In (Mostly Military) Confidence

Background

Having just passed out from the Britannia Royal Naval College (BRNC) soon after World War 1, my Dad (aka Nick) was sculling around awaiting a Posting Order as a Seaman Officer.?With little else to occupy his time, he attended a presentation from an Admiralty team which claimed that the age of sail had truly ended and, therefore, more Engineer Officers were needed.?On hearing vague promises about excellent promotion prospects, he opted for a change of discipline to become an engineer (aka a Plumber). ??A decision he came to regret.?

In the Royal Navy (RN) at least two features distinguished Engineer Officers from the Seaman Branch.?First, they were required to display purple coloured background between their gold braid rank insignia.?Second, they were denied command appointments (Royal Naval Air Station Arbroath being the only exception that comes to mind).?So, the dashing edge of the sword officers, such as Admiral Beatty, generally regarded Plumbers as second class citizens although Dad might have been comforted by this claim on an Internet discussion group:

“The purple, a more Royal sort of colour, was awarded by King George V to engineers ?because he could see they were of a more noble breeding that others.”?

I am no expert but suspect such a claim is pure fantasy bearing in mind that the bands were introduced in the reforms of 1863.?Anyway, long after Dad had retired, the RN abolished the stripes (May 1955), except for those who must be clearly recognisable as non-combatant under the Geneva Convention. ?These include medical and dental officers, and civilian officers required to wear uniform.?With Nick being promoted very early to Commander, the claim made by the Admiralty seemed to have been justified.?However, that proved to be his last promotion and the curious can only guess why.??Was it a personality clash with the Captain of HMS Cumberland while patrolling the South Atlantic in 1939??Although the reason for his career hitting the buffers will never be known, the timing of it can be guessed.

Back then, the foundation of the RN officer reporting system was a three-part, comprehensive, formal annual Confidential Report (CR) Form S206.?The victims neither saw, nor were intended to see, the contents of the S206 which housed sections on professional and general conduct and numerical markings out of ten for various officer-like qualities.??The only indication of career prospects appeared in a supplementary document known as a Flimsy which was a small slip of paper, torn out of a book of blank forms, for a Commanding Officer (CO) to give to his officers on leaving their appointments. ?It simply had a pre-printed statement of from and to dates and a pithy summary that generally went: ?“during which time he has performed his duties to my entire satisfaction”.??However, one of Nick’s later Flimsys omitted the word “entire” and, it may be surmised, it indicated there were no more rungs on his promotion ladder.

That RN system may have seemed brutal but officers were accorded the trump card of one (only one) interview with the Naval Secretary, when he would be told the unadorned truth.?Knowing the truth is so important in terms of planning one’s life; sound decisions can be made about the future.?Meanwhile the Army preferred to maintain a cloud of mystery, drip feeding hints suggesting that promotion would occur in due course which resulted in a cohort of POMs (Passed Over Majors) filling crucial slots in the ORBAT (Order of Battle).?So, conscientious POMs were critical to the functioning of the Army.

In his book – Finest Years, Max Hastings suggests that, during World War II, the reputation of RN stood much higher than that of the Army, so perhaps its reporting system achieved a better result.?In the latter’s case, the efficacy of its reporting system may have been hampered by the quality of the raw material:?“All too many senior officers were indeed men who had chosen a military career because they lacked sufficient talent and energy to succeed in civilian life” – Max Hastings.?As a naval reject, I can identify with is train of thought.

?Reporting Systems

School offered the initial introduction to the concept of reports overlaid with the attendant stress of a parental debrief that mirrored the later experience of being wheeled in front of the CO.?Some may suspect that Independent School reports glossed over major problem areas in a student’s performance for fear of losing the fees, should parents decide to move their child to another place of alleged learning.?So, reports tended to peppered with such clichés as:

???????????????????????????????“Michael could do better if he tried harder”

However, sometimes a Headmaster takes a more cavalier approach to a school’s financial viability, as was the case at my secondary school.?The Captain Superintendent, in effect the Headmaster, wrote a personal letter to my father in which he recommended that Nicholson should move immediately to Guildford Technical College – for my good or that of the school I wondered.?I was mortified.?My pleadings with Dad mercifully led to me staying on to continue an undistinguished academic career at the school, tastefully peppered with plenty of sport.?As it happens, within a few years the school ran into financial difficulties leading to the replacement of the title ‘Captain Superintendent’ ?with ‘Headmaster’ and replacing a Gunnery Officer with an academic.?

