Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (58 page)

For almost all 18-year-old males, still three years shy of being entitled to vote, there was the awkward, almost unavoidable fact of conscription – formally known from 1949 as National Service and lasting for up to two years. Peacetime conscription was unique in modern British history, but the Labour government was insistent that it was the only way in which the country could meet its extensive military commitments across much of the world. Such was the general assumption – in all parts of society – that Britain must continue to be a main player on the international stage that there was at most only muted opposition to the policy. And equally tellingly, in the broad support given to that policy until at least the mid-1950s, the latter-day notion that the discipline of National Service would somehow act as a magical moral stiffener for errant, delinquent youth played little or no part. In other words, some 2.3 million men were called up between 1945 and 1960 for essentially geopolitical purposes.

Among those who got the summons (invariably in a buff envelope), some 16 per cent were rejected as physically unfit, compared with only 0.4 per cent who successfully claimed conscientious objections. Invariably, there were many urban myths in circulation about surefire ways of failing the medical – such as throwing a fit, eating cordite to induce sweating, and sticking a knitting needle into the ear in order to perforate an eardrum – as there were also about trying to fail the intelligence test. Kenneth Tynan gave a notably ‘successful’ performance, smothering himself in Yardley scent and cutting an outrageously camp figure, while his fellow-thespian Tony Richardson was so genuinely nervous and nauseous during his medical that he won a reprieve – to the eternal shame of his father, an earnest, moralising man who kept a pharmacy on the main road from Bradford to Bingley.

In general, the probability is that resentment about being called up was less common than a fairly passive acceptance of the inevitable. Such at least is the conclusion of Stephen Martin, on the basis of an oral-history survey conducted in Essex in the mid-1990s. One of his interviewees, Peter Hunt, put it as well as anyone:

I mean it was purely, in my case anyway, something that everybody had to do. You know, you just waited for it to come, went for the medical and that was it. There was no questioning it at all, not as far as I was concerned. Having thought about it, I suppose because it was only five years after the war and we lived in a sort of very, I won’t say repressed, but suppressed society, whereby you were used to taking orders without question such as the blackout and queues and rationing and things like that. So against that background it doesn’t seem so unusual now to say, ‘Oh well, we just went and did it!’

Indeed, several of Martin’s sample recall positively looking forward to the call-up – the chance to ‘cut the apron strings’ and get away from home, to stop doing a boring job, to visit foreign countries at someone else’s expense. ‘Attitudes surrounding the question of National Service,’ he concludes, ‘owed more to the concerns and aims of growing teenagers rather than any ideas about the rights and wrongs of conscription.’
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Even so, it is possible to argue that the way in which National Service operated had a significantly destabilising – if not necessarily radicalising – effect on the assumptions and norms of British society. For one thing, it served as a melting-pot, especially during the early weeks of square bashing and basic training, for people from different classes and regions who were often living for the first time outside their familiar home environments. Confronting ‘the revelation of another England’, the future writer Edward Lucie-Smith, ‘a middle-class product of a scholarship mill’, was ‘shattered to discover how poorly most [men] had been taught’ at school. For the future cartoonist Mel Calman, the revelation was coming across people who ‘spoke a language that said “cunt” instead of “woman” and “fuck” instead of “love”’. Another eye-opener could be watching the officer class in action, as the young doctor (and poet) Dannie Abse did in the officers’ mess on dining-in nights after he had been posted in 1951 to the mass radiography unit at Cardington, near Bedford:

Two teams lined up, in single file, each team member having been supplied with a snooker ball that was held high up between thighs and crutch and buttock. At the other end of the room two buckets had been placed and towards these, now, each player awkwardly progressed in a relay race. At the bucket, each in turn would stoop in the posture of defaecation in order to drop the billiard ball with a zinc clang into the receptacle. Or two men, blindfolded, would lie prone on the carpet as they tried to hit each other with a rolled-up
Picture Post
or
Life
magazine. These two blind antagonists lay on their stomachs, horizontal on the floor, swinging their arms and crashing down their weapons mainly on the carpet while other officers gathered round frenetically shouting, ‘Smash him, Jocelyn. Attaboy, Robin’.

