Edwin Alderson

Lieutenant General Sir Edwin Alfred Hervey Alderson, KCB (8 April 1859 – 14 December 1927) was a senior British Army officer who served in several campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1915 to 1916 during the First World War he commanded the Canadian Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, during which time it saw heavy fighting.

Early life

Born in 1859 in Capel St Mary, a village in Suffolk, Edwin Alderson was the son of Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Mott Alderson and his wife Catherine Harriett Swainson.Alderson, Sir Edwin Alfred Hervey
''Dictionary of Canadian Biography'' article by Desmond Morton, Retrieved 5 November 2007 He attended Ipswich School from 1873 to 1876.

Early military career

At 17 years of age Alderson received a commission into the Norfolk Artillery Militia, and at 19 he was transferred to the 1st Foot (later Royal Scots Regiment) on 4 December 1878. He transferred again ten days later, replacing a promoted officer, to his father's regiment, the 97th (The Earl of Ulster's) Regiment of Foot (soon to become a battalion of the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment). Joining the regiment in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Alderson was soon transferred to Gibraltar and later South Africa, where he was detached to the Mounted Infantry Depot at Laing's Nek.

Mounted Infantry

The Mounted Infantry Depot was a post where young officers could be stationed, forming a ready reserve of young, educated officers available as volunteers for staff or command positions in African colonial campaigns. It was whilst attached to this post that Alderson saw service in the First Boer War in 1881 in the Transvaal. The following year, Alderson served in the 1882 Anglo-Egyptian War, fighting at the battles of Kassassin and Tel-el-Kebir. Two years later, he was attached to the Mounted Camel Regiment during the failed expedition to relieve Khartoum and rescue General Gordon. During this campaign, Alderson was presented with the Bronze Medal of the Royal Humane Society after diving into the Nile to rescue a drowning soldier.Alderson, Brig-Gen Edwin Alfred Hervey
''Anglo-African Who's Who and Biographical Sketchbook, 1907'', Walter H. Willis, Retrieved 12 November 2007 For his service in these campaigns, Alderson was promoted to Captain and was stationed at Aldershot with the European Mounted Infantry Depot. The same year he married the daughter of the vicar of Syresham, Northamptonshire, a Miss Alice Mary Sergeant.

The next ten years of Alderson's career were spent on staff duties and with his old regiment in England and Ireland. He also 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. Following the campaign's successful conclusion he returned to Aldershot and published his first book, ''"With the Mounted Infantry and the Mashonaland Field Force, 1896"'', an account of the war and a thesis on the tactical uses of mounted infantry. A second book on military tactics followed in 1898 called ''The Counter-attack''. His third book, ''"Pink and scarlet"'' was published in 1900 and was another tactical treatise concerning the relationship between fox-hunting and the cavalry, and the connection that these gentlemanly and military concerns had in training young officers and developing innovations in cavalry tactics. In 1908, he released a compilation of notes made on campaign entitled ''Lessons from 100 notes made in peace and war''.

Second Boer War

In 1900, shortly after the outbreak of the Second Boer War, Alderson returned to South Africa to command the Mounted Infantry against the Afrikaner forces. His experience with mounted infantry made him suitable for this role in fighting the highly mobile horsed Boer Commandos, as they moved in the latter part of the conflict to a strategy of hit and run attacks upon the British Expeditionary Force in South Africa. 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. The force was under the overall command of experienced British soldier Edward Hutton, previously General-Officer-Commanding the Canadian Militia, who became a lifelong friend of Alderson's. Among the Canadian troopers Alderson was a popular commander, being preferred to the tactless Hutton by the Commander of the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles, and in 1901 the then Governor General of Canada, Lord Minto, unsuccessfully petitioned the British government to have Alderson brought to Canada as G.O.C. of its Militia.

He participated in the battles of Paardeberg and Driefontein as well as the relief of Kimberley and the capture of Bloemfontein