[1980s] Background and Parent Unit for Female in 14 Co in the British Armed Forces

[Farmer]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Sure, but contrary to cinema, SIS and the Security Service were neither armed nor trained with firearms, for the most part.

Most intelligence gathering, undercover, counter-terrorism, and support roles don't need firearms. Their being seconded was for other purposes, not least of which being less suspected of being involved, but also potentially have significant skill set variations that might have been needed. It's factual that they were seconded, so there was clearly a considered need and benefit, particularly set against a general prohibition on women serving in many roles.

[Farmer]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I found a site with good examples of careers for Wrens, but I still don't have the same grasp of what careers were possible in the WRAC.

What were the major vocational, technical, Signals and specialized careers in the WRAC?

Did they have translators and linguists? If so, as enlisted or officers? And what would their actual job title be? Would they be a 'Signals analyst' or something else?

This is the best I can find:

https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/womens-royal-army-corps

In 1952, ranks in the WRAC were aligned with the rest of the British Army. Eventually, women worked in over 40 trades, including as staff officers, clerks, chefs, dog handlers, communications operators, drivers, intelligence analysts, military police women, and postal and courier operators.

But there were some areas of Army service where progression was slower. It was not until the 1980s that women were allowed to train in, carry and use firearms. And it wasn’t until 1984 that women were allowed to undergo their officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Before then, they had a separate training college, the Women’s Royal Army Corps College, Camberley.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Farmer

Most intelligence gathering, undercover, counter-terrorism, and support roles don't need firearms. Their being seconded was for other purposes, not least of which being less suspected of being involved, but also potentially have significant skill set variations that might have been needed. It's factual that they were seconded, so there was clearly a considered need and benefit, particularly set against a general prohibition on women serving in many roles.

The main reason is the same reason why the PCs need females. A pair or group of fit military-aged males looks like they might be threats. A couple, man and woman, look like husband and wife or young people out on a date.

There were areas that the unarmed Security Service personnel simply didn't go, though. Hardcore militant strongholds, where strangers could be snatched by armed men minutes after drawing suspicion, were off-limits to surveillance and intelligence operations by anyone other than 14 Company and the SAS, who were armed, trained and had their own QRF ready to launch hostage rescue immediately, before a van left the neighbourhood.

Those areas were only patrolled by massive shows of British Army or RUC force and they were only targeted by intelligence operations where the operators considered kidnapping so likely an occupational hazard that about half their training was about avoiding and countering it.

[Farmer]

Yep, definitely there were no-go zones, certainly officially and, given the likely potential fallout, probably even unofficially.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I need to know what jobs women who volunteer for 14 Company were doing in the British Armed Forces before they found out about a chance to volunteer for dangerous duties. And I want to know what parent units they would have returned to after their 14 Company rotation and whether any of them perhaps took stock of their life, thought about doing that job for the next two years, and might instead be recruitable for another adventure.

They are likely to have been doing jobs that involved contact with intelligence work, such as signallers, cryptographic operators, analysts or linguists. They're likely have had to go to some effort to volunteer.

They'd have a much better chance of being accepted if they were conspicuously athletic: there are quite a few people in the British services who are keen on sports and physical training and spend a lot of time on it.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

They are likely to have been doing jobs that involved contact with intelligence work, such as signallers, cryptographic operators, analysts or linguists. They're likely have had to go to some effort to volunteer.

One character concept stems from the method of selecting these potential adventurers, i.e. through the social networks of relatives of a former British Army officer, whose family is no longer all that rich, but can trace their line of descent on one side to a knight in William the Conqueror's train and his land-holding Saxon heiress wife and on the other to Scottish and Anglo-Irish aristocrats descending from the High Stewart of Scotland, a Breton knight arriving shortly after the Conquest.

Their generational wealth has dwindled, at least in the case of the branch which produced the NPC discreetly looking for people with a very specific set of skills, but they still have valuable family connections to simply enormous numbers of upper class twits, owners of grand estates, and vast numbers of cousins with a tradition of service as military officers, in Her Majesty's Diplomatic Service or as officials of what was in the period Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service (HMOCS), but used to be the Colonial Service and Indian Civil Service.

Among the people his many relatives know is an aristocratic young woman whose views on gender roles and equality are conspiciously modern, but believes that this means she should have the same opportunity her brother has to attend Sandhurst and become a real military officer, risking her life for her country with the same genteel sangfroid as generations of her forebears have done. I imagine she would become an officer of military intelligence, as that, at least offered a somewhat better chance of an interesting foreign posting than the Royal Military Police, as well as being closer to her image of the military service of her male relatives.

Where would such a young lady have gotten an excellent education, before university, and/or Sandhurst? Which public schools open to girls in 1961-1988 were not just posh, but also known for elite academic performance?

Originally Posted by johndallman

They'd have a much better chance of being accepted if they were conspicuously athletic: there are quite a few people in the British services who are keen on sports and physical training and spend a lot of time on it.

The aristocratic young woman above rides like a centaur, awaits weekend shoots as avidly as her father, uncles, brothers and cousins, plays tennis, skis, swims, and travels with some frequency to hike various nature trails and even summit mountains.

What are some sports a more working-class woman, someone whose brothers were factory workers, tradesmen, fishermen, barkeeps or postal workers, might engage in, born in the fifties or sixties, so in school at some point between 1961-1988, depending on her age?

