Selection of army personnel : development of the DSP / Charles S. Myers.

  • Charles Samuel Myers
Date:
1942?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Selection of army personnel : development of the DSP / Charles S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Reprinted from The Lancet, Nov. 21, 1942, p. 591. SELECTION OF ARMY PERSONNEL: DEVELOPMENT OF THE DSP Charles S. Myers, m d camb, f r s The Directorate of Selection of Personnel was instituted in the British Army in the early summer of 1941, under the immediate control of the Adjutant- General. Its work had been foreshadowed about a year before, when the Army Council decided to introduce selection tests into units receiving intakes of recruits. This initial phase was entrusted to the director of military training, who appointed as his adviser a civilian (later aided by 3 assistants) to devise and to arrange for the application of a 20 min. test in the various training regiments for artillery, engineers, ASC, armoured corps, infantry, &c., throughout the country. Separate, but similar, arrangements were also in force for the testing of recruits in training regiments for anti-aircraft duties. One great disadvantage of this scheme was the length of time needed to transfer an unsuitably allocated recruit from one arm of the Service to another and to procure the discharge of a recruit found unfit, owing to lack of intelligence or mental instability, for any kind of Army work. In contrast to the practice obtaining in the Navy and in the Royal Air Force, it had been laid down by Parliament that no man could be deemed enlisted until he had been posted by the Ministry of Labour to one arm of the Service (and to its training regiment), after his attendance at one of that Ministry’s recruiting centres. The DSP was provided with a staff of adminis¬ trative and technically qualified men and women of military rank to conduct its work. Its institution followed the receipt by the War Office of a memorandum on the selection and allocation of personnel prepared by one of the command psychiatrists of the Army medical services, and of a report from a committee of three psychologists appointed to advise him by the Adjutant - General. Both the memo and the report had urged that the new directorate be established ; that a non-verbal test of intelligence be given to every recruit on his medical examina¬ tion at the recruiting centres ; that mobilisation depots be established throughout the country, to which recruits should first be sent after their attendance at the recruiting centres, and at which a more detailed psychological and psychiatric examination could be carried out before their allocation to any arm of the Service ; that a permanent staff of non-com¬ missioned officers be provided in the new directorate to carry out the routine application of the necessary tests; and that the directorate should be in the closest possible relation not only with the directorate of the Army medical services (concerned with the problems of Army health), but also with the directorates of recruiting and mobilisation and of military training (concerned with the problems of Army personnel). * * The first work of the DSP was to select NCOs suitable for the roul t THE CHARLES MYERS
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