Early Life and Career
Douglas Wimberley was born on 15 August 1896 at 8 Ardross Terrace, Inverness, the son of Surgeon-Captain (later Colonel) Charles Neil Campbell Wimberley, and Minnie Lesmoir Gordon, daughter of R.J. Wimberley.
Wimberley was educated at Alton Burn, Nairn, Wellington College and then the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders in 1915. On the Western Front he served first with the 1st Division and then with the 51st (Highland) Division. During his period with the Highland Division he was wounded and won the Military Cross at the Battle of Cambrai (1917).
In 1918 Wimberley was promoted acting and temporary major and dispatched to Russia and in 1919 was attached to the Machine Gun Corps. In 1921 Wimberley served as the Assistant Adjutant of the Cameron Highlanders stationed at Queenstown during the Irish War of Independence. Wimberley's battalion was regarded by the brigade-major of the parent Cork Brigade, a certain Bernard Law Montgomery to be the best troops available to act as a "flying column" to round up rebels. 1922 saw Wimberley made an adjutant of the 2nd Camerons. Two years later he gained distinction in promotion examinations and was allowed to spend a year at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Following his studies, Wimberley went on to the Staff College, Camberley in 1925, where he was a student of a class of instructors who would lead the British Army to victory in the next war, such as Montgomery and Alan Brooke, with fellow students as august as Harold Alexander, Miles Dempsey, Oliver Leese, Gerald Templer. On 29 April of that year, he married Elsye Myrtle Livingston, daughter of Captain F.L. Campbell RN of Achalader, Perthshire. With her he had one son and one daughter.
After his marriage the still-young Wimberley's peacetime career progressed steadily. In 1929 he was appointed brigade-major of the 1st Gurkha Brigade which was involved in operations on the North West Frontier Province a year later. In 1933 he was promoted brevet major, the same year that he won the Army Quarterly military prize for an essay on recent military campaigns.
He served as a GSO2 at the War office for four years before returning to an active command in 1938 when he was promoted lieutenant-colonel and given command of the 1st Cameron Highlanders, which he commanded until the outbreak of war a year later.
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