BEING ACCEPTED ONTO the Russian course in the JSSL was a hit and miss business. One of my colleagues on the course, the late Kevin Ruane, told the following story. Being in basic training at Woolwich Barracks as a clerical trainee, he tried to apply for the course through ‘normal channels’. This, however, met with uncompromising resistance from his sergeant, who told him he had no right to ask the country to spend ‘thousands’ on teaching him Russian.

This seemed to be the end of the matter, until about two weeks later the same sergeant was ordered to take Kevin to see the Commanding Officer. The CO told him he had discovered that Kevin, who came from Liverpool, was a Catholic. The CO therefore asked him if he would sell some raffle tickets on behalf of the Children of Mary, since his daughter had become a Catholic. Kevin agreed, and ended up buying most of the raffle tickets himself. When Kevin told the CO that he was keen to join the Russian course, he was given the impression that that would not be too difficult. ‘The Brigadier’, he said, ‘is an old chum of mine.’ About a month later, Kevin was posted to Bodmin.

Kevin Ruane was to pursue a distinguished career in later life as BBC correspondent successively in Washington, Warsaw and Moscow. He was in Warsaw at a crucial and fascinating time, able to observe the birth of the Solidarity movement led by Lech Wałe¸ sa and the subsequent crackdown on dissent, under Soviet pressure, by the Communist regime of Wojciech Jaruzełski. His book To Kill a Priest, about the murder of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko under the Communist regime, was based on much first-hand information gathered by him in the aftermath of the murder.

So ‘spending thousands’ on teaching Kevin Russian, agreed over the purchase of three books of raffle tickets, was to give the world a deeper understanding of crucial events in Poland during the 1980s leading eventually to the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Each separate course of kursanty was designated by a letter of the alphabet. We were ‘L’ course, in other words the twelfth course since the JSSL was launched. For a while we overlapped with ‘K’ course, and perhaps also with ‘M’. Kevin was one of a small elite group among us, who had already graduated from university.