The latinisation of grades sometimes softened the blow but the elevation of the importance of ‘trying hard’ above ‘progress’ seemed a strange concept.?Thus, A+ for effort and B- for progress attracted plaudits whereas reversing the grades engendered much opprobrium.?Such a system prompts some questions:?How do the teachers know that a pupil is really trying hard??Further, why should it be particularly meritorious to try hard and get nowhere??Perhaps, such a reporting philosophy bred skilled actors rather than educated boys and girls.?With such thoughts in mind, schools might usefully give consideration to the military Reports & Return system that included a Nil Return category (ie, if there’s nothing to be said don’t say it).

Having successfully failed twice to enter the RN, I found myself in the Army[i] with my first port of call being the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS).?Although there may have been a reporting system, I have no memory of it.?Evidence of being on track for being commissioned seemed to have been confined to:?Not being kicked out; not being back-termed; and, in the last phase, being promoted from Senior Cadet to rank holding office such as Junior Under Officer (JUO).

RMAS held one mysterious trump card that often determined the fate of an Officer Cadet, namely an assessment described as Officer Quality (OQ).?There appeared to be no particular logic to the grading of OQ other than if ‘they’ liked you, it would be an A+ which smoothed a Cadet’s way to being commissioned automatically, despite, perhaps, leaving behind a trail of failed examinations or misdemeanours of varying degrees of seriousness.?In essence, if you were a ‘Good Chap’, being commissioned would be the outcome.?So, Tim Nice-But-Dim (with apologies to Harry Enfield) would be commissioned, whereas a lonely brain who had recently written an erudite thesis on splitting the atom would not since he lacked the necessary street-cred to be PLU (People Like Us).

Other measures offered succour to the Tim Nice-But-Dim cadet, particularly in the allegedly academic module of the course (ie, Terms Two to Five, leaving Terms One and Two for purely military pursuits).?It became clear that a significant cohort of cadets was beyond academic redemption and the system remained uncertain of how to amuse them.??The 1960s marked the burgeoning of the Army’s obsessive focus on equipping all officers with a Degree, while being at a loss as to how to handle a load of academic deadbeats.?To facilitate the eventual commissioning of these ne'er do wells, various measures to lower the academic bar were instituted.

The primary need was to unearth a subject that required minimal intellectual effort while defying any accurate assessment – as with OQ it needed to allow for much flexibility; thus, the Communication Skills module curriculum, came into being.?Cadets were generally unaware of the purpose of this particular study, remaining supine under the weight of circumlocutory reading material. To motivate us – yes I was in the cohort – the academic staff reminded us that President Kennedy could read at the speed of two thousand words a minute.?Did he remember what he had read we wondered.

Some oiling of the wheels of progress towards commission was left to the discretion of the professor or lecturer.?In my case, French made up another module which, with 55,000 Army personnel in Germany at that time, seemed to be a nugatory pursuit.?Be that as it may, none of us failed the sub-O Level French exam due to the fair wind offered by a lecturer who, for fear of losing his job, wanted to minimise the risk of a high failure rate in his class. ?So, this is how he introduced the dictation element:

“I will write the dictation on the blackboard with my right hand…..just in case an invigilator comes in, I shall then rub it out with my left hand.?So, please write quickly.”

By such means the class achieved a 100% pass rate. ??????

Superimposed on the vagaries of the RMAS assessment system rested the need to secure a vacancy in a regiment or corps.?There is little doubt that quality played a significant part in finding a cap-badge that would accept an Officer Cadet and fierce competition pertained for the recruitment of that quality product; even at that early stage some regiments had an eye on placing one of their own on the Army Board (AB) some thirty years down the road.?Sometimes nepotism could over-ride quality by virtue of a parental or familial link to a cap-badge.?For example, one regiment offered six vacancies for which there were sixteen applicants; one of the six was filled by an absolutely harmless Officer Cadet who had sat at the bottom of the order of merit in successive years.

