Smith Dorrien and the Mons Campaign - David Keable-Elliott
David Keable-Elliott is a retired general practitioner, who has been researching the First War for 10 years. Publishing under the name David Hutchison, his first book, The Young Gunner, the edited letters of his grandfather, was published in 2016, and his second, Mons, an Artillery battle, in 2018. “The Doctrine of the British Army, Field Service Regulations, 1900 -1918” was published, under his own name, by Helion in July 2025.
'Smith Dorrien and the Mons Campaign' Relying solely on the evidence of contemporaneous entries in unit war diaries and informed by an awareness of the Old Contemptibles adherence to Field Service Regulations, this lecture presents a narrative of Mons which transforms our understanding of the battle. Horace Smith Dorrien’s coolness and rapidity of thought, under the competent direction of Sir John French, is revealed as the key to the remarkable survival of II Corps at both Mons and Le Cateau.