James Edward Edmonds
Brigadier-General Sir James Edward Edmonds, CB, CMG (25 December 1861 – 2 August 1956) was an officer of the Royal Engineers in the late-Victorian era British Army who worked in the Intelligence Division, took part in the creation of the forerunner of MI5 and promoted several spy scares.
The 4th Division fought at the Battle of Le Cateau on 26 August and then participated in the Great Retreat, an ordeal which Edmonds, 53 years old, found most trying, buoyed up only by his pre-war training and belief that it would end in a counter-offensive.
In his unpublished Memoirs, Edmonds wrote that he was surprised to see that the Arc de Triomphe had not been demolished and that he became sceptical of the reports of war correspondents for the rest of his life.
[3] While Edmonds was in Amiens, still under German occupation, a Bavarian officer said "Ve haf beat de Franzmen, you vill be next" (sic).
At the end of the course Edmonds achieved the highest marks that instructors could remember, and was awarded the Pollock Gold Medal for Efficiency and prizes for mathematics, mechanics, fortification, geometrical drawing, military history, drills and exercises and exemplary conduct.
After returning from Malta, Edmonds was posted to Hong Kong with two companies of engineers to garrison the colony after a Russian invasion scare.
The posting was uneventful; in 1888 Edmonds returned to Chatham after three months' sick leave in Japan and sojourns US and Canada, to join the 38th Mining Company as Assistant Instructor.
[1][5] In 1895 Edmonds took the entrance exam for the Staff College, Camberley and passed first again; during the year he married Hilda Margaret Ion (died 1921), daughter of the Rev.
Edmonds felt intellectually superior to his peers and wrote later that only George Macdonogh was an exception, a man who could also understand some of the more recondite subjects, like the decoding of cyphers.
[8][a] Edmonds passed out in 1899 at the top of his class, one of the most successful and popular students of the era, noted for his conversation which had become even more interesting and appreciated by, amongst others, Douglas Haig, Aylmer Haldane and Edmund Allenby.
[9] Edmonds was offered a post in the Intelligence Division of the General Staff, commanded by Major-General John Ardagh in October 1899, ten days after the beginning of the Second Boer War (1899–1902).
The section later took on counter-intelligence and secret service work which entailed the dispatch of a small number of officers to South Africa to study topography, communications and Boer troop movements.
The section managed to intercept Dutch correspondence to South Africa but was prevented from accepting the offer by the captain of a rugby team to vandalise the London offices of a pro-Boer agent.
Edmonds drew up a list of experts in code-breaking and trained junior officers in cypher methods to create a reserve for times of war.
[14] Edmonds attempted to establish intelligence gathering by the British as an equivalent of the efforts being made by the French and Germans, who had been spying and counter-spying on each other since before the Franco-Prussian War.
The growing Anglo-German antagonism had led to a fashion for alarmist literature about German spies and invasion scares, several written by William Le Queux, one of Edmonds's friends.
There were some German agents in Britain watching ports and dockyards but no centrally organised system of espionage; Germany was far more interested in France and Russia.
Even Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, the Chief of the Great German General Staff (1906–1914) claimed that an invasion might be feasible but that supplying a landing force or re-embarking it would be impossible.
[23][f] Edmonds, who in October 1909 succeeded Brigadier General Aylmer Haldane as a GSO1 at the War Office, was promoted in January 1910 to colonel and left MO5 later that year.
Kitchener hoped to maintain public interest in the main series and put the case of the government at the same time as accounts by participants and popular authors.
[33] The Treasury gave way and agreed to finance an official history series and popular single-volume works, written by civilian authors to ensure public appeal.
Edmonds blamed Fortescue for lack of interest, lethargy and ignoring the records made available, bungling the chance to write an exciting story of the BEF by delivering a patchwork of unit diaries.
The Treasury managed to obtain the removal of Lieutenant-General Launcelot Kiggell, Chief of the General Staff of the British Armies in France from late 1915 to early 1918 from writing 1918 Part I and Edmonds agreed, because his work was "lacking in colour and atmosphere".
Edmonds had found the papers in heaps in the floor and apparently summarily sacked the Chief Clerk for refusing to climb a ladder to retrieve a bundle.
Edmonds complained that Atkinson, his predecessor, had let historians plunder the packets of documents and not return items and claimed that it took until June 1923 to catalogue the records.
Edmonds' claim has been challenged ever since, leading to a common assumption that the work is vapid at best and at worst fraudulent, a partial, misleading and exculpatory account of the military establishment.
[46] In 1996, Paddy Griffith (1947–2010) called it an ...encyclopaedic work, transparently individualistic in tone, lucidly organised, wide in scope and by far the best book on the Western Front.
[47]Griffith called the quantity of writing on the Great War "prodigious" and that despite Edmonds being unstable, insecure and having never held a field appointment, he was conscientious, intelligent and rarely allowed his devious and opinionated nature to distort his work on the official history.
In writing the first Gallipoli volume (1929), Cecil Aspinall-Oglander ignored the convention and on the draft copy, Edmonds called his account biased and lacking in the objective judgement necessary for an official historian.
When Aspinall-Oglander refused to revise his text, Edmonds criticised him for ...lacking critical judgement, of arrogant sarcasm and of producing a valueless work which he would one day come to regret.