Eyes were also sometimes opened in the wider world. ‘I felt increasingly distressed by what I was being asked to defend – it seemed to be a system based on political injustice,’ one ex-National Serviceman recalled about his time in Malaya, a British colony beset (like Cyprus and Kenya) by a strong and growing independence movement. Moreover, many young conscripts were caught up in fighting; indeed, in the course of the 1950s several hundred died in action.

Far more common, though, was the need to endure long hours of boredom and mind-numbing tasks. It was in this context that there developed a culture where skiving – best defined as looking busy while doing nothing – was made into a fine art. The Boulting brothers (John and Roy) commemorated the culture, undeniably subversive if sturdily apolitical, in their 1956 satire
Private’s Progress
, featuring Richard Attenborough as Private Cox, the arch-skiver. Whether two years of skiving in the army automatically led to 40 years of skiving on the factory floor is a hypothesis not yet empirically tested. More plausible is the view that these two years spent as involuntary conscripts with a bunch of other 18- and 19-year-olds provided a shared experience – living away from home, going out together to pubs, dance halls and so on without any parental restraint – that did much to accelerate the arrival of ‘youth’ as a category in its own right. Indeed, by happy chance National Service got properly under way just as the term ‘teenager’ was being imported from the United States and rapidly becoming a staple of social reportage.
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That said, it is equally if not more probable that National Service served at least as much to reinforce as to undermine existing social structures and attitudes. Take the question of who got a commission from among the conscripts. ‘The potential National Service officer had to possess a good education, social confidence, some previous military training and a certain conceit,’ Trevor Royle has noted in his survey of the National Service experience. ‘Most of these qualities, the Army generally agreed, were to be found in the products of a public or grammar school education.’ And he adds that ‘there were many National Servicemen who would have applied for officer selection but for their fear (not altogether groundless) that they did not have the right accent or social background, or that they would be unable to afford the higher expenses of the Officers’ Mess’. Moreover, the whole basis on which the army was run was consciously designed to encourage conformity and stamp out independent, critical thinking, especially of a left-wing variety. Instead, it offered a wonderfully self-contained world in which tradition, hierarchy, authority and discipline were privileged above all else.

Crucially, the evidence we have is that most conscripts – themselves predominantly working-class – did not in any fundamental sense challenge that value system. A survey of almost 500 young Glaswegians, who had left school in 1947 aged 14 and were called up and accepted in the early 1950s, found as follows on questioning them two years after return from National Service: 59 per cent had ‘enjoyed Service life’; 27 per cent had ‘actively disliked it’; and the remaining 14 per cent were ‘more or less neutral, regarding it as “just a job that had to be done”’. The majority, in other words, would probably not have disagreed with the more or less contemporaneous view of a young factory worker quoted in the 1955 collection
Called Up
: ‘When I was back in Civvy Street and looked back on all the good times I’d had with my friends, my National Service didn’t seem so bad after all. But I do think that a lot of time is wasted in the Army just hanging around.’ There could even be something else involved. The future writer Colin Wilson, conscripted into the RAF and immediately nicknamed ‘Professor’, wrote home in the autumn of 1949 about his passing-out parade:

It was an odd experience. I’d come to feel such contempt for the R. A.F. and everything it stood for. I used to repeat to myself that comment of Einstein about strutting imbeciles in uniform. Well, on the last morning in Bridgnorth, we were all on the square, and all I wanted was to get the whole stupid farce finished with and get home. Then suddenly the sun came out. I stood there, with the band playing the R.A.F. march-past and the sun shining and all of us moving like a single great machine, and suddenly I felt a tremendous exhilaration and a love for it all.

