Career
He attended Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where he won the Infantry Sword of Honour, and was commissioned as an officer in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry in 1956. He served in operations against EOKA in Cyprus, and in Malaysia, countering incursions by Indonesia into northern Borneo, in the early 1960s. His regiment became the 1st Green Jackets (43rd and 52nd) in 1958, and was merged into The Royal Green Jackets in 1966, becoming its 1st Battalion.
Jones married Suzanne Leschallas in 1965. They had two sons and a daughter together.
He took command of the 1st Battalion for a tour in South Armagh in 1975, and was mentioned in dispatches. During his period of command, the internal operations of his battalion were exposed to public scrutiny in Edward Mirzoeff's film, The Regiment. He also served with the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus in 1976.
In the late 1970s, he was the colonel in charge of MO4, the office at the Ministry of Defence responsible for Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, when Airey Neave was murdered by a bomb at the House of Commons car park, and Provisional Irish Republican Army detainees undertook hunger strikes.
Jones attended the Royal College of Defence Studies in 1980, and was promoted to brigadier in 1981 to take command of the 6th Armoured Brigade in Germany, his first duty with the British Army of the Rhine. He then took command of a British military team in Zimbabwe in 1983, establishing a working workmanlike relationship with Robert Mugabe in the years after Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, for which he was appointed CBE.
He was promoted to major-general in 1985, and became Director-General of the Territorial Army at the Ministry of Defence. He then took command of the 3rd Armoured Division in Germany in 1987. He received the KCB in 1988 when he was promoted to lieutenant-general, when he returned to London to become Quartermaster-General to the Forces. He was tasked with remodelling the Army's logistics after the end of the Cold War, and continued in that position through the 1991 Gulf War. He was also Colonel Commandant of the Royal Army Education Corps from 1986 to 1992, and of the Royal Green Jackets from 1988 to 1995.
He was promoted a full general in 1992, and became the UK's military representative at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he was able to make use of his fluent French.
Read more about this topic: Edward Jones (British Army Officer)
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)