From private to top brass
QUESTION What is the highest rank attained by a raw recruit in any ofthe Armed Forces?
Sir William robertSon was the only man in the british army to rise from private to Field marshal.
robertson was born in 1860, the son of a tailor, and started out as a garden boy and a footman at the local big house.
in 1877, at 17, he lied about his age to enlist as a trooper in the 16th (the Queen’s) lancers, much to his mother’s disgust. He was a voracious reader and excelled at sword, lance and shooting.
by 1885 he was promoted to troop sergeant major. encouraged by his officers, he passed an exam for an officer’s commission and was posted to the 3rd Dragoon Guards as a second lieutenant.
the regiment was posted to india where the pay was better and the cost of living less. Here he qualified as an interpreter in Urdu, Hindi, Persian, Pashto and Punjabi. He left india with the Distinguished Service order (DSo).
on the recommendation of the Commander in Chief of india he attended the staff college in Camberley as the first ranker to go there.
on the outbreak of the second boer War he was appointed to the staff of the british Commander in Chief and on returning to the War office was promoted to brevet lieutenant Colonel and then brevet Colonel in 1903.
He was later appointed assistant Quartermaster General at aldershot with the rank of brigadier general on the aldershot General Staff. He then spent four years as Commandant at Sandhurst.
on the outbreak of World War i, he was made Quartermaster General of the british expeditionary Force and the Chief of Staff in 1915.
Following the resignation of Sir John French, robertson was made Chief of the imperial General Staff (CiGS).
Having seen the politicians run rings round Kitchener, he pursued an energetic policy of insisting that advice from the army leadership was paramount. For the next couple of years there was infighting between robertson and lloyd George as to the conduct of the war, although King George V had a very high opinion of him. Following arguments as to who would attend the Supreme War Council in Versailles, robertson ‘resigned’ as CiGS.
in June 1918 he was appointed General officer Commanding of the Home Forces and then Commander in Chief of the british army of the rhine. With the war ended he was created baronet in 1919 and after various options had been discarded, he ‘joined the list of unemployed officers on half pay’. However, in 1920, on Churchill’s recommendation, he was promoted to Field marshal. He died of a thrombosis in 1933.
Geoff Viner, Fleet, Hants.
QUESTION Does a talking salamander feature in Mormon theology?
mormoniSm is a religion that embraces concepts of Christianity and revelations made by its founder, Joseph Smith.
Some aspects of the religion are highly controversial, particularly its embrace of polygamous marriage. the events surrounding the religion in the mid-1980s were particularly unusual.
From around 1980 mark Hofmann, a forger from Salt lake City, Utah, began producing a number of religious documents including an ‘early’ King James bible and documents relating to the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints.
He managed to sell 48 of these to the church, the most significant being the so- called Salamander letter. this was purchased by a stockbroker called Steve Christensen, a sealer (someone able to oversee a mormon marriage) in the bountiful Utah temple and president of the tabernacle Choir orchestra. Christensen paid $40,000 (£29,000) for the document and donated it to his Church. it was explosive stuff. mormon theology states that Joseph Smith was led to a book of revelatory golden plates which contained the text that would become the book of mormon in 1823.
the Salamander letter was a document supposedly written in 1830 by martin Harris, Smith’s scribe. it stated that Joseph Smith was led to the golden plates by a spirit who ‘transfigured himself from a white salamander’.
this document contradicted the traditional narrative that Smith had been guided to the plates in 1823 by an angel called moroni.
the fact that an angel could be replaced by an amphibian did not seem to faze the church too greatly and the letter was published in 1985.
the story was to have a tragic ending. as suspicion closed around Hofmann he resorted to violence and murdered Christensen with an exploding package.
to throw investigators off the scent, he planted a device that killed 50-year-old schoolteacher Kathy Sheets.
Her husband Gary was Christensen’s boss and Hofmann hoped investigators would suspect a disgruntled investor as the culprit.
Hofmann’s plan worked until he accidentally set off a bomb in his own sports car and police scrutiny uncovered evidence of his fraud. the Hofmann documents were eventually proven to be sophisticated forgeries.
He was arrested in January 1986, pleading guilty a year later to two counts of second- degree murder and theft by deception and was jailed for life.
Annette Boutwood, Halifax, West Yorks.
QUESTION Would a hovercraft work on Mars?
WHile gravity on mars is about one third of that on earth, the atmosphere is very thin. air pressure at the surface is just six to seven millibars, over 150 times less than that on earth’s surface.
a hovercraft on mars would have to generate at least 30 times more power to provide the equivalent lift. it would require a huge machine and lots of fuel, and would be massively energy inefficient compared to wheeled transport.
Dan Abrahams, Nottingham. n IS THERE a question to which you want to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question here? Write to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT; or email charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection is published, but we’re unable to enter into individual correspondence.
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