Why I looked crummy serving the Queen

Joining the RAF for two years’ National Service (1955 – 1957) meant I would wear a uniform, a word with several implications. Obedience is one, something I’d never shone at during the previous nineteen years. Another is invariance, a further intellectual discouragement since variety is surely the spice of life. 

Would I disappear into the human sludge that is the ideal basis for a military force? Or would my untamed tongue get me into trouble?

These matters were to some extent put on hold. At a height of 6 ft 1½ in. I was taller than the physical norms of the average recruit and would have to wait months to be properly dressed. In the interim I wore the shabby sports jacket and even shabbier trousers (standard journo turn-out) I had arrived in. Made marginally more sartorially acceptable when hidden by a khaki boiler-suit.

The new kit took some time to arrive. And six weeks’ square-bashing (Initial training. US: boot camp) wreaked havoc on my “civvies”. But there was one advantage: I was left out of any marching for formal occasions. Think badly stuffed scarecrow.

What happened next was heavily ironic. Against my expectations and my formal education the RAF decided I would train to be a wireless (ie, radio) technician in a course lasting eight months, mostly sitting at a desk wrestling with Kirchoff’s Laws and the calculus associated with the hysteresis curve. By now I was uniformed, but not appropriately. The rest of the class wore Working Blue whereas I wore Best Blue, my Working Blue had still to arrive.

RAF Working Blue. More compact

battledress format, despite its name,

was more fitted for sedentary work

Here’s the irony: Working Blue has a battledresss format jacket ending with a tightly belted midriff. By contrast the Best Blue jacket is much longer reaching halfway down the bum. Battledress or not, Working Blue is much more resistant to crumpling for those doing deskwork. The speed with which my Best Blue started to wear out was horrifying, given that I would have had to pay for a replacement.

RAF Best Blue. Flounced 

bottom half of jacket tended

to get crumpled and worn
when wearer worked at a desk

Happily, Best Blue lasted out the course and I was posted to Far East Air Force there to wear lightweight shirt and shorts. National Service done, I hung Best Blue on my bedroom door back home in Bradford and the moths finished off the abrasivon resulting from desk work at the technical training camp.

CODA: My Working Blue finally arrived but it distorted my appearance: seemed as if my belly started at my sternum and stretched halfway down my thighs. Being a techie helped just a bit.