Education/service
He was educated at Winchester College and the Staff College, Camberley. He obtained a commission first in the Devon artillery. In 1897 he joined the Royal Artillery, seeing service in Bermuda, Canada, Malta, England, Ireland, and India. After Camberley he was nominated to attend a naval war course, one of the first two army staff officers to be so chosen. In 1909 became a member of the home defence section of the Imperial Defence Committee, which was then involved with the general defence of the United Kingdom.
He was at one point the youngest staff officer in the British army.
He organized, and partly financed, a national petition against Home Rule, and helped establish the Junior Imperial League. He accepted an invitation to stand for Parliament, but withdrew when the rules were changed to place officers on half pay if they entered parliament. He signed the Ulster Covenant when it was opened for signature in England.
In 1913 he was allowed to retire from his army commission, refusing to resign with the rank of Captain and £120 per year. A confidential inspection report of 1913 commented that Captain Spender had been led away by a ‘too active conscience’ and had been very injudicious, risking his prospects in life. While disputing his leaving the army, feeling his services were required in Ulster, he sought legal advice from Sir Edward Carson; Carson invited Spender to Belfast to help organise the Ulster Volunteer Force. During a period of leave from service in India he met once again an old friend, Alice Lilian Dean, they were married within a few weeks. After a ten-day honeymoon he and his wife travelled to Belfast where Spender became Quartermaster General of the UVF, based at the Old Town Hall in Belfast, while remaining a director of his newspaper in Plymouth.
In December 1913, amidst widespread suspicions that sympathy for the Ulster cause might make army officers reluctant to move against the Ulster Volunteers, the CIGS Sir John French recommended that Spender be cashiered (stripped of his commission - a social disgrace which disqualified the victim from any further Crown employment) “pour decourager le autres”, but this did not happen.
In April 1914 he was involved in co-ordinating the distribution of the UVF's rifles imported in the "Larne gun-running" incident.
Read more about this topic: Wilfrid Spender
Famous quotes containing the words education and/or service:
“You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.”
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“Let the good service of well-deservers be never rewarded with loss. Let their thanks be such as may encourage more strivers for the like.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)