Fighting the Reds a matter of learning the lingo

The Russians, then waging a cold war that could turn hot almost overnight, hit back by calling it a spy school. In truth, talking to them six decades later, Ralph Robinson and Henry Thompson strike you as being two of the most unlikely looking spies.

But then so do the playwrights Alan Bennett, Jack Rosenthal, Michael Frayn and Dennis Potter, historian Sir Martin Gilbert, Sir Edward George - respected Governor of the Bank of England - and York-born actor Peter Woodthorpe, who played the rumpled pathologist in Inspector Morse. All are widely scattered now, and Potter is dead, but all have one thing in common.

They were among 5,000 young national servicemen put through intensive training as Russian translators and interpreters to help meet the needs of British intelligence operations at a dangerously volatile time on the world stage.

Like Station X at Bletchley Park during a different sort of war, it's a subject that is little known today beyond official circles and those who took part.

The JSSL was supposed to be secret at the time yet Henry Thompson, now living in Leyburn, recalls that the resourceful Soviets found out about one of its centres on Bodmin Moor and bombarded the isolated place with a daily supply of Izvestia and Pravda.

For nine years, until the end of national service was in sight and the military realised that it had enough Russian linguists to meet foreseeable needs, the JSSL operated from military bases in Surrey, Cornwall and Scotland and enclaves were set up at the universities of Cambridge and London.

While Cold War paranoia gripped the world's military powers, JSSL students had Soviet sentences, syllables and subjunctives drilled into their brains over 18 months to two years, ironically often by obliging Russian emigres recruited by the authorities.

Ralph Robinson, now living in Crakehall, served in the RAF and took his course from 1957 to 1959 at Cambridge University, where the guiding light was the redoubtable Prof Elizabeth Hill, head of Slavonic studies and a leading architect of the JSSL.

Henry Thompson, a soldier, read Russian at Oxford and continued to teach it as a housemaster at Winchester School for 36 years.

He was originally in the Royal Sussex Regiment, but transferred to the Intelligence Corps. He was three weeks behind Mr Robinson in the JSSL, but they finished their course together as officer cadets.

Mr Robinson explained: "The idea for the JSSL emerged just after the war, when things began to look sticky in Europe. The cold war began, Churchill was talking about an Iron Curtain and the Russians were anything but co-operative, with a stand-off situation in Berlin.

"The Government decided that if we had a confrontation with the Soviet Union we needed people who could speak the language.

"In the early Fifties they set up the JSSL to immerse people in Russian. They trained on average 500 a year. Most of them were trained to do practical work as translators, sitting in outposts in Europe and listening to military traffic. It was a low level form of intelligence, getting an idea of who was where in case the Russians mounted a surprise attack with stronger forces. You could also find out how their alarm systems operated and could listen to a pilot talking to his controller."

Mr Robinson added: "At the end of the course I had to stand up in class and describe the workings of a jet engine in Russian."

Criteria for JSSL selection included a will to learn a daunting language, powers of concentration, good memory, accuracy and a general knowledge of grammar.

In the early days of the school, 65pc of entrants were graduates and the remaining 35pc had places waiting at university after national service, but by the mid-Fifties class sizes were falling and among the 12 young men on one course there was only one graduate.

Mr Thompson said: "I remember having an interview with a career-type person who wanted to see what I might best do with my two years in the Army. I might have a chance of going to Russia."

Mr Robinson said: "Teaching was very intensive, course classes of four with a Russian emigre. There was no chance of going to sleep.

"You learned 30 words a day, 210 words a week, covering insects, machinery and all kinds of stuff, but the bias was towards military terms. You had an exam every week and if you failed three on the trot you were out."

Mr Thompson said: "It was total immersion in the language. Lessons were like a school timetable. There were conversations, grammar classes and little lectures. It was immensely stimulating. If one didn't sink one swam rather well.

"We were regarded as untouchable. There was military discipline, but perhaps not as it was applied in ordinary national service.

"Detailed administration was done by a CO and officers, but there was civilian teaching staff and I imagine there were quite frequent tensions between the two elements, but the academic side must have had quite a strong hand to play because that was the business we were there for."

Mr Thompson left the Army in 1959 and went to Oxford University. Two years later he went to Russia with an educational delegation to further his studies and did a post-graduate course at Moscow University.

Mr Thompson organises reunions of JSSL students, but on a wider front the paranoid suspicions - reminiscent of Dr Strangelove - bred by the Cold War are long gone.

He has been back to Russia many times and is an ardent supporter of Downside Up, a charity which looks after 200 children with Down's Syndrome in and around Moscow. Every year he takes part in a sponsored cycle ride finishing in Red Square.

Mr Robinson has been to Russia only once, but recalls: "The Russians were really quite charmed to hear a Westerner speaking Russian - simple things like walking into a department store in Leningrad."

He added: "The JSSL turned out some fairly competent linguists. In our case this was another string to our national service bow, whereas for many people national service was two years out of their lives doing pointless things."

Mr Robinson is a member of the local HARP Singers, who have also supported Downside Up.

Mr Thompson shares some of his memories of the JSSL in the first book to be published on the subject - Secret Classrooms, by former JSSL students Geoffrey Elliott and Harold Shukman (St Ermin's Press, £18.99).