BYNG OF VIMY

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXI, 29 October 1928, Page 7

BYNG OF VIMY

HOLDING THE LONDON FRONT COMMAND OF POLICE FORCE KEEPING THEM IN LINE Viscount Byng-of Vimy, |ho.famous commander oi' tho Canadians in Franco and former Viceroy of Canada, has tackled a good many queer jobs in his career, but none so queer as the command of London’s 20,000 police in a period of historic transition. > The job is bigger than it sounds. In fact, the Homo Secretary, JoynsonHicks, maintained in tho face of a Parliamentary storm that Byng was tho only man in sight to handle it. And probably ho was right, for Byng is an interesting psychological study and a most unusual man.

Ho was living tho peaceful life of a retired soldier on his modest demesne at Thorpe ]e Soken, a littlo Essex village, when the notorious Money-Savidgo petling-in-the-dark case sent a train spluttering through Parliament i and tho press and exploded a large-sized mine under Scotland Yard and its chief, the former army provost marshal-general, Sir William Horwood. The world, reading the story through the cabled day-to-day reports, laughs, England laughs'. But Premier Baldwin, his Home Secretary and the Tory party learlers do not laugh, for they recognise (.hat the laugh of the nation is a sour one, lacking real mirth. They realise that if something is not done quickly to reassure the island race, jealous of its liberties, and sweeten the relations between police and public, there will be trouble in tho party, and a gust of passion in the country that will swing millions of voles into the enemy camp at tho coming general election. They know that on an issue of police versus the people the latter will win, and they also know that if the police feel tliey are being made scapegoats in this silly business the sluicegates that hold back tho criminal underworld . will slip open and the present figures of 130,00 U major crimes and IJ>O murders per annum will show a largo increase.

Byng of Vimy is tho practical solution of this complicated politico-polioO problem. His job is to “roinspire” the police. Ho has to bold the police fort while a royal commission, with the Earl of Reading, former Lord Chief Justice of England. Indian Viceroy, and once British Ambassador to Washington, in the chair, investigates the whole police system and frames its report. Viscount Byng had earned the repose he was taking' when he was called out of retirement to head London r s police. His active soldiering life covers Hie British campaigns of forty years. He had his first taste of steel and lead charging at the head of his cavalry troop against the dervishes of the Sudan, back in ’B4. The boy subaltern of that day developed, into the man who manoeuvred the 300,000 men of the third British Army in tho final operations which smashed the great Hindenburg line, and with it the iron German back, in 1918. Then there was that memorable viceroyalty in Canada, which, has written a page into Empire history, because at its 'end the issue of Crown versus Colony was acutely raised in the three-cornered clash between Tory leader, liberal leader and Governor-General. A patrician, seventh son of the Scottish Earl of Stafford, blue-eyed, tall, with a body of whipcord and steel, he owes his rise to merit. He has survived searching tests and achieved a unique prestige. He is, incidentally, about the only general in England who does not possess the military mind—with its notable defects in the civil sphere. He was twenty-one when he drank liis first toast to “The King!” in old port in the mess of the 10th Hussars, one of the crack regiments; twenty-two when ho embarked for the Sudan war with the force bound to avenge the murder df “Chinese” Gordon at Khartoum; and thirty-eight when he returned from the South African war, a colonel. There end the stories of most British patricians who adopt the army as a career. They retire with a colonelcy, a pension of £9OO and a paternal or avuncular inheritance or allowance) (or a rich wife) and live happily ever after in a good hunting country." But Byng was set upon a career. He had done fine work. He had youth, energy, ambition, purpose, and little beyond his pay.' He came home, broke away from the regiment dead end by way of the command of a cavalry school, and at fortythree got his brigade and his stop in the' world of general officers. Byng in 1912 got tho command in Egypt where Kitchener was England’s viceroy; and it was in the commander-in-chief’s big, cool house in Cairo, two years later, that he heard the first rumbling echoes of the war. He was too good a man to be left in the Egyptian theatre. Kitchener summoned him home; and, m command of a cavalry division, he was a tower of strength to that first little British army that retreated from Mons, stood on the Ypres line, and after tremendous fighting held the old cloth fown. Byng was “blooded” as an infantry general in the Gallipoli campaign of ’ls. It was wild and desperate work, clinging to the toes of “that damned peninsula,” as the Westerners, who hated Winston Churchill’s Dardanelles strategy, called it. But Byng did well and presently returned to the Flanders front with a new order (Knight Commander of the Bath) and a jump in rank to lieutenantgeneral. In the late spring of ’l6 came his big chance. The Canadian’s needed a commander of a special type. A formal man was no good. A spit-and-polish general would break their hearts. They required a leader who was at once physically impressive, able, strong, a firm disciplinarian, and yet a man who could capture their hearts and imaginations, a general, besides, who would not “get tfie goat” of the citizen officers. The war chiefs took council and chose Byng. Byng was a sjiccess. The Canadians admired his robust physique and the “no

damn nonsense” air about Jiim. They liked his blue glanco, like a sword thrust, his calm deliberation in a crisis and the broad smile into which his blunt, stern Nordic face so easily crumpled. Also they liked his knack of leading them to victory after victory. For his part Byng, a cavalryman, understood these Canadians, a wilder crowd i than the British troops he had always been accustomed to, less amenable to discipline, men with more dash hut less dour obstinacy magnificent storm troops, at their best in the assault. He never made a mistake with them. And ho earned them tho admiration of tho entiro Allied forces by thp operation v/hich resulted in the storming of Vimy

Ridgo, the tremendous bastion from which Byng takes his title name, t. most glorious of all the Canadians’ exploits in France. The feat won Byng, hithertoa corps commander, command of the Third Bntish Army, incorporating the Canadian Corps. He helped to break through; the German line in September, and after the war, went over to Canada, whore he made an immensely popular GovernorGeneral. ' ' V ''' (