John Vereker, 6th Viscount Gort
Field Marshal John Standish Surtees Prendergast Vereker, 6th Viscount Gort, VC, GCB, CBE, DSO & Two Bars, MVO, MC (10 July 1886 – 31 March 1946) was a senior British Army officer. As a young officer during the First World War, he was decorated with the Victoria Cross for his actions during the Battle of the Canal du Nord. During the 1930s he served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (the professional head of the British Army). He is best known for commanding the British Expeditionary Force that was sent to France in the first year of the Second World War, only to be evacuated from Dunkirk the following year. Gort later served as Governor of Gibraltar and Malta, and High Commissioner for Palestine and Transjordan.
The Viscount Gort
31 March 1946 (aged 59)
Southwark, London, England
3
John Vereker, 5th Viscount Gort
Eleanor Surtees
William Philip Sidney, 1st Viscount De L'Isle (son-in-law)
"Tiger"
United Kingdom
1905–1945
British Expeditionary Force
Chief of the Imperial General Staff
Staff College, Camberley
Guards Brigade
1st Battalion, Grenadier Guards
4th Battalion, Grenadier Guards
Early life and family[edit]
Vereker was born in London. His mother was Eleanor, Viscountess Gort née Surtees (1857–1933;[1] later Eleanor Benson),[2] who was a daughter of the writer Robert Smith Surtees. Vereker's father was John Gage Prendergast Vereker, 5th Viscount Gort (1849–1902).[2]
J. S. S. P. Vereker grew up in County Durham and the Isle of Wight. He was educated at Malvern Link Preparatory School, Harrow School,[3]
and entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst in January 1904.[4] As Viscount Gort, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards on 16 August 1905,[5] and promoted to lieutenant on 1 April 1907.[5]
In November 1908, Gort visited his uncle, Jeffrey Edward Prendergast Vereker, a retired British army major, who was living in Canada, at Kenora, Ontario. During a moose hunting trip, Gort slipped off a large boulder, causing his rifle to discharge; the bullet injured a local guide, William Prettie, who later died of his wound in Winnipeg. Gort returned immediately to England.[6] While studying at Trinity College, Cambridge he was initiated into Isaac Newton University Lodge.[7]
Gort commanded the detachment of Grenadier Guards that bore the coffin at the funeral of King Edward VII in May 1910.[5] He was made a Member of the Royal Victorian Order for his services in that role.[8]
On 22 February 1911, Gort married Corinna Katherine Vereker, his second cousin; the couple had two sons and a daughter,[5] before divorcing (1925).[9] Their elder son, Charles Standish Vereker, was born on 23 February 1912, and served as a lieutenant with the Grenadier Guards, before committing suicide (26 February 1941).[10] A second son, Jocelyn Cecil Vereker, was born on 27 July 1913, but died before his second birthday.[2] Gort's daughter, Jacqueline Corinne Yvonne Vereker, who was born on 20 October 1914, married (June 1940) The Honourable William Sidney, later the 1st Viscount De L'Isle.[2]
Inter-war years[edit]
Gort was promoted to the substantive rank of major on 21 October 1919.[21] After attending a short course at the Staff College, Camberley, in 1919 he joined Headquarters London District and, having been promoted to brevet lieutenant-colonel on 1 January 1921,[22] he returned to the College as an instructor.[12] He left the Staff College in May 1923.[23]
Gort was promoted to colonel in April 1926 (with seniority backdated to 1 January 1925).[24] In 1926 he became a staff officer at London District before becoming a chief instructor at the Senior Officers' School at Sheerness.[9] In January 1927, he went to Shanghai, returning in August to give a first-hand account of the Chinese situation to the King and the Prince of Wales. He returned home to be a staff officer at Headquarters 4th Infantry Division at Colchester in July 1927.[9]
In June 1928, Gort was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.[25] He went on to command the Guards Brigade for two years from 1930 before overseeing training in India with the temporary rank of brigadier.[26] In 1932, he took up flying, buying the de Havilland Moth aircraft Henrietta and being elected chairman of the Household Brigade Flying Club. On 25 November 1935, he was promoted, at the relatively young age (in peacetime, where promotion was painfully slow) of 49,[27] to major-general.[28] He returned to the Staff College in 1936 as its Commandant.[9][27]
In May 1937, Gort was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath.[29] In September 1937, he became Military Secretary to the War Minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha, with the temporary rank of lieutenant-general.[30] On 6 December 1937, as part of a purge by Hore-Belisha of senior officers,[31] Gort was appointed to the Army Council,[32] made a general and replaced Field Marshal Sir Cyril Deverell as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS).[33] On 1 January 1938, he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath.[34] His appointment was generally well received in the army, although there was some resentment in his having passed over a number of much older and more senior officers, among them John Dill, Archibald Wavell and Alan Brooke, who would later become an outspoken critic of Gort.[27] He was not especially highly regarded for his intelligence and so Major General Ronald Adam was appointed to be Gort's Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff.[27]
As CIGS, Gort advocated the primacy of building a land army and defending France and the Low Countries over Imperial defence after France had said she would not be able on her own to defend herself against a German attack.[35]
On 2 December 1938 Gort submitted a report on the readiness of the British Army. He observed that Nazi Germany, as a result of the acquisition of Czechoslovakia, was in a stronger position than the previous year and that as a result of the government's decision in 1937 to create a "general purpose" army, Britain lacked the necessary forces for the defence of France.[36]
On 21 December Gort recommended to the Chiefs of Staff that Britain would need to help France defend the Netherlands and Belgium and that for that purpose the British Army needed complete equipment for four Regular army infantry divisions and two mobile armoured divisions, with the Territorial army armed with training equipment and then war equipment for four divisions.[37] The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Roger Backhouse, replied that Britain's continental commitment might not be a limited liability. Gort replied: "Lord Kitchener had clearly pointed out that no great country can wage a 'little' war". He also attacked as a fallacy the theory of strategic mobility by the use of seapower because in modern war land transport was faster and cheaper than transport by sea. The experience of David Lloyd George's 1917 Alexandretta project "proved that [maritime side-shows] invariably led to vast commitments out of all proportion to the value of the object attained".[38] If a purely defensive position was taken the Maginot Line would be broken, and the British Army (with anti-aircraft defence) was only getting £277 million out of a total £2,000 million spent on defence.[39]
Death[edit]
After leaving Palestine and returning to England, Gort was admitted to Guy's Hospital in London, where exploratory surgery revealed that he was dying from inoperable liver cancer.[50][55] In February 1946 he was created a Viscount in the Peerage of the United Kingdom under the same title as his existing Viscountcy in the Peerage of Ireland. On 31 March 1946, he died in Guy's Hospital at the age of 59 years.[56] As he did not have a surviving son, the Irish Viscountcy of Gort passed to his brother, Standish Vereker, and the British creation became extinct.[50] His body was entombed in the Sidney family vault at St. John the Baptist Church, Penshurst, in the county of Kent.[50]