Lionel Dunsterville

Lionel Dunsterville
File:LCDunsterville.jpg Lionel Dunsterville
Born	9 November 1865
Died	18 March 1946 (1946-03-19) (aged 80)
Allegiance	United Kingdom
Service/branch	British Indian Army
Rank	Major General
Battles/wars	World War I
Awards	Companion of the Order of the Bath Companion of the Order of the Star of India

Major General Lionel Charles Dunsterville CB, CSI (9 November 1865 – 18 March 1946) was a British general, who led the so-called Dunsterforce across present-day Iraq and Iran towards Caucasus and oil-rich Baku.

Biography

Lionel Charles Dunsterville went to school with Rudyard Kipling at The United Services College, a public school later absorbed into Haileybury and Imperial Service College, which prepared British young men for careers in Her Majesty's Army. He served as the inspiration for the character "Stalky" in Kipling's novel Stalky & Co. He was also uncle to H.D. Harvey-Kelly, the first Royal Flying Corps pilot to land in France in World War I.

He was commissioned into the British Army infantry in 1884. Later he transferred to the colonial Indian Army and served on the North-West Frontier, in Waziristan and in China.

In the First World War he held a posting in India. At the end of 1917 the Army appointed Dunsterville to lead an Allied force of under 1,000 Australian, British, Canadian and New Zealand troops, drawn from the Mesopotamian and Western Fronts, accompanied by armoured cars, from Hamadan some 350 km across Qajar Persia. His mission was to gather information, train and command local forces, and prevent the spread of German propaganda. On his way to Enzeli he also fought Mirza Kuchik Khan and his Jangali forces in Manjil.

Dunsterville was assigned to occupy the key oil-field and port of Baku, held by the Centro Caspian Dictatorship. However, the British and their allies had to abandon Baku on 14 September 1918 in the face of an onslaught by 14,000 Turkish troops, who took the city the next day. The Allies regained Baku within two months as a result of the Turkish armistice of 30 October 1918.

Promoted to major-general in 1918, Dunsterville died in 1946.

Sources

• Encyclopaedia of the First World War- Who's Who

References

• Stalky's Reminiscences by Major-General L. C. Dunsterville (London: 1928; re-issued under title Stalky's Adventures in 1941)
• Something of myself by Rudyard Kipling
• Stalky and Co. by Rudyard Kipling
• S. P. Menefee, "Dunsterville, Lionel Charles," in H. C. G. Mathews and Brian Harrison (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 17 (2004): pp. 361–63.

External links

• Online version of Stalky & Co.
• The Adventures of Dunsterforce by L.C. Dunsterville
• The Diaries of General Lionel Dunsterville
• More Yarns by L.C. Dunsterville
• Dunsterforce: A Case Study of Coalition Warfare in the Middle East 1918-1919