The Russian language front

During the war against Hitler, secret services recruited on the old boy net: there was no other way of being sure that recruits were not duds, and even on the old boy net bad mistakes could be made – Philby and Maclean were only the most notable examples. All that was supposed to vanish with Ernest Bevin’s arrival at the Foreign Office and the Attlee government’s clearing away of old boy values for ever.

Not a bit of it. Here is a vivacious account of how in the 1950s, under Eden and Lloyd at the Foreign Office, some 5,000 young men doing national service were quietly siphoned off from their units, secluded in Cornwall and Fifeshire, or, more boldly, next door to the Guards depot at Coulsdon in Surrey, and put through crash courses in Russian till they could speak it fluently. The luckiest of them were up at Cambridge or London universities, but again kept a sort of purdah. The kursanty, as they called themselves – those who were on the Russian course, officially known as the Joint Services School of Linguists (JSSL) – formed a caste apart, exactly as Etonians and Wykehamists had done in the 1920s and 1930s. Either they had been there together and therefore joined in the intense peer pressure to do well; or they had common instructors, and had picked up common turns of phrase, common ways of holding a cigarette, common anecdotes, a common outlook on life.

Of those of them who were promoted into the really secret parts of the state, Elliott and Shukman can of course say nothing; though we are told that the JSSL trained at least one unnamed head of GCHQ, as well as a bishop, numerous professors and a governor of the Bank of England.