Here again, a little nuance allowed for the ‘good bloke’ to slip under the wire into a respectable regiment, namely:?A quota system.?Each regiment needed, ideally, to fill the quota allocated to it while, within it, placing a limit on the number of Old Welbexians who could be accepted.?In my last Term, Bereft of a regiment that found me acceptable and having had my application to join the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) rejected by the formidable College Commander with this dismissal: ?“You are not driving effing trucks, boy.?You’re going to join the Gunners.”??My claim to be hopeless at mathematics was brushed aside with:?“Bugger maths”.?So, largely through fear, I accepted his offer with the passing vain thought that the Gunners ‘knew a good man when they saw one’.?A few months later the reality of my acceptance became clear – the Gunners had not filled its quota, indeed Nicholson was number thirty two out of a total of thirty six vacancies. ??The cap on the much better qualified Welbexians had allowed for my selection.??[Welbeck Defence Sixth Form College]

The system engineered the Royal Artillery (RA) Young Officers’ (YO) Course to last just under six months; by so doing the Army avoided the payment of Qualification Pay (aka Qually Lolly).?The YO Course’s reporting system is not recalled but it seems likely that the Regiment to which an officer was initially posted offered an indication of the regard in which he was held.?A posting to the Royal Horse Artillery (RHA) suggested that a YO had done rather well whereas one to a Locating Unit did not!?In between those extremes rested Field Artillery and Air Defence (AD).?For two reasons few wished to be posted to the latter.?First, the aged L40/70 Gun had long since ceased to be sexy[ii].?Second, a good working relationship with Mathematics was deemed necessary.?So, most sane YOs avoided displaying any mathematical skills and focused on being good blokes to have around.?

In the 1960s report grades were linked to the alphabet, namely, in descending order: A, B, C etc. The system then changed to the following grades:

Outstanding:??You are potential AB material Excellent:??You have a future - potentially. Very Good:??You work well under supervision but you are unlikely to command a Battalion or regiment. Good:?You are bad. Unsatisfactory:?You are worse than bad (for a Regular Officer compulsory retirement at 36 years of age is the likely outcome).????

Unlike a cavalry regiment or an infantry battalion, service in the Gunners generally involved a posting every two to three years; this meant that, combined with changes at the top, an officer could be reported on by two different COs during a tour of duty.?The need to forge a new relationship interrupted the flow of residual personal knowledge of an officer; this could be a good or a bad thing depending on the number of low level crimes an officer had committed and, worse still, been found out.?Further, in those days a YO rarely had a sighting of, or dealings with, the CO; this meant that if one screwed up the only meeting/event involving a CO in the reporting year it would dominate the CR.?So, two options existed for career preservation.?First, as far as possible, avoid any contact with the CO in the hope that he would give one the benefit of the doubt and make the assumption that the assessment, by default, would be: ?A good bloke.?The second choice lay out of reach to me since it necessitated perfervid dedication quite beyond my skill-set: ?With any contact with the CO make sure you get it right – first time.?????

As indicated, with a two year posting cycle it was sometimes the case that an officer would only serve for a few months under the CO who delivered his final CR.?With little chance of developing any in-depth of his subordinate, that CO would have been heavily reliant on the handover notes of his predecessor in order to construct the CR; for good or ill, prejudice influenced the report’s outcome.?In similar vein, at a lower level, the turbulence of postings allowed for reputations to precede the arrival of a new officer to a regiment, again for good or ill.?I recall staying in an Officers’ Mess and listening to an officer mouthing off in the bar that a soon to arrive officer from his regiment was an ‘absolute shit’.?In my book such a view did not represent the reality.?True or false, the new officer would be running with lead weights in his pockets trying to prove that he was an OK guy.

Only requiring a six month reporting period in the second year of a posting allowed those officers blessed with assumed brilliance, to garner an earlier recommendation for promotion than those who lacked that accolade.?In effect this offered a fast track system.

That regularity of inter-regimental postings allowed for the exploitation of the system.?In outline, the plan for career success involved, in year one, blaming one’s predecessor for any problems and devoting year two to ‘preparing for handover’.?For the new arrival, the embellishment within that was, in year one, to feed good ideas into the CO as CR influencers while ensuring that those bon mots did not cause him too much extra work. In the final year, grand, visionary recommendations could be fed into the CO, in the full knowledge that the extra workload would fall to his successor.?In truth I pay credit to my Battery Commander (BC) predecessor who had succeeded in getting most of his soldiers qualified in two to three trades which meant that not only were they on a higher pay scale but qualification training did not present a planning burden to me.

Such considerations about exploiting the system were not confined to the regimental coal-face.?One of the duties in a Staff Appointment that befell me was Secretary of the Standing Committee on Mobilisation (SCOM) – a body of Major Generals that wielded neither influence with nor interest from other departments.?Before receiving his final CR, the previous holder of the appointment, had minuted his boss - Chairman of SCOM - thus: “In view of the importance of the Committee I strongly recommend that it should meet bi-annually”.?Of course, the general’s reply reached me on my first day:?“Excellent idea, please action”.?Moving from one meeting a year to two engendered an increased unwelcome nugatory workload.

The machinations of the officer merry-go-round also impacted on the lives of soldiers.?I remember our departing Battery Commander (BC) making his farewell address in which he said inter alia: “It has taken me two years to knock you into shape”.?His successor, in introducing himself to the battery, said:?“I have watched you for two weeks and think it will take me two years to knock you into shape”.?Perhaps it’s a good job that soldiers are cynical or at least given to saying “I’ve heard that before”!

Such a focus on the reporting system of the officer corps may appear to be self-indulgent, after all there is a host of ‘non-officers’.?However, the relationship turbulence, and its effect on that system, has a trickle down impact.?Talking recently to a former RSM, he revealed that during his time in a Regiment as Unit Training Officer (UTO), he worked with four Adjutants, of which: two were excellent both technically and socially, one was good and one who had joined from an Air Defence Regiment was completely out of his depth.??There’s the rub – an officer unfamiliar with his new environment, is writing a CR on soldiers while understanding little of their technical skills or operational modus operandi. ???

It is inevitable that reports are influenced by personality factors, at its crudest “Do I like this guy”.?Sometimes, however, in the interests of furthering the cause of a particular cap-badge, reporting officers sometimes had to forego the personality factor and inflate a Grade.?So, for the good of a regimental cause, Excellent soon became the default option; reports had become inflationary.?In its wisdom the AB eventually realised that an Army packed full of allegedly high grade officers had merely resulted in an inverted pyramid of officers convinced that promotion lurked around their particular corner.?Such thinking led to the introduction of this potentially more foolproof system of dividing Excellent into three categories, to wit: ?High, Middle and Low.?Grade inflation soon returned! ?

The Army was, however, not stupid and before the introduction of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act there lay a concealed system to separate the wheat from the chaff; the Senior Reporting Officer (SRO) effected this separation.?Unless the grade of a report had been changed, usually down (!), the recipient had no right to see what the SRO had written.?This clever wheeze allowed for the deployment of words that might have had a terminal impact on an officer’s career.?In the case of one officer who had been recommended for promotion by his CO, the SRO had written:?“I agree but this officer would be on the bottom of any promotion list that I produce”.?This probably resulted in the luckless officer staying on in the erroneous belief that promotion would soon occur until, after the years passed, the window of opportunity closed and he retired as a POM.?So, not only are words important but so are half-truths that lead to incorrect decisions about planning one’s life.

Sitting in my office one day, the CO phoned and politely asked me to drop in to see him.??That particularly gentlemanly CO took a hands-off approach to command and in nearly a year he had never made such a call or, for that matter, ever held a conference; so, I knew ‘something was up’.?On arrival in his office, the CO said: “What have you done to upset Brigadier Twitcher?”?I replied that we had only met twice; once when, greeting him at the Officers’ Mess and handing him a pen to sign the Visitors’ Book and once, at a dinner party, when I had sat next to his wife (that was not the moment to reveal that I thought she had gorgeous tits). The CO then revealed that Twitcher had sent an Insert Slip for my CR stating that:?“I find this officer off-hand and casual”.

