the Army Council should call for written explanations from the soldiers, and, on receipt of them, consider what further action was to be taken. The result of this procedure in Nixon's case was an announcement in the House of Commons on 28 October 1918 that the Army Council had received and considered his explanation and had informed him that they regarded it as satisfactory. The G.C.M.G. was conferred on Nixon in 1919, and in 1922 the dignity of grand officier of the legion of honour was posthumously awarded him.
The nine months of command in Mesopotamia were Nixon's last active service. He lived, in gradually failing health, till 15 December 1921, when he died at St. Raphael, France. He had married in 1884 Amy Louisa, daughter of James Wilson, of Gratwicke, Billingshurst, and Felpham Manor, Sussex, and had one son.
[Official Army Lists; Naval and Military Dispatches, London Gazette, January–December 1916; Mesopotamia Commission Report, 17 May 1917, Cd. 8610; Parliamentary Debates, June–August 1917, and October 1918; Sir C. Townshend, My Campaign in Mesopotamia, 1920; personal knowledge.]
NOBLE, Sir ANDREW, first baronet (1831–1915), physicist and artillerist, the third son of George Noble, sometime lieutenant in the royal navy, of Greenock, Renfrewshire, by his wife, Geils Moore, only daughter of Andrew Donald, of Ottercaps, Virginia, U.S.A., was born at Greenock 13 September 1831. His father came of a Dumbartonshire family which had at one time owned property in the county. His mother belonged to an Ayrshire family. He was educated at the Academy at Edinburgh, and entered Woolwich as a cadet in the spring of 1847. In June 1849 he received a commission in the Royal Artillery, and served with that regiment for eleven years. Most of his military career, which was uneventful, was passed abroad. Always interested in mathematics and chemistry, Noble showed the scientific bent of his mind in various lines before he took up the special branch of inquiry in which he gained distinction. He returned to England at the beginning of 1858, and found the attention of the naval and military authorities occupied with the question of superseding the old smooth-bore guns by a new system of rifled artillery. It is a remarkable fact that no advance in gunnery had been made between the Napoleonic and the Crimean Wars, and the armed forces of the country still relied upon weapons of the type which had served Wellington and Nelson nearly half a century earlier. It was not until after the battle of Inkermann that (Sir) William George (afterwards Lord) Armstrong [q.v.] submitted to the War Office for trial a rifled breech-loading field gun, and began a controversy which agitated public opinion for several years. The subject exactly suited Noble's aptitude for patient experiment and accurate observation, and he lost no time in taking part in it. He was appointed secretary to various committees formed to investigate the new system of artillery, which was adopted officially by the services towards the end of 1858, a step which had the effect of accentuating rather than mitigating the acrimonies of discussion.
Noble began to be recognized more and more as a specialist, and it was not long before his ability attracted the notice of Armstrong, then in want of technical assistance for the Ordnance Company at Elswick, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where the government orders for re-armament were being carried out. He offered Noble a partnership in the business, and in December 1860 the latter was gazetted out of the army as a captain, and threw in his lot with Armstrong. The Elswick Ordnance Company, as a result of arrangements complicated by Armstrong's official position of director of rifled ordnance, was kept at first distinct from the Hydraulic Engineering Works at Elswick. In 1863, however, when the government contracts were completed, the two concerns were amalgamated, and, as Sir W. G. Armstrong, Whitworth, and Company, Limited, the business had grown, even before the war developments of 1914, into one of the largest industrial enterprises in the country [see Whitworth, Sir Joseph]. When he joined the Ordnance Works Noble shared the management with George Wightwick Rendel [q.v.]; but he assumed active control of the entire concern when he became vice-chairman of the public company formed in 1882. On the death of Lord Armstrong in December 1900, he succeeded to the chairmanship.
Noble's new position was of undoubted advantage to the pursuit of his scientific inquiries. He had now opportunity and resources available for the study of gunnery and explosives, and he made full use of them. His observations and experiments followed the lines of those of T. J. Rodman, Sir Benjamin Thompson (Count von Rumford) [q.v.], and earlier investigators, in ascertaining the conditions which
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