A Sort of Book Review

Background

As a minimal consumer of books, it is easy for me to remember those that I have enjoyed and this is one of them: The Captain – The Life and Times of Simon Raven – Michael Barber. This Review first saw the light of day at least a decade ago and it is to be hoped that it stands the test of time. The claim ‘Review’ may be a false one.

Introduction

The process of re-reading The Captain - The Life and Times of Simon Raven has prompted some thoughts. It is a book that merits multiple re-readings if only to understand the references to Greek mythology. Unless otherwise stated the quotations offered below are from the book.

There was a temptation to call this piece ‘BAOR in the 1950s – Deterring the Warsaw Pact’ but there is much additional detail about his service in Kenya, including Operation DANTE in which his Commanding Officer (CO) was killed in an ambush set by his own battalion. By an accident of birth, my generation only caught the tail-end of the privileged lifestyle of serving in Germany, even so I can readily identify with Raven’s claims about ‘the perks of the job’. For example, young officers returning broke from downtown Dortmund in a taxi – the Linienstraße to be precise – proffered to the driver, in lieu of payment, a Churchman’s No 1 cigarette on each click of the meter. Even in the 1960s coffee and cigarettes found favour with the locals; nylons may also have been in short supply but young officers did not always have ready access to marketable versions of those.

Background Perspective of the Army 

In terms of the concept of the successful peacetime route to the top in the military via the concept of decision avoidance, some will feel quite at home with this thought:

"One of the lessons that Simon had learnt as a National Service officer was that in the Army, 'it is more important that nothing should go wrong than that anything should go very right'".

Societal changes in post war Britain did not only impact on the military, as Raven’s thought on the academe shows:

“Change was in the air even before Simon withdrew. Whereas he pursued knowledge for its  own sake, the new men who began to arrive in 1950 saw it as a means to an end.”.

Frederic Raphael’s described that new breed identified by Raven thus:,

“They belonged to a generation that laid its ladders against the ramparts of the Establishment and swarmed up brandishing degree certificates.” - My Generation

Here however, Michael Howard strayed into a view of an earlier army, threatened by the upcoming newbies:

“Soldiering – that pleasant, clubbable occupation compounded equally of regimental duties, minor imperial skirmishes and field sports.” - Three People.

Some military folk of a certain generation might feel that such thoughts on those changes have equal application to an army that enacted such measures as: The introduction of the Military Salary, the lowering of the ‘earnesty’ threshold with the introduction of the Junior Division of the Staff College (JDSC), the obsession for recruiting Graduates and breaking the link with local recruitment areas with the abandonment of the County Regiment system. These, and doubtless other factors, have coalesced to bring an untimely (?) end to the Army being ‘a way of life' or 'calling’. Some personal experiences might help to illustrate these elemental changes to life in the military.

In the early 1990s two rather elderly Lieutenant Colonels were ambling down a Staff College corridor for afternoon tea when one turned to the other and said: “This is what I joined the Army for – tea in the Mess. I never really relished training and all that stuff”. I suspect Raven would not only have identified with such a thought but also have been delighted that such thinking still prevailed in the 1990s.

In contrast, but contemporaneously, to the agreed thoughts of a brace of POLCs (Passed Over Lieutenant Colonels), a rather startling (depressing?) incident took place in the Staff College Officers’ Mess. At a Christmas drinks session, a gaggle of elderly booze-laden middle ranking officers leaning on the bar was approached by a group of fresh-faced Sandhurst Officer Cadets who posed the following question: 

“What Staff appointment do you recommend we go for?” 

Such a question to a generation that regarded the prospect of being a Staff Officer as hugely distasteful was something of a show stopper. The elders having been reared on the myths of Oh What A Lovely War regarded Red Tabs as a badge of dishonour; indeed the prevailing modus operandi of modern junior officers or even ambitious Officer Cadets was anathema to the bar leaning elders whose youthful policy was to avoid contact with senior officers at all costs. In the elders’ youthful days, the CO was a remote figure, meaning that a single unsatisfactory meeting with him might form the basis of an officer’s Confidential Report; the stakes were high and contact avoidance made career survival sense.

A penultimate personal experience relates to a short chat with the Quartermaster General (QMG) – even in maturity, I retained a preference for short, rather than long, conversations with senior officers. The background to this brief exchange related to the inequality of opportunity to study for the Staff College Examination; as between cap-badges there was great disparity of time off to study. The Gunners were not generous in this regard, except in the case of the golden few blessed with assumed brilliance who needed to be afforded a fair wind to achieve future greatness. 

