Wolseley ring
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Wolseley ring was a group of 19th century British army officers loyal to Garnet Wolseley and considered by him to be clever, brave, experienced and hard-working.
After the Crimean War Wolseley started to keep a note of the best officers he met, and began gathering a network of able military men loyal to him. There were other circles around other military leaders; later these would dwindle as more formal selection and promotion procedures became established.
The 'ring' itself was rooted in Wolseley's appointments for the Ashanti Campaign of 1873-4, in which Wolseley led British troops to take control of the Gold Coast. He chose officers he had got to know during his Red River Campaign Canada in 1870:
- John Carstairs McNeill
- William Francis Butler
- Redvers Henry Buller
- Hugh McCalmont
as well as other key figures:
- Henry Brackenbury
- John Frederick Maurice
- George Pomeroy Colley
- Baker Creed Russell
- Henry Evelyn Wood
Men from this group accompanied Wolseley on his various projects for about a decade. They are sometimes called the Ashanti ring, or, in a punning reference to Wolseley's first name, the Garnet ring.
[edit] See also
[edit] Reading
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
- Hew Strachan , The Politics of the British Army (1997)
- Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria's Little Wars (1973)
- Leigh Maxwell, The Ashanti Ring: Sir Garnet Wolseley's Campaigns 1870-1882 (London 1985)
