Edmund Ironside, 1st Baron Ironside
Field Marshal William Edmund Ironside, 1st Baron Ironside GCB CMG DSO (6 May 1880 – 22 September 1959) was a senior officer of the British Army who served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff during the first year of the Second World War.
For other people named Edmund Ironside, see Edmund Ironside (disambiguation).
The Lord Ironside
William Edmund Ironside
Tiny
6 May 1880
Edinburgh, Scotland
22 September 1959 (aged 79)
Queen Alexandra Military Hospital, London
United Kingdom
1899–1940
- C-in-C Home Forces (1940)
- Chief IGS (1939–40)
- Army Inspector-General (1939)
- Eastern Command (1936–38)
- 2nd Division (1926–28)
- Staff College (1922–26)
- North Persian Force (1921)
- Archangel expedition (1918–1919)
- 99th Infantry Brigade (1918)
- Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath
- Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George
- Distinguished Service Order
- Knight of the Venerable Order of Saint John
- Mentioned in Despatches
- Legion of Honour (France)
- Croix de Guerre (France)
- Order of St. Vladimir (Russia)
- Order of the Lion and the Sun (Iran)
- Order of the Rising Sun (Japan)
Ironside joined the Royal Artillery in 1899, and served throughout the Second Boer War. This was followed by a brief period spying on the German colonial forces in South-West Africa. Returning to regular duty, he served on the staff of the 6th Infantry Division during the first two years of the First World War, before being appointed to a position on the staff of the newly raised 4th Canadian Division in 1916. In 1918, he was given command of a brigade on the Western Front. In 1919, he was promoted to command the Allied intervention force in northern Russia. Ironside was then assigned to an Allied force occupying Turkey, and then to the British forces based in Persia in 1921. He was offered the post of the commander of British forces in Iraq, but was unable to take up the role due to injuries in a flying accident.
He returned to the Army as Commandant of the Staff College, Camberley, where he advocated the ideas of J. F. C. Fuller, a proponent of mechanisation. He later commanded a division, and military districts in both Britain and India, but his youth and his blunt approach limited his career prospects, and after being passed over for the role of Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) in 1937 he became Governor of Gibraltar, a traditional staging post to retirement. He was recalled from "exile" in mid-1939, being appointed as Inspector-General of Overseas Forces, a role which led most observers to expect he would be given the command of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the outbreak of war.
However, after some political manoeuvring, General Gort was given this command and Ironside was appointed as the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Ironside himself believed that he was temperamentally unsuited to the job, but felt obliged to accept it. In early 1940 he argued heavily for Allied intervention in Scandinavia, but this plan was shelved at the last minute when the Finnish-Soviet Winter War ended. During the invasion of Norway and the Battle of France he played little part; his involvement in the latter was limited by a breakdown in relations between him and Gort. He was replaced as CIGS at the end of May, and given a role to which he was more suited: Commander-in-Chief Home Forces, responsible for anti-invasion defences and for commanding the Army in the event of German landings. However, he served less than two months in this role before being replaced. After this, Ironside was promoted to Field Marshal and raised to the peerage as Baron Ironside.
Lord Ironside retired to Morley Old Hall in Norfolk to write, and never again saw active service or held any official position.
Early life[edit]
Ironside was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 6 May 1880. His father, Surgeon-Major William Ironside of the Royal Horse Artillery, died shortly afterwards, leaving his widowed wife to bring up their son on a limited military pension. As the cost of living in the late nineteenth century was substantially lower in mainland Europe than in Britain, she travelled extensively around the Continent, where the young Edmund began learning various foreign languages.[1] This grasp of language would become one of the defining features of his character; by middle age, he was fluent enough to officially interpret in seven, and was proficient in perhaps ten more.[2]
He was educated at schools in St Andrews before being sent to Tonbridge School in Kent for his secondary education; at the age of sixteen he left Tonbridge to attend a crammer, having not shown much academic promise, and was admitted to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in January 1898 at the age of seventeen. At Woolwich he flourished, working hard at his studies and his sports; he took up boxing, and captained the rugby 2nd XV as well as playing for Scotland. He was built for both of these sports, six feet four inches tall and weighing seventeen stone (108 kg), for which he was nicknamed "Tiny" by his fellow students. The name stuck, and he was known by it for the rest of his life.[3]
Boer War[edit]
After attending the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich he was commissioned into the army as a second lieutenant with the Royal Artillery on 25 June 1899.[4][5] Later that year his unit, 44th Battery Royal Field Artillery, was despatched to South Africa.[6] He fought throughout the Second Boer War being wounded three times,[7] and was mentioned in despatches in 1901.[8] He was also promoted lieutenant on 16 February 1901.[4]
