Vol. 9 No. 1 · 8 January 1987
pages 3-6 | 3399 words
Gangs
D.A.N. Jones
- The Old School: A Study by Simon Raven
Hamish Hamilton, 139 pp, £12.00, September 1986, ISBN 0 241 11929 4
- The Best Years of their Lives: The National Service Experience 1945-63 by Trevor Royle
Joseph, 288 pp, £12.95, September 1986, ISBN 0 7181 2459 6
- Murder without Conviction: Inside the World of the Krays by John Dickson
Sidgwick, 164 pp, £9.95, October 1986, ISBN 0 02 839940 4
- Inside ‘Private Eye’ by Peter McKay
Fourth Estate, 192 pp, £9.95, October 1986, ISBN 0 947795 80 4
- Malice in Wonderland: Robert Maxwell v. ‘Private Eye’ by Robert Maxwell, John Jackson, Peter Donnelly and Joe Haines
Macdonald, 191 pp, £10.95, December 1986, ISBN 0 356 14616 2
These tales of mob and gang will be appreciated by man and boy, but especially by those of us who have survived fifty-odd years of life in Britain. Our day-school years in the Thirties were much influenced by the public school system, expressed in schoolmasters’ aspirations and schoolboys’ comics. Simon Raven’s notorious devotion to that system began when he was only a seven-year-old comic reader, as he admits in The Old School, a loving but mordant survey of the dormitory schools: he went on avidly to Charterhouse and he fancies other men will envy or scorn that experience, as he himself scorns or envies men from rival dormitories. Such is the gang spirit. Then, in our teens or twenties, we entered the mob, post-war conscripts in the years of National Service: here the public schoolboys came into their own, hogging the Queen’s Commission and acquiring conscript valets. Trevor Royle, a serious young Scot, describes ‘the National Service Experience, 1945-63’ in his worthy book, The Best Years of Their Lives: he feels sorry that he was too young to meet this challenge himself.
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Letters
Vol. 9 No. 4 · 19 February 1987
From C.A. Latimer
SIR: It was particularly interesting to read D.A.N. Jones’s review (LRB, 8 January) of Trevor Royle’s The Best Years of their Lives, in that he paraded, without necessarily agreeing with, many of the received opinions about National Service. One can only speak from personal experience, but mine of the conscript army of 1948/49 is in many respects in direct contradiction to the popular view. For example, it seems to be thought that commissions were reserved for public school twits, who were quickly separated from the lowly mass of conscripts, and that the long-suffering Army had then to put up with these callow young fools, who were ‘carried’ by experienced and dependable regular sergeants and warrant officers. Even after nearly forty years, one has to laugh. Or, at least, I do. Neither I nor any of my four contemporary fellow second-lieutenants had been to a public school, not even a ‘minor’ one. Perhaps it doesn’t become me to say so, but we were conscientious, keen and hard-working – and a good deal more intelligent than most of the regular NCOs we were set among. The Army of 1948 was not a very efficient body: many of the best officers and NCOs had been demobbed, and quite a few of the remaining ones were, to put it bluntly, deadbeats, who would never have been acceptable to the Army of today in the rank they held. Of course there were good ones, but I know that much of the work that they were supposed to have done was, in fact, done by 19-year-old us. No doubt this area of National Service is just another skirmish in the interminable British class war, with a scenario of worthy working-class NCOs propping up, and clearing up after, feckless privileged upper-class subalterns. Believe me, it wasn’t like that at all.
If Mr Brien (Letters, 22 January) wants to find out whether or not the idea of a Lost Generation is a myth, it would be more useful to analyse the percentage of deaths in action recorded among the alumni of the leading public schools and Oxbridge colleges, in relation to the total numbers turned out by those institutions, of relevant military age. I think this would give him a better guide than a crude division of officers and men. As the war progressed, many officers were commissioned from the ranks, and in any case, by no means all the officers of Kitchener’s Army were jeunesse dorée. It would probably serve his purpose well enough to confine the analysis to Oxbridge alone, for which records must be readily available. As he says, statistics are funny things, but are they really as funny, or rather ghastly, as the ones he quotes for RAF aircrew losses in the Second World War? 55 per cent killed? There seems to be something wrong somewhere in that statistic.
C.A. Latimer
Woodbridge