Today, there are women in most sports, but there used to be some resistance to girls participating in sports with lots of physical contact or with high velocity projectiles, like cricket. Beyond knowing that rounders exists, I'm not at all sure what sports British society from 1961-1991 considered acceptable pursuits for teenage girls and young women. Exceptionally athletic and talented girls must have practised the sports women competed at the time in the Olympics, gymnastics, track and field, swimming and so forth, but what were the most common athletic or active hobbies of teenage girls and young women in their twenties in the UK at the time?

At some point, it became perfectly acceptable for girls to play association football, take the game seriously and play into adulthood. When I was growing up in the 80s, it was very rare to see girls over 13 continue playing, as teenage peer pressure discouraged girls doing anything so stereotypically masculine. Field hockey, volleyball, swimming and gymnastics were less associated with maleness, but, of course, never anywhere near as popular as football. Actually, for most sports, female participation rates plummeted much faster than male ones as kids grew older and discovered other interests.

[dcarson]

The St. Trinians girls always seemed to have hockey sticks.

Which was inspired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Trinnean%27s_School and two private girls' schools in Cambridge – Perse School for Girls, now known as the co-educational Stephen Perse Foundation, and St Mary's School for girls, a Catholic school established by the Sisters of Mary Ward.

[Icelander]

I don't know if it's worth a whole thread on its own, but among the very particular set of skills that this particular adventure calls for is a working knowledge of Russian*, with the ability to pretend to be a native not necessarily being a precondition, but acknowledged as a very big plus and probably at least as helpful as a survival skill for what they will be doing as combat skills.

During the Cold War, there are a few ways to have such knowledge of Russian while still being someone Western intelligence and security organizations might trust. Your parents or other relatives might be White Russian émigrés, you or your family might be more recent defectors from the Soviet Union or another country behind the Iron Curtain, you might be a trained linguist or intelligence officer taught Russian specifically for national security related reasons, or you might have studied Russian at university.

Any of these might apply for characters in this particular campaign, but for the last one, I'd quite like to know more about the universities in the UK where Professors who might know Russian at Native level are teaching and what Russian Literature department might be regarded as the best in Great Britain or the entire Commonwealth.

Does anyone know about any UK or other Commonwealth universities particularly associated with Russian language and literature studies, not only in the modern day, but having been so historically, before Russian-speaking academics could more easily have moved to English-speaking countries?

*While the skill set of 14 Intelligence Company, the SRU, and its modern successor, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment is broadly applicable to almost all of my campaigns, certainly for all of them which are set at some point between the 1980s and the modern day, it is perhaps especially relevant to campaigns with any connection to the network of occultists supported by Texan-born and Caribbean-focused billionaire, J.R. Kessler, Patron of the PCs in my campaign of Caribbean by Night, and its setting, which I've named 'Monstrum', consisting of the modern Earth with supernatural elements starting to emerge in subtle way, almost as if they are elements of other realities leaking through into our own as reality frays and tears, according to some occultists centered around certain geographic regions, as with the theories of biologist, cryptozoologist and paranormal writer Ivan T. Sanderson and his Vile Vortices. Aside from certain NPCs in the Caribbean leveraging a Commonwealth element in the recruiting of adventurers, potential PCs and their colleagues and support staff, any campaign set in the world of Monstrum might be particularly concerned with British characters due to my fictionalization of the late Queen Elizabeth II as aware of the occult when almost no governments in the world were, and her 'Shadow Court' of other subjects of the Queen who shared her knowledge and have a benign conspiracy to prepare Great Britain for the fundamental changes in the world when governments and people at large realize what is happening, as well as the self-dubbed 'Rangers' who feel that they must do what they can to protect the people until that happens, though, of course, such conspiracies of people in the know, benign or not, to hunt monsters humanity doesn't realize prey on them, might exist anywhere in the world, and call themselves all kinds of names.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Today, there are women in most sports, but there used to be some resistance to girls participating in sports with lots of physical contact or with high velocity projectiles, like cricket. Beyond knowing that rounders exists, I'm not at all sure what sports British society from 1961-1991 considered acceptable pursuits for teenage girls and young women. Exceptionally athletic and talented girls must have practised the sports women competed at the time in the Olympics, gymnastics, track and field, swimming and so forth, but what were the most common athletic or active hobbies of teenage girls and young women in their twenties in the UK at the time?

At some point, it became perfectly acceptable for girls to play association football, take the game seriously and play into adulthood. When I was growing up in the 80s, it was very rare to see girls over 13 continue playing, as teenage peer pressure discouraged girls doing anything so stereotypically masculine. Field hockey, volleyball, swimming and gymnastics were less associated with maleness, but, of course, never anywhere near as popular as football. Actually, for most sports, female participation rates plummeted much faster than male ones as kids grew older and discovered other interests.

About the only one that really springs to mind is netball, maybe hockey. Tennis to my mind has was not a working class sport.

[Pursuivant]

If you're looking for "posh + elite" public/private schools, also consider exclusive institutions in places like Switzerland. That would guarantee extensive foreign language training, both formally and informally.

Any institution offering an International Baccalaureate program is likely going to be both posh/exclusive and academically demanding. Since the program was founded in 1968, some of the first graduates of the program might have been accepted into the Royal Armed Forces by the early 1970s.

I know from personal experience that any academically elite institution will start kids with second language programs when they're tiny. That might be the norm outside the English-speaking world, but is a distinct rarity in the U.S., at least in the late 20th century. I believe that that was the case for the UK as well.