‘It was,’ in fact, ‘quite irrational.’
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If National Service was unconnected in most people’s minds with the state of the nation’s moral fibre, that was much less the case with matters of sexual attitude and behaviour. Mass-Observation in early 1949 asked 2,052 people, chosen randomly on the streets of a cross-section of British cities, towns and villages, whether they thought ‘standards of sex morality today’ were ‘getting better or worse or remaining about the same’. Some 39 per cent were either ‘undecided’ or ‘vague’ or reckoned they were ‘much the same as ever’; 44 per cent (with a bias towards the elderly) said they were ‘declining’; and only 17 per cent (with a bias towards the young) thought they were ‘improving’.

The question was part of a survey subsequently dubbed ‘Little Kinsey’ – in the event never published but having some limited affinity to the recent celebrated (or infamous) American sex survey. It did not get very far in terms of uncovering actual sexual behaviour – beyond revealing that 33 per cent thought ‘sexless’ happiness was possible and 32 per cent thought it impossible, with a judicious 9 per cent reckoning it ‘depended on the individual’ – but it was quite revealing in terms of broad attitudes. For instance, 76 per cent were in favour of sex education and only 15 per cent (including a high proportion of churchgoers) positively against; 63 per cent approved of birth control and 15 per cent disapproved; 58 per cent were ‘unreservedly in favour of marriage’, with most of the rest in favour depending on circumstances, and only 8 per cent either having ‘mixed feelings’ or giving ‘unfavourable opinions’; and 57 per cent ‘more or less’ approved of divorce, with the emphasis almost invariably, Mass-Observation noted, ‘on divorce as a regrettable necessity, to be avoided wherever possible, but not at the expense of happiness’. Tellingly, when M-O put this last question to its largely middle-class (and somewhat leftish) National Panel, as many as 83 per cent expressed broad approval of divorce – 26 per cent higher than the mainly working-class street sample.

Inevitably, there was also a question about people’s attitude to extramarital relations. ‘That’s wrong’, ‘I don’t agree with that’, ‘It’s filthy’, ‘Well, I think that’s awful’, ‘Oh no, that’s not done, that’s lust’ – such were some of the brief, indignant replies. Others elaborated somewhat more on their views:

I feel very strongly about this. I’ve seen a lot of the harm it causes. I may say my wife and I have dropped one or two people who weren’t playing the game, we didn’t think they were worth knowing. (
Taxi-cab proprietor
)

I don’t believe in it, it’s not right, it’s going like animals. (
Painter
and decorator,
70)

You can’t stop the feeling, I agree with it. It’s to try people out – you never want to buy a pig in a poke. (
Steeplejack,
37)

It’s hard to say. As far as I can see everybody does it. If I was single I wouldn’t refuse, would I? (
Dock labourer
)

After I had been going with her for two months, I tried to go all the way with her, but it wouldn’t work. She wants a white wedding and marriage in a Church, and to be a virgin. I agree with her and I don’t try any more. (
Londoner,
20)

That shouldn’t be allowed. Just because I do it, I don’t think it’s right. (
Lorry driver
)

Overall, 63 per cent of the street sample disapproved of extra-marital relations, compared with only 24 per cent of Mass-Observation’s National Panel. And within the street sample, there was above-average opposition from regular church-goers, people who had left school by the age of 15, those living in rural areas, women, and married people over 30. As for the 37 per cent of the street sample who did not express outright disapproval, the M-O report stressed that only a minority ‘gave even lukewarm unqualified approval’. Accordingly, ‘There is certainly no easy or widespread acceptance of sex relations outside marriage in the population as a whole.’ Even so, the report’s accompanying assertion (largely on the basis of illegitimacy statistics) that ‘there is ample evidence for assuming that at least one person in three, probably more, has intercourse either before or outside marriage’ suggested that what people did was not always the same as what they said when confronted on a street by an inquisitive stranger.
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