Edwin Alderson
British and Canadian First World War general (1859–1927)
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. He was educated at Ipswich School.
Early military career
Aged 17, 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.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edwin Alderson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.