The high failure of the Gunners in the Staff College Examination at that time suggested that there was some merit in my case. Further, it had been observed that the QMG’s Regiment had an impressive pass rate for the Staff Examination. So, fired up with belief in a cause, and topped up with alcohol, in the Henry The VII Cellar in the MOD Main Building, I posed the following question: 

“General how is it that your Regiment is so successful in getting officers into the Staff  College?”. 

Of course, remembering words spoken C1975 makes it impossible to offer a verbatim version but, in essence, he said this:

“At my initial interview on joining the Regiment, the CO said ‘James go way and be with your soldiers for the next 10 years and learn your trade, after which I will recommend you for Staff College. I will give time off to study when the time comes and all I ask in return is that you pass the Examination”.

To bring this whingeing mode to a conclusion, allow me to recall an incident when, again armed with alcoholic courage, I had the temerity to ask a visiting Brigadier about the inequality of opportunity in studying for the Staff College Examination. He dealt tersely with the issue thus:

“Well, it was good enough for me in my day, so it should be good enough for you now.”

My thought on his response was: Is that how progress is made?

 Chosen Extracts.

Some extracts from The Captain: are offered:

“I loved the Army as an institution and loathed every single thing it required me to do.

“…….. though a better word than institution would have been club. Just as some MPs, who never make a single speech in their entire careers, regard the House of Commons as an admirable club, so I regarded the Army as an admirable club. But when it came to spending the night in a slit trench or going to the lavatory in a ditch, this had less appeal. And therein lies the dichotomy.”

Simon’s distaste for roughing it may have been unusual, but 40 years ago there were still plenty of other officers in circulation who regarded the Army as a comfortable refuge from the modern progressive industrial society, sitting on the cusp of the politically correct new age. Luckily for Simon, the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry (KSLI) apparently had its fair share of them. Not that this was immediately visible, for no sooner had he reported to Copthorne Barracks than he was despatched to the exacting two months Platoon Commanders’ course he had missed earlier in his army service.

Given the way he had spent the previous five years it was right and proper, said Simon that he should be “smartened up” by attending the Platoon Commanders’ Course . The trouble was that the School of Infantry did not confine itself to practical instruction; it also went in for the sort of “quasi-moral indoctrination” that he found repugnant. Too much was at stake for Simon to complain about this at the time; but as we shall see he cut loose five years later in Perish by the Sword, “a polemic that could still call forth an indignant seven-page rebuttal from the Commandant of Sandhurst 30 years after it first appeared”.

He addresses the potential threat of the brainy to the hitherto agreeable way of life:

“The news of his [Raven’s] recruitment disquieted the Regulars, a majority, for whom brains came a poor third behind breeding and character in respect of officers. As the then Adjutant, JD ‘Oscar’ Whitamore, explained, ‘The KSLI was an old-fashioned county regiment, very keen on sport and with strong landowning connexions. I remember thinking when I heard there was a University entrant coming to join the Mess, ‘Oh God, I hope he’s not one of those wet intellectual types”’.

He defined the KSLI as an upper middle class regiment:

“…with the exception of ‘one or two hard-faced ex-rankers left over from the war, who didn’t care for me’, the KSLI Mess was every bit as congenial as he had hoped. Although a fairly ordinary upper-middle class regiment – ‘not a bit smart by Brigade [Guards] or cavalry standards ‘ – it just happened to have, both among its national service officers and its regulars, ‘a lot of rather eccentric, intelligent, sceptical, ‘gambly’ sort of people. It was one of the last regiments to remain firmly bachelor, too, which was a great relief, because there’s no fun to be had in the Army if everybody’s married and the Mess is deserted after four o’clock.”

[NB. Although married, Raven avoided most, if not all, the norms of married life. He saw the move to BAOR as an opportunity to improve his standard of living via the additional payments of: Local Overseas Allowance (LOA) and Marriage Allowance. In the latter case, he trousered the money rather than passing it on to his wife who had been left in the UK; this led to an exchange of telegrams:

Wife: “Wife and baby starving send money soonest”. Raven: “Sorry no money suggest eat baby.”]

Conclusion

No doubt Raven articulated views that many will find either unacceptable or distasteful but The Captain is a good read.