He later commanded a division, and military districts in both Britain and India, but his youth and his blunt approach limited his career prospects, and after being passed over for the role of Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) in 1937 he became Governor of Gibraltar, a traditional staging post to retirement.

He was replaced as CIGS at the end of May, and given a role to which he was more suited: Commander-in-Chief Home Forces, responsible for anti-invasion defences and for commanding the Army in the event of German landings.

As the cost of living in the late nineteenth century was substantially lower in mainland Europe than in Britain, she travelled extensively around the Continent, where the young Edmund began learning various foreign languages.

He then disguised himself as an Afrikaans-speaking Boer, taking a job as a wagon driver working for the German colonial forces in South West Africa.

[16] On its arrival in France in late 1916, the division participated at the end of the Battle of the Somme, before being moved north to prepare for the attack at Vimy Ridge.

[17] He remained with the division through 1917, when it fought at the Battle of Passchendale,[9] and in January 1918 was appointed to an administrative posting, as commandant of the Small Arms School, with the rank of acting colonel.

[21] This was his first independent command, and he threw himself fully into it; for over a year, he travelled continually along the Northern Dvina to keep control of his scattered international forces, at one point narrowly escaping assassination.

The precise level of British involvement in Reza Khan's coup remains a matter of historical debate, but it is almost certain that Ironside himself at least provided advice to the plotters.

Most importantly for his future career, he became the mentor of J. F. C. Fuller, who was appointed a lecturer at the College at the same time, and became a close acquaintance of Sir Basil Liddell-Hart.

Thus, he was appointed an aide-de-camp to HM the King in October, a purely ceremonial position, and early in 1938 accepted the offer of Governor of Gibraltar,[39] generally seen as a quiet role where to retire.

However, after some debate, Hore-Belisha went ahead and offered Ironside the position in May, appointing a corresponding Inspector-General of Home Forces at the same time, both under Lord Gort's command.

Whilst his sympathetic manner reassured the Poles, the visit may have unintentionally given the impression that Britain was intending to provide direct military assistance.

He returned able to report that the Polish Government was unlikely to provoke Germany into war, but warned that the country would be quickly overrun and that no Eastern Front was likely to exist for long.

[46][45] As CIGS, Ironside adopted a policy of rapidly building up a strong force in France, aiming to put some twenty divisions in the field.

[49] Both Ironside and Churchill supported the plan enthusiastically, but it met with opposition from many other officers, including from Gort – who saw his forces in France being depleted of resources – and from Cyrill Newall, the Chief of the Air Staff.

[51] Following the German invasion of Norway in April 1940 as part of Operation Weserübung, the Norwegian campaign of April–June 1940 saw significant British forces committed to action for the first time in the Second World War.

[52][53] Ironside's main contribution to resolving the Norwegian campaign was to insist on a withdrawal when the situation worsened, and he pushed through the evacuation of central Norway at the end of April despite ministerial ambivalence.

"[56] Although Billotte was supposed to be co-ordinating the British, French and Belgian armies' operations in Belgium, Ironside took over the job himself, ordering Gort and Blanchard to launch a counter-attack against the Germans at Arras.

[63] The deficiencies with equipment led to an overall lack of mobility, which coupled with the limited training of the units meant that very few were capable of organised offensive counter-attacks against an invading force.

As a result, the only way they could practically be used would be to commit them to static defence; Ironside planned to steadily pull units away from the coast and into a central mobile reserve, but this was not possible until they were trained and equipped for the role.

[64] He threw himself into the details of the strategy, laying out plans for the static defence of village strongpoints by the Home Guard,[65] patrols of "Ironsides" armoured cars to strengthen the divisions,[66] and light artillery mounted on trucks as improvised tank destroyers.

[72] He was clear in his diaries that he saw the static focus as an undesirable option – "[the] eternal preaching of the defensive and taking cover behind anti-tank articles has been the curse of our tactics"[73] – but that it was the only practical way to make use of untrained and badly-equipped forces.

[78] Another critic was Major-General Bernard Montgomery, who later wrote that he found himself "in complete disagreement with the general approach to the defence of Britain and refused to apply it.

Shortly before being dismissed, Ironside was implicated as a potential military leader for a fascist coup organized by Leigh Vaughan-Henry, intended to take place when Germany landed in Britain.

A fellow conspirator, Samuel Darwin-Fox, told an MI5 agent that:"Italy would declare war almost immediately, that France would then give in and that Britain would follow before the end of the week.

There would be a short civil war, the Government would leave first for Bristol and then for the Colonies, General Ironside would become dictator and after things had settled down Germany could do as she liked with Britain.

After almost two decades in retirement, having survived a driving accident, he was injured in a fall at his home; he was taken to Queen Alexandra Military Hospital in London where he died on 22 September 1959, aged 79.

In the late 1950s, however, a former colleague persuaded him to allow extracts to be published as part of an account of the run-up to the Second World War, although he died shortly before it saw print.

[88] A second volume, High Road to Command: the diaries of Major-General Sir Edmund Ironside, 1920–1922, was published in 1972, edited by his son; this covered the period from 1920 to 1922, during his service in the Middle East.

The book was assembled by Ironside shortly before his death and, whilst it drew heavily on the diaries, it was written in a more conventional narrative form rather than as a strict day-by-day account, with editorial remarks kept to a minimum.