General Sir Alan George Barwys Bourne, KCB, DSO, MVO (25 July 1882 – 24 June 1967) was a senior officer in the Royal Marines who had a military career spanning well over 40 years, which included service in the two world wars.
[1][2][n 1] In 1911, Bourne married Lilian Mary Poole (died 1958), daughter of Colonel Poole Gabbett, an officer in the Royal Army Medical Corps,[1] and his wife Edith Mary (died 1927), daughter of Major General Stewart Richardson, who commanded the 2nd Battalion of the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry;[4][5] they had one daughter:[1] Elizabeth Muriel Barwys (died 2011),[6] who married George Reginald Knox Ord, an officer in The South Wales Borderers and son of G. Knox Ord, in 1940;[7] she married secondly in 1950, Lieutenant Colonel Norman Charles Ries, of the Royal Marines.
[11] Promoted to the rank of major in the Royal Marines on 6 June 1917, he was posted to France and Belgium on 23 July 1917, where he served throughout the remainder of the war.
That September, he was appointed a General staff Officer (2nd grade) in France, and held the post until June 1918, when he was promoted to the 1st Division with the rank of temporary lieutenant colonel.
His next posting came on New Years Day 1921, when he was appointed a brigade major with the RMA (till October 1923);[9] he was then an instructor at the Royal Marine Depot, Deal, before graduating from the Imperial Defence College in 1931.