Brian Robertson, 1st Baron Robertson of Oakridge
Brian Hubert Robertson, 1st Baron Robertson of Oakridge, was a senior British Army officer during the Second World War, who played an important role in the East African, North African and Italian Campaigns. After the war he was the Deputy Military Governor of Germany from 1945 to 1948, and then the Military Governor from 1948 to 1949.
The son of Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, he was educated at Charterhouse and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers in November 1914, and served on the Western Front and Italian Front during the First World War. He was awarded a Military Cross in 1918 and the Distinguished Service Order in 1919. After the war he served with the Bengal Sappers and Miners from 1920 to 1925 and took part in the Waziristan expedition of 1923 to 1924. Following his father's death in February 1933, he succeeded him in his baronetcy. He retired from the Army in early 1934 to become the managing director of Dunlop Rubber in South Africa.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, Robertson re-entered military service in 1940 as a lieutenant-colonel in the South African Army. He served in East and North Africa, and Italy until the end of the war, notably as Harold Alexander's Chief Administrative Officer in Italy. He was promoted to brigadier by 1942 with the temporary rank of major-general from 1944 to 1945. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery considered Robertson the best chief of administration in the British Army.
Robertson was restored to the Active List in October 1945 as a substantive major-general, becoming a lieutenant-general in 1946 and full general in 1947. He was Commander-in-Chief of Middle East Land Forces from 1950 to 1953, when he retired from military service for the second time to become Chairman of the British Transport Commission, a post he held until 1961. That year he was raised to the peerage as Baron Robertson of Oakridge, of Oakridge in the County of Gloucester.
Early life
Brian Hubert Robertson was born in Simla, India, on 22 July 1896, the son of William Robertson, a captain in the British Army, and his wife Mildred Adelaide, the second daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Thomas Palin, an officer in the Bombay Staff Corps. Charles Palin would rise to become a lieutenant-general; William Robertson would become the only man to rise from private to field marshal going through every rank in between, and become Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the highest position in the army. Brian had three younger siblings: his sisters Rosamund, born in 1901, and Helen, born in 1905, and a younger brother, John, who was born in 1909. An older brother, Hubert, died in infancy. Like most military families, they moved frequently as his father was posted on various assignments.Robertson was educated at Tanllwyfan, a preparatory school in Wales. In 1908, he transferred to Pinewood School, which was then in Hampshire, and was a feeder school for Winchester College. Given the family's financial situation, Robertson's only chance of attending Winchester was to win a scholarship. This he failed to do; but he secured a £39 per annum scholarship to Charterhouse in 1910. The scholarship was good only until he turned sixteen, but in 1912 he was awarded a senior scholarship, and moved on to the Army Division of the sixth form, to study for the entrance examination for the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, the British Army's academy for engineers and gunners. His father believed that this would prove a better military education than the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, which trained officers for the infantry and cavalry, in an Army and a century dominated by technological change. At Charterhouse he joined the Rifle Corps, a school cadet unit that provided some military training. He passed the Woolwich entrance examination in 1913, ranked tenth.
First World War
The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 caused the course at Woolwich to be truncated, and Robertson, who graduated fourth in his class, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers on 17 November 1914. On 29 November he reported to the School of Military Engineering at Chatham for a two-month course in military engineering. He was then sent to Aldershot for a 12-week course at the Signals Depot. On completion of this training in April 1915, his father, now the Chief of Staff of the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, had him assigned to his own staff as an aide de camp. This provided a good introduction to the workings of a military staff. When his father left in December 1915 to become the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Robertson became an aide to the Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, General Sir Douglas Haig, with the rank of lieutenant from 23 December 1915. He was mentioned in despatches on 1 January 1916. As part of the BEF staff, he was able to view the elaborate preparations for, and the early stages of, the execution of the Battle of the Somme.In July 1916, Robertson was posted to the headquarters of the XI Corps as a General Staff Officer Grade 3. The commander of XI Corps, Lieutenant-General Sir Richard Haking was a friend of his father's. He was promoted to captain on 16 January 1917, and accompanied his father on a tour of the Italian Front. The XI Corps sector of the Western Front was a quiet one at this time, but Robertson was mentioned in despatches on 15 May 1917, awarded the Order of the Crown of Romania with Swords on 21 June 1917, and the Military Cross in the 1918 New Year Honours. In response to the Italian defeat in the Battle of Caporetto, XI Corps was ordered to Italy on 18 November 1917, but by the time it arrived the front had settled down, and it saw little action. For his part, Robertson was made a cavalier of the Order of the Crown of Italy. When XI Corps returned to France in March 1918, Robertson was sent to Clare College, Cambridge, to attend a staff school. On completion of this training in July, he became brigade major of the 177th Brigade, part of the 59th Division, which was assigned to XI Corps. As such, he participated in the Hundred Days Offensive. He was made a member of the Distinguished Service Order in the 1919 Birthday Honours, and was mentioned in despatches a third time on 5 July 1919.