Under normal circumstances that Insert Slip from that Garrison Commander would have remained unseen without me ever knowing.?As luck would have it, the SRO disliked that particular Brigadier and probably resented his intrusion on the appropriate chain of command; hence his decision to warn me of the SRO’s comment, via the CO.?In consequence, the CO advised me to adopt a lower profile with Twitcher and that the Insert Slip had been expunged.??In retrospect, I had foolishly overlooked these wise words on the profile issue:

“The secret to success in the Army is total inactivity……..after all I should know”?- Major General (Later General) David Fraser at lunch in the field at G?rlitz, West Germany C1971

Anyway, this SRO intervention event was a close call that might have prevented me from even clawing my way to Passed Over Lieutenant Colonel (POLC).

Some officers’ careers are cursed by reporting officers who do not take the role of diligently assessing their subordinates and are given to offering shallow judgments, adorned with unhelpful one-liners.?History is replete with such examples as: “This officer is tall” or “I would hesitate to breed from this officer”. ?Their veracity may be questionable but there’s little doubt that such alleged wit permeated the system. ?In less humorous tone, twelve years after its construction, I saw my Staff College Report on which the Commandant had written:?“I find this officer dull and uninteresting”.?An astute judgment by the Commandant no doubt but he had absolutely no idea who I was since we had never spoken to each other during a year-long course.?He later rose to be the Chief of the General Staff (CGS) so, had I known at the time, I would have been aware that the future would be less than promising.??

Although a tick box matrix with all the ticks in the career blossoming boxes, it is the nuances of the written words than could make or break an officer’s career.?For example, consider two CRs offering the same Grade.?Officer A’s report includes such words as ‘Ably supported by his young energetic wife who contributes so much to the welfare of the soldiers’ whereas officer B’s CR omits any reference to his wife.?In such circumstances it was the former who gets command while the latter has no idea that the CO’s policy was to mention the role of the wife.?While the choice of words is of crucial importance, so is an understanding the true meaning of the grading system; I recall awarding a YO a grade of Very Good only to be staggered by his effusive gratitude – poor chap, he really thought that Very Good meant just that!?

?As with the forensic choice of words in a report, luck also plays an important role in the furtherance of a career.?In MOD Main Building our fastidious Brigadier proved to be totally out of his depth, largely because he accorded much of his time to agonising over such issues as split infinitives and errant commas.?Thus, to keep up with the workload, he found it necessary to load his briefcase with classified documents to be read on his commute and/or at home. ??One day, he leapt on a train leaving behind a briefcase, bulging with Secret documents, on the railway station platform.?Being a Garrison Town the briefcase was returned in short order, via the police, thereby closing the matter.?Whereas, a Wing Commander later found himself Court Martialled for having a MOD Laptop nicked from his car on a garage forecourt, while he had nipped in to the showroom for a few minutes.

Of course, some officers who are far enough up the food chain can actively change their fortune.?In this context, Colonel Dithery played a masterful role.?In pushing the work of his subordinates up the chain of command he separated the good brief from the bad.?In the latter case he would annotate the work with a pithy comment, such as:?“General , this is not a good brief but time is against us so I have decided to submit it to you as is”.??Such action had the dual benefit of absolving him from any blame while stuffing the career of a subordinate.??In the case of a good product however, he would delete the author’s signature block details and replace them with his own.?He secured promotion to Brigadier.

No system is perfect but its authors will defend it for fear of admitting that there are imperfections.?By the same token, an officer who appeals against a report is generally engaged in a pointless activity since it implies that some senior officer had ‘got it wrong’; an appellant is regarded as a nuisance and merely assaulting a system cherished by its senior beneficiaries. ??Since it is based on human inter-action I doubt if there is such an animal as a perfect reporting system – God forbid the introduction of an algorithm one.?However, a justifiable gripe is being denied the truth, since such camouflage impacts on an individual’s ability to plan his or her life.?Brutal as it may sometimes be, honesty about an individual’s prospects should be the mainstay of any system.?

Whether it is still the case I know not but the US Army reporting system seemed to get somewhere near the goal of honesty[iii].?As I understand it, the US point system generates a league table which an officer can access at will.?So, if the league table of Majors suggests that the top one hundred will be promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and Major Chuck is placed well below that, he can consider other career options. ??Had Chuck been above the line he had the bonus opportunity of applying to command a particular unit notwithstanding he may not necessarily have got the job.

