Britain lowers the call-up age

On 22 October 1942 the Minister of Labour and National Service, Ernest Bevin, announced in the House of Commons that the British armed forces would begin calling up men who had reached the age of 18. The same day King George VI signed a proclamation requiring everyone who had reached that age to register. Strictly speaking, this was not a lowering of the statutory call-up age but the full use of it. The National Service Acts under which conscripts had been registered since 1939 allowed 18-year-olds to be called up, but in practice the government had been summoning older men. The October decision brought the actual age of call-up down to the limit laid down in law.

From twenty to eighteen

The question was put by private notice by the Labour MP Arthur Greenwood, who after leaving the War Cabinet in February 1942 led the unofficial opposition in the House. Bevin replied briefly and recalled the whole course that British call-up policy had followed. The lower limit in the Acts had always been 18, but at the start of the war only 20-year-olds were called up. The age was then lowered to 19 and, in December 1941, with the Act that extended compulsory service to women, to 18 and a half. For ten months, the minister said, the services had recruited on a large scale without reaching down to younger men, but the government had now concluded that a further reduction “could not be postponed and was indeed urgently necessary”. All three services had asked for the men.

Bevin also set out a timetable. Young men who had turned 18 between 1 July and 30 September were to register on 7 November. Medical examinations were planned for the second half of November, and many of them could expect to be called up as early as December. The government promised to consider the usual concessions for apprentices and students. Finally, the minister made it clear that the change did not affect the minimum age at which Army soldiers were sent to serve overseas. That stood at 19 and was to remain unchanged.

An 18-year-old who entered the forces after the change followed the same path as older conscripts. He registered at the employment exchange and could state which service he wished to join, although the Navy and the RAF took men according to their own needs; after a medical examination he waited for his call-up papers. From July 1942 Army recruits went first to the newly formed General Service Corps. There they spent six weeks on basic training and tests, on the basis of which they were posted to the infantry, artillery, armoured units or technical services.

The manpower crisis

The decision stemmed from a problem that had weighed ever more heavily on Britain since 1941: it was running out of men. A country of fewer than 48 million people had to sustain at the same time an army, navy and air force fighting from the Atlantic to Burma, an armaments industry, agriculture and the mines. Winston Churchill’s government tried to solve the problem in various ways. In December 1941 it passed an Act extending conscription to men up to the age of 51 and to unmarried women aged 20–30. In March 1942 it extended the registration of women to further age groups, and from the beginning of the year young people aged 16–18 were also registered so that they could be directed to pre-service organisations and civil defence. In June the state took control of the coal industry, because the pits were short of labour and coal output was falling.

In the autumn of 1942 the War Cabinet had to balance growing demands. The Army was preparing for the landings in North Africa and the fighting in Egypt, the bomber force and the aircraft industry were expanding, and the Navy needed crews for new escort vessels. Each age group called up six months earlier yielded tens of thousands of recruits without taking experienced workers away from industry. Bevin, a former leader of the transport workers’ union, had from the outset made sure that conscription did not wreck production, and he preferred to take the youngest rather than strip the factories of skilled tradesmen.

The December Act

The announcement of 22 October still required changes in procedure. Until then the proclamation, registration and medical examination could take place only after a man’s eighteenth birthday, so in practice a young man entered the forces at 18 years and four or six months. The new National Service Bill, debated in the House of Commons on 8 December 1942, allowed all these steps to be taken at 17 years and 8 months, so that on his eighteenth birthday a conscript would be ready for enlistment. Bevin gave an assurance that the government did not intend to lower the call-up age below 18 and that the limit for service at the front overseas would remain at 19.

The minister also justified the change on military grounds. He recalled that in the previous war, when losses rose sharply, untrained boys had been rushed to the front. Now, he argued, it was better to call them up earlier and give them 11 or 12 months’ training at home, because modern mobile warfare demanded soldiers capable of acting on their own, and “the old infantry is dead”. The Bill also gave young men the right to register a conscientious objection, or to apply for postponement on grounds of family or occupational hardship, at the time of registration. Previously they could do so only once they were liable to be called up. Bevin argued that this benefited both sides: the conscript learned his fate sooner, and the ministry knew how many men of a given age group would actually enter the forces once the tribunals for conscientious objectors and the hardship committees had dealt with their cases. A further proclamation was, moreover, to cover in advance everyone who would reach call-up age in future, so that a new one need not be issued for each age group. The Act (the National Service Act 1942) was passed in December.

Place in the war

Lowering the call-up age was one of the last steps in a mobilisation that, in the view of many historians, made Britain the most fully mobilised society among the democracies at war. It did not end the manpower problems. In December 1943 Bevin, unable to find volunteers for the mines, began directing a proportion of conscripts aged 18 and over into coal mining by ballot; they later became known as the “Bevin Boys”. The age groups called up from the autumn of 1942 were trained at home and in many cases reached the front in 1944–1945, in Normandy, Italy and Burma, by which time they had turned 19.

Conscription in Britain did not disappear after the war. An Act of 1948 kept compulsory national service for 18-year-olds in peacetime, and the last conscripts were called up in 1960. The age limit of 18, adopted in the 1939 Act and fully applied in the autumn of 1942, remained the reference point of British call-up policy throughout that time.