by Rusty Firmin
The idea of the ‘Junior Leaders’ scheme in the army in the 1960s up to the 1990s was to take 15- and 16-year-olds and prepare them over a two-year period to be future NCOs and warrant officers in the adult, regular army. A lot of bollocks is spouted these days about how the British Army recruits ‘child soldiers’, as if we were going to be sent out to fight as kids, but it wasn’t really like that. In fact, although the training programme did include all the usual elements of basic training – drill, weapons, physical training (PT), fieldcraft, and so on – quite a lot of it was also about leadership and education. This meant that we would be going on various ‘adventurous training’ courses and expeditions to get us used to the idea of leading and working in small teams; but we would also be doing our ‘Army Certificate of Education’, which meant that by the time we finished there we would have the necessary academic qualifications for eventual promotion to senior NCO and warrant officer rank, and even commissioning further down the line. Of course, being the army, it was going to start with the nasty bit: basic training.
We seemed to arrive in Nuneaton in no time at all and as I got off the train, I could see quite a few other lads milling aimlessly around the platform, clutching their suitcases nervously. There were also several men in sharply pressed khaki flannel shirts and green denim trousers, wearing dark blue berets and highly polished black ankle boots with wool puttees. They were on the lookout for what they called ‘Nigs’.
‘Nig’, we soon learned, stood for ‘New Intake Gunner’. Yeah, right. You can work out what it derived from and I suppose the best thing to say is that attitudes were different back then. Suffice to say that we were all white but, for the next three months, they were going to treat us like absolute shit.
We were rounded up on the station platform and our names were checked off against a list; then we were loaded onto an old army charabanc and driven to Bramcote Barracks, a late Victorian pile in the heart of the Warwickshire countryside which housed the JLRRA. I don’t know how anyone else felt but my heart was in freefall.
At the barracks the first thing that happened was that we were taken to the block which housed the NAAFI and cookhouse and sat down in front of a pile of forms which we were instructed to fill out. While we were working through the paperwork, we were pulled out in small groups and taken to a side room where, lying in wait, was the fucking barber. By the time I got there, the floor of the barbershop was nearly ankle deep in hair. When my turn came, he gave me a particularly evil grin as he pushed me back into his chair and wrapped his grubby towel round my neck. There was no question of ‘How would Sir like it?’ Instead, it was the clippers with the ‘Number 1’ head on and schunk, schunk, schunk straight down to the wood. It took less than two minutes and he didn’t even offer me something for the weekend.
As I got out of the seat, shell-shocked, hearing the barber shout ‘Next!’, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I looked like a convict.
Immediately after the haircut I was taken into another side room where an ID photograph was taken of me, holding a little board with my new army number on it under my chin. Then it was back to completing the documentation. I already hated everything about the place.
Once all the admin, documentation, haircuts and photos had been sorted out we were organised into groups and taken on a whistlestop tour of the camp by the instructors, then led to the blocks which would be our accommodation for the next three months. There were about 60 lads in my intake and we were organised into two squads. Squad 1 got the downstairs accommodation – two mirror-image 15-man rooms together with washrooms and toilets – and Squad 2, which I was in, got exactly the same thing upstairs.
The accommodation wasn’t luxurious. I got a steel-framed bed, a bedside locker and a wardrobe, and that was it. With bed-spaces allocated, we were then marched off to the quartermaster’s store for kit issue, receiving a bewildering collection of clothing, combat kit, boots, belts, braces, hats and PT gear, all of which had to be crammed into a kit-bag so we could get it back to the accommodation.
Once we had been issued our kit, we were assembled as a squad back in one of the rooms where we were to meet our instructors properly for the first time. This was when the troop sergeant laid down the law:
‘From here on in, you’re fucking Nigs and you do exactly what we tell you: got that?’
There were a few mumbled responses.
‘I said, have you fucking got that?’ he growled angrily. A few more of us Nigs spoke up.
