Watching the Doctor Who episode “Into the Dalek”, there’s a new character, Danny Pink, who is a former soldier.
Everyone acts rather rudely to him, assuming that since he was a soldier, he’s a mindless killing machine.
Is this a common prejudice to soldiers in Britain?
From Rudyard Kipling
In the British class system, soldiers - enlisted men, that is - are definitely lower-class. They’re not “mindless killing machines” but they are presumed to be not very bright. The two principal stereotypes are (a) not very bright but loyal, respectful, dependable, conceivably even resourceful, might make a good NCO; and (b) not very bright, not trustworthy, will slack off, filch rations, etc, if can. Definitely not to be trusted when in drink. English folk music largely consists of songs about foolish, trusting young women who have been seduced and abandoned by soldiers and now find themselves in A Certain Condition. By the conventions of the song, the abandoned woman must follow her faithless soldier to, e.g., the West Indies, where she either (a) marries him, or (b) shoots him, either being regarded as an acceptable outcome.
Basically, you wouldn’t enlist if you had any other options, so people’s assumption may be that Danny Pink didn’t have other options.
Doctor Who is not nor intended to be the average Brit. Nor his assistants. They have a distinctly pro-peace/science etc tendency.
I get the impression, and Rudyard seems to say the same - that the typical soldier is seen not just as lower class and not too bright, ill-mannered, but also as habitually drunk when out on the town, with a strong tendency to be rowdy and start fights and cause trouble and encourage prostitution. (Much as my buddy the Korean war vet described his life in the Canadian army; “did I ever tell you about the time in Seoul where Bob’s hobnail boots slid on the marble floor of the whorehouse and he fell making a grab across the bar to stay up, so the American MPs thought he was drunk and tried to arrest him, so we beat the crap out of them, but to escape we had to jump out the second floor window and the sewage was pretty deep in the ditch, but we made it back to the Canadian base before the MP’s figured out who we were… no? How about the time Jim was arguing with the madam in a village over his change, and waved a torch around to make a point? He accidentally set the nearest cottage on fire, so we got the hell outta there as the entire village’s thatch roofs went up in flames… or the vandoos playing hot potato/chicken with a live grenade”). I support our troops.
This.
The Doctor is a Survivor’s Guilt and PTSD-inflicted veteran of a war that literally spanned all of time and space, which included several genocides, including his thinking he’d sentenced his own people to death, for which he’d actively buried the incarnation that did it. Who, even at his best, is a Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
Why would you think his attitudes were meant to reflect regular British persons’ attitudes?
But the OP doesn’t say that the Doctor acts rudely to Pink; he says that everyone acts rudely to Pink.
The OP is wrong about that.
Danny doesn’t really interact significantly with anyone but the Doctor and Clara (Danny’s girlfriend) until…well, it’s spoilery. And nobody he has minor interactions with is particularly rude him.
The relationship between the Doctor and Danny is thematic. Danny’s a reminder of everything the Doctor hates about himself - an active, vocal one, when he points out the Doctor’s ‘officer’ traits. Making Danny a general buttmonkey would undermine the entire point of having him as a character.
One of George Orwell’s essays makes the point that until conscription and universal military service in the two world wars, soldiers were indeed often looked down on and often left in destitution and turning to petty crime on their return. Once everyone had to do their bit, attitudes changed for a while (though there were again, at least by the 50s, plenty of references to those who found a way to do the easy jobs and find all the fiddles going, which really started to get a hold as peacetime conscription continued). Nowadays, with an all-volunteer professional army, you get some of the same old attitudes re-emerging, and some of the same problems for the ex-soldiers who can’t find their feet in civilian life.
Danny’s schoolkids seem to love him, not disdain him.
[QUOTE=Mum of Sir William Robetson, when he enlisted]
[the Army) is a refuge for all idle people…I shall name it to no one for I am ashamed to think of it…I would rather bury you than see you in a red coat.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Duke of Wellington]
The French system of conscription brings together a fair sample of all classes; ours is composed of the scum of the earth — the mere scum of the earth]
[/QUOTE]
I’d say the view of soldiers in generally positive, though nuanced.
Most people are aware that soldiers do a difficult and dangerous job. And that there’s more to it, and many more roles, than just pointing a gun.
But yeah there might be a stereotype of enlisted soldiers as being essentially jocks who weren’t smart enough to train for anything, and couldn’t think of anything else to do.
None of this applies to officers and above who are held in very high esteem.
