British Army and its Corps ?

Delancey

Just reading a really good book about the History of National Service in Britain.
One thing I notice is the proliferation of different Corps in the BA of the 50's and 60's - Pay Corps , Education Corps, Dental Corps , Veterinary Corps, Pioneer Corps......the list is almost endless.

What became of these Corps ? Does for example the Pay Corps still exist ?
Have their roles been ' outsourced ' or is there some MoD organisation that does it all now ?

golden lane

Delancey wrote: »

Just reading a really good book about the History of National Service in Britain.
One thing I notice is the proliferation of different Corps in the BA of the 50's and 60's - Pay Corps , Education Corps, Dental Corps , Veterinary Corps, Pioneer Corps......the list is almost endless.

What became of these Corps ? Does for example the Pay Corps still exist ?
Have their roles been ' outsourced ' or is there some MoD organisation that does it all now ?

all are now in the logistics corps.....i believe..

bwatson

golden lane wrote: »

all are now in the logistics corps.....i believe..

All apart from the Pioneer Corps mentioned by delancey, which does come under the RLC are now parts of the Adjutant General's Corps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjutant_General%27s_Corps

tac foley

RLC = Royal Logistics Corps, or as we prefer to call it - the Really Large Corps.

tac

Delancey

Thanks for replies lads , that explains it - can't have been a terribly effiecient way of operating with all those Corps I would imagine .

tac foley

Delancey wrote: »

Thanks for replies lads , that explains it - can't have been a terribly effiecient way of operating with all those Corps I would imagine .

It worked just fine when you had a 1/2 million personnel in your Army. AND a constant turnover of 18-20 year old compulsory recruits every six weeks or so.

How would you have done it?

tac

Delancey

Fair point that the manpower was certainly there to allow it. This book actually tells a lot of the sitting around and doing nothing that many ( but not all ) National Servicemen endured.

OS119

Delancey wrote: »

Fair point that the manpower was certainly there to allow it. This book actually tells a lot of the sitting around and doing nothing that many ( but not all ) National Servicemen endured.

theres more to it than simply having loads of people sitting around playing with themselves - you've got a confluence of lots of relatively unskilled work at a low level that people who are only in the job for two years can do/learn, an expectation that National Service would, to some degree, 'give the men a trade', and the fact that may of the jobs that are now done by MOD civil servants or private contractors were then done 'in-house' by the services themselves.

tac foley

Let's not forget that there were always wars to go to, wars to tidy up after, or wars to get ready for..

Apart from the Occupied Germany task - British Army of the Rhine [BAOR] there was also the Malayan Emergency, followed by the Korean War, the Mau-Mau uprising, Cyprus, Aden, and The Suez Crisis - all taking place in the 1950's....some of it lasted a lot longer, as well. Cyprus had the Sovereign Bases and airfields, Germany alone had almost 200,000 troops and Air Force personnel and the Yemeni affair lasted a lot longer than anybody had thought with a communist insurgency that took well into the 1970s to deal with. Borneo and Belize were also problem areas. Remember also that in that time period the UK had one of the largest naval presences on the planet, and that there were literally dozens of training locations scattered far and wide all over the UK.

tac

Delancey

Interestingly the Navy took only a tiny number of men on National Service - vast majority went to the Army.
The descriptions of conditions and the fighting in Korea are scary and to think these guys were being paid little more than ' pocket money ' earning far less that regulars. In Korea , Australian conscripts were earning almost 4 times what their British counterparts were on.