his teaching made such a mark that he was selected to be the first commandant of the Indian Staff College at Quetta. In 1910 he received the C.B., and from 1911 to 1914 he commanded the 138th infantry brigade at Dublin. As a trainer of troops he made a great impression on those who served in his brigade, and they profited greatly by his lucid, practical, and suggestive instruction. In 1914 he was promoted to major-general and appointed Inspector of Infantry.
Shortly after the outbreak of war in August 1914 Capper was appointed to command the 7th division, the first addition to the original six, which was mainly composed of units from South Africa and the Mediterranean. It was an improvised formation, staff and units were strangers to each other, though the proportion of serving soldiers to reservists was much higher than in the Expeditionary Force. The division was dispatched to Belgium at the beginning of October, being intended to relieve Antwerp; instead of which, after covering the Belgian retreat to the Yser, it took a leading part in the defence of Ypres against the German effort to reach the Channel ports, holding a line out of all proportion to its numbers and bearing the brunt of the earlier attacks. When, after nearly three weeks’ fighting, it was relieved on 7 November, its 14,000 infantry had been reduced to 4,000, and if it had more than once lost ground it had re-formed its line and had beaten back repeated attacks by greatly superior forces. Of Capper’s share in the division’s splendid achievement it has been well said ‘no one but Capper himself could, night after night, by the sheer force of his personality have reconstituted from the shattered fragments of battalions a fighting line that could last through to-morrow’ (The Times, 1 October 1915).
Capper, whose services at Ypres were rewarded by a K.C.M.G., retained command of the 7th division until April 1915 when he was accidentally wounded at some experiments with hand-grenades. In this period the division was in the line facing the Aubers Ridge, and took part in the battle of Neuve Chapelle (10-13 March). Capper was at home most of the summer, but recovered in time to resume command of his old division shortly before the battle of Loos (25 September). In this the 7th division captured its first objectives between Hulluch and the Hohenzollern redoubt, but lost too severely to achieve anything against the German second line position, and was itself heavily counter-attacked. Capper, who had gone forward to investigate the exact situation, was badly wounded, 26 September, and died next day. In him the army lost a commander of real achievement and promise, an original and inspiring teacher, a man of high standards and high attainments.
Capper married in 1908 Winifride Mary, eldest daughter of the Hon. Robert Joseph Gerard-Dicconson, of Wrightington Hall, near Wigan, who survived him. They had one son.
[Army Lists; ‘The Times’ History of the War in South Africa, 1900-1909; J. E. Edmonds, (Official) History of the Great War. Military Operations, France and Belgium, 1914, vol. ii, 1925.]
CARLISLE, Countess of (1845~1921), promoter of women’s political rights and of temperance reform. [See Howard, Rosalind Frances.]
CARNEGIE, ANDREW (1835-1919), manufacturer and philanthropist, the elder son of William Carnegie, a damask linen weaver of Dunfermline, by his wife, Margaret, daughter of Thomas Morrison, of the same town, was born at Dunfermline 25 November 1835. In the ‘hungry forties’ an unprecedented depression was experienced in the linen trade of Dunfermline, and in 1848 the Carnegie family emigrated to the United States of America, and took up residence in Allegheny city, Pennsylvania. At the age of thirteen Andrew Carnegie began work as a bobbin-boy in a cotton factory at a weekly wage of one dollar and twenty cents. Within a few months he had changed to a bobbin manufacturing establishment, where his duties included the firing of the furnace of a small engine in a cellar. Feeling like a ‘bird in a cage’ in the cellar, he applied for a post as a messenger boy in Pittsburg telegraph office (1850), and was appointed at a weekly wage of two and a half dollars. As he entered on his new duties Colonel James Anderson, the founder of free libraries in Western Pennsylvania, announced that he intended to open his private library of 4,000 volumes ‘to working boys in Pittsburg’. As telegraph messengers did not ‘actually work with their hands’ it was proposed to exclude them. The youthful Carnegie wrote a letter to the Pittsburg Dispatch arguing that telegraph messengers were ‘working boys’, and so impressed was the colonel that he enlarged the classification. Every Saturday a new volume was obtained by Carnegie, and in after life, when he had
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