Carry on Sergeant, the first Carry On film, came out in 1958 when national service was a reality for most young British men. It mingled a music-hall banter with daft one-liners. ("Your rank?" "Well, that's a matter of opinion.") Kenneth Williams, with his outlandishly flared nostrils, played an army conscript spectacularly ill-suited to bayonet practice. In his camp-cockney nasal protestations ("Don't you think this is a trifle out of date, sergeant?"), one can hear something of the angry young men who had begun to rebel against peacetime conscription.
In his fascinating cultural history National Service, Richard Vinen reminds us that Williams had undertaken national service in Bombay after the second world war, where he staged It Ain't Half Hot Mum-like concert parties and burlesques in the company of the future playwright Peter Nichols. Drill attendance did not always agree with the thespian in Williams.
In spite of his amused public image in later years, he was a man embittered by a sense of social grievance and often depressed. Though homosexuality was rife in the armed forces, national service was not always kind to gay men such as Williams, whose sneering, acid-tongued personality might have served to conceal some secret hurt aggravated by the indignities (as he perceived them) of call-up.
Britain still ruled a quarter of the globe when, in 1948, conscription was formalised by the National Service Act. The country was stony-broke, yet conscription emphasised the mirage of its importance on the world stage. Eighteen-year-old men were sent off to fight in the jungles of imperialist Malaya or in the hills of Kenya. As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, however, the threadbareness of imperial Britain could hardly be ignored. Jamaica and other islands in the anglophone Caribbean were poised to celebrate independence. The colonial wars fought by British national servicemen in Malaya, Cyprus and Kenya nevertheless perpetuated an idea of Britain's relevance, even if the price was high. Almost 20,000 national servicemen died in the 12-year period between 1948 and 1960. (Korea, reckoned to be the most lethal of the conscript wars, claimed 1,135 lives.)
The Kenya emergency of 1952-1960 marked a turning point in British attitudes to empire, says Vinen. Some conscripts objected to taking part in police actions against the anti-colonial Mau Mau as they did not see the Kenya war as a "good war" against an evident evil. Nazi Germany clearly had departed from the community of civilised human beings (the discovery by British troops of piles of naked, decomposing corpses at Belsen in April 1945 lent a moral clarity to the war), but the Mau Mau could not so easily be made into an enemy. They had taken up arms against an oppressive colonial administration, after all.
For every man who disliked conscription there were thousands who said they loved it. More than two million men were called into the British armed forces between the end of the second world war and May 1963, when the last of them were demobilised. The vast majority were working class and had never been abroad. Not surprisingly, they looked back on their service as a supreme experience of comradeship and even the "great adventure of their lives", says Vinen.
Exemptions were made for clergymen, students and those certified as insane or blind. Otherwise, every male born between 1928 and August 1939 was liable to be called up. Only rarely did conscription last for more than two years. The argument that it fulfilled an educational or disciplinary purpose (the "short, sharp shock") is a retrospective one, says Vinen. The reality is that Britain needed reserve troops in the event of a nuclear conflict and to fight in its various wars of decolonisation. The notion that conscription made men out of boys came later.
Class distinctions were prevalent in the army but less so in the RAF and navy, says Vinen, where discipline was known to be more lax. Army sergeants blown out with rank and self-importance were a part of national service mythology. Even so, many army conscripts came to enjoy the rigours of button-cleaning and boot-polishing. Public school boys who had earlier been enlisted in the combined cadet force had some basic knowledge of rifle parts and could withstand the loneliness of dormitory life. The majority of conscripts had never left home, however, and were profoundly upset at having to say goodbye to loved ones. At night in the barrack huts the predominant sound was one of weeping.
Conscription may have fostered feelings of belonging and even national unity, but it seldom mixed recruits from different social classes. Public schools remained at the top of the military hierarchy and provided a disproportionate number of officers. Auberon Waugh, John Wells, Richard Ingrams and others behind Private Eye (founded in 1961) were public school national servicemen whose irreverent attitude to authority sprang, they liked to say, from their experience of the army overseas. Waugh's conscription in Cyprus came to an abrupt end when he accidentally fired bullets into his chest while unlocking a jammed machine gun. (The episode provided comic material for his first novel, The Foxglove Saga, published in 1960.)
By the time the last British conscripts left the armed forces, national service had become a ramshackle totem of former imperial power, out of touch with Britain's prosperous new consumer society. After the material deprivations of the postwar years, the extravagance of Carnaby Street, the clothes of Mary Quant and Terence Conran's first Habitat store made the parade ground look drab and unappealing. Arnold Wesker, in his 1962 play Chips With Everything, caught a mood of square-bashing and bullying attendant on his RAF conscription. (Wesker, for one, had no wish to go back to bayonet charges.)
Vinen, a history professor at King's College London, has written a well-researched (if occasionally dry) history of British call-up and its personnel and personalities. Until now, the subject has been rather neglected by academics, not least because sociologists took oddly little interest in the armed forces. National Service fills the gap commendably well.
