Nevil Macready - War Office

War Office

In 1907, Macready was appointed Assistant Adjutant-General in the Directorate of Personal Services at the War Office in London, and helped to form the Territorial Force. He commanded the 2nd Infantry Brigade at Aldershot from May 1909, being promoted to Brigadier-General, and in June 1910 returned to the War Office as Director of Personal Services, responsible for a variety of personnel matters. Also having responsibility for military aid to the civil power, he played a large part in a series of labour disputes and in deploying troops to Ireland in anticipation of disturbances there. Unusually for an army officer of the time, he had marked liberal tendencies, believed in the right to strike, and supported Irish home rule. He was contemptuous of politics, socialism, communism, pacifism and capitalism (unless the employers treated their employees very well).

He was promoted Major-General in October 1910, and in November he took direct command of troops deployed to deal with a possible miners' strike, in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales, insisting that his troops remained subordinate both to the police and to the Home Office and not answerable to the panicking local magistrates. This policy probably helped to avert serious unrest in 1910 and again in a similar situation in 1912. A civil CB was added to his military CB in 1911, and in 1912, he was knighted as a Knight Commander of the Bath (KCB). After the Curragh incident in Ireland in March 1914, Macready was made General Officer Commanding Belfast District and was nominated as military governor-designate of Belfast in the event of civil war breaking out, something averted by the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914.