Other news stories

Military home page

The school was created after a series of decisions by the chiefs of staff following the implementation of the National Service Act of 1947 and subsequent amendments. The conscription of all young men over the age of 18 gave the armed services access to those with a talent for learning languages who would not, in normal peace-time conditions, have been available.

In some respects the school was a continuation of the war-time provisions made in 1942-5 for recruiting young men between their secondary school examinations and their call-up for military service. The Board of Education selected suitable schoolboys who were then awarded scholarships to attend special courses. The first batch, which was housed in Dulwich College, went to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) to learn Japanese; the second to the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) to learn Russian and other Slavonic languages. The armed forces also used the University of Cambridge teachers of Russian, and Bletchley Park, wanting shorter courses than SOAS would provide, ran its own school for Japanese in Bedford.

The Inter-Services Languages Committee was created to supervise these arrangements and to coordinate the specifications made by the different services for their intelligence requirements. Basil Reay, an Arabist in the RAF who had worked in Egypt before 1939, took over the chairmanship of the committee at the end of the war and secured a continuation of the Russian courses in Cambridge between 1945 and 1951; the committee itself recommended that it should be brought under the control of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

The Cambridge facilities seemed an asset worth retaining under the direction of Lisa Hill. She had gained a reputation for training English speakers to have a good Russian accent, and she concentrated on the techniques required to bring men up to the level of university degree work. Her family had fled from Russia at the time of the Revolution. There were sometimes difficulties in securing the services of other emigrés as teachers because of the security clearance required. Servicemen, who had the advantage of daily oral classes with native speakers in small groups, often found two kinds of instructors in Russian and two accents, the older  pre-revolutionary generation and those who had lived under the Soviet regime.

A working party on Russian linguists and a parallel committee on the training of translators and interpreters were appointed in 1950. A major consequence of their deliberations was the setting up of the JSSL.

The arrangements agreed were that each of the three services should be technically responsible for one part of the school, but that there should be a single director and a common code of discipline for all the servicemen in the different parts. The Sussex Square building in London, which had been used in1945 for the extended provision by SOAS of Japanese and Chinese teaching, then thought necessary to continue the war in the Far East after peace had been restored to Europe, was used as a mess for all the officers involved. Some of the tutors such as Lisa Hill were honorary members. That part of the school under the management of the Army was in Bodmin where the Education Corps had been established; the part managed by the Navy was in Coulsdon Camp near Caterham, the Guards training base. SSEES which provided most of the instruction in Russian in London hired a house in Russell Square for servicemen only. The part of the JSSL managed by the RAF in Salisbury Villas, Station Road, Cambridge was virtually a continuation of the war-time courses which had allowed servicemen to sit for university examinations.

The main purposes of the courses were to train men for interception and interpretation. Each service brought JSSL trainees at some stage into contact with its own intelligence section for  specific orientations, such as radio-listening techniques. The immediate needs of the three services were determined by the Korean War which had broken out in 1950. This required men trained in Russian and then in Chinese. The principal theatres of war calling for a wider range of language skills were those in British colonies with internal disorder, such as Malaya, Cyprus and Kenya. One of the recommendations of FM Templer's inquiry into the security of the colonies in April 1955 was to emphasise the importance of officers from all three services stationed in the colonies being fluent in local languages.

Men at JSSL were examined every week, had regular progress tests, and could be "returned to unit" if they failed repeatedly. The courses began with  intensive work to come up to 0 level standard in about eight weeks, and to A level in 4-6 months. Students  considered suitable after a progress test for the more advanced courses leading to interpretation work were sent to either SSEES or Cambridge, each of which developed its own teaching style. The courses consisted of sessions for the spoken word and for  grammar, with dictation, reading and vocabulary learning every evening. A few regulars attended, but the great majority were National Service. The Navy and the RAF tended to offer acting-rank commissions to those on the advanced courses once they had passed the examination for interpreters supervised by the Civil Service Commission after a year, with rank confirmed after they had passed a further five-month course of military language training. The Navy allowed only those worthy of a commission to enter the advanced courses. In 1954 the Coulsdon school was amalgamated with Bodmin, and then in 1956 all went from Bodmin to Crail in Fife. The JSSL trained those not proceeding beyond the linguists exam as well as the advanced students who returned after a year in Cambridge or London for further work before the interpretership exam. Some students, largely the regulars, went on to live with Russian families in Britain or in the Russian quarter of Paris for "continuation and orientation". The Services Language Training Committee, which acknowledged that service life did not attract many regulars with a natural liking for languages, kept the system under constant review.

The pressures on young men working very hard under close supervision induced a high degree of camaraderie. A journal called Samovar recorded a wide range of activities, such as folk dancing, singing, orchestras, and the production by Dmitri Makaroff of the plays of Shakespeare in Russian. A number of JSSL graduates still continue to meet in their own private societies. 

The three services did not work together through the JSSL for all purposes. Like the Foreign Office or GCHQ, they sometimes made their own provisions. The Foreign Office ran the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS) at Shemlan in the Lebanon for training in Arabic, open to candidates outside its own personnel, including some managers from the private sector. GCHQ in Cheltenham which succeeded Bletchley Park had very specialist needs and used its own tutors. The Royal Navy undertook its own languages inquiry in 1952-4. The RAF, which had a school in Kidbrooke and sent officers to learn Chinese in SOAS and the University of Hong Kong, made provisions for language teaching in Wythall, Pucklechurch, Tangmere and North Luffenham. The Army, which had its own Arabic school in Aden, set up its own officer language committee in 1956 to explore what incentives might be introduced to raise levels of attainment in language skills. These parallel initiatives led to negotiations with the Treasury for a new scheme of service language allowances. The break-up of the JSSL in 1960 was part of the reduction of the armed forces after the decision to suspend National Service conscription in 1957. This meant a reversion to each one of the armed forces making its own arrangements or agreeing a special arrangement with another. The committee of permanent secretaries dealing with the budget for the intelligence services had expressed disquiet about the high cost of training an officer in a given language. The Army concentrated its facilities on the school of education in Beaconsfield run by the Army Education Corps from Eltham. The Navy joined with the RAF for a number of courses. The next major joint services initiative was the school for Chinese in Hong Kong which was planned in 1965 and opened in 1967.

The effect of the JSSL was to create a body of linguists who could be called upon when needed. A number of different lists were prepared; officers on the reserve were called in for regular refresher courses, often a fortnight in length. The most public aspect of this resource was the sudden increase in the number of secondary schools teaching Russian after the launching of Sputnik in 1957. Headmasters in boys' schools found that they had on their staff men who had taken courses in Russian while on National Service. Colleges of further education also had men with the same background. The Annan Committee appointed by the Ministry of Education to consider improving the teaching of Russian distributed a questionnaire and published the numbers of Russian teachers from different backgrounds. The Hayter Committee appointed by the University Grants Committee made similar discoveries in universities. The JSSL left a permanent mark on a wide range of institutions. A fair estimate of the number who passed through during the nine years of its existence would be between 5,000 and 7,000, a major contribution to the nation's assets.

Michael Lee is emeritus professor of politics at the University of Bristol.