National Service Life Stories: Masculinity, Class, and the Memory of Conscription in Britain

National service was a defining feature for a generation of young men in post-war Britain. Around 2.3 million of them were called up between the end of World War Two and 1963, when conscription ended. However, national service was forgotten almost before it had ended, a process aided subsequently by professional historians who have been reluctant to assess its longer-term influence on British social and political history.

Based on original oral interviews with well over one hundred men, this...