Talk:Sir Henry Wilson, 1st Baronet/Archive 1

Archive 1

May 2004

Below text moved here from Henry Hughes Wilson, 1st Baronet, to be incorporated into article as appropriate.

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Field Marshal Sir Henry Hughes Wilson, 1st Baronet, GCB, DSO, born May 5, 1864, near Edgeworthstown, County Longford, Ireland. died June 22, 1922, London, England

• Served in the Royal Irish Regiment.
• Appointed British field marshal on 1919/07/03,
• Chief of the British imperial general staff, and main military adviser to Prime Minister David Lloyd George in the last year of World War I.
• MP for Down after 1921 he was Sir James Craig's parliament's military adviser

22 June 1922 two English born members of the IRA, Reginald Dunne and Joseph O'Sullivan, shot Sir Henry Wilson as he returned to his Eaton Square home after unveiling a war memorial in Liverpool Street Station. Two policemen were also shot as the the pair tried to make good their escape. They were then surrounded by a hostile crowd and arrested by other policemen. They were hanged on 10 August 1922. The assassination may have been ordered by Michael Collins in retaliation for the continuing troubles in Northern Ireland.

External link

• more on the murder of the field marshal

-- Infrogmation 04:46, 27 May 2004 (UTC)

Collins' role

Perhaps, Collins may have been motivated by Wilson's role in trying to eliminate him.

194.46.230.195 22:50, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Further Foreign decoration

I think this would cover the award of a Russian decoration, but the pag is constantly erroring when I try to access it. David Underdown (talk) 11:09, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

References

Motive

Why were the IRA especially hostile towards him? Was it his involvement in the Curragh affair, or some policy he advocated while advising the NI government? Drutt (talk) 13:36, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

The latter; he was the security advisor to the NI govt and became a hate figure for republicans Kernel Saunters (talk) 14:48, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

Shouldn't this be mentioned in the article? His support of the notorious B specials and other loyalists groups, real or imagined, should be mentioned. He was also a vocal opponent of any concessions to Irish Nationalists and disapproved of the ANnglo-Irish treaty. As of now one is left to guess why he was shot. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.56.205.8 (talk) 02:35, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

B-class

This article needs hardly any changes for B-class, only some references at the end of a few paragraphs need to be added. Anybody familiar enough with the article?PINTofCARLING (talk) 18:45, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

I have added some more references at the end of the paragraphs as suggested. Dormskirk (talk) 20:26, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Name of eye-witness

Reginald Dunne was named as one of the assassins, and duly hanged. But one of the three eye-witnesses to the murder is also named as Reginald Dunne, a road-mender. Are you sure this is correct? Valetude (talk) 19:00, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

The road mender was a different person. Clarification added.Paulturtle (talk) 21:14, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

article is too long

This article, while interesting, is simply too long for an encyclopedia entry. Its "readable prose" size is 158 kb, which is substantially above the point where Wikipedia guidelines indicate the article should be split or reduced, per WP:TOOLONG. For illustration, at an average reader speed of 300 words per minute, it would take more than 1.5 hours to read this article from start to finish. Jrt989 (talk) 14:35, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

Happy to listen to constructive suggestions as to which bits should be hived off into sub-articles. An obvious bit for hiving-off would be his time as CIGS which straddles the last year of the war and most of Lloyd George's postwar premiership; if anything there is a fair bit more to be said about 1918 which is thinly-covered in the late Keith Jeffrey's otherwise excellent biography (in the last year or so I've re-read a few classic works on British war strategy of that era by people like David French and David Woodward, discussing how the War Cabinet were getting ready to wind down Britain's Western Front commitment and concentrate on land grab in the Middle East before the German Spring Offensives threw a spanner into the works, not to mention historians like Greenhalgh who write about Foch and Anglo-French relations, including the moment of panic in May/June 1918 when it looked like France was beaten). Having said that, I think it's fair to say that few people other than serious WW1 buffs are going to want to read about Wilson (unlike, say, Douglas Haig or Lloyd George), which is why I took some care to write a decent introduction for the benefit of those who see his memorial at Liverpool Street Station and wonder who the hell he was. The need to pitch to schoolkids & general readers is, IMHO, inversely proportional to the number of daily hits an article gets. But, as I said, open to constructive suggestions.Paulturtle (talk) 17:02, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

In my view the article is long by wikipedia standards, but being similar in length to the article on Winston Churchill it is not unduly excessive, so I would question the need to hive anything off. Dormskirk (talk) 20:44, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

Bicycling Trips?

In the CID Meetings section, it says Hankey scoffed at Wilson’s bicycling trips. What bicycling trips? 213.205.198.85 (talk) 13:23, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

His working holidays, mainly around Belgium, to reconnoitre likely German invasion routes. They are discussed a few sections further up.Paulturtle (talk) 03:26, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

Spencer & Sheffield

Important-looking new book on Wilson, by John Spencer and Gary Sheffield, due out on 31 October. Article may need some freshening-up when this is out.Paulturtle (talk) 03:58, 3 August 2019 (UTC) Book is apparently not published yet, but Spencer's PhD thesis on Wilson is available online, and says interesting things about his role in 1918.Paulturtle (talk) 05:09, 27 December 2019 (UTC)