Secret Classrooms: An Untold Story of the Cold War

by Shukman Elliott, Harold Shukman

Lambasted by the Soviets as a "spy school", the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) was a major Cold War initiative, which pushed 5000 young National Servicemen through intensive training as Russian translators and interpreters, primarily to meet the needs of Britain's signals intelligence operations. Over its nine-year life it operated from military camps in Surrey, Cornwall and Scotland, and special enclaves created at Cambridge and London Universities. It had parade grounds rather than sports fields and pupils included a remarkable cross-section of talented young men who came to JSSL as National Servicemen and went on to a diversity of glittering professors of Russian, Chinese, ancient philosophy, economics, history; authors such as Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter and Michael Frayn; screenwriter Jack Rosenthal; and churchmen ranging from a bishop to a Discalced  Carmelite friar. The two authors, both of whom emerged from JSSL as interpreters, have drawn on many personal recollections and interviews with fellow students, as well as once highly classified documents in the Public Record office.

Genres: Russia

286 pages, Paperback

First published February 17, 2011

Reviews

[Andi C Buchanan · Rating 3 out of 5]

As someone with a personal interest in the JSSL (a relative was a kursanty in the programme, but declines to speak of his experience in any detail) this was an interesting and enlightening book.

For those with a more casual interest, I wouldn't be inclined to recommend it. While well-researched, it suffers from an excess of detail, some clumsy and hyperbolic metaphors ("the ‘new’ hard-line Communist Party of Great Britain, which arose like a foot-and-mouth diseased Phoenix from the ashes of the discredited old organisation in 1991") and the occasional offensive comparison. It wasn't a bad book, but one that I don't think could catch the general interest in the way the subject has the potential to do.