Charles Edmund Carrington, MC (21 April 1897 – 21 June 1990) was a scholar, Professor of History at Cambridge University, Educational Secretary to Cambridge University Press and a historian specializing in the British Empire and Commonwealth, a Professor of Commonwealth Relations at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and the author of a number of books academic, learned and biographical.
[2] When the First World War broke out in August 1914, Carrington was in England preparing for his university entrance examinations and enlisted in the British Army's Royal Warwickshire Regiment, although he was under age.
In February 1915, an uncle obtained for him a commission as a second lieutenant into the 9th (Service) Battalion, the York and Lancaster Regiment, a Kitchener's Army unit, part of the 70th Brigade of the 23rd Division, where his job was to train his platoon.
He spent six months in the trenches in a relatively quiet sector of the Western Front at Gommecourt before being transferred to the Battle of the Somme in July 1916.
[3] He also features in the BBC film clip, ″The voices behind They Shall Not Grow Old″[4] After being demobilised in 1919, he finished his education at Christ Church, Oxford, studying history.
He rejoined the British Army in the Second World War, serving as a liaison officer with the Royal Air Force and as Lt. Col. General Staff (1941–45).
Carrington left Cambridge in 1954 to become Professor of Commonwealth Relations at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (the RIIA - Chatham House), a post he held until 1962.
[9] He wrote positively of the effect of Army training on recruits[10] When the 1960s saw a more critical attitude of the War, expressed in Alan Clark's book The Donkeys and Joan Littlewood's play Oh, What a Lovely War!, Carrington praised the historian John Terraine's defence of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front, and the record of the British Army.