At the end of the war in May 1902, he was a member of the small force which escorted Jan Smuts to the peace negotiations. He then disguised himself as an Afrikaans-speaking Boer, taking a job as a wagon driver working for the German colonial forces in South West Africa. This intelligence work ended unsuccessfully when he was identified, but managed to escape.[6] This escapade later led to claims that he became the model for Richard Hannay, a character in the novels of John Buchan;[7] Ironside was always amused by these novels when reading about Mr Standfast in the implausibly romantic setting of the passenger seat of an open-cockpit biplane flying from Iraq to Persia.[9] He left Cape Town on the HMT Britannic in early October 1902, and arrived at Southampton later the same month.[10]
Ironside was subsequently posted to India, where he served with I Battery Royal Horse Artillery (RHA), and South Africa, with Y Battery RHA.[6] He was promoted to captain in February 1908, appointed to the Staff in September of the same year, and then as a Brigade-Major in June 1909.[4] He returned home in September 1912,[11] in order to attend the Staff College, Camberley.[7]
Interwar period[edit]
After recovering from his injuries on half-pay, Ironside returned to active duty as Commandant of the Staff College in May 1922.[26] He spent a full four-year term there, running the college efficiently as well as publishing several articles and a book on the Battle of Tannenberg. Most importantly for his future career, he became the mentor of J. F. C. Fuller, who was appointed a lecturer at the College at the same time, and became a close acquaintance of Sir Basil Liddell-Hart. Fuller's views were deeply influential on Ironside, who became a supporter of reforming the Army as an elite armoured force with air support, and of forming a single central Ministry of Defence to control the services.[27] He argued frequently over the need for faster modernisation and rearmament, and the problem of the 'old men' still filling the upper ranks of the army; in the end, he was reprimanded by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir George Milne.[7]
After Camberley he was appointed to command 2nd Division in England,[28] a post he held for two years with little effect or interest – he was frustrated by the task of training an infantry force with no modern equipment – and then sent to command the Meerut district, in India, in 1928.[29] He enjoyed life in India, but found the military situation to be equally uninteresting; the equipment was old-fashioned, as were the regimental officers and the overall strategic plans. He was promoted to lieutenant-general in March 1931, and left for England in May,[30] where he returned to half-pay with the sinecure of Lieutenant of the Tower of London.[31] He was then posted to India as Quartermaster-General in 1933,[32] where he travelled extensively, crossing the country to visit regiments and oversee the Indianisation process. For all this, however, it was the best of a bad job; he was still far from the War Office, and unable to make significant impact on the army's preparation for a future war.[7]
Retirement and writing[edit]
At the end of August, a month and a half after his resignation as Commander-in-Chief of Home Forces, Ironside was appointed a field marshal. He was raised to the peerage in the New Year Honours, on 29 January 1941, as "Baron Ironside of Archangel and of Ironside in the County of Aberdeen",[80][81] and retired to Morley Old Hall in Norfolk with his family. He never received another military posting, and ostracised by the Army establishment,[7] rarely visited London, and never spoke in the House of Lords.[82]
He turned to lecturing and writing books, including a study of the Archangel expedition, and farming his estates in Norfolk. After almost two decades in retirement, having survived a driving accident, he was injured in a fall at his home; he was taken to Queen Alexandra Military Hospital in London where he died on 22 September 1959, aged 79. His coffin was escorted to Westminster Abbey with full military honours,[7] and he was buried near his home at Hingham, Norfolk. He is commemorated by a memorial plaque in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral.[83]
Ironside kept a diary throughout his life, starting as a subaltern at the turn of the century, with the goal of keeping a clear recollection of what had happened during the day and allowing him to reflect on the day's events. These were written directly into bound foolscap volumes, a page or more a day, each night; throughout his life, he totalled some twelve volumes and the best part of a million words. He did not ask for these to be destroyed on his death, though their content was sometimes quite contentious, but did write a will – in 1930 – asking that they not be published. In the late 1950s, however, a former colleague persuaded him to allow extracts to be published as part of an account of the run-up to the Second World War, although he died shortly before it saw print. This was published as The Ironside Diaries: 1937–1940, edited by Colonel Roderick Macleod and Denis Kelly, in 1962; the material was selected from May 1937 to his retirement in June 1940, and published as numbered daily entries with editorial notes.[84]
A second volume, High Road to Command: the diaries of Major-General Sir Edmund Ironside, 1920–1922, was published in 1972, edited by his son; this covered the period from 1920 to 1922, during his service in the Middle East. The book was assembled by Ironside shortly before his death and, whilst it drew heavily on the diaries, it was written in a more conventional narrative form rather than as a strict day-by-day account, with editorial remarks kept to a minimum.[85]