Between the wars
After the war Robertson was posted back to Brompton Barracks to complete his interrupted engineering studies. In November 1920, he commenced a five-year secondment to the British Indian Army, on assignment to the Bengal Sappers and Miners, based at Roorkee, about north of Delhi. He assumed command of its 3rd Field Company, with Lieutenant Ian Jacob as his second in command in April 1921, and the company moved to Peshawar in the North-West Frontier Province. In the wake of the 1919–1920 Waziristan campaign, the Army had decided to establish a permanent garrison at Razmak, and to support the operations in Waziristan, construction of a new gravel road was required. Robertson's company was ordered to work on the road in November 1921. The road traversed some of the most remote, rugged and inhospitable terrain in India. The work was completed in October 1923, and was inspected by General Lord Rawlinson. For his work on the road, Robertson was mentioned in despatches twice more.The 3rd Field Company returned to Peshawar in October 1923, and Robertson was granted seven months' leave, commencing in April 1924. He returned to his family's home in Bayswater, where he bought a car, studied for the entrance examinations to the Staff College, Camberley, saw Edith Macindoe, whom he had met at a party in Scotland before his posting to India, and was best man at Jacob's wedding. He returned to Peshawar in December 1924, where he sat the staff college examinations in February 1925. Three weeks beforehand, he was hospitalised with a fever, and did not think he had performed well on the exams. Nonetheless, he was breveted as a major on 13 March 1925, and in April General Sir Claude Jacob, the acting Commander-in-Chief, India, asked Robertson to become his ADC. In June, Robertson received the news that he had been offered a place at Camberley.
Robertson returned to England in December 1925, and commenced the two-year course at Camberley. He married Edith Macindoe on 4 August 1926. They had three children. Staff college training was normally followed by a staff posting, and Robertson was posted to the Quartermaster General's Department at the War Office. After three months there, he was transferred to the Directorate of Military Operations and Intelligence, where he specialised in South America. In 1929, he visited six South American countries—Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay—on a fact-finding tour. In his report, he noted that in four of these countries military training was being conducted by German military missions, and argued that military attachés should be posted to South America. The War Office and Foreign Office agreed, but HM Treasury did not, and the result was that the military attaché to the United States was also accredited to South American countries.
Robertson was promoted to the substantive rank of major on 11 January 1930. In February 1932, he became a military advisor to the British delegation to the League of Nations conference on disarmament in Geneva, along with Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Dawnay and Brigadier Arthur Temperley. His father died on 12 February 1933, and he inherited the baronetcy. The disarmament conference was a failure; negotiations stalled, and on 14 October 1933, the new Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler, announced that Germany was withdrawing from the League of Nations. Robertson's next posting was back to India as an instructor at the Staff College, Quetta, but he decided, in view of the dismal prospects for promotion in the Army, to retire on half pay and accept an offer from Eric Geddes to manage a Dunlop Rubber factory in South Africa. The officer sent in his place died in the 1935 Quetta earthquake.
The tyre factory in Durban was a brand new one, opened by the Prime Minister of South Africa, General James Hertzog on 13 August 1935. Until 1937, Robertson was nominally the assistant to Malcolm Irving, the company's managing director in South Africa, but owing to Irving's poor health, Robertson ran the factory from the beginning. The business was successful, with the factory generating a 12.6 per cent profit in 1936. He became an influential member of the local business community, and was elected Chairman of the Rubber Growers' Association in 1936, and President of the Natal Chamber of Industry in 1938.