Edgar Williams

Brigadier Sir Edgar Trevor Williams (20 November 1912 – 26 June 1995) was a British historian and army military intelligence officer who played a significant role in the Second Battle of El Alamein in the Second World War. He was one of the few officers who was privy to the Ultra secret, and he served on the staff of Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery as his intelligence officer for the rest of the war.

A graduate of Merton College, Oxford, where he obtained a First in modern history in 1934, Williams was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 1st King's Dragoon Guards in June 1939. In February 1941, the troop he was commanding was the first British unit to encounter the German Afrika Korps. He was recruited to work in military intelligence by Brigadier Francis de Guingand, who later became Montgomery's chief of staff. As an historian, Williams was accustomed to integrating different sources of information to build up a larger picture. He integrated information from Ultