Modern recruitment: conscription, women and the professional army

From Volunteer to Conscript

When Britain went to war in August 1914, the regular army numbered roughly a quarter of a million men. Lord Kitchener, the new Secretary of State for War, judged that this was nowhere near enough for an industrial European war. His ‘Your Country Needs YOU’ recruiting poster, the Pals Battalions raised by mayors in northern industrial towns, and a wave of patriotic enthusiasm produced what became known as Kitchener’s New Armies. By the end of 1915 over two million men had volunteered. The official Victorian and Edwardian preference for a small, professional, all-volunteer army still held.

The Somme in 1916 changed the calculation. Casualties on the Western Front outpaced volunteer recruitment and the government’s political room for manoeuvre narrowed. The Military Service Act of January 1916 imposed conscription on single men aged 18 to 41; in May it was extended to married men. For the first time in British history a peacetime population was being compelled by statute to serve in a foreign war.

1939: Conscription Before the Bombs

In 1939 the government did not wait for casualties. The Military Training Act of May 1939 introduced peacetime conscription for single men aged 20 and 21, and the National Service (Armed Forces) Act of 3 September 1939 — the day Britain declared war — extended it to all men aged 18 to 41. By 1942 the upper age limit had risen to 51 and conscription had been extended to single women aged 20–30 through the National Service (No. 2) Act of December 1941, the first time British women had been conscripted into the armed forces.

Women in Uniform

Women had served in support roles in the First World War through the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) and the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF), but in volunteer and largely clerical capacities. The Second World War transformed both the scale and the range of women’s service. Three uniformed services emerged: the ATS for the army, the WAAF for the RAF, and the WRNS (Wrens) for the Royal Navy. Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen, served as an ATS driver and mechanic in 1945. ATS gunners worked alongside Royal Artillery crews on heavy anti-aircraft batteries; WAAFs operated the radar screens that vectored Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. Combat itself remained closed to women, but the line between ‘support’ and ‘front line’ was much harder to draw than in 1914.

Conscientious Objectors

Both wars allowed men to claim exemption from military service on grounds of conscience. Conscientious objectors, often labelled ‘conchies’, appeared before local tribunals which could grant absolute exemption, conditional exemption (often working on the land or in hospitals), non-combatant service in uniform, or refusal — in which case the man was handed to the army and, if he refused to obey orders, court-martialled and imprisoned. Around 16,000 men sought CO status in 1916–18; about 6,000 went to prison, and 35 were initially sentenced to death (the sentences were commuted). In the Second World War tribunals were generally more sympathetic and roughly 60,000 were registered as objectors. Many served bravely as stretcher-bearers in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit or as bomb-disposal volunteers.

Public attitudes hardened in 1914–18 around the white-feather campaign, in which women handed feathers to civilian-clothed men in the street to shame them into enlisting. By 1939 a more nuanced view prevailed: opposition to conscription on moral grounds was tolerated more readily, partly because the moral case for fighting Nazi Germany was widely accepted and an objector was less easily dismissed as a coward.

Peace, Cold War and National Service

After 1945 Britain did not return to a small volunteer army. The Cold War, the Korean War, decolonisation campaigns from Malaya to Kenya and the demands of empire required manpower the volunteer system could not produce. National Service ran from 1948 under the National Service Act 1948. Men aged 17 to 21 served eighteen months — raised to two years from 1950 because of Korea — before passing into the reserve. Around two and a half million men did National Service before it was phased out: the last conscript joined in 1960 and the last left the regulars in 1963.

The All-Volunteer Professional Army

Since 1963 Britain has had an all-volunteer professional army. Recruiters target school leavers and skilled workers, training is longer and far more technical, and pay and conditions are competitive with civilian employment. Women were admitted to all combat roles in 2018, including the infantry and the Royal Marines. The modern soldier is a paid technical specialist, not a Kitchener volunteer or a 1950s conscript.