Do we have anyone here who was in the Royal Observer Corps? There's a tremendously sad recruiting film out there on Youtube somewhere - which I was directed to by
@taras - which plays heavily on the fact that there are tremendous social opportunities to be had by joining the ROC - the subtext there is perhaps not one that might have recruits flocking to join. So that's one element of sadness, in the more modern sense, but there is also an odd coda, given that the thing sets out as a recruitment film, which states that the Corps was stood down in 1991, and a truly bizarre cod-heroic allusion to the stalwart members remaining ready to answer the call in the nation's hour of need, as though they were Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table slumbering under a hill somewhere.
Please note, it's the editing decisions taken around that film which I find questionable. I don't mean to mock the actual Corps members, who signed up for an unsung but brave role. In fact, I have so many questions about the job they were meant to do if it did all kick off: how long were they supposed to stay at the monitoring stations? What were they supposed to do afterwards? etc. etc. I have spoken to a former Vulcan rigger, who told me his plan would have been to remain at his post with a cigarette on once the bombers had departed. He wouldn't have made it very far in the four minutes or so it was reckoned they would have had left, so what would have been the point of working up a sweat? I suspect that, in contrast to the many poor sods who didn't have a fast ride out of RAF Finningley, for many Observers, the end would have come with a whimper, not a bang, and still the reality would have been very different from official guidance. I am curious to know what that guidance said. I recall that in the War Game, the narrator reads out, dead-pan over scenes of chaos, the planned menus that field kitchens were supposed to rustle up for the survivors: substantial meals of meat and veg with pudding and custard for dessert. That tension between what the authors must have known and what they wrote down fascinates me unduly.