Who is This ? ? ?

[Ron Clifton]

15 hours ago, Uncle George said:

John Bradbury

His signature appears on £1 and 10s Treasury notes (as distinct from Bank of England notes) issued during the Great War to reduce demand for gold sovereigns and half-sovereigns.

 

Ron

[Uncle George]

18 minutes ago, Ron Clifton said:

His signature appears on £1 and 10s Treasury notes (as distinct from Bank of England notes) issued during the Great War to reduce demand for gold sovereigns and half-sovereigns.

 

Ron

 

There would appear to be a demand amongst some quarters to Bring Back The Bradbury:

 

https://www.britishconstitutiongroup.com/campaign/bring-back-the-bradbury

 

which links to an interesting article, 'Bankers, Bradbury Notes and the Carnage on the Western Front':

 

http://www.lawfulrebellion.org/2012/11/19/the-bankers-the-bradburys-the-carnage-on-the-western-front/

[neverforget]

To stay "in theme" who is this, and what is his Grimsby link to Ww1???

[Phil Wood]

Admiral Lord Charles Beresford - put out to grass before the war, but in previous years recomended use of Grimsby trawlers as minesweepers. 

[neverforget]

8 minutes ago, Phil Wood said:

Admiral Lord Charles Beresford - put out to grass before the war, but in previous years recomended use of Grimsby trawlers as minesweepers. 

Sounds about right Phil. Not a very popular character:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Charles_Beresford

[Phil Wood]

3 minutes ago, neverforget said:

Sounds about right Phil. Not a very popular character:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Charles_Beresford

 

I can't imagine that he was at all popular with the trawlerment sent into the Dardanelles to clear the way for the fleet!

[neverforget]

Churchill on Beresford:

"He is one of those orators of whom it was well said. Before they get up, they do not know what they are going to say;when they are speaking, they do not know what they are saying;and when they have sat down, they do not know what they have said."

[Ron Clifton]

Beresford seems to have made the mistake of alienating the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), Jacky Fisher and Winston Churchill at various times and for various reasons. This was not the way to advance his social, naval or political careers. No doubt a lot of his later attitude was caused by the frustration of these ambitions.

 

Ron

[rolt968]

2 minutes ago, Ron Clifton said:

Beresford seems to have made the mistake of alienating the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), Jacky Fisher and Winston Churchill at various times and for various reasons. This was not the way to advance his social, naval or political careers. No doubt a lot of his later attitude was caused by the frustration of these ambitions.

 

Ron

Nor for the then immediate future what history said of him. King George V must have thought he was OK since he suggested that he be made an admiral of the fleet.

RM

[neverforget]

Politics and personalities played a major role. Beresford was a Unionist, Fisher a Liberal. Beresford accused Fisher of operating a system of espionage against him when he was Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, and ruthlessly crushing all opposition at the Admiralty. However, there were also solid professional reasons for the dispute. Beresford believed that Fisher's division of the forces destined to defend home waters into separate Channel, Home, and Atlantic fleets was potentially disastrous and that these forces should be under a single Commander-in-Chief who would manœuvre and train them for war. 

http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org/tfs/index.php/Charles_William_de_la_Poer_Beresford,_First_Baron_Beresford

Edited 25 June , 2017 by neverforget

[michaeldr]

Just dipping in here and don't know if it has been mentioned before

but I recommend 'The Great Edwardian Naval Feud' by Richard Freemen

 

 

[neverforget]

Just a little bump in case #6839 has slipped through unnoticed: He was, before the war a good marksman, and highly skilled at shooting from horseback.

Joined a MGC at the Western Front, until 1916.

Survived the war.

Edited 26 June , 2017 by neverforget

[Knotty]

NF

Your chap is flying ace William ("Billy") George Barker VC the most decorated of Canadian serviceman. He went solo after about an hours instruction in Jan 1917, went on to score 50 victories, although his VC action saw him badly wounded in legs and arm. After the war he formed an short lived aviation company with Billy Bishop, he rejoined the RCAF but resigned in 1926. He held a post in the tobacco industry but resigned through ill health. He was flying a new design of aeroplane as President of Fairchild Aviation when he crashed and was killed on 12th March 1930.

