an interview form by one of the researchers in this project: ‘I bet his mates hate him.’
136. Hansard, 2 February 1954, Arthur Lewis.
137. Basil Henriques, So You’re Being Called Up, various editions 1947–52.
138. NAM 2001-07-1187-63, ‘Advice on Sex, October 1955’.
139. Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship, p. 74.
140. Ibid.
141. TNA HO 345/13, Wolfenden Committee, 25 May 1955.
142. TNA ADM 1/26594, minute by Medical Director General, 23 April 1956: ‘one sees more cases nowadays of pseudo homosexuality which before the war might have masqueraded as pathological enuresis’.
143. TNA AIR 2/12407, Wolfenden Committee, memorandum by the Air Ministry.
144. Cited in Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship, p. 76.
145. TNA AIR 2/12407, Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, memorandum by the War Office, Appendix A, ‘Homosexuality in London. Summary of Statement by GOC London District on Aspects of the Problem Affecting the Army’, attached to note signed Curtis, 15 April 1955.
146. Hansard, 14 July 1955, speech by Alport.
147. TNA AIR 2/12407, ‘Homosexuality Within the Royal Air Force’, note by DPS: ‘Homosexuality is like an iceberg: the greater part remains unseen and undetected.’
148. Cited in Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship, p. 61.
149. TNA AIR 2/12407, ‘Homosexuality Within the Royal Air Force’, note by DPS.
150. Ibid.
151. Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship, p. 73.
152. IWM 614, W. H. Butler, ‘Derby to Derna (an Account of National Service Experiences)’, p. 68: ‘what does seem somewhat surprising in retrospect is that there was not much evidence of homosexuality amongst that large male community’. Butler said that he came across ‘three or four’ who were ‘suspect’ and that there was no problem ‘once things were made clear’. Ernest Dobson mentions ‘puffs’ on the boat returning from Korea and expresses hostile views of them. IWMSA 19993, Ernest Dobson, reel 25.
153. TNA AIR 2/12407, ‘Homosexuality Within the Royal Air Force’, note by DPS.
154. IWM 15608, G. J. W. Rosbrook, letter, 28 August 1954.
155. IWMSA 14786, Godfrey Raper, reel 3.
156. Cowell, Elephant Grass, p. 66.
157. Reg Martin, interviewed by Wendy Rickard, HIV/AIDS Testimonies, 1995, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue reference C743/02, transcript p. 29. © The British Library.
158. Ibid., p. 28.
159. Ibid., p. 29.
160. Ibid., p. 30.
161. Ibid., p. 31.
162. Ibid.
163. Roy Strong, Self-portrait as a Young Man (Oxford, 2013).
164. NAMSA 2000-04-56, Perry, reel 2.
165. Sussex University, National Gay and Lesbian Survey, case 183.
166. Ibid., case 417.
167. Christopher Hurst, The View from King Street: An Essay in Autobiography (1997), p. 114.
168. Ibid., p. 140.
169. Ibid., p. 142.
170. Ibid., p. 135.
171. TNA AIR 77/608, ‘Morale of the National Service Airman on Entry and During Initial Training’.
172. IWM 2118, Mayo, diary entry, 22 December 1956.
173. Ibid., 6 November 1956.
174. Ibid., 4 December 1956.
175. Ibid., 9 December 1956.