National Service Life Stories Masculinity, Class, and the Memory of Conscription in Britain

National service was a defining feature for a generation of young men in post-war Britain. Around 2.3 million of them were called up between the end of World War Two and 1963, when conscription ended. However, national service was forgotten almost before it had ended, a process aided subsequently by professional historians who have been reluctant to assess its longer-term influence on British social and political history. Based on original oral interviews with well over one hundred men, this book explores the ways in which compulsory military participation reverberated in the memories of interviewees long beyond the end of conscription, and how these early military experiences shaped their later life stores. Unlike existing accounts that tend to rely on memoirs written by officers, or else oral interviews that concentrate narrowly on the details of military service, this study focusses instead on men from working-class backgrounds and it situates national service in the context of the life course and the wider transformations that have occurred in British society since conscription ended. In so doing, the work shines new light on important areas of current scholarly interest and historiographical concern, including the changing meaning and experience of class, masculinity, and citizenship, as well as the complexities of popular memory.

Peter Gurney is Professor of British Social History at the University of Essex, where he has taught since 1999. Matthew Grant has taught history at the University of Essex since 2013, having previously worked at the Universities of Sheffield, Manchester, and Teesside. Joel Morley specialises in the social and cultural history of war in twentieth-century Britain, and oral history. He was awarded a PhD in History at Queen Mary University of London, and has since taught at QMUL and the University of Birmingham, and held post-doctoral research positions at the University of Essex and the University of Bristol.