Sir Frank Fox

First World War and WW2 Author, author of Breaker Morant

The King’s Pilgrimage

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The King’s Pilgrimage By Sir Frank Fox
An Account of King George V’s Visit to the War Graves in Belgium and France in 1922

In May 1922, King George V took a very small party to the graves of First World War soldiers buried in France and Belgium in the cemeteries and memorials being constructed at the time by the Imperial War Graves Commission. The trip was documented by Australian journalist and soldier Sir Frank Fox and commemorated by Rudyard Kipling in a poem written specifically for the occasion. Despite its lack of fanfare, or perhaps due to its solemn and understated nature, the British monarch’s visit to the war cemeteries was an important moment in the history of First World War commemoration. Since George V onwards, members of the Royal Family have visited sites throughout the world to pay homage to the fallen.

This journey began a wider pilgrimage movement that saw tens of thousands of bereaved relatives from the United Kingdom and the Empire visit the battlefields of the Great War in the years that followed the Armistice.

Kipling’s poem prefaces the book with lines and stanzas from the poem and the speech given by George V being used as epigraphs for the chapters describing the King s journey, as detailed by Sir Frank Fox. Illustrated with 61 black-and-white unposed and evocative photographs of the visits, as well as a signed letter from the King, telegrams and a letter of thanks from George V on his return home, it is a poignant record of an important moment to these moving memorials after four years of death and destruction.

Dr Charles Goodson-Wickes, the great-grandson of Sir Frank Fox and a veteran of the First Gulf War himself, contributes a new introduction reflecting on the importance of this act of understated remembrance and its legacy.

Recently reviewed by Dan Snow´s History Hit:

Dan Snow´s History Hit WW1

About the Author: Sir Frank Fox (1874-1960) was an Australian born Journalist, Soldier, Author and Campaigner who lived in Britain from 1909. Having warned on the public platform
and in the press of an impending war in Europe he was appointed to the Morning Post and was sent as their War correspondent to the Balkan wars.

He was then attached to the Belgian Army and recorded the German invasion in 1914. Motivated by the atrocities he witnessed to the civilian population there, he was commissioned at the age of 41 into the British Army. Fox was appointed O.B.E. (Military) and was Mentioned in Despatches. In 1926 he was Knighted by King George V.

He was a prolific author writing over 33 books, 5 of which books relating to World War One, including the recently republished “The Agony of Belgium” and ”GHQ Montreuil-sur-Mer”.

Introduction by Dr. Charles Goodson-Wickes, Great-Grandson and Literary Executor of Sir Frank Fox.

It was the wish of King George V to honour the dead of the Great War by visiting the Military cemeteries in Belgium and France as soon as this were practically possible.

He determined that the Visit should be simple and dignified, with the minimum of formality and trappings.

Thus it was, following the first State Visit to Belgium in 1922, that he assembled a small but distinguished party to accompany him: Field Marshal the Earl Haig, The Rt. Hon. Sir Frederick Ponsonby, Major General Sir Fabian Ware, Colonel Clive Wigram and Major Reginald Seymour.

They were joined by Queen Mary, Lady Haig (her Lady-in-Waiting) and Admiral of the Fleet the Earl Beatty, towards the end of the itinerary.
Frank Fox, War Correspondent for the Morning Post at the time of the German invasion of Belgium in 1914, had subsequently been commissioned as a combatant and was seriously wounded on the Somme.

After convalescence, during which he worked for MI7, he joined Haig’s GHQ in Montreuil-sur-Mer. His name probably came to the fore to write this narrative of the King’s Pilgrimage, through his association with Ware on the Morning Post, before the latter championed the formation of the Imperial War Graves Commission.

The result is this book, full of evocative and unposed photographs, preceded by Rudyard Kipling’s verse.

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“Marks the full stop to the Great War. It is a very special book”

Field Marshal the Lord Bramall

For Press please contact Flora Ross [email protected]

The Times includes GHQ in its “Six of the best First World War reads”

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Buy the book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0992890128/
Allan Mallinson from The Times reviewed new books on the wider aspects of the Great War. We were delighted that G.H.Q. was selected as one of the 6 books.

Sir Frank Fox’s G.H.Q., first published in 1920 and now reissued in a limited edition by his great-grandson, Charles Goodson- Wickes (Beaumont Fox, £25), is an absorb­ing study of Haig’s chateau-HQ at Montreuil-sur-Mer. Fox — a journalist and tempo­rary soldier — paints a vivid picture of the comprehensive com­plexity of the British Ex­peditionary Force, with organisational dia­grams, statistics and vi­gnettes of day-to-day life.

The BEF, or more correctly in the later stages of the war the British Armies in France, was the largest organisa­tion the country has ever maintained abroad — more than two million men. Montreuil-sur-Mer began to look as much like a colonial administration as an operational headquarters, with di­rectors of agricultural production (Brigadier-General the Earl of Radnor) and forestry (Brigadier-General Lord Lovat), controllers of labour, of salvage and of canteens, subordinate directors of docks, of inland water transport, of roads, and of light railways. The list goes on, testimony to the industrialisa­tion of the war and the sheer scale of Haig’s purview. For these and other reasons, on taking over as C-in-C at the end of 1915 he had moved GHQ back from Saint-Omer to Montreuil, almost on the Channel coast, placing him 70 miles and more behind the front line.

Fox writes: “It was the job of General Headquarters to try to see the war as a whole.” In fact. Haig found it difficult to see strategically beyond the Western Front or the tactical reality of the war in the trenches. Fox’s fascinating book explains a lot.”

