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William Capper

British Army officer (1856-1934)

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 14, 2026
Entity authorityQ8006532
Source-derived summary

Colonel William Baume Capper CVO (6 February 1856 – 15 January 1934) was a British Army officer who became Commandant of the Royal Military College Sandhurst.

Military career

Capper was born on 6 February 1856 at Newbridge Hill, Bath, Somerset, his father William Copeland Capper having been in the Bengal Civil Service. Educated at Haileybury, Capper was commissioned into the 85th Regiment of Foot in 1876 and subsequently played cricket for Shropshire in 1882-83 and for Staffordshire.

He became adjutant of the King's Shropshire Light Infantry in 1886. He served in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, in the 1882 Anglo-Egyptian War and in the Mahdist War in Sudan from 1884 to 1885.

He attended the Staff College, Camberley, from 1893 to 1894.

He was promoted to colonel and appointed as an assistant adjutant general in India on 15 June 1901. He was director of military education in India in December 1902. He was commandant of the Royal Military College, Sandhurst from January 1907 until 15 January 1911 when he relinquished command and was placed on half-pay.

He then served in World War I, following which he was made a CVO in 1919.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “William Capper” is british Army officer (1856-1934). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through William, Capper and British, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1856, 1934, 1876, 1882—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1856-02-06. For this dossier, William, Capper and British is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “british Army officer (1856-1934)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8006532. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1856, 1934, 1876 and 1882.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from William Capper” 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.