Military After graduating from the
Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in 1894, Thomson was commissioned into the
Royal Engineers. He served first in
Mauritius and then saw action during the
Second Boer War (1899–1902), during which he was in command of a field company section and was
mentioned in dispatches. He also had his first encounter with aviation when he was detailed to help with the R.E. Balloon Section outside
Kimberley. After the war, he became an instructor at the
School of Military Engineering at
Chatham and then in
Sierra Leone. He was promoted to captain and
brevet major in 1904, and in 1909 joined the Army Staff College in
Camberley. In 1911, he went to the
War Office, and in 1912 Thomson was appointed military attaché with the Serbian army during the
first and
Second Balkan Wars, after which he returned to the War Office in 1913. During the
First World War, Thomson first served at the
British Expeditionary Force Headquarters and was Chief Military Interpreter between
Sir John French and
General Joffre. In 1915 he was sent to
Bucharest as
military attaché on
Kitchener initiative to bring the
Kingdom of Romania into the war. But when there he quickly formed the view that an unprepared and ill-armed Romania facing a war on three fronts against
Austria-Hungary,
Turkey and
Bulgaria would be a liability rather than an asset to the allies. This view was brushed aside by Whitehall, and he signed a Military Convention with Romania on 13 August 1916. By the end of 1916, he had to alleviate the consequences of Romania's capitulation, and he supervised the destruction of the Romanian oil wells to deny them to the
German Empire. From 27 August 1917 to 27 May 1918, Thomson served as Commander, Royal Engineers (CRE), of
60th (2/2nd London) Division in
Palestine, commanding the
divisional engineers in the
Battle of Beersheba, the
attack on the Sheria position, and the
Capture of Jerusalem. He distinguished himself at the
Capture of Jericho. After a distinguished wartime career both behind the lines and at the front, Thomson formed part of the British delegation at the
Versailles conference, but condemned the Versailles terms as "containing the seeds of another war." As in Romania where he followed a policy (of making Romania an ally) with which he did not agree, he found the experience to be profoundly negative.
Politics After Versailles Thomson made the decision to enter politics, and joined the Labour Party and
Fabian Society. He stood as Labour candidate in two Tory strongholds,
Bristol Central in 1922 and
St Albans in 1923, but failed to win either seat. In 1924, however, newly elected Labour Prime Minister
Ramsay MacDonald elevated him to the peerage as
Baron Thomson, of Cardington in the County of Bedford. He was sworn of the
Privy Council at the same time. He served as
Secretary of State for Air in MacDonald's first short lived
Labour administration of 1924 – interrupting briefly
Sir Samuel Hoare's seven-year grip on the post. The fall of the government meant that it was not until 1929 that he regained the position, once again serving under MacDonald. In the interim he had maintained his air interests acting as chairman of the
Royal Aeronautical Society and the
Royal Aero Club, and patron of the
Air League. ==Private life==