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On ‎7‎/‎10‎/‎2016 at 8:49 AM, IMMORTAL HOWDEN ENDER said:

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Many of these, possibly upgraded in part, were still in Duff St when we lived round the corner in Kenneth St in the mid 1950s. I remember they were complete s**thouses by that stage and if I wouldn't do what I was told my mother used to threaten me with going to live in Duff St. I very quickly complied!

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Spot on Jock I remember them well. The Eighth were always in the running in these comps. There was one time though Herb MacDonald's halt command caught us on the wrong foot 

(  the one and only time he got it wrong  ) and we made a hash of it. He said later he was so proud the way we had performed he got over excited.

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On ‎08‎/‎09‎/‎2016 at 4:11 AM, JockWatt said:

If I remember correctly, it was in there that the BB's drill competitions were conducted back in the 40s/50s.

These drill competitions, and indeed drill in general, always baffled me. I just couldn't see the point of performing random mass manoeuvres designed to get pre-mechanised troops from previous centuries into lines and squares in response to somebody shouting very loud at you. It was totally out of date but the argument was that it instilled "discipline" - in other words responding to commands without thinking too much. I suspect that, in the church based Boys' Brigade, a sub-agenda may well have been also getting Boys (capital B) to conform to religious diktats without thinking too much about that either. I have frequently thought that, although there was a lot of good in the Boys' Brigade, there was also an element of an establishment - both political and religious - ploy to ensure that the lower orders knew their place in life and conformed to that. Another "opium of the people".

Drill was utterly pointless and out of date but you still had to pass exams on this nonsense before you could aspire to the Boys' Brigade's premier award The Queen's Badge (King's Badge to you Jock:lol:). Mind you until the several generations of officers who had done military service of some kind or another worked their way through the system, I suspect that those in charge looked back on all this mindless stamping and shouting with a degree of bizarre nostalgia.

Edited by Charles Bannerman
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1 hour ago, DoofersDad said:

I remember years ago being in the same badminton club as a guy who was some big wig in the BB.  Someone asked him what exactly the BB was.  Before he could reply I said that it was the para-military wing of the Boy Scouts. If looks could kill I would have died young.

 

I always thought that the Boys' Brigade, with their captains, corporals and sergeants believed they were still guarding the Empire while the Scouts, with their District and Area Commissioners, believed they were still ruling it.

In reality too, the Boys' Brigade did tend to be more of a working class movement with a strong presence in council housing schemes whereas the Scouts always tended to be rather more middle class.

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57 minutes ago, IBM said:

To do real drill competitions with .303 rifles as well you had to be in the Army Cadets :smile:

Yes, for a country more reputed for its Navy, two World Wars certainly played their part in boosting the influence of the Army, such as through these cadets and the incredibly long time that drill survived alongside the promotion of religion in the Boys' Brigade.

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