Hubert Huddleston
Sir Hubert Jervoise Huddleston, was a senior British Army officer who served as General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland District in 1940.
Military career
Educated at Felsted School and Bedford School, Huddleston joined the British Army and was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Coldstream Guards in 1898. He then served in the Second Boer War. He took part in operations in the Orange Free State from April to May 1900, and the Transvaal in May and June, including actions near Johannesburg and at the Battle of Diamond Hill. During the war he transferred to the Dorsetshire Regiment as a second lieutenant on 26 May 1900, and was promoted to lieutenant on 19 November 1901. He was mentioned in despatches for actions in December 1901. He stayed in South Africa throughout the war, which ended in May 1902 with the Treaty of Vereeniging. Four months later, he left Cape Town with other officers and men of the 2nd Battalion, Dorset Regiment on the SS German and arrived at Southampton in late October, when they were posted to Portland.Huddleston also served in the First World War, including in the operation in 1916 against Sultan Ali Dinar of Darfur, which resulted in the province being formally incorporated into the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium and end of its monarchy. He became General Officer Commanding Sudan in 1924. He was then appointed Commandant of the Sudan Defence Force, the local troops, when they were established a year later. He was appointed commander of the 14th [Infantry Brigade (United Kingdom)|14th Infantry Brigade] in 1930 and, after becoming a major general in April 1933, and colonel of the Dorsetshire Regiment in July 1933, then joined Eastern Command in India in 1934. He became commander of the Baluchistan District in Western Command, India, in 1935. He was appointed Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of the Royal Hospital Chelsea and was then briefly GOC Northern Ireland District from April to July 1940 before being appointed Governor General of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan later that year. He retired from that post in 1947, under pressure from the Foreign Office, after insisting on Sudan's rights to independence from Egypt during disturbances over the future of the Condominium in 1946.