''SOLDIER Magazine'', the official monthly publication of the
British Army
The British Army is the principal land warfare force of the United Kingdom, a part of the British Armed Forces along with the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. , the British Army comprises 79,380 regular full-time personnel, 4,090 Gurk ...
, is produced by an in-house team and published by the
Ministry of Defence
{{unsourced, date=February 2021
A ministry of defence or defense (see spelling differences), also known as a department of defence or defense, is an often-used name for the part of a government responsible for matters of defence, found in states ...
. It strives to offer an effective means of communication aimed primarily at junior ranks but also of interest to all ranks of the British Army, cadets and the wider military community, including veterans and members of the public with an interest in militaria.
Its objectives include providing a channel of welfare information; promoting the British Army's image internally and externally; and contributing to the upkeep of morale within the Service.
Tri-annual independent readership research (by the Army Management Consultancy Services) of its core audience has produced strong evidence that most officers and soldiers read some of the magazine, and that some officers and soldiers read most of the magazine. The publication's robust and oversubscribed correspondence pages, which allow serving personnel to air grievances, criticise procedure and raise areas of concern, further indicate that the readership is genuinely engaged with the magazine.
The magazine is distributed free to serving personnel (70,000 copies), but paid-for subscriptions – an unusual requirement for a government-sponsored publication – have risen year-on-year, most recently by 2 per cent. SOLDIER subscribers number 2,627 (), with an additional 4,514 copies sold through newsagents in the UK. About 15,000 visitors from 85 countries read the magazine online each month, taking away a positive impression of the British Army.
In January 2008, a free-access digital edition of SOLDIER was launched on the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
.
The range of coverage includes news sections; features; celebrity interviews; sport; music, book and games reviews; and, crucially, a controversial warts-and-all correspondence section, in which military personnel are invited to have their say. After some initial misgivings about "washing dirty linen in public" the Army's
chain of command
A command hierarchy is a group of people who carry out orders based on others' authority within the group. It can be viewed as part of a power structure, in which it is usually seen as the most vulnerable and also the most powerful part.
Milit ...
is now fully signed up to the section, regarding it both as a valuable pressure valve for serving personnel with grievances, and confirmation of issues flagged up by the MOD's independent Continuous Attitude Surveys and the Chief of the General Staff's Briefing Team.
Tapes and CDs of the magazine produced by the
Talking Newspapers organisation are used for English language tutoring of
Gurkha
The Gurkhas or Gorkhas (), with endonym Gorkhali ), are soldiers native to the Indian Subcontinent, chiefly residing within Nepal and some parts of Northeast India.
The Gurkha units are composed of Nepalis and Indian Gorkhas and are recruit ...
recruits, and the magazine is extensively used as a language learning aid by
British Council
The British Council is a British organisation specialising in international cultural and educational opportunities. It works in over 100 countries: promoting a wider knowledge of the United Kingdom and the English language (and the Welsh lan ...
teachers instructing former Soviet Bloc military personnel under the British Government's
Partnership for Peace
The Partnership for Peace (PfP; french: Partenariat pour la paix) is a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) program aimed at creating trust between the member states of NATO and other states mostly in Europe, including post-Soviet states; ...
initiative.
History
Given the go-ahead by
Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery as a morale-boosting magazine for
British Liberation Army
The British Liberation Army (BLA) was the official name given to the British Army forces which fought on the Western Front of the Second World War, between the Invasion of Normandy and the end of the war. Almost all BLA units were assigned to the ...
troops then fighting in Europe during the
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, the first fortnightly edition of SOLDIER was printed in
Brussels
Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...
in March 1945. It was conceived by Colonel Sean Fielding (later to become Editor of ''
The Tatler
''Tatler'' is a British magazine published by Condé Nast Publications focusing on fashion and lifestyle, as well as coverage of high society and politics. It is targeted towards the British upper-middle class and upper class, and those interes ...
'' and ''
Daily Express
The ''Daily Express'' is a national daily United Kingdom middle-market newspaper printed in tabloid format. Published in London, it is the flagship of Express Newspapers, owned by publisher Reach plc. It was first published as a broadsheet i ...
'') while he was serving in the Western Desert. Its first editor was Philip 'Pip' Youngman Carter (the husband of detective fiction writer
Margery Allingham
Margery Louise Allingham (20 May 1904 – 30 June 1966) was an English novelist from the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", and considered one of its four " Queens of Crime", alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh.
Alli ...
) who, in due course, also went on to become editor of ''The Tatler''. A reporter from ''SOLDIER'' was one of the first to record the horrors of the
Belsen concentration camp
Bergen-Belsen , or Belsen, was a Nazi concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Originally established as a prisoner of war camp, in 1943, parts of it became a concentrati ...
and the magazine's "scoops" included revealing the secret engineering feat of
Operation Pluto
Operation Pluto (Pipeline Under the Ocean or Pipeline Underwater Transportation of Oil, also written Operation PLUTO) was an operation by British engineers, oil companies and the British Armed Forces to construct submarine oil pipelines un ...
.
The publication was expected to disappear as peace and normality returned, but survived to become the house magazine of the entire British Army. As the Armed Forces reduced in size after the War, so the magazine's circulation declined to fewer than 20,000 by the end of the 1980s. It was radically redesigned in October 1997 and changed from fortnightly to monthly publication. It is printed by Wyndeham (Roche).
Awards
Since switching in October 1997 from fortnightly production to an expanded monthly aimed broadly at a younger audience, ''SOLDIER'' was named in 1998, 2000 and 2005 as the best internal magazine in Britain by the British Association of Communicators in Business (CiB), the leading professional corporate communicators' body in the UK. It was named the best internal magazine in Britain for 2009, 2010 and 2011 by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and was awarded the same title in 2010 by the Institute of Internal Communication.
External links
* {{Official website
Military magazines published in the United Kingdom
Ministry of Defence (United Kingdom)
Monthly magazines published in the United Kingdom
Magazines established in 1945
British Army mass media
1945 establishments in the United Kingdom