I had an interesting conversation with my dad a few years ago, on the subject of his National Service. He did most of his service in (I think) Dortmund then Woolwich, where he served as the company clerk of Chestnut Troop, A Battery of the Royal Horse Artillery. He has joked that, if he'd been involved in any ceremonial procession in which the RHA was marching with its guns, the order of precedence would have meant that (as the first clerk in Chestnut Troop, itself the first battery of the RHA), he would have been marching very close to the head of the British Army (only the Household Cavalry march ahead of the RHA, but only when the RHA are without their guns).
At the end of his service, he spent a few months undergoing civil defence training, which was mainly about rescuing people from collapsed buildings in the wake of the inevitable Soviet nuclear strike on the UK. The public information and training films from the same period (the early 1950s) treated a nuclear attack as something survivable, which with hindsight seems rather optimistic, but I suppose that you're unlikely to get civil defence troops to do much if you give them an accurate estimate of their likelihood of survival, and that of those that they're trying to help.
I'll bring Threads in today, if you want to borrow it.
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Date: 2008-12-11 08:23 am (UTC)I had an interesting conversation with my dad a few years ago, on the subject of his National Service. He did most of his service in (I think) Dortmund then Woolwich, where he served as the company clerk of Chestnut Troop, A Battery of the Royal Horse Artillery. He has joked that, if he'd been involved in any ceremonial procession in which the RHA was marching with its guns, the order of precedence would have meant that (as the first clerk in Chestnut Troop, itself the first battery of the RHA), he would have been marching very close to the head of the British Army (only the Household Cavalry march ahead of the RHA, but only when the RHA are without their guns).
At the end of his service, he spent a few months undergoing civil defence training, which was mainly about rescuing people from collapsed buildings in the wake of the inevitable Soviet nuclear strike on the UK. The public information and training films from the same period (the early 1950s) treated a nuclear attack as something survivable, which with hindsight seems rather optimistic, but I suppose that you're unlikely to get civil defence troops to do much if you give them an accurate estimate of their likelihood of survival, and that of those that they're trying to help.
I'll bring Threads in today, if you want to borrow it.