Colin Browning, Phd student at Brunel Uni
June 25. PhD student examining the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA) and the British Way and Purpose (BWP)
The Army Bureau of Current Affairs & British Way and Purpose
ABCA & BWP - Educating the British Army in WW2
June 2025
My name is Colin Browning (colin@colinbrowning.com). I’m 60 years old and I live in Norwich in the UK where I work as a personal trainer. I am also a part time history PhD student at Brunel University, London. My thesis is an institutional study of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA) and the British Way and Purpose (BWP), two organisations set up by the British Army during the Second World War to teach its conscript army more about the world they lived in and to get them to think about how their world might look after the war.
My thesis title is:
Class, "Reds" and the counter intuitive, anti-establishment influences in military education: A case study of political, social and citizenship teaching in the British Army 1941-1946
And is being supervised by Dr Richard Hammond.
I am currently working on Chapter One: "The Development of Army Education 1918-1939". I hope to have the first draft of this chapter ready for Christmas 2024.
It is an underappreciated fact that during the Second World War, between the evacuation from Dunkirk in May 1940 and D-Day in June 1944, the vast bulk of the British Army was stationed at home, and not involved in any fighting. Sure, the 8th Army was fighting in North Africa, Sicily and Italy and the 14th Army (the ‘Forgotten Army’) was engaged in Burma, but these were relatively small scale compared to the mass deployments to Northwest Europe after June 1944. It also explains why most casualties suffered by the British Army came in the final year of the war.
Under the Adjutant-General, General Sir Ronald Adam, “perhaps the great unsung hero of the British Army of the Second World War", (Fennell, J. Fighting the People’s War. 2019 p 269), education was seen as a potential weapon against poor morale and boredom of an army stuck at home. Set up in 1941 under director WE Williams ('ABCA Bill'), ABCA set out to get the soldiers involved in weekly discussion groups about current affairs and progress of the war. This was added to during the winter training programme of 1942 by BWP, which focussed entirely on how Britain and the Empire worked. ABCA and BWP remain the largest experiment in mass, compulsory adult education in British history.
I’d love to hear from anyone interested in ABCA, BWP or British military education in general. Being a remote, part-time PhD student can be an isolated experience, so feel free to get in touch. I look forward to hearing from those with similar interests.