Presentation Album of the Gun Ammunition Filling Department of the Ministry of Munitions.

£300 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Splendid item presented to Geddes “by his former Directors of the Gun Ammunition Filling Department” at their First Anniversary Dinner in 1917. Geddes had a fascinatiing life, having been educated at Oxford Military Academy, Cowley, he decided against joining the Royal Engineers instead leaving for the United States. For the next four years he filled a variety of unusual posts, as a brakeman on the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, as a lumberman, and as a labourer in a steel works. He later went to India where his position as manager of a forestry estate gave him experience in running a light railway. The railway was amalgamated with the Rohilkhand and Kumaon Railway and he became traffic superintendent, in 1906 he returned to England to improve his prospects with N.E.R.. By 1914 he was Deputy General Manager, nominated as a future General Manager. At the outbreak of the Great War Geddes took charge of the mobilization movement in Northern Command, raising a Battalion from N.E.R. employees, later the 17th Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. In 1915 he was Deputy Director-General of Munitions Supply and was asked to report on the obstacles impeding the flow of munitions to the Front. In this he won the complete confidence and friendship of Lloyd George and was consequently appointed Director-General of Transportation on the C-i-C’s Staff in France and later Inspector-General of Transportation for all theatres with the honorary rank of Major-General. In May 1917 he was appointed Control

• Binding: Hardcover

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