24 Facts About Edwin Alderson

Lieutenant-General Sir Edwin Alfred Hervey Alderson, KCB was a senior British Army officer who served in several campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Aged 17, Alderson received a commission into the Norfolk Artillery Militia, and at 19 he was transferred to the 1st Foot on 4 December 1878.

Edwin Alderson transferred again ten days later, replacing a promoted officer, to his father's regiment, the 97th Regiment of Foot.

The next ten years of Edwin Alderson's career were spent on staff duties and with his old regiment in England and Ireland.

Edwin Alderson undertook training at the Staff College, Camberley, and in 1896 was sent to Mashonaland as a commander of a regiment of local troops during the Second Matabele War.

In 1900, shortly after the Second Boer War started, Edwin Alderson returned to South Africa to command the Mounted Infantry against the Afrikaner forces.

Edwin Alderson was instrumental in forming British counter-tactics and used his brigade to good effect against the Afrikaners, the troops under his command including two battalions of Canadian Mounted Rifles.

Edwin Alderson participated in the battles of Paardeberg and Driefontein as well as the relief of Kimberley and the capture of Bloemfontein and Pretoria.

Edwin Alderson was mentioned in despatches several times, and received the Queen's South Africa Medal.

On his return, Edwin Alderson was attached to the 1st Army Corps, stationed at Aldershot.

At the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914, Edwin Alderson was, on 5 August, placed in charge of the 1st Mounted Division and all troops in the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk.

When Hughes' representative in England, Colonel John Wallace Carson, secured preferential accommodation for the Canadian soldiers at the expense of a British Army brigade, Edwin Alderson refused the barracks and in doing so, drew personal hostility from both Carson and Hughes upon himself.

Colonel Carson however, who reported personally to Hughes, downplayed the mishaps, and blamed the Division's heavy casualties on Edwin Alderson's leadership, indicating that it had only been saved from annihilation by the actions of Turner and Hughes.

Edwin Alderson responded by ordering all subordinate commanders to prepare reports on the efficiency of the Ross in the field.

Sir Herbert Plumer, the commander of British 2nd Army commanding the front, demanded Ketchen's immediate dismissal, and when Turner claimed that if Ketchen was dismissed he would resign, Edwin Alderson sought his dismissal as well.

Edwin Alderson was not initially aware of the purely nominal nature of his new position, and with it the practical end of his field career, and when he requested a staff car for its duties he was informed that the post did not require one to be issued.

Edwin Alderson enjoyed an active retirement, becoming Regimental Colonel of the Royal West Kent Regiment in 1921, pursuing hunting and yachting with fervour, being an active master of foxhounds of the South Shropshire Hunt and member of the Royal Norfolk and Suffolk Yacht Club.

Edwin Alderson was very concerned that the growing popularity of motor sports would result in the demise of these traditional pastimes and expended much energy promoting them.

Edwin Alderson lived in his final years on a houseboat moored in Oulton Broad.

Edwin Alderson died on 14 December 1927 at the Royal Hotel, Lowestoft of a sudden heart attack at the age of 68 years.

Edwin Alderson was survived by his wife who arranged for his private papers to be given to the nation.

Edwin Alderson retained strong feelings about his treatment at the hands of Hughes and his allies, commenting to a friend that "Canadian politics have been too strong for all of us".

English military historian Alan Clark's book "The Donkeys", a polemical indictment of British General Staff incompetence in 1915 Western Front operations, contains a photograph of Edwin Alderson decorating a Canadian soldier with a medal, captioned "Donkey Decorates Lion", stating he was decorating the unnamed soldier for bravery at the Second Battle of Ypres.

The name Mount Edwin Alderson was given in 1915 to one of the peaks in the Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Canada.