Demob unhappy

After all the carousing and flag-waving that followed VE day in 1945, millions of young men fortunate enough not to be still fighting the Japanese faced a problem. Having spent five or six years in uniform, they needed jobs. For those who lacked explicit civilian skills, which meant most, it was hard to persuade employers that a talent for flying a Spitfire, commanding a gun battery or navigating a destroyer qualified a man to run a factory or even sell socks.

For years after the shooting stopped, newspapers bulged with small ads placed by demobilised officers. Many such entries exuded unconscious pathos. That quirkily brilliant writer Richard Usborne had the notion of investigating the responses received by such men, who had risked much and borne life-and-death responsibilities. He recorded the outcome in the Strand magazine, then edited by my father.

Usborne wrote to 71 ex-officers who offered their services to employers in what was then called the ‘agony column’ of the Times. He heard back from 33, of which the following are typical examples. An ex–submarine captain, aged 27, admitted in his ad that he had ‘no specific qualification’, but said he was ‘accustomed to responsibility, hard work, loyalty and exercising initiative’.

He was offered one job in a West Country hotel and another selling insurance, together with a third which proposed ‘something peculiar, which I suspect was a bit illegal’. He told Usborne that, as a former lieutenant-commander who had been earning £600 a year in the Royal Navy, his name had now been on an appointments register for six months without result. He concluded with some bitterness: ‘I venture to prophesy that the ex-officers of this war, highly trained, war-seasoned, intelligent people, will think very hard before serving their country again, except under compulsion.