[neverforget]

1 minute ago, Knotty said:

NF

Your chap is flying ace William ("Billy") George Barker VC the most decorated of Canadian serviceman. He went solo after about an hours instruction in Jan 1917, went on to score 50 victories, although his VC action saw him badly wounded in legs and arm. After the war he formed an short lived aviation company with Billy Bishop, he rejoined the RCAF but resigned in 1926. He held a post in the tobacco industry but resigned through ill health. He was flying a new design of aeroplane as President of Fairchild Aviation when he crashed and was killed on 12th March 1930.

Right on all counts John. Well spotted. 

Picture taken from here;

http://www.theobserver.ca/2013/10/26/william-barker-first-world-war-heroics-deserve-to-be-remembered

[Fattyowls]

Is that Admiral Sir John Cunningham NF?

 

Pete.

[neverforget]

15 minutes ago, Fattyowls said:

Is that Admiral Sir John Cunningham NF?

 

Pete.

It isn't Pete. 

A most fascinating character, he began his career at sea, but spent most of the war on land. After the war he went into politics, and then spent ww2 in the home guard.

His contributions to the war effort were huge, and had a massive influence on the final result.

Described as a genius, he was much feared by the Nazis, who tried to "get" him.

[Ron Clifton]

Is it Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, who became the director of Coventry Ordnance Works and masterminded the 15-inch howitzer project?

 

Ron

[neverforget]

4 minutes ago, Ron Clifton said:

Is it Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, who became the director of Coventry Ordnance Works and masterminded the 15-inch howitzer project?

 

Ron

Not him either Ron. 

During his naval career, he was responsible for several changes which benefitted his crew members.

[Guest]

Blinker Hall?

[Knotty]

Think you have him GUEST, I believe that the photo only shows half and WRH is standing next to his son onboard HMS Queen Elizabeth sometime around the Armistice.

[neverforget]

Blinker Hall?

I was just posting another clue with reference to his condition, whch hindsight seems to suggest that he suffered from a form of dyspraxia.

The man jointly responsible for the interception of the "Zimmerman telegram", and the arrest of Roger Casement, it is indeed Blinker Hall. 

Well played GUEST.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Reginald_Hall
William Reginald “Blinker” Hall led Room 40, the British naval intelligence division responsible for intercepting and decrypting signals.

Room 40 was a highly secretive British intelligence organization within the directorate of intelligence of the Admiralty. Its primary task was to intercept and decrypt German wireless and telegraph messages. It also intercepted some diplomatic traffic, including the infamous Zimmermann Telegram.

Intelligence before the Great War

One of the many unintended consequences of World War I was the establishment of permanent, bureaucratic intelligence apparatuses. Prior to the Great War, spying on one’s foes was a task undertaken generally for short periods, for specific reasons and only by a few, well-trusted individuals. Few standing intelligence organisations existed across Europe before 1914. Those that did were small and of narrow focus. The exigencies of war, however, necessitated a systematic approach to the collection, analysis and dissemination of large quantities of information about the enemy. Arguably the single most important type of intelligence in the Great War was counter-artillery intelligence; however, the most prolific form, and the greatest contributor to the rise of modern intelligence organisations, was signals intelligence (SIGINT). While nearly every major European power exploited this relatively new form of intelligence, no organization better understood the need for systematic intelligence processing or experienced such noted achievement as Room 40 of the British Admiralty.

The success of Room 40 is in many ways owed to happenstance. Within the first months of the war, British naval intelligence acquired three German naval codebooks, all in a unique fashion. The Royal Navy seized the Handelsverkehrsbuch from a German merchant ship off the coast of Australia; the Russians shared a copy of the Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine (SKM), which they captured from a German ship that had ran aground in Estonia; and a British trawler turned over the Verkehrsbuch after catching it off the coast of the Netherlands. These were but three of many codebooks utilized by the Germans. Each was of a different value and Germany would eventually replace all of them at some point during the war. However, early British success at acquiring these highly-classified documents, particularly the SKM, coupled with decades of German investment into its High Seas Fleet, gave the Admiralty great impetus to create an internal intelligence function devoted to German naval activities. The sheer number of intercepted messages and burden of decryption and analysis demanded a standing organization; thus, in November 1914, the newly appointed director of naval intelligence, William Hall moved his burgeoning intelligence staff out of the main Admiralty building and into an isolated area of the Old Admiralty Building indistinctly labeled Room 40.