The scan of the article is below and the link to the website here (summary only available to non-subscribers of The Times):
Six of the best First World War reads

You can also download the PDF of the article here: Six of the best First World War reads

The RUSI Journal review essay including G.H.Q.

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Excerpt from THE SOMME A CONTEST OF ENDURANCE, Review Essay by Jack Spence:

So much for context. Two of the authors under review — Frank Fox and Taylor Downing — provide specialised treatment of two subjects: the work of General Headquarters (GHQ) based at Montreuil-sur-Mer and the impact of shell shock on those who suffered and those in authority who had to deal with it.

Frank Fox, whose G.H.Q. (Montreuil-sur-Mer) was first published in 1920, was severely wounded on the Somme, but after a year’s convalescence returned to France as a staff officer at Montreuil.
The work was reissued in 2015 by Charles Goodson-Wickes, the author’s great-grandson and literary executor.
The reader is offered a meticulous and well—researched account of the vast bureaucratic structure and process required by Britain to prosecute the war successfully. This was, in many ways, a miracle of improvisation that governments of the past had never had to deal with on this scale, given the logistic requirements of modern war. In effect, the war, at one level of analysis, was a bureaucratic contest between states, all of which were seeking to mobilise and destroy the enemy’s ability to wage war most effectively. The author considers this in superb detail: for example, how munitions were supplied and despatched to the front; how medical facilities were organised; how horses and mules were cared for; and how a rudimentary educational system was devised. Fox is also illuminating on Secretary of State for War Horatio Kitchener’s New Army, providing an altogether fascinating account of the supporting role of the Dominions and the US. This argument is supported by a wealth of statistical information, photographs and a helpful chart detailing the various directorates and inspectorates controlled by the quartermaster general. Finally, there is a delicately phrased account of GHQ at play: ’monkish in its denial of some pleasures, rigid in discipline, exacting in work, but neither austere nor anxious’.7

This is an important text full of insight into how the British organised themselves for war.

7Frank Fox, G.H.Q. (Montreuil—sur-Mer)
(Beaumont Fox, 2015), p. 1.

(The RUSI Journal Dec 2016, Vol.161)
Buy the book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0992890128/

Rupert Edis on GHQ for “History Today”

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History Today book review
Sir Frank Fox is a largely forgotten figure whose life reads like a character from a John Buchan novel. A “strikingly handsome” Australian émigré to England, who became a doyen of Fleet Street, as a war correspondent he witnessed German atrocities against Belgian civilians in 1914 which so appalled him that he signed up – lying about his age – at 41.

Grievously injured at the Somme, he worked for a time at MI7, focused on bringing the USA into the war, before charming his way to a staff officer post at General Headquarters (GHQ) in Montreuil-sur-Mer, northern France.

GHQ was the ‘brain’ of the huge British expeditionary effort in France and Belgium, responsible for strategy, coordination with Allied governments, and administration.

This contemporary account, re-published to coincide with the centenary of GHQ’s move to Montreuil under Haig, is a fascinating reminder of the unsung but vital role of logistics in military success or failure – “for every rifleman in the trenches there are at least three people working to keep him supplied with food, clothing, ammunition, and on communication.”

The red-tabbed staff officers of GHQ, whose prior experience at best stretched to small colonial wars, suddenly found themselves as the “Board of Directors” of a vast wartime supermarket, transport (in charge of half a million horses, and a spider’s web of railways), laundry and health service which had to match the BEF’s tenfold growth 1914-16.

Fox compares the challenge to peacetime civilian administration: “Tell the manager of the London to Brighton line that next week he must carry 15 times the normal traffic for a number of days, and that it is extremely important that people observing his termini and his lines should not notice anything unusual”. During intense fighting, 1,934 tons of materiel had to be supplied to each mile of front, per day, to feed the war machine.

GHQ personnel led lives of monkish hard work, sealed tight inside Montreuil’s medieval ramparts against the dangers of espionage. Fox, who had experienced both, downplays the dangers of trench life, “not nearly so dangerous as one might judge from the lurid accounts of imaginative writers”, as set against the “fantastic” but punishing work at GHQ.

Work might continue through consecutive days and nights, and some men, tortured by their sometimes momentous effect on human lives, became unfit to work there. Hardly the image of cosy “chateau generalship” encouraged by some historians and “Blackadder”.

There are moments of high tension at GHQ when the Ludendorff Offensive of March 1918 smashed through British lines, threatening the Channel Ports, the conquest of which the author estimated could have extended the war by another ten years. GHQ worked then with the French on defensive preparations to destroy Calais, Boulogne and Dunkirk and flood the Pas de Calais from the sea, which would have made “this great province a desert for two generations”.

From March 1918 until the Armistice, GHQ was subsumed under the overall command of the French Généralissime Marshal Foch, but continued to play its crucial role in the complex strategic and logistic planning for the ultimate defeat of the German Army.

This charming account, sometimes disjointed and written in the manner and language of its time, which will not please all modern readers, gives rare perspective on GHQ’s wartime operations. Its example 1916-18 (the author also reminds us that Montreuil was a jump off point for the Roman invasion of Britain, and “lay almost in sight” of Agincourt and Crecy) demonstrates the need for a flexible, bilateral approach to meet changing circumstances – at least in military and security affairs – rather than the over-idealistic “ever closer union” required by some of Britain’s current allies.
Buy the book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kings-Pilgrimage…/dp/0992890160/