George Henry Fowke
Encyclopedia
Lieutenant General
Lieutenant General is a military rank used in many countries. The rank traces its origins to the Middle Ages where the title of Lieutenant General was held by the second in command on the battlefield, who was normally subordinate to a Captain General....
Sir George Henry Fowke KCB
Order of the Bath
The Most Honourable Order of the Bath is a British order of chivalry founded by George I on 18 May 1725. The name derives from the elaborate mediæval ceremony for creating a knight, which involved bathing as one of its elements. The knights so created were known as Knights of the Bath...
, KCMG
Order of St Michael and St George
The Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George is an order of chivalry founded on 28 April 1818 by George, Prince Regent, later George IV of the United Kingdom, while he was acting as Prince Regent for his father, George III....
(1864–1936) was a British Army
British Army
The British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdom of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England...
general, who served on the staff of the British Expeditionary Force during the First World War.
He joined the Royal Engineers
Royal Engineers
The Corps of Royal Engineers, usually just called the Royal Engineers , and commonly known as the Sappers, is one of the corps of the British Army....
in 1884, and saw service in the South African War at the Defence of Ladysmith, where he was mentioned in despatches. After the end of the war, he was appointed as Director of Public Works in the Transvaal and was a member of the Transvaal Legislative Council from 1902 to 1904. During the Russo-Japanese War
Russo-Japanese War
The Russo-Japanese War was "the first great war of the 20th century." It grew out of rival imperial ambitions of the Russian Empire and Japanese Empire over Manchuria and Korea...
he was an observer attached to the Japanese Army in Manchuria, and then lectured on fortifications at the School of Military Engineering
School of Military Engineering
School of Military Engineering may refer to a training institution for military engineering such as:*Royal School of Military Engineering of the British Army*College of Military Engineering, Pune of the Indian Army...
. He was appointed the Assistant Adjutant General for the Royal Engineers in 1910, and then the Inspector of the Royal Engineers in 1913.
On the outbreak of the First World War, he was appointed to the post of Brigadier-General Royal Engineers in the BEF, the senior engineering advisor. As the war settled into a stalemate it became apparent that the Royal Engineers would play a significant role in trench warfare
Trench warfare
Trench warfare is a form of occupied fighting lines, consisting largely of trenches, in which troops are largely immune to the enemy's small arms fire and are substantially sheltered from artillery...
, and the position was changed to Chief Engineer and then to Engineer-in-Chief in 1915. It was in this position, that he agreed the formation of the Royal Engineer tunnelling companies
Royal Engineer tunnelling companies
Royal Engineer tunnelling companies were specialist units of the Corps of Royal Engineers within the British Army, formed to dig attacking tunnels under enemy lines during the First World War....
, after a proposal from John Norton-Griffiths
John Norton-Griffiths
Lieutenant-Colonel Sir John Norton-Griffiths, 1st Baronet KCB DSO was an engineer, soldier during the Second Boer War and World War I, and later a British Member of Parliament.-Early life:...
.
In February 1916 he was promoted to hold the post of Adjutant-General of the Expeditionary Force, and succeeded as Engineer-in-Chief by S. R. Rice. He held this post until the end of the war, and retired from the Army in 1922.
Sources
- FOWKE, Sir George (Henry) (1864-1936), Lieutenant General - Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives.