Alfred Knox

Major-General Sir Alfred William Fortescue Knox (30 October 1870 – 9 March 1964) was a career British military officer and later a Conservative Party politician.

Military career

Born in Ulster, Knox joined the British Army when he attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, from where he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Royal Irish Rifles on 2 May 1891, and was promoted to lieutenant on 18 November 1893. He was posted to British India where he joined the 5th Punjab Infantry, became a double company commander, and was promoted to captain on 10 July 1901. He was adjutant to the Southern Waziristan Militia, and as such took part in operations in Waziristan under Major-General Charles Egerton in summer 1902, for which he was mentioned in despatches.

In 1911 Knox was appointed the British Military Attaché in Russia. A fluent speaker of Russian, he became a liaison officer to the Imperial Russian Army during First World War.
During the October Revolution in Russia he observed the Bolsheviks taking the Winter Palace on 25 October 1917 (by the Julian or Old Style calendar, which corresponds to 7 November 1917 in the Gregorian or New Style calendar).

He wrote:

During the Russian Civil War, he was the head of the British Mission (''Britmis'') and notional ''Chef d'Arrière'' of the White Army in Siberia under Admiral Kolchak. He barely intervened in the combat operations, as Kolchak was unwilling to listen to his advice and to accept demands about a Russian Constituent Assembly after the war.

In 1921 Knox published his memoirs, ''With the Russian Army: 1914–1917''. In this book he also tells the story of heroine Elsa Brändström.

Political career

At the 1924 general election, he was elected as a Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Wycombe, defeating the sitting Liberal MP Lady Terrington. He held his seat during the 1929 general election and through subsequent general elections, serving in the House of Commons until the 1945 general election. In 1934, Knox argued against Indian self-government by stating "India, diverse in races and creed and united only by Britain, is not ready for democracy."This was a major political issue of the early 1930s. Following the Round Table Conferences of 1930-32, the National Government had produced a White Paper on the constitutional future of India in March 1933. After a further year and a half of debate, legislation was introduced, which became the Government of India Act 1935, creating elected provincial governments in India.S.P. Agrawal and J.C. Aggarwal,''Information India : 1993–94''. Global View. New Delhi : Concept, 1997. (p. 379). His parliamentary questions mainly concerned the Soviet Union and the threat of Hitler as well as the rearmament of Britain during the inter-war period. Knox remained a strong opponent of Communism throughout his career and following the Soviet invasion of Finland, campaigned to give military support to the Finns."...General Alfred Knox MP, who in 1919 had been Churchill's special representative at the headquarters of Admiral Kolchak and who still regarded the anticommunist fight as his special vocation". Markku Ruotsila ''Churchill and Finland: A Study in Anticommunism and Geopolitics''. London ; Frank Cass, 2005. (p. 92)

He died on 9 March 1964.

In Fiction

Knox is depicted in the book '' August 1914'' by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as a somewhat troublesome attache as General Samsonov attempts to lead his army through East Prussia.James M. Curtis, ''Solzhenitsyn's Traditional Imagination''. University of Georgia Press, 2008 (p.70)

References

External links

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Alfred Knox
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Knox, Alfred
1870 births
1964 deaths
British Indian Army generals
Conservative Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies
UK MPs 1924–1929
UK MPs 1929–1931
UK MPs 1931–1935
UK MPs 1935–1945
Indian Army generals of World War I
Graduates of the Royal Military College, Sandhurst
British anti-communists
British military personnel of the Russian Civil War
Royal Ulster Rifles officers
British military attachés
People from Ulster