Dismissal of Henry Sclater

On 21 February 1916 Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Sclater stepped down as Adjutant-General to the Forces, one of the most important posts in the British Army. At the War Office, the British ministry of war, the Adjutant-General headed the department responsible for men: reinforcements, recruiting, discipline and personnel matters. As Second Military Member of the Army Council he belonged to the army’s inner leadership. The British chronology of the war calls his post “Adjutant-General to the Home Forces”, but in reality it covered the whole army.

Sclater, born in 1855, was a gunner. During the Second Boer War he served on the artillery staff in South Africa, and Lord Kitchener wrote of him in 1902 as an exceptionally valuable staff officer. He was later Director of Artillery at the War Office, Quartermaster-General in India and commander of the division at Quetta. He became Adjutant-General in April 1914, succeeding General Spencer Ewart, who had resigned after the so-called Curragh incident. In March 1914 officers stationed in Ireland had declared that they would rather leave the army than use force against the opponents of Home Rule in Ulster, and the assurances given to calm them cost several senior officials and generals their posts.

The war broke out a few months later, and it was on Sclater’s department that the burden of the rapid expansion of the army in 1914 fell. He was short of experienced men. Many officers who had worked at the War Office before the war had gone, in accordance with the mobilisation plans, to the staff of the British Expeditionary Force, and their successors had to learn the work of the office in the middle of a war.

The sources give no official reason for the change. It coincided, however, with the reorganisation that General William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff since December 1915, was carrying out at the War Office. According to the memoirs of Sclater’s successor, Robertson considered that the machinery of the War Office was far from efficient, and the Adjutant-General’s most important task was now to be finding men for the army. Conscription was just coming into force, and the needs of the front were growing.

Sclater’s successor was General Sir Nevil Macready, until then Adjutant-General of the expeditionary force in France. According to his memoirs he took over from Sclater on 21 February itself, while the formal appointment is dated 22 February. Sclater was not put out to grass: on 8 March 1916 he took over Southern Command in England, which he held until 1919. In the same year he was promoted to general, and in 1922 he retired.