Office for three years, becoming lieutenant-general in November 1901.
During his tenure of office the War Office Reconstitution Committee under Viscount Esher issued its report (1904), and as a result of the determination to carry into effect the various reforms recommended, the government decided to change the heads of departments at the War Office. Nicholson was offered the post of military member of council in India, which he declined, and the Gibraltar command, which he was considering, when he was asked to go to Manchuria as chief British military attaché with the Japanese army. He reached Tokio in March 1904, but there was some delay in reaching the front. However, in July he joined the second Japanese army under General Oku at Hai Cheng, being present at the operations leading up to the battle of Lio Yang and the capture of that place in September. He had been in bad health for some time, and was pressed in consequence to return to Tokio; but he rejoined the second army in December, and remained with it till he returned to England in January 1905. It was intended that he should take up the Gibraltar command, but he never did so.
In the following December Nicholson succeeded Sir Herbert (afterwards Baron) Plumer as quartermaster-general, the appointment synchronizing with the accession of the liberals to office and the appointment of Mr. Haldane as secretary of state for war. In 1906 he was promoted general. In 1908 he succeeded Sir Neville Lyttelton as chief of the Imperial General Staff and was created G.C.B. During the years 1905 to 1912 the reorganization of the army was completed and the territorial force created. Ably assisted by Sir Douglas Haig, who was first director of training and later of staff duties, Nicholson played an important part in this work. At first he advocated compulsory service, but later came to the conclusion that it was impossible of realization. He aided considerably in the development of the Imperial General Staff, and by his wide knowledge of affairs, his gift of able and lucid draftsmanship, and his clear understanding, rendered valuable assistance in the realization of the scheme of army reform.
Promoted field-marshal in 1911, Nicholson was created a peer on retiring from the Army Council in 1912, and went to India in the same year as chairman of a commission to inquire into Indian army expenditure. He returned to England in 1913; but, owing to the outbreak of war in 1914, the recommendations of the commission were not carried out. He continued to be a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence, and served on the royal commissions of inquiry into the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia campaigns (1916). He was also chairman of the London territorial force association. He died in London 13 September 1918.
Nicholson's career was as peculiar as it was brilliant, for though he never commanded a unit in peace or war he became a field-marshal, and though he never passed the Staff College he became chief of the General Staff. Reserved in manner, he possessed great kindness of heart, and was ever at pains to encourage brains in his junior officers. He spoke brilliantly but he never courted publicity. He married in 1871 Victorie Ursula, daughter of Monsieur Dominique d'Allier. His wife survived him. He left no issue.
[The Times, 17 September 1918; Army Lists; Royal Engineers' Journal; Lord Roberts, Forty-one Years in India, 1897; C. E. Callwell, Tirah, 1897; ‘The Times’ History of the War in South Africa; War Office records; R. C. Temple, The Annexation of Burmah, 1886; Reports of Mesopotamia and Dardanelles Commissions; private information.]
NIXON, Sir JOHN ECCLES (1857–1921), general, was born at Brentford 16 August 1857. He was a younger son of Captain John Piggott Nixon, of the 25th Bombay native infantry, by his wife, Ellen, daughter of G. Cooper, of Brentford. His father afterwards held various appointments in the Indian political service, and retired as a major-general in 1879. John Eccles Nixon was educated at Wellington College, and was commissioned from Sandhurst as a sub-lieutenant in the 75th Foot in September 1875. He entered the Bengal staff corps in 1878, and was appointed to the 18th Bengal cavalry, in which, in the course of twenty-five years, he passed through successive grades up to that of second in command. During ten years of regimental duty he served in the Afghan War of 1879–1880, and took part in a very successful punitive expedition by a brigade of the Kurram force into the Zaimukht country, and was mentioned in dispatches. He was also present in the Mahsud Waziri expedition of 1881. In April 1888, as a captain, he was appointed for five years to the garrison instruction staff. Owing to almost continuous employment on the staff in peace and in war, he saw little regimental service during the next fifteen years, and in May 1903, having been appointed to a district command with the rank of brigadier--
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