The Dulwich Boys and their Successors

To meet the need for linguists in the war with Japan, the War Office finally responded to pressure from SOAS and in 1942 instituted a series of language courses at SOAS in London. For the first course, which consisted only of men, schoolboys were recruited from all over Britain and they were accommodated at Dulwich College during their 18-month course, so they became known as the Dulwich Boys. Frank and Otome Daniels were the key teachers, but Daniels had to recruit many more teachers as the courses expanded, including some Canadians of Japanese origin, some Japanese residents in the UK who were released from internment so that they could teach, and assorted others. Other courses at SOAS were taught by linguists and phoneticians with no knowledge of Japanese who nevertheless successfully trained students to recognize and understand spoken military Japanese, a skill that they put to good use monitoring air-to-ground communications in the Burma Campaign.