Postcards of the Past
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Some articles about Crail and
the Firth of Forth
"Crail, Fife"
by dwg

Crail is a small town situated at the east tip of the Kingdom of Fife, just a few miles
from St Andrews and its golf courses. To the east of the town is Fife Ness, the site of
Crail Aerodrome, which was a naval air station during the two World Wars.  Planes
from the airbase took part in the final attack on the Tirpitz in 1944.  In the 1950s, the
Joint Services School for Linguists was moved there from Bodmin in Cornwall.

I spent the very windy autumn and winter of 1956/57 there as the guest of the Royal
Navy. We travelled to JSSL from Portsmouth by train - that was a long night ! We
changed trains in Edinburgh in the early morning, and had to march along Princes
Street from Waverley to Princes Street station for the local train across the Forth
Bridge and along the Fife coast to Crail. We had little idea of where we were going and
were quite surprised to arrive in what seemed to us the middle of nowhere ! However,
we soon settled in and spent nearly 8 months there studying the Russian language -
Russian with a strong military emphasis, so that for example we all knew the Russian
for aircraft carrier but lacked a more domestic vocabulary. We used to go to St
Andrews on Saturday nights, to the pictures and to have fish and chips - the fish was
the best ever, so fresh ! We also spent far too much time in a coffee bar in Crail, and in
the "Golf" Hotel bar.

The Isle of May is a small island in the Firth of Forth easily visible from along the Fife
coast. It has - or had - a lighthouse which we could see from JSSL. One of our number
who was a keen ornithologist took a trip to the island which, although small, has an
interesting history which you might like to follow up by using the search box below.
If you have any postcards, memories etc of Crail and/or JSSL, please get in touch. We
will be happy to publish your story here.
DID YOU KNOW that JSSL has some famous former students, including Eddie
George (currently (2008) the Governor of the Bank of England), Michael Frayn
(playwright and novelist), Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter, Sir Peter Hall and, strangely,
the Soviet spy Geoffrey Prime - how do the security people explain that one ??