This week the Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promised that, if re-elected, he will introduce a form of National Service for 18-year-olds. UK National Service, which was for young men only, ended in the early 1960s, and was entirely military - but this proposed 21st Century version is for eighteen-year-old men and women, and offers a choice: one year's military service or one weekend a month 'community volunteering' for a year. In other words, the military part of national service is mostly being used as a stick to get teens to 'volunteer' for unpaid community work.
After fourteen years in power, the Tories are highly unpopular, and the policy itself is polling badly. But the likely winner in July is the Labour Party, led by Establishment darling, Sir Keir Starmer - who I bet a King's Shilling will introduce something similar.
I wrote this piece for the Guardian back in 2010, when the Tories had just ousted Labour, analysing old British Army recruiting films, made during National Service, and just after - when the focus was, like mine, very much men and masculinity.
AS A BOY GROWING up in the 1960s and 70s I was raised to fight the Second World War all over again. Airfix models. Commando comics. Air tattoos in June. Watching The Battle of Britain and The Longest Day on telly with my dad, just so I’d know what to do if I ever found myself pinned down on a Normandy beach, or with an Me 109E on my tail.
All of which made me easy prey to an 1978 RAF recruiting film shown at my school about a Blackburn Buccaneer squadron training sortie from Gibraltar, set to a Vangelis soundtrack.
I promptly signed up to the air cadets and spent Tuesday afternoons and a week or two in the summer hols wearing itchy shirts and a Frank Spencer-style beret, learning how to march without falling over. I loved it, and would probably have signed up for the real thing if it hadn’t been for a sixth-form flirtation with Quakerism.
Alas, that old recruiting film isn’t included in They Stand Ready, a new collection of Central Office of Information (COI) armed forces recruitment and propaganda shorts made between 1946 and 1985, released by the BFI. But several similar ones are, including Tornado (1985), about a simulated attack on a Warsaw Pact surface-to-air missile site, and HMS Sheffield (1975), about life onboard a Royal Navy frigate (that was later hit by an Exocet during the Falklands war with the loss of thirty lives).
With their promise of escape from humdrum life, opportunities for new mates, good times, foreign travel and playing with really expensive toys – though strangely silent on the possible physical cost – these films offer a glimpse into the listless, regimented world that was mid-to-late 20th-century civilian Britain, waiting impatiently for Xboxes, EasyJet, the internet, and proper drugs to turn up.
Perhaps it’s because Prime Minister David Cameron is around the same age as me – or possibly because the armed forces, or at least the army, are still largely run by Ruperts like him – that he seems so nostalgic for this vanished old world. Cameron recently vowed to make the forces “front and centre of national life” and “revered” again, in a speech to UK personnel in Afghanistan.
Not that increased prominence is a guarantee of increased reverence, however. A short celebrating National Service, They Stand Ready made in 1955, a year before the Suez debacle punctured the UK’s post war imperial pretensions, recalls the last time that the armed forces really were ‘front and centre’ of national life.
“You’ve got to do it, so you might as well make the best of it,” is what a cloth capped father figure tells our despondent new draftee, played by a young Lane Meddick (though not really young enough: he was 31). The short emphasises both the duty and the potential benefits of ‘service’, along with the possible promise of foreign postings around what was left of the Empire (when travelling abroad was still a rarity).
By the end of his mandated two years, the army has gradually transformed the meek-mannered and trepidatious young(ish) draftee, into a self-assured tank commander.
National Service, introduced in 1949, required all healthy young men aged between 17-21 to serve for two years in the armed forces – unless working in one of the three ‘essential services’: coal mining, farming, and the merchant navy.
It proved to be highly unpopular – both with most of those who had to do it, and those who had to find something to do with them, and was ended by Harold Macmillan in the early 1960s. Once the last national servicemen left the ranks in 1963, military life could then be sold as something glamorous, colourful, and exciting instead of an onerous black-and-white duty.
This is exactly what Ten Feet Tall, a rock ‘n’ roll (Shadows/Tornados style) soundtracked recruiting film made by Rank studios in 1963 does in glorious Eastmancolor. It stars a young Scottish lad with matinee idol looks, perfect white teeth, and great hair, who is bored by the routine of civilian life but spurns the cheap thrills of the ugly, spotty, uncouth greasers with bad teeth loitering outside the caff with their motorbikes – “there’s nothing there, there’s no future in it” the voiceover actor pretending to be him tells us.
Instead he goes to see the smartly-turned-out Army Careers officer with (now ominously) nicotine-stained fingers on the High Street, who shows him some glossy brochures, outlines the trades he can learn, and the fun to be had, and persuades him to make “the best decision of my life”.
You can watch Ten Foot Tall here.
Smooth Submariners
While looking for the above-mentioned films on YT, I found this Look at Life short (also made by Rank) from 1960, when National Service was still in effect, about life and work on a Royal Navy diesel submarine, HMS Narwhal.
In addition to all the fags and pipes puffing away in the cramped interior, even when submerged - or when loading torpedoes - I was struck by the lack of beards.
Despite the mind-bogglingly limited space and facilities, the months spent away at sea, and RN regulations which permit a 'full set', almost every submariner - as the narrator points out - prefers to stay clean shaven.
Nowadays there is much more space on board a modern sub, and many more sinks, but smoking is banned, and everyone has a beard.
Including the women.