As a YO, I paid little regard to CRs. They came and went and nobody had suggested that the Army no longer needed me.?So, having never achieved anything higher than Grade C, it proved to be a great surprise when I received a Posting Order to the, allegedly, elite Royal Horse Artillery (RHA); such a selection was deemed to be an honour.?In retrospect, it seems likely that the cohort of second tour officers functioned as cannon fodder to fill the ORBAT while the ‘real’ RHA officers moved on to such career enhancing appointments as an Aide de Camp (ADC) or a Grade III Staff Officer. ?In due course, those, tip-for-the-top real officers returned to the RHA, trumping the need for the cannon fodder to return. ?

The self-perpetuating aims of the RHA were brought home to me on receiving my first CR in the Regiment.?After I had read the report with concealed delight, the CO said:?“Mike, I hope you are not too disappointed with the B Grade but I like my officers to prove themselves.”?After a short pause, before I had time to express a view, he said: “But next year I will give you an A.”?His two remarks seemed to be in conflict!?For my part, ecstasy dominated my thinking, after all, hitherto, C had been my highest award and here the CO had not only given me a B but guaranteed an effortless A in the future.?Had I been blessed with a conscience, I should have given a passing thought to those officers in the Royal (Ordinary) Artillery slaving away to earn a C but I had developed a liking for assumed brilliance!??????

The third, and last, RHA CR interview brought home the importance of words, the need for a recipient to be aware of their lasting implications and to speak out if necessary.?Two contrasting comments in the next CO’s written words are worthy of note.?First, he described me as ‘lugubrious’ which, in my ignorance, I fancifully thought meant something like ‘large and cuddly’ so I let it pass without comment.?Second, more worryingly, he opened the second paragraph with “This officer is disloyal” which, bearing in mind that the ticks on the matrix were all in the best possible boxes, his comment seemed illogical.??Emboldened, I expressed the view that loyalty must surely be an important component of a decent report.?The CO agreed, saying “come back in an hour”.?On my return the report had been completely retyped with disloyal replaced with “This officer tends to be argumentative”.?This change pleased me since it inferred that at least I had some sort of personality.?As for the retyping, Snopake was not an allowable amendment tool otherwise many of us would have been busy secretly embellishing our CRs.?

Course reports offered another intrusion into the reporting process – sometimes welcomed sometimes not.?If they are good, in the true meaning of the word, their value should be optimised - something I unwisely failed to recognise in receiving my first external course report.??After completing a rigorous five day Helicopter Handling Course, flailing around with ping-pong bats at RAF Gütersloh, the BC called me in for a debrief.?“What did you think of the course?” says he.?I replied “A complete and utter waste of time” to which he responded “That’s a pity since you got an A Grading.”? I had foolishly squandered some potentially useful brownie points that might have helped offset the disastrous report from the Junior Division of the Staff College (JDSC) - a wheeze introduced in the late 1960s to lower the earnesty threshold, ignite ambition and remove young(ish) officers from the coal-face[iv].

The offending JDSC report contained this memorable one-liner from the Course Director:?“Under no circumstances should this officer ever hold a Grade III Staff Appointment”.?His words proved prophetic since my first staff appointment was at Grade II.?The publication of that damning report coincided with my arrival in 1RHA, offering the CO the opportunity to read out its contents to a highly embarrassed me.?As luck would have it, the CO took a very sanguine view of the inadequate performance and despatched me to a Regimental Signals Officers (RSO) Course with the advice to “do better this time”.?

Apart from a abject failure to understand the complexities of battery charging, the RSOs’ course proved to be a largely gentlemanly affair with many deployments in penny packets to remote parts of SW England and Wales.?Time in camp however, offered some brief moments of levity such as stumbling across the course Warrant Officer (WO) bonking the cleaning lady in the classroom one lunch-time.?Although coming to terms with battery charging presented a challenge so did the requirement to give a presentation on the Moving Coil Galvanometer; to this day, I have absolutely ?no idea of the purpose of, and need for, that piece of equipment.?

