Archibald Murray

General Sir Archibald James Murray, GCB, GCMG, CVO, DSO (23 April 1860 – 21 January 1945) was a British Army officer who served in the Second Boer War and the First World War. He was chief of staff to the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in August 1914 but appears to have suffered a physical breakdown in the retreat from Mons, and was required to step down from that position in January 1915. After serving as Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff for much of 1915, he was briefly Chief of the Imperial General Staff from September to December 1915. He was subsequently Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force from January 1916 to June 1917, in which role he laid the military foundation for the defeat and destruction of the Ottoman Empire in the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant.

Archibald James Murray was "the fourth child and second son of nine children" of Charles Murray and his wife Anne Graves. He was educated at Cheltenham College and it was from here, in 1877, that he went to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, intent on starting a military career, despite there being "no evidence of a family military connection or any indication of how free Murray was to choose his own career". He was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the 27th Regiment of Foot, later the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, "an unfashionable regiment", on 13 August 1879.

He was appointed adjutant of his regiment on 12 February 1886. After promotion to captain on 1 July 1887 and taking part in the suppression of a Zulu uprising in 1888, he became adjutant of the 4th Battalion, the Bedfordshire Regiment on 15 December 1890.

Murray attended the Staff College, Camberley from 1897 to 1898 and was promoted while there to major on 1 June 1898. While at the college he encountered several men with whom he would later encounter in the years leading up to the First World War, most notably Douglas Haig and Edmund Allenby, who attended from the years 1896 to 1897, and William Robertson. It was also here where Murray gained his nickname of "Old Archie".

He served in the Second Boer War as deputy assistant adjutant general for intelligence in Natal from 9 October 1899 and then as chief of staff to the commander there. He took part in the withdrawal from Dundee and then the siege of Ladysmith in late 1899 and became senior staff officer to Sir Archibald Hunter, general officer commanding of the 10th Division, early in 1900. He was appointed an assistant adjutant general on 6 March 1900, promoted to lieutenant-colonel on 29 October 1900 and awarded the Distinguished Service Order on 29 November 1900. He was again mentioned in despatches in February 1901.

Murray was appointed commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, stationed in India, in October 1901, but never took up this position. He was deployed to Northern Transvaal in February 1902 where he was seriously wounded in April and mentioned in despatches once more in July.

After the end of hostilities in South Africa, he returned to England in June 1902, and became assistant adjutant general at Headquarters 1st Division at Aldershot on 3 November 1902. Promoted to colonel on 29 October 1903, he was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath in the 1904 Birthday Honours and, promoted in November 1905 to the temporary rank of brigadier general, upon being made BGGS of Aldershot Command, became a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order on 12 June 1907.

Murray became director of military training, "a key posting in an army that was undergoing substantive reform", at the War Office, in succession to Major-General Douglas Haig, on 9 November 1907 and, having been promoted to major-general on 13 July 1910, he was advanced to Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in the June 1911 Coronation Honours. He also took part in the procession for the coronation of King George V on 22 June 1911. Murray became inspector of infantry on 9 December 1912. At the General Staff Conference in January 1914 he rejected proposals to adopt what he saw as a stereotyped French fire-and-movement doctrine. He then served as General officer commanding (GOC) of the 2nd Division from 1 February 1914, taking over this post from Major-General Henry Merrick Lawson.