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘First, you don’t call me Sir: that’s for officers. I work for a living. You call me “Sergeant” when you speak to me, understand?’
‘Yes, Sergeant,’ we responded.
‘These gentlemen,’ he indicated the other uniformed instructors, ‘you’ll call “Bombardier” or “Staff”, understand?’
He continued on, explaining how every time we fucked up, got something wrong or committed any of an infinite number of crimes we’d be punished; how we would be responsible for keeping our kit and our bed-spaces immaculately clean and tidy at all times; and how we would collectively keep all other parts of the block neat and ship-shape. After this introduction, the section bombardiers took over.
For the first couple of days, we learned how to sort out our kit. Our bedding had to be made up every morning into a bed-block, with blankets, sheets and pillowcases precisely folded and ironed into shape and our pillows neatly stacked at the head of the bed. All uniform that we weren’t wearing had to be clean and ironed and hung up in our wardrobes or laid out in our bedside lockers according to a precise pattern. All of our boots and shoes needed to be cleaned and polished to a high standard, not forgetting the soles. Our washing and shaving kit had to be as clean as if we’d never used it. This last wasn’t so difficult for me. At 15 I’d never had to shave and wouldn’t do for a while yet.
It was all very ‘monkey see, monkey do’. As far as the instructors were concerned, once they’d shown us what to do, it was up to us to get on and do it. If you didn’t understand something, you could ask them to show you again and they would, but if you then fucked up, you were punished.
Reveille every morning was at 6am followed by breakfast at 7am. After that, we were on our own time until a barrack room inspection at 8.30am but woe betide anyone who didn’t fill every second of that with cleaning, pressing and ironing their kit; sweeping and dusting their bed-space; or getting on with collective block jobs like cleaning the bogs and windows, and bumpering the floor. The inspection was an opportunity for the NCOs to hit us with their ‘Little Hitler’ act. Every wrinkle in our bed-blocks was an abomination and every speck of dust in our lockers was a potential plague epidemic.
After the inspection, we had training. For the first three months, the focus was on the basics: fitness, drill and weapons; but any other time was filled out with map reading, first aid, education and any other bullshit they could think up, like shining parades, changing parades and so on. Lights out was at 10pm. The only communication we had with home was the occasional letter. My parents didn’t have their own telephone anyway.
It didn’t surprise me but I absolutely hated it. For the first few weeks I cried myself to sleep every night – from what I could hear in my room, I wasn’t the only one – and I started praying as well, something I’d learned from a short spell at Sunday School when I’d been living with my grandparents in Carlisle.
For me the worst thing about it was that it was completely unrelenting. Everything we did – drill, fitness, cleanliness – was marked and recorded, both as individuals and as a squad, as we worked towards our passing-out parade which would take place in December when we finished the basic training package. We had to compete against each other to be ‘best junior leader’, and the squads competed against each other to be ‘top squad’; and of course, the instructors wanted recognition too, so they pushed us as hard as they could.
After about three weeks, I decided I couldn’t take any more; but when I asked abou
t how to leave, I found I had to buy my way out and that would cost me £50. It was a lot of money in those days and far more than I could afford but if I’d had it, I’d have been out of the door in seconds flat.
The funny thing was that I was doing OK. After spending most of my life getting into trouble, I discovered that if I did what I was told then everything was more or less OK. Inevitably, I screwed things up from time to time. Block inspections were what I hated most. The bombardier would come to my bed-space:
‘What’s this, Firmin?’
‘My bed-block, Bombardier.’
‘No, this, wanker,’ he would say, pointing towards some miniscule wrinkle.
‘A crease, Bombardier.’
‘Open the fucking window, Firmin,’ and, with that, he would hurl the whole lot out from the first floor to the lawn outside. Inevitably everyone downstairs would see the result of this performance as I scurried down to pick it all up and remake the bed-block, but I was rarely, if ever, the only one.
