In a letter to the Times of 9 November 2016, by and large repeated in a letter to the Telegraph on 2 November 2018, Lord Lexden, the historian of the Conservative Party, wrote:
Sir, When we fall silent at 11am on Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day, we should spare a thought for Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss. Lloyd George instructed Wemyss, his representative at Allied HQ in France, to ensure that the armistice took effect at 2.30pm. The prime minister planned to announce it triumphantly in the House of Commons. Wemyss defied him, telephoning George V to fix the eleventh hour for the cessation of hostilities.
A furious Lloyd George withheld the £100,000 grant awarded to other service chiefs, and while they received earldoms he got a mere barony.
Quite apart from the crassness of asking us to spare a thought for Wemyss when our thoughts ought to be elsewhere at such an important hour, Lord Lexden’s final paragraph is completely incorrect. The other service chiefs at the time of the Armistice were Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Frederick Sykes, Chief of Air Staff, who was succeeded in early 1919 by Sir Hugh Trenchard. In August of that year Parliament granted sums of money to leading naval, military and air officers of the War. The largest sums were given to the Commander-in-Chiefs of the British Expeditionary Force and Grand Fleet, Sir Douglas Haig and Sir David Beatty. Each received £100,000 apiece, and also earldoms. No service chief received £100,000. Wilson and Trenchard each received £10,000 each, and were given baronetcies in December 1919, not earldoms. Sykes received a knighthood and no grant and no title. Whilst Wemyss may have felt justly slighted at not receiving a grant, his ‘mere barony’ (the same dignity Lexden holds), conferred a month before Wilson and Trenchard were given their baronetcies, and special promotion to Admiral of the Fleet in November 1919, means he is far less deserving of our thoughts than Lexden would have us believe.
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