SCHOOL OF SPIES

A sleepy Scottish fishing village became an espionage academy for hundreds of 'clever boys' in the Fifties, including future literary luminaries Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter and Michael Frayn, as Britain geared up for Cold War confrontation with the USSR

- By Maggie Ritchie

School site on an old military base is derelict

WITH its charming miniature harbour and cottages, the sleepy picturesque fishing village of Crail on the coast in Fife is a draw for tourists. But in the 1950s, its cobbled streets were filled with off-duty servicemen known by locals as “the linguists”.

As members of the School for Spies, a military base located close to Crail, they were some of the hundreds of Cold War personnel covertly taught Russian so they could become secret agents and interpreters to listen in to the “Red Menace” as fears of a Third World War intensified.

Today, the base is a ruin with abandoned barracks. But in 1956, the RNAS Crail (HMS Jackdaw) airfield in Fife established the Joint Services School for Linguistics so that teachers could train some of Britain’s finest young minds.

The JSSL was based in Fife because the former naval air station was available for reuse. Prior to this, the language school was split across three separate locations — Bodmin (Army), Caterham (Navy), and Cambridge (RAF). These operations were merged at Crail in 1956.

The school was a response to intelligence needs during the Cold War as the threat of all-out nuclear war intensified after the Soviet Union held its first bomb test in Kazakhstan in 1949, to the surprise of US intelligence services, and after it successfully launched the first satellite Sputnik in 1957.

The Soviets kept a close eye on the JSSL but there is no evidence they penetrated the school. However, the Russian spy Geoffrey Prime, convicted in 1980 for leaking information to the Soviets while working for the RAF, was one of the 6,000 alumni who went through the various JSSLs.

Among the national servicemen dispatched to Crail to do their bit in the Cold War were three clever grammar school boys who would go on to become playwrights and novelists - Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter and Michael Frayn.