We all had to have a pair of ‘best boots’ that we wore for drill and which we were preparing for the final passing-out parade at the end of basic, and these were inspected the whole time. The idea was that these were polished to a mirror shine by slowly building up layer after layer of Kiwi black shoe polish which we would carefully shine using our fingers wrapped in a wet yellow cotton duster. If they were done properly, you could literally see your face reflected in them but it took weeks of hard work to get them up to the standard and if they weren’t good enough, our instructors would rub the soles of their own boots across them and we would have to start over again.
It was at times like this I came close to taking a swing at some of the directing staff (known as DS, a term for instructors). I was still pretty small but I was aggressive and my despair meant I didn’t really give a fuck about anything. However hard we worked, they just seemed to pile on more pressure and there seemed to be no way out of it. They wouldn’t even let us leave the barracks on our own until we had completed our three months’ basic training.
As time went on, some of the lads began to get pulled out of training for being ‘incompatible with army life’. I didn’t know what this meant but it seemed like a possible escape route for me and I began to try to work out how to pull a fast one and get them to kick me out without having to pay up the 50 quid; but it wasn’t obvious what I needed to do.
The weird thing for me was that apart from the odd minor mishap like dust in my locker and boots not being up to scratch, I hadn’t managed to get into serious trouble. Still, I did my best.
One lunchtime I was in the cookhouse queuing for scoff when a couple of ‘mustering gunners’ turned up and pushed straight into the queue in front of me. Mustering gunners were boys of 17 or so who were in their last term as junior leaders and were preparing to be mustered into the regular army, and at Bramcote they were allowed to wear an empty bayonet frog on their belt to indicate this. It was a tradition there that mustering gunners got to eat ahead of the Nigs and I wouldn’t have complained normally but I was tired, cold and wet after a long session on the drill square and one of the fuckers trod on my best boots, duly scuffing them up.
‘Watch what you’re fucking doing!’ I complained.
He looked at me contemptuously.
‘Fuck off, Nig.’ Then he gave me a sharp push backwards.
I was pissed off enough to lose it then and there, took a swing, connected with his face and decked him. There was a momentary silence before his mates began to pile in on me but fortunately enough the orderly sergeant saw what appeared to be a gang of senior trainees beating up a raw recruit and stepped in to stop it.
My mates from my intake were horrified at what I’d done but once the orderly sergeant had worked out what had happened, it was the mustering gunner who copped a bollocking to go with his black eye. Even so, I was reported and summoned to see my own training sergeant. Here we go, I thought, this is where it all turns nasty, I’m going to get charged and fined for this.
In fact I couldn’t have been more wrong. Once I was in his office, the training sergeant actually congratulated me for sticking up for myself, but told me to be careful about choosing who I hit. That was a bit of a turn-up for the books. Even better, he told me that he was making me in charge of block for the next week, meaning that I got to allocate the block jobs, like cleaning the toilets and washrooms. This was my chance to get the ‘shit sniffers’ and ‘DS Watchers’* to do some of the dirty jobs for a change and the whole episode made me a minor hero amongst the other Nigs.
*DS Watcher = someone who spends their time trying to attract the attention of the ‘directing staff’ (instructors) in the hope of gaining brownie points.
Even so, it still didn’t change my determination to get myself out of the army as soon as I could. It was now November 1965 and we were due to pass out of basic training in the second week of December, after a parade to which all of our families were invited. I’d written to Dad and knew he was coming to watch the parade, and I decided to ask him whether he would lend me the money to buy myself out. I don’t remember how much we were paid back then – it certainly wasn’t much – but as boy soldiers who weren’t out of basic, we only got a fraction of it anyway. We were basically given pocket money to spend on things like snacks and drinks from the NAAFI, boot polish and other cleaning materials, but the rest of it was withheld by the pay office, who would transfer the whole lot into a Post Office savings account at the end of the first term before we went home on leave. This meant I would have about 30 quid to take home for Christmas – a reasonable amount of money back then – and I hoped Dad would lend me the extra I needed.
In the meantime, in addition to the competitions for the best recruit and best squad, I discovered that there was going to be an inter-squad boxing competition and a football tournament. Now this was interesting and I was keen to be involved. In the days leading up to the passing-out, as we polished and pressed our kit to a peak of perfection, I worked hard to ensure that I got myself into our squad team. To be fair, there wasn’t a lot of competition.
The passing-out parade was to take place on a Saturday morning but on the Thursday before we had our final pay parade of the term. Pay parades are a thing of the past now that everyone’s wages get paid directly in to their bank accounts but back then it was a formal process. We lined up outside the troop commander’s office with our paybooks, and then we would be called in individually, come to attention, and salute. The officer would count out our money from a cashbox, whilst the pay bloke entered the details into our books; then we would count our money, check it against the entry in the paybook, declare ‘Pay and paybook correct, SAH!’, salute, and march out again.
On this occasion, I heard my name called, marched smartly in, came to attention, slipped on the polished floor, slid under the table and banged my head on the floor. Seeing stars, I tried to get up but I was so groggy I collapsed again and, when I finally got my pay, the sergeant had to help me out. I was pretty embarrassed but everyone else got a laugh.
On the big day itself I was up early to do my kit, keen that there wouldn’t be any hitches and I decided that I would give myself another 20 minutes’ polishing time by missing breakfast. Strictly speaking this was a no-no. Breakfast, we were always being told, was a parade not a meal because we couldn’t hope to cope with a hard morning’s training without some food inside us and we weren’t allowed to miss it. I reckoned I’d be OK.
We started the preparation for the parade with an inspection by our troop officer outside the block. It was an icy December day and we were soon all feeling the cold. The initial inspection took about 20 minutes, with the officer and NCOs checking us from top to bottom but, for once, everything was perfect and we were marched out onto the square to form up and wait for the commanding officer. We’d been there for about 15 minutes when I suddenly started feeling light headed. This was the lack of breakfast kicking in. I tried to stay upright but, all of a sudden, I found myself sprawled
in a heap on the ground: I’d fainted.
I was helped back to block to rest and was soon feeling better, but I had to go to the MRS* to be checked over and couldn’t rejoin the parade. I didn’t get in any trouble but I was mortified that I’d missed the parade and was desperately anxious that I wouldn’t be able to play in the football match in the afternoon.
*MRS = medical reporting station – the sick bay.
When the parade finished the rest of the lads came back to the block and the piss-taking started. I had a thick enough skin by now that I didn’t mind and soon afterwards we were able to bomb-burst out and find our families. As an ex-soldier my dad had enjoyed the parade and we had hugs all round and after this, it was my chance to show him round the camp.
Dad had never seen me play football, he just wasn’t interested, but I showed him where the football pitch was and we agreed to meet there so he could see the match. Then the families went off to have a sandwich lunch with the DS whilst we got ready.
When the match was underway, an odd thing happened. I was playing as a forward and I had a premonition that the ball was going to come to me and I was going to score with a bicycle kick. Sure enough, a couple of minutes later that is exactly what happened: very strange.
With the match over I went for a chat with Dad and broached the subject of buying myself out. He said that he would see what he could do when he got back to Carlisle and I genuinely thought he was going to go along with it. I was pleased as punch. We said our goodbyes and he set off back for the long drive to Carlisle in his car.
Feeling chuffed to bits, I went back to the block for a bath and a clean-up, followed by a debrief from the troop instructors. I’d passed out of basic training – literally in my case – and while, in theory, I still had 20 months of Junior Leaders left to go, I was confident that I would soon be out of it. Even so, I still had to carry on going through the motions. I’d asked to be sent to 44 Battery for the rest of my training and the next few days before Christmas leave were to be spent moving my kit over to their lines and getting settled in.