1969: US FORCES Living in BRITAIN | Man Alive | Voice of the People | BBC Archive

"You are our American ambassadors. It is through your actions that the British people are able to judge us Americans as we really are and not as some people think that we are..."

So spoke the United States Air Force officer at this month's briefing when thirty airmen learnt the realities of being foreigners in Britain. The subject was 'Host Nation Irritants': in peacetime learning to live at peace with the natives is the main concern.

There are 52,000 American servicemen and their families in Britain. 8,000 of them are stationed at two nuclear alert air bases within five miles of Woodbridge, a Suffolk market town population 6,650). Those who cannot face the strangeness of it all never leave the base - an island of America in Constable country: gas stations and air conditioning, canned beer and bowling, and big American cars. American schools, American hospitals, even the meat is flown in from Washington D.C.

Those who brave the outside world, the country pubs, the thatched cottages, the world of the village bobby, see the England the tourist learns about. How different from the ad-man's dream do these uniformed American 'ambassadors' find us? How different do we find them? How difficult is it for an American to adapt to the English way of life?

Clip taken from Man Alive: Stars and Stripes Down at the Bull, originally broadcast on BBC Two, 26 February, 1969.

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