Joint Services School for Linguists

The Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) was founded in 1951 by the British armed services to provide language training, principally in Russian, and largely to selected conscripts undergoing National Service. The school closed with the ending of conscription in 1960, after which the services made their own provisions as they had prior to the opening of the school (and, to some extent, even during its operation).

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 the Korean War which had started the previous year.

Training in Russian had been conducted by British forces long before JSSL, such as an intensive course for regular Army officers run at King's College London and SSEES, followed by a four-month stay with emigre families resident in Paris or a Baltic State. and an 'Inter-Services Russian Course' between 1945-46. However, these efforts were mostly small-scale and largely not co-ordinated, with their organisation being described as a 'mosaic'.

What has been described as "the first building block in the JSSL structure", was a school for Russian linguists in Kidbrooke, southeast London, which opened in 1949.

The establishments which operated under the official JSSL name operated from a large number of different sites during its history. This was partly because the course had two distinct elements; an initial 'linguists' course, and a subsequent, and more advanced, 'University' element to produce interpreters.

Two of the school's sites — at Walker Lines, Bodmin, Cornwall, and Coulsdon, near Croydon - opened in September 1951. The Coulsdon site closed in 1954, and Bodmin in 1956. These sites were replaced by a single unit at a former airfield near the fishing village of Crail on the east coast of Scotland.

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