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Stand By Your Beds!
A Wry Look at National Service
Dr David Findlay Clark
O.B.E., M.A., Ph.D., C.Psychol., F.B.P.s.S.
Foreword by Trevor Royle, Historian and Author
ISBN 0954441699 pbk £12.99 £9.00
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About the Book
As the young conscripts of National Service retire, sit back, and think back, the extraordinary events of two years of their late teens or early twenties, never to be repeated, take on a new life of their own. Tales are shared with friends who found themselves similarly called-up, away from mundane or engaging lives, and forced into situations they would not have envisaged a few years earlier.
David Findlay Clark served his National Service in the RAF. He describes with wry humour and sometimes with a degree of quiet drama, some of the boring, stressful, whimsical, ludicrous and exciting events that were packed into two eventful years. The subtle changes from resentment to enthusiasm in some who served their time, and the reverse process in others, are pointed up by the recounting of episodes in dramatic detail. David also outlines the setting and nature of National Service between the years of 1948 and 1963 and comments on some of its effects on the two million young men who, reluctantly or otherwise, went through it.
National Service is part of our social history which has been dealt with at a fictional level by Arnold Wesker, David Lodge and Leslie Thomas, but prior to the first edition of this book in 2001, relatively little had been written of a factual nature other than Trevor Royle’s The Best Years of their Lives. Subsequently there have been two or three other volumes on related topics, the best of which is Tom Hickman's The Call-Up which, like Trevor Royle's own book, deals with all the services. Nevertheless, this new edition of Stand by your Beds! with added Postscript will continue to echo for many National Servicemen their own experience and convey to their children and grandchildren something of the flavour, activities and attitudes that filled those two compulsorily ‘stolen’ years of their lives.
Foreword
For an episode which lasted eighteen years and involved over two million young men, National Service has been strangely neglected by the historians. In most accounts of the post-war period, it attracts little more than a brief mention and although there is a reasonable amount of literature from the period, most notably in novels by Leslie Thomas and David Lodge, there is an acute shortage of lively memoirs. Now David Clark has done his bit to remedy that omission by writing his own account of his National Service days in the Royal Air Force in the early 1950s.
Flattered though I was by being asked to read it in manuscript, my one regret is that I did not meet Dr Clark some dozen years ago while I was researching my history of post-war conscription. It would certainly have added to my understanding for it seems to me that he has produced an account which every former National Serviceman will recognise instantly. In so doing, he has added to our knowledge of that period – the aim of every good historical writer.
As conscription came to an end in 1963, several generations have grown up without knowing what it was like to wear uniform and to have the honour of serving one’s sovereign and country. As a result, the armed forces have become smaller and there is a gap between civilian and military life which would have been unthinkable only a few decades ago. Even the sight of men and women in uniform is rare. At a time when the Services are more conscious of security, Dr Clark’s description of travelling home in Service dress seems to come from another, and perhaps more idealistic, age. Few National Servicemen felt that their lives had not been changed by two years’ service in the armed forces. Some believed that it was a waste of time, but, as the author argues with some force, those who got most out of the experience were those who were prepared to make something of it. As a result they emerged as different people, boys who had become men, more disciplined and more likely to accept responsibility. And then there was the sense of togetherness.
During basic training - the period which no National Serviceman will ever forget - the barrack-room was the nation in microcosm where boys from every type of background, social and educational, found that they had to sink or swim. The vast majority swam, often with a little help from friends whom they might never have met but for the intensity of their shared experience.
Where in today’s world is that university of life ? They are growing older now, those men who spent what many still insist were the best (or at least the most unforgettable) years of their lives in uniform. Their story deserves to be told in all its richness and variety : by deciding to commit his own memories to print, David Clark has done just that.
Trevor Royle, historian and author.
Biography
Retired from working as a consultant clinical psychologist in private practice, Dr Clark is a son of the manse who was brought up in Banff and educated at Banff Academy and Aberdeen University. He is still a Clinical Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mental Health there though no longer active in teaching.
After a period of National Service in the RAF (from AC2 to Flying Officer) which became the source of much of the material in this book, he worked first as an industrial psychologist at Leicester Industrial Rehabilitation Unit of the then Ministry of Labour before becoming a clinical psychologist in the NHS.
He has taught and researched at the Universities of Leicester and Aberdeen in the course of his work within a number of hospitals in the NHS, eventually retiring from the NHS in 1990 as Director of the Grampian Health Board's Area Clinical Psychology Services. For his work in that context he was awarded an OBE in 1989 and, having been active in one or another form of public service for most of his life, became Deputy Lieutenant of Banffshire in 1992.
He has been a Consultant for the WHO in Sri Lanka and has also been invited to lecture on his research in India, Canada and the USA. He is the author of a textbook, Help, Hospitals and the Handicapped as well as a contributor of chapters in several other major texts and over thirty professional research papers in learned and technical journals.
Latterly he has taken to less academic forms of journalism by writing magazine articles and another book, One Boy's War. He writes now as an additional activity to his pervasive hobby interests in photography, painting and drawing, music and golf.
He lives with his wife, Janet, in Banff, and has two married daughters and four grandchildren.