BOOK REVIEW Inside a secret Chinese classroom Mandarin Blue by Reginald Hunt et al
Reviewed by Michael Rank
The 1950s in Britain was a decade of post-war reconstruction, growing
prosperity and conscription, when some 2.5 million young men had to do their
"national service" in the name of queen and country.
For most it meant endless square-bashing and a fairly mindless submission to
authority, but for a lucky few it involved discipline of the mind rather than
the body. For over 5,000 conscripts this meant learning Russian, and their
little known story was vividly told in Secret Classrooms by Geoffrey
Elliott and Harold Shukman (2002). A much smaller number, under 300, spent
their national service studying Chinese, and this is the topic of this
fascinating study by three men who were drafted into the Royal Air Force (RAF)
in the 1950s.
The decision to teach a select group of servicemen Russian or Chinese was
closely linked to the Cold War, for clearly it was necessary to know the
enemy's language if we were to have any idea of what Moscow and Peking
(Beijing) were thinking and planning. Not that most of the recruits gave grand
strategy a great deal of thought.
They were told little about the purpose of learning Chinese (or Russian) and
were not encouraged, or even permitted, to ask questions. The task of the
Chinese linguists was to perform voice intercept work in Hong Kong, and that is
just about all they knew.
"Occasionally one or two mysterious words or acronyms might escape the lips of
their instructors and superior officers: some learned they would (or would
later be) engaged in SIGINT [signals intelligence] work and a very few heard
mention of a shadowy organization known as GCHQ [Government Communications
Headquarters], which, they were told, might even be able to make use of their
services after they returned to civilian life."
But the secrecy has to some extent been lifted since, and the book opens with
some valuable research, based on declassified material in the Public Records
Office, into how the RAF's Chinese intelligence-gathering fitted into the
larger intelligence picture.
The authors conclude that it was "at the behest and for the eventual benefit of
GCHQ that service linguists performed their tasks"; transcripts of all
intercepts were initially sent for analysis to GCHQ's Australian and American
counterparts and these were forwarded to GCHQ in Cheltenham, although military
radio transmissions were just one component of the corpus of intelligence data
available.
The first batch of airmen selected to learn Chinese were in 1951 sent to the
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, but from 1955 the RAF
took direct responsibility for language teaching. Training centers moved around
the country and included Wythall near Birmingham, Pucklechurch near Bristol and
Tangmere in West Sussex, but all came under the Joint Services School for
Linguists, which also had responsibility for teaching Russian.
The Chinese courses were under the direction of Squadron Leader John "Squaddy"
Wright and Flight Lieutenant Joe Cant, who were popular, well-respected
figures. Wright is remembered for having "made every effort to protect his
charges from the attentions of over-zealous officers or NCOs [non-commissioned
officers] from outside the program. While being reasonably tolerant of youthful
exuberance, when he was pushed too far [students on] various courses reported
that he could deliver an appropriate bawling out ..."
An idiosyncrasy of the course was that the Romanization used was the now
obsolete Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GR), which uses an ingenious if complex system of
"tonal spelling" rather than accents or numerals to indicate the four tones of
Mandarin Chinese. This makes the tone part of the syllable, as it were, rather
than an added-on feature, but the system is time-consuming to learn and even
some of the Chinese instructors had difficulties getting to grips with it.
But the powers that be were so committed to GR that two American military
textbooks were transcribed into GR specifically for the RAF course. The
recruits would have little need to know Chinese characters, so the course was
aimed mainly at learning the spoken language, although some students attended
extra classes to learn characters voluntarily. The book contains some
fascinating appendixes, including a sample exam paper in which students had to
translate sentences like "Although tanks of the 50th division encountered heavy
enemy field gun and anti-tank gun fire their casualties were not heavy."
Once they got to Hong Kong, the servicemen spent much of their time
transcribing four-figure blocks of numbers, the form and function of which they
knew nothing, but were presumably based on the Standard Telegraphic Code used
to represent Chinese characters.
Accuracy was clearly paramount but none of the recruits is known to have been
reprimanded for making an error in transcription, "So not having the slightest
idea of what was going on above their heads, the unaware and uninformed
linguists could happily carry out their duties with a clear conscience."
This exotic episode in British military history came to an end with the
abolition of conscription in 1960. Some of the RAF linguists became eminent
sinologists, including David McMullen who became professor of Chinese at
Cambridge and David Pollard, former professor at SOAS, but they all served in a
little known theater of the Cold War which would be in danger of being
forgotten if it were not for this highly readable book.
Sadly, one of the authors, Geoffrey Russell, who produced more of the text than
the other two, died just as the book was being prepared for publication. I have
just one criticism: I don't understand why the authors chose a 19th century
scene of Hong Kong for the cover when this is such a quintessentially 20th
century story.
Mandarin Blue, RAF Chinese Linguists in the Cold War, 1951-1962, by
Reginald Hunt, Geoffrey Russell and Keith Scott, Hurusco Books, ISBN
978-0956023506
Michael Rank is a former Reuters correspondent in China, now working in
London.
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