Brigadier-General Sir Berkeley Vincent, (4 December 1871 – 29 January 1963) was a British Army officer and sportsman.
Contents
Military career
Educated at Wellington College and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, Vincent was commissioned into the Royal Artillery as a second lieutenant on 24 July 1891. He was promoted to lieutenant on 24 July 1894 and to captain on 13 February 1900. He served with the China Expeditionary Force in late 1900 and then in the Second Boer War in South Africa.
Following the end of the war, Vincent left Point Natal for India on the SS Ionian in October 1902 with other officers and men of the J Battery Royal Horse Artillery, and after arrival in Bombay, was stationed in Meerut, Bengal Presidency. In 1903, Vincent was sent to Tokyo to learn Japanese: he served as British military attaché with the Japanese Army during the Russo-Japanese War and, from 1 March 1904, was attached to the 2nd Division of the First Japanese Army in Manchuria.
Vincent was a protégé of Ian Hamilton, also an observer in the Russo-Japanese War, and who Vincent had served as an assistant military secretary in October 1905. Vincent attended the Staff College, Camberley. The then commandant of the college, Henry Wilson, was sceptical of Berkeley's claims that Japanese morale had enabled their infantry to overcome Russian defensive firepower. He was promoted to major in the 6th (Inniskilling) Dragoons in 1908.
In January 1910 he was appointed as a professor at the Staff College. In 1911, when Vincent learned that he was to leave his job, and was shown General Haig's critical report on him, he availed himself of his right to Appeal to the King, under Section 42 of the Army Act, claiming unfair dismissal.