Author Description

From the end of the Second World War to the early 1960s, more than two million conscripts - most paid just over a pound a week - underwent national service. Britain has a curious blind spot about this aspect of its recent past, generally regarding it as a comic interlude - notable for inspiring the first 'Carry On' film. Yet its impact was huge. Without peacetime conscription Britain would not have been able to cling on to its status, or its Empire. National service cut across the lives of an entire generation. Some spent two years on bases in Lincolnshire or in Germany; other teenagers who had never left home found themselves hacking through the jungles of Malaya or enduring bitter trench warfare in Korea. Society too was changed, with information acquired from studies of conscripts contributing to everything from the end of the elven plus to the legalization of homosexuality. With great sympathy and curiosity, Richard Vinen unpicks the myths surrounding this extraordinary institution. Those who imagine national service introduced 'bad lads' to brisk discipline will learn that some officials believed it increased juvenile delinquency; those who suppose conscription mixed up the classes will discover that some regiments took almost half their national service officers from Eton. This book puts national service back at the centre of British history. Most of all, evokes the atmosphere of a time - which now seems almost impossibly remote - when pale, nervous eighteen-year-olds turned up at military camps every two weeks to play their part.