On returning to the Regiment, the face-to-face RSO course report de-brief with the CO took place.?The CO immediately relieved my tension by opening with:?“Congratulations, you got a B”.?His next remark negated the consequential relief of getting a decent report:?“However, every student got a B.”?None-the-less he seemed content.???

Conclusions?

Drawing worthwhile conclusions from the above random thoughts is a tricky exercise but the over-riding one might be the need for honesty.?The FOI has helped in the cause of honesty and it may be as far as can be gone within the military system.?After all, the apogee of honesty would be that an individual CR can be accessed by everyone else but such a suggestion is totally unrealistic. An outrageous middle course might be to offer the right to access the SROs innermost thoughts; Margot Asquith’s [v] ?1916 diary entry offers an example:

“H [Herbert Asquith Prime Minister] says he feels he is dealing with children.?The intelligence is of a low level….Bonar Law has brains that would fill a wine glass! (he did not know where the Dardanelles were) but he is very nice and plays bridge well.?Lansdowne is old and has no temperament.?Walter Long is an angel, as loyal as possible and adoring Henry…..Curzon is loathed by the whole lot.?Poor Curzon (whose suggestion that we should fight Greece to make it our ally has covered him with ridicule) left too soon and is in consequence biter but he has great charm – I see him often and laugh with him.?He hates Arthur Balfour and Lord Kitchener.?Austin [Chamberlain, Secretary of State for India] and Bonar Law are jealous of each other and Selbourne is a 1st class bounder.?Lord Bob Cecil is delightful and a really clever man….Kitchener is a hero in the country but hell in the War Office as he is a muddler.”[vi]

It can be seen that Margot offers an across the board assessment allowing everyone the chance to know the truth (assuming the contents of the diary are made available!).?To me, her assessment of Kitchener is far too kind; Machiavellian might be the most succinct description of him.?However, it raises the need for loyalty and highlights the need for some social graces such as playing Bridge.

Building on the need for honesty, it might be observed that for those serving in the military it assumes greater importance than other walks of life; after all, it would be a fruitless exercise to pop down to the Job Centre and ask if there are any spare regiments that need a commander.?Although, on the whole, Service leavers seem to move seamlessly into the civilian market, there remains a transferrable skills issue – a Wilco attitude is not always enough.?So, to allow for the garnering of transferrable skills or qualifications, if an officer knows the unwelcome truth that he/she is unlikely to be a member of the AB, the earlier a decision is made to leave the better.

It seems an oddity that an elite cohort can exist within a wider alleged elite organisation.?Be that as it may, elites inevitably harbour a blind faith in their particular system and so naturally inclined to perpetuate the status quo.

The recipient of any report must understand the importance of words in the context of the bespoke language of the system.?He/she must have the courage to raise concerns about words that can damage their future.?On the other side of the coin, the author of a report should choose words with care.?Guidance is, no doubt, on offer but in the final analysis a fair system requires that author to dedicate considerable time and effort to the task – a Post-it Note approach is not appropriate.?

In a modern age in which a high proportion of Army officers are not looking for a career in the military, the issue of transferable skills comes to the fore.?In that context, Harold Macmillan held out some hope, even for senior officers:?“[British administrative generals] At the end of their careers, they are just fit to be secretaries of golf clubs.” - Max Hastings???????

If the depicted US system is largely accurate, then it has a lot going for it.

[i]The RN wanted A Levels – a step too far for me and for the school!

[ii] That said, Field Artillery also had old WW2 equipment such as the 25 Pounder and the elegant 5.5in. But the promise of the forthcoming introduction of the Self Propelled Abbot offered a more appealing prospect (a false dawn if ever there was one!)

[iii] As described to the author by a US Army Liaison Officer, at HQ United Kingdom Land Forces?C1983

[iv] At a drinks party, the Quartermaster General – a Four Star General – revealed that when he first joined his Regiment his CO said to him: “Go away Patrick, be with your soldiers and learn your trade; in return I will guarantee you get the right reports to recommend you for Staff College.”?Clearly, back then being at the coal-face assumed greater importance than how to write a Memorandum under thirty years of age.

[v] Wife of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith

[vi] Margot at War, Page 283 Anne de Courcy, Weidenfield & Nicolson