X-Nico

26 unusual facts about War Office


4th Light Horse Brigade

After returning to Egypt from the Gallipoli Campaign the 4th 11th and 12th Light Horse Regiments remained unbrigaded until the War Office agreed to reform the 4th Light Horse Brigade in January 1917.

Aeroscope

Hundreds of light and relatively compact Aeroscope cameras were used by the British War Office for the combat cameramen on the battlefields of World War I, and later by all newsreel cameramen all over world, until the late 1920s.

Alexander Richardson

From 1940 to 1941 he was Commanding Officer 26th Armoured Brigade and then became Director-General Armoured Fighting Vehicles at the War Office He became Brigadier General Staff 2nd Army in 1942 and in 1943 Chief of Staff 18th Army Group, Tunisia and then Chief of Staff 15th Army Group, Italy.

Arthur Spurling

Captain Tucker carried written instructions from the War Office that ensured that they remained together as a unit, under their own badge.

Bronaber

During the Second World War, the War Office used a site near Bronaber up in the Ranges for training exercises.

Canal Defence Light

The British War Office showed no interest until 1940, when a prototype was constructed using a Matilda II tank.

Charles Deedes

After the War he was appointed Deputy Director of Staff Duties at the War Office.

Colville Wemyss

On 1 October 1935 he was promoted Colonel and appointed an Assistant Adjutant General at the War Office in London.

Condover Hall

Between August 1942 and June 1945 the hall was commandeered by the War Office and pressed into service as the officers' mess for nearby RAF Condover.

Denis Mackail

In 1917 he married Diana Granet, only child of the railway manager Sir Guy Granet, who was a director-general for railways in the War Office.

The outbreak of World War I interrupted this promising start, however, and Denis, not fit enough for active service, worked in the War Office and the Board of Trade.

Douglas Brownrigg

After the War he became Deputy Assistant Adjutant General at the War Office and then became a General Staff Officer at the Royal Military College Sandhurst.

Faraday Building

The Post Office’s first London telephone exchange served nearly two-and-a-half square miles of the capital – notable subscribers included the Treasury, the War Office and Fleet Street.

Francis Mudie

A number of successful ICS candidates had joined the army before the examination results came out, and the War Office decided that successful candidates should be sent to India as soldiers and could join the service provided that within a year they had passed health, riding and language examinations.

George Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff

He was Assistant Director, Fortifications and Works, Army Headquarters 1909-1911, and Director, Fortifications and Works, War Office 1911-1918.

Hardknott Pass

The War Office used the area for tank training during the Second World War and this completely destroyed the ancient track.

Hugh Elles

After the war, he commanded the Tank Corps Training Centre at Bovington from 1919–1923 and was Inspector of Tank Corps at the War Office.

Manning Coles

Manning worked for the War Office during World War I. Their first books were fairly realistic and with a touch of grimness; their postwar books perhaps suffered from an excess of lightheartedness and whimsy.

Noel Wild

Wild joined the Territorial Army Royal East Kent Regiment as a second lieutenant, before being transferred to the 11th Hussars (via the influence of his uncle at the War Office).

Pattern 1913 Enfield

This experience prompted the War Office to develop its own "magnum" round in 1910, using a .276 calibre rimless cartridge.

Radio Londra

The success of Radio Londons broadcasts was because the British War Office, instead of managing their propaganda broadcasts directly, had entrusted them to a self-governing body, the BBC, which was already well known for its independent journalistic style, with news kept separate from comments.

RAF Condover

Airmen and WAAF personnel were accommodated in prefabricated Quonset hutting and the officers were housed in the nearby magnificent Elizabethan manor house, Condover Hall, that had been commandeered by the War Office for the duration of the war.

Stanley Kirby

For four years from 9 February 1931 until 18 February 1935, he served as a General Staff Officer at the Directorate of Military Operations and Intelligence, War Office, starting as a General Staff Officer, 3rd grade (GSO3) and then as 2nd grade (GSO2).

Transport Board

In 1724 the Commission was disbanded and other Admiralty boards and several Departments of the War Office assumed its functions.

War Department

War Office (17th century–1963), a former department of the British Government

War Office Act 1870

The War Office Act 1870 was introduced in Britain to allow the War Office to be reorganised.All of the various sections of the War Department were brought together in one building, and the Horse Guards were placed under the jurisdiction of the War Office.


British North America

From 1783 to 1801 it was administered by the Home Office and by the Home Secretary, then from 1801 to 1854 under the War Office and Secretary of State for War and Colonies.

Capture of Jericho

General Jan Christiaan Smuts, a member of the Imperial War Cabinet, was sent to confer with Allenby regarding the implementation of a French qualification to the War Office's Joint Note No. 12—that no troops from France could be redeployed to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force.

Flying Elephant

Albert Gerald Stern, the head of the Tank Supply Department, wrote that the War Office ordered the end of the project late in 1916, because it deemed mobility more important than protection.

Frank Newbould

In 1942 he joined the War Office as assistant to Abram Games where he produced eleven posters, including a series Your Britain, Fight for it Now.

John Hay Beith

The work so impressed the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, that he appointed Beith Director of Public Relations at the War Office.

John Sherwood-Kelly

In mid-April 1919, Sir Keith Price, a head of production at the Ministry of Munitions, wrote to the War Office urging the use of new variants of gas against the Bolsheviks in the North Russian theatre.

May Wedderburn Cannan

During the war, she went to Rouen in the spring of 1915, helping to run the canteen at the railhead there for four weeks, then returning to help her father at the Oxford University Press, but finally returning to France in the espionage department at the War Office Department in Paris (1918), where she was finally reunited with her fiancé Bevil Quiller-Couch.

Michael Hicks Beach, 1st Earl St Aldwyn

The sale of his Netheravon estates in Wiltshire to the War Office in 1898 occasioned some acrid criticism concerning the valuation, for which, however, Sir Michael himself was not responsible.

Philip Guedalla

During the First World War he organised and acted as secretary to the Flax Control Board and also served as legal adviser to the Contracts Departments of the War Office and the Ministry of Munitions.

S. F. Newcombe

In 1913 and the early part of 1914, following short spells at the War Office, he carried out a survey across the Sinai Peninsula to Beersheba, under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund.

Velocette MAC

In October 1939 a Velocette MAC was purchased by the British War Office Army Mechanisation Experimental Establishment (MEE) at Cove in Hampshire for testing its suitability for military use.

William Henry Drake

In 1867, Drake was appointed Controller for Ireland, and two years afterwards Controller for Great Britain in the War Office.

Willoughby Gwatkin

In July 1913 he was appointed Chief Staff Officer, Canada, the first to be appointed by the Dominion Government instead of by the British War Office.