Robert Stone (British Army officer)

Lieutenant-General Robert Graham William Hawkins Stone, (16 January 1890 – 27 June 1974) was a senior British Army officer who became General Officer Commanding (GOC) British Troops in Egypt.

Military career
As a child aged 12, Stone travelled to South Africa, enlisted in the District Mounted Troop, Aliwal North in early 1902, and fought as a private soldier in the Second Boer War.

Subsequently educated at Wellington College, Stone was commissioned into the Royal Engineers in December 1909. He served in the First World War in France, latterly as brigade major for 32nd Infantry Brigade.

After remaining in the army during the interwar period, he attended the Staff College, Camberley from 1923 to 1924, and became a general staff officer at the War Office in 1930, Commander Royal Engineers for Deccan District in India in 1934 and military attaché in Rome in 1935. He went on to be assistant commandant and chief of staff in Sudan in 1938.

Stone also served in the Second World War, initially as chief of British Mission to the Egyptian Army and then, from 1942 as general officer commanding the British Troops in Egypt. In this capacity he had to maintain control during a coup d'état that resulted in Ahmad Pasha becoming Prime Minister of Egypt in 1944 as well as a subsequent mutinies within the Egyptian Army.

He retired in 1947.