I’ll just third this. Doctor Who is kinda a…Doctor House character, and it’s entirely in character that he’d wag his finger and tut at someone who’s paid to engage in physical combat (even though the doctor himself has had to dispatch quite a lot of lifeforms in his time, though usually indirectly).
you have to remember back in the day that if you wanted to be anyone of note in the british army you literally bought your commission from someone selling theirs
Once in a while someone was given one for special service
But those who weren’t commissioned were basically considered to be white (or native depending) trash
The navy was considered to be the workingman’s service branch …
The Navy and the Air Force are able to point to all the skilled trades they equip people for, the Army somewhat less so, at least for the general run of the PBI.
Attitudes change over time. Soldiers have had a bad reputation, not entirely undeserved, over the years. More recently (ie - this century) the general public has developed a lot more respect for the ordinary squaddie. Of course, the media has pretty much orchestrated this with plenty of documentary and fictional stories of how they train and work in places like Afghanistan.
Of course, it is undoubtedly true that they often take the young men and women who come from troubled background and did badly at school. It is recognised by most of the public that discipline and training is exactly what these young people need to turn them into good citizens.
The big problem with soldiers is not while they are serving, but after they leave the forces; I think that this is probably universal. Take someone who has spent the last 20 years of their life, not having to worry overmuch about where the next meal is coming from, or mundane stuff like utility bills and commuting, and it is no surprise that many of them have trouble fitting in.
When I was a truck driver, I came across a number of ex soldiers who used their military driving qualification to become commercial drivers. Some fitted in better than others; some found it hard to relate to the lack of discipline and, basically, not having someone there to tell them what to do all the time. Others liked the job well enough but had a hard time relating to the other drivers, who had zero interest in what they had done in the army. Sadly, a fair proportion of the homeless, and this in a country where benefits are not all that bad, are ex soldiers who just couldn’t cope and turned to drink and drugs.
In general, at least in the circles in which I move, soldiers are generally respected for doing a job that none of the rest of us would care to do. We also believe, rightly or wrongly, that our soldiers are better than anyone else’s.
Note that that Kipling poem is over a century old, so it’s probably not a very reliable indicator of how Brits think nowadays.
More to the point, historically (up through 1871 actually), Army commissions were purchased, while Navy officers encountered a much more meritocratic system. Everyone started out as a midshipman, and after some term of service, took exams for Lieutenant. Then, after another term of service, they managed to get themselves appointed Post Captain, and from there, promotion was more lock-step all the way through the Admiral ranks, unless you were ‘yellowed’, meaning that you were promoted to Admiral and put out to pasture.
In practice, this meant that the Navy drew a lot of their officers from the middle class and above, with the men before the mast being lower class, sometimes illiterate men. Hornblower and Aubrey, to use a pair of fictional officers, were neither one sons of aristocrats- Hornblower was a doctor’s son, and Aubrey was an Army officer’s son, IIRC.
In the Army, it meant that there was an effective barrier to entry to the officer corps for anyone but the wealthy, and as a result, there was an extreme class differential between the officers and men.
All that aside, I kind of think that it’s more the typical civilian thinking that military people are probably more highly trained and combat experienced than they actually are. Think about the degree of badassery people ascribe to Marines, and then think of the actual Marines you’ve known. There’s a bit of a disconnect there to say the least, at least in my mind.
There’s always been that kind of attitude in Doctor Who. The Third Doctor in particular had a contempt for soldiery. While he was friendly with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, he always derided the military mind and its tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.
Seventh Doctor had a big beef with it, too.
It’s part of the long pacifist, anti-military vein in the show.
For three centuries from say 1700 to 2000 AD, there was a definite folk memory — particularly amongst educated people — of the repulsion of Cromwell’s military dictatorship through the Major-Generals: which led to a disdain of soldiering not shared on the continent. [ Which memory also led to purchased commissions, to ensure the officer-corps had a stake in the country. ] And the Empire was rarely won by actual fighting, more by positioning with the potentialty of fighting.
Yet however much we jeered at them as Lobsters, we liked them enough when they weren’t breaking up strikes or beating up civvies when drunk, or when Irish or Scottish, evicting tenants at the behest of their aristocrats; and Johnson wisely opined: “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not being a soldier.”
Still there was never any danger of the Military Worship that distinguishes the United States; and one of the few benefits of Common Law is that it rather discourages the open allowance of Might Makes Right.
This is probably more suited to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator