Army Reserve

Work continued that Saturday and with some 2,000 emergency services workers and volunteers on the scene working round the clock, work continued on clearing the slurry.

By the 23rd of October, the Territorial Army, naval ratings from HMS Tiger and members of the King's Own Royal Border Regiment were working at Abervant.

It was not until the 28th of October that the last victim was dug out of the slurry and after 15 days and with the 144th body identified, Charles and his team packed up and left Aberfan.

The question was, how had this massive disaster been allowed to happen? The entire South Wales Valley's landscape was dotted with these slag heaps and it was known, much before the 1966 disaster, that a badly sited slag heap could move.

We realize you're U.S. because you put National Guard in your show notes.

So we have the Territorial Army here.

It's the same thing.

So you weekend, but you can be recalled for full service, and you do lots of services within the community rather than overseas.

And if you'd like to get involved in the discussion online, you can use the hashtag BBC Antisocial or you can email us throughout the programme, antisocial at bbc.co.uk. And with me throughout this episode of Antisocial are two people who come at this discussion from different perspectives.

James Vitale is a councillor for the Conservatives in Dorset, and he's also an officer in the British Army Reserve.

Hello, James.

Hi, Adam.

both of which originated from the County Durham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne areas, and became British TV legends in their heyday.

Maddy's father Tim was raised in a working class family, working as a welder in a factory and also served part time in the British Territorial Army at the age of just 18.

Serving in the 4th Battalion Parachute Regiment, completing 13 jumps during his service.

Tim would then return to England, where his interest in the arts and acting saw him apply for art school, before becoming an actor, appearing in minor roles in shows like Emmerdale, Coronation Street and Soldier Soldier, just to name a few.

I

can't imagine it being very popular if there's a film about what we used to call the Territorial Army or British Army Reserve now, exercises going wrong somewhere in Snowdonia and then being hunted by rural Welsh-language speakers.

because

it does feel a little bit like that so i okay let us let us let's conduct that thought experiment

With this in mind, I became engaged at Christmas 1938.

My fiancé was a bombardier in the AA battery of the local territorial army and, in the event of hostilities, was bound to be called up immediately.

Indeed, his battery had been mobilised briefly at the time of Munich.

The wedding was fixed for August.

The handsome presence which started to arrive helped greatly in this respect and we decided we would spend our honeymoon adding the finishing touches to our new home and garden.

August arrived and the weather was beautiful, though with the usual fog which in Orkney follows any warm spell.

The wedding had been fixed for Friday the 25th, but as that date approached, so also the rumours of war increased, culminating in the call-up of the Territorial Army on Thursday the 24th.

My fiancé's battery mustered at the Scout Hall, preparatory to leaving the following morning, our wedding date, for their war station at Rysa.

We are digging into an incredibly revealing piece of academic research.

Uh, the article is called Recruitment and Retention in British Army Reserve Logistics Units.

Spot on.

It was written by Patrick Burry and published in the journal Armed Forces and Society, which, uh, is put out by SAGE Publishing.

So to offset this dangerous loss of regular logistics personnel, the Ministry of Defence launched a secondary policy, and this was called Future Reserves twenty twenty, or FR20.

FR20.

The mandate there was to expand the Army Reserve to thirty thousand trained troops.

But achieving that required recruiting over ten thousand completely new reservists.