Vinen - National service: conscription in Britain, 1945-1963

Richard Vinen is the author of the highly praised A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century, The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation (published by Penguin) and Thatchers Britain. He is Professor of History at Kings College London.

National Service has won the Templer Medal Book Prize and the Wolfson History Prize.

PENGUIN BOOKS

A superb history Vinen, who was born in 1963, when the last national serviceman was demobbed, draws on memoirs, interviews and official records, to evoke and analyse past experience in a way which will command the unqualified assent and appreciation of those who were there at the time. If anyone wants proof that historians really can recover the truth about the past, this book will provide it Keith Thomas, London Review of Books

Vinen has given us the kind of book that every professional historian surely wants to write: not only with a mastery of its voluminous original sources but also a sensitivity to the rich human detail, by turns authoritative, thoughtful, poignant and funny Peter Clarke, Financial Times

This pioneering study reminds us that for nearly twenty years after the Second World War, Britain remained a nation in arms A. W. Purdue, The Times Higher Education

A fascinating cultural history Ian Thomson, Observer

A clear, comprehensive account of the national service years. Someone needed to do that while there were still former national servicemen to talk to, and future historians will be glad that Professor Vinen was there Francis Beckett, BBC History Magazine

An entertaining but sobering account of the postwar experience of millions of young Britons the great merit of Vinens intelligent and measured account is to restore national service as an element of British social history worth observing Richard Overy, New Statesman

Their story has never been better told than it is in this definitive and compelling history Richard Vinen dissects the postwar class-ridden army with a scalpel Roger Hutchinson, Scotsman

Richard Vinens book should banish for ever the well-meaning but delusory notion that if only they could reintroduce national service, social problems would be solved or at least greatly lessened Brian Bond, The Times Literary Supplement

[Vinen] has a good eye, and clear relish, for institutional absurdity John Sutherland, Evening Standard

It is written with cool, elegant lucidity and there are neither ideological tricks nor obscure jargon. The book is bigger than its ostensible subject, embracing class, masculinity, sexuality, compliance, rebellion, combat atrocities, petty crime, notions of national identity, group solidarity, the fallibility of memory and what it means to be a man Richard Davenport-Hines, Guardian

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First published by Allen Lane 2014
Published in Penguin Books 2015

Copyright Richard Vinen, 2014

Cover photographs Land of Lost Content/HIP/Topfoto; Imperial War Museum; Pat English/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Cover design: Richard Green

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-1-846-14388-5

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For my mother, Susan

Only bases that were especially important and/or those that feature frequently in the text of this book are shown

SECRET

DISPOSITION OF BRITISH TROOPS AS AT 31 MARCH 1951

ALL RANKS AND WOMEN INCLUDED (LARGER FIGURES ROUNDED)

A Personal Preface

The question of conscription would indeed be a tedious topic to pursue to which no doubt in years to come dull history professors will direct their duller research students