20th Century Portraits Catalogue

Educated at Eton College and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst; in 1885 he was commissioned and became a second lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards; after spending two years in Canada on foreign appointment until 1893, he returned to England and his regiment which served in Dublin, London, Aldershot and Windsor; he became the tenth Earl of Cavan when his father died in 1900; retired from the army in 1912 and became master of the Hertfordshire Hunt; during the First World War he took up various appointments, such as brigadier-general and then commander of the 14th corps in France and full general in Italy; throughout the inter-war years he spent time in the USA as a military advisor and became Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1922; he finally retired when his four-year term as CIGS ended in 1926; knighted in 1927 and appointed field marshal in 1932; he moved out of central London during the Second World War but continued to correspond with members of the general staff and worked on drafts of his memoirs; he died of a heart attack in August 1946.