 Room 40 decoded messages outlining plans by the High Seas Fleet to attack British fishing vessels in the Dogger Bank of the North Sea. The timely interception and decryption of signals gave the Admiralty sufficient warning to dispatch its Grand Fleet, and ultimately contributed to British victory at the Battle of Dogger Bank when the Germans were caught off-guard. Room 40 likewise performed admirably in late May and early June 1916 when it intercepted German orders to move the High Seas Fleet into the North Sea in an attempt to lure the Grand Fleet into battle. Not only did Room 40 provide advance notice to the Grand Fleet, it also provided regular updates about the position of the High Seas Fleet until the Battle of Jutland began, and provided an accurate assessment of German losses after the battle.

One of the greatest organisational and long-term successes of Room 40 was its use of traffic analysis to detect the movement of German ships and U-boats. Traffic analysis was necessary when analysts could not break a signal and read the transmission. Instead, by using direction-finding stations, analysts could geolocate the origin of the signal, and thus identify the location of the vessel. Knowing even basic information about the type of signal gave the British an overview, updated daily, of German naval force disposition. This was particularly important during the U-boat campaign when Room 40 could display the location of German submarines and Allied ships on large maps in the Admiralty’s War Room, and then identify those vulnerable to attack. However, such identification did not necessarily mean protection. One of the endemic problems of intelligence is the critical decision of how to act upon it, if at all. Those few in the British government privy to Room 40 intelligence were anxious that acting on every piece of information (i.e. trying to protect every ship known to be under threat of a U-boat) would tip off the Germans, inducing them to change their communication practices and thus deprive Britain of valuable intelligence. Conversely, others questioned the purpose of intelligence that could not be acted upon. The Admiralty often developed ingenious, but not imperfect, mechanisms to obfuscate the source of intelligence. For example, when Room 40 intercepted and decrypted the Zimmermann Telegram, the Admiralty and foreign office developed elaborate lies, one for the U.S. government and the other for the general public, about how they acquired the telegram. The need for deception was heightened in this case by the fact that Room 40 was actively collecting signal intelligence against the United States.

Ultimately, Room 40 rose to the challenge not only of providing invaluable information about the enemy to the Royal Navy and British government, but of serving as the vanguard of modern intelligence organizations responsible for collecting, analyzing and disseminating a plethora of data within a much larger, often rigid, overly-compartmentalised, bureaucratic system. The success of Room 40 during the war was integral to the challenges two decades later, when yet again Britain turned to its SIGINT analysts to gain an advantage over the enemy.

Sources and picture from here:

http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205357465

 

[Guest]

Yes, Blinker Hall's  achievements are deserving of wider knowledge-but it is not all good news- There are tales, of course, that he went into politics to secure the retention of the intelligence services on a permanent post-war peacetime footing-against both the Geddes Axe and the rise of the Labour Party. The suppression of the Communist Party in 1925-26 and the Zinoviev Letter show that gentlemanly behaviour did not resume with the Armistice-if,indeed, it was ever there. I have put up an appeal for info on another thread regarding knowledge still tucked away-perhaps a War Office equivalent of Hanslope Park- There is just not enough on domestic surveillance  during the War .to have been just casual lack of attention to it.  

[neverforget]

6 hours ago, voltaire60 said:

Yes, Blinker Hall's  achievements are deserving of wider knowledge-but it is not all good news- There are tales, of course, that he went into politics to secure the retention of the intelligence services on a permanent post-war peacetime footing-against both the Geddes Axe and the rise of the Labour Party. The suppression of the Communist Party in 1925-26 and the Zinoviev Letter show that gentlemanly behaviour did not resume with the Armistice-if,indeed, it was ever there. I have put up an appeal for info on another thread regarding knowledge still tucked away-perhaps a War Office equivalent of Hanslope Park- There is just not enough on domestic surveillance  during the War .to have been just casual lack of attention to it.  

The whole espionage thing has always been of particular fascination to me, as my fellow long- term inmates will know.

 Typical of my tendency to make life difficult for myself by being interested in the subject that's hardest to research.

[Uncle George]

When this man "first attended his Sovereign in the official dress of a Privy Councillor," the King "told him how well the coat fitted him." 

 

This chap replied, "It is not the first time, Sir, that I have worn Your Majesty's uniform".

 

"So you served in the Army?"

 

"No, Sir, I was in prison."

 

 

[Guest]

  The white beard and ferocious eyelashes suggests that it is John Burns. Had been in prison, was a PC-though the cartoon may not be contemporaneous with his elevation