Generals' Biographies

‘Who were all these generals anyway?’

This question, asked by the late Peter Lawrence one spring evening at a University of Birmingham extra-mural class in Wolverhampton, changed Prof John Bourne's professional life.

Most people interested in the Great War are familiar with the names of a handful of senior commanders, French, Haig, Allenby, Byng, Plumer, Rawlinson. And probably familiar with the reputations of many of them as ‘donkeys’ who sent their lion-hearted men to brutal deaths on squalid battlefields, the state of which they were culpably ignorant and from whose deprivations they were comfortably remote.

But what about the mass of general officers in an army of 60 divisions and two million men? Who were they? How many were there? How were they chosen, promoted and dismissed? Under Pete Lawrence’s inspiration, a group set out to discover the answers to these questions.

Identifying the Generals

One of the key elements of the British generals’ project was to identify all British generals who served in the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front between 5 August 1914 and 11 November 1918. A general is defined as an officer holding the rank of brigadier-general and above. The posts held by them also had to be ‘permanent’, rather than ‘acting’ or ‘temporary’. Given these criteria, 1,254 names have been identified. Below are the biographies of some of them.

The Western Front Association is incredibly grateful to Prof John Bourne for giving his permission to use the project's work.

Although the biographies below do not list all the 1,254 officers who held a permanent rank of Brigadier-General or higher during the war, it is hoped that over coming months the number of biographies will increase.

A note on the biographies

The stated rank for each of the officers is the highest rank held on the western front during the war. The 'regiment' is his regimental affiliation (what cap badge he was wearing) on the 4 August 1914, although some officers had - on the outbreak of the war - already been promoted out of the regimental structure. Some officers were non-regulars in the British Army, being Indian Army, Territorials or Dominion officers, or in a very few instances, civilians.