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Joint Services School for Linguists
The Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) was founded in 1949 by the British armed services to provide language training, principally in Russian, and largely to selected conscripts undergoing National Service.
The school was established at RAF Kidbrooke in southeast London in 1949. The founding of the school was prompted by the need to provide greater numbers of interpreters, intelligence and signals intelligence officers due to the Cold War, and, later, the Korean War.
Additional sites, at Walker Lines, Bodmin, Cornwall, and at Coulsdon Common Camp in Coulsdon, near Croydon, opened in 1951 and 1952 respectively.
The Kidbrooke site closed in 1953, Coulsdon closed in 1954, and Bodmin closed in 1956. The school was then based at a single site at RNAS Crail in Scotland from easter 1956. It then moved, in 1960, to RAF Tangmere near Chichester in Sussex, where Mandarin, Polish and Czech in addition to Russian were taught.
The school was superseded by the work of the language wings at Wilton Park in Beaconsfield in the mid-1960s. The wings later combined to form the Defence School of Languages in 1985. The school remained at Beaconsfield until it moved to Shrivenham in April 2014.
Russian tutors tended to be a mixture of White Russian émigrés and carefully vetted Soviet defectors. Among them were some odd and colourful figures, including an aged, wooden-legged "colonel of cavalry" who claimed to have lost his leg while fighting against the Reds in the Russian Civil war. Another, a mysterious 'Countess', always dressed from head to toe in black, "in permanent mourning' for the tsar and his family". One set of statistics from Bodmin listed the teaching staff as comprising:
Probably the most important member of the teaching staff was Professor (later Dame) Elizabeth Hill, who was director of the JSSL through its period of existence.
One major teaching tool was the Anna H Semeonoff Grammar textbook, informally known as Semyonova. Other teaching materials included comprehensive vocabulary lists, a reading primer called Ordinary People, and a textbook by Pears and Wissotsky's titled Passages for Translation. Literature published in Russian, such as Crime And Punishment, was also used.
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Joint Services School for Linguists
The Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) was founded in 1949 by the British armed services to provide language training, principally in Russian, and largely to selected conscripts undergoing National Service.
The school was established at RAF Kidbrooke in southeast London in 1949. The founding of the school was prompted by the need to provide greater numbers of interpreters, intelligence and signals intelligence officers due to the Cold War, and, later, the Korean War.
Additional sites, at Walker Lines, Bodmin, Cornwall, and at Coulsdon Common Camp in Coulsdon, near Croydon, opened in 1951 and 1952 respectively.
The Kidbrooke site closed in 1953, Coulsdon closed in 1954, and Bodmin closed in 1956. The school was then based at a single site at RNAS Crail in Scotland from easter 1956. It then moved, in 1960, to RAF Tangmere near Chichester in Sussex, where Mandarin, Polish and Czech in addition to Russian were taught.
The school was superseded by the work of the language wings at Wilton Park in Beaconsfield in the mid-1960s. The wings later combined to form the Defence School of Languages in 1985. The school remained at Beaconsfield until it moved to Shrivenham in April 2014.
Russian tutors tended to be a mixture of White Russian émigrés and carefully vetted Soviet defectors. Among them were some odd and colourful figures, including an aged, wooden-legged "colonel of cavalry" who claimed to have lost his leg while fighting against the Reds in the Russian Civil war. Another, a mysterious 'Countess', always dressed from head to toe in black, "in permanent mourning' for the tsar and his family". One set of statistics from Bodmin listed the teaching staff as comprising:
Probably the most important member of the teaching staff was Professor (later Dame) Elizabeth Hill, who was director of the JSSL through its period of existence.
One major teaching tool was the Anna H Semeonoff Grammar textbook, informally known as Semyonova. Other teaching materials included comprehensive vocabulary lists, a reading primer called Ordinary People, and a textbook by Pears and Wissotsky's titled Passages for Translation. Literature published in Russian, such as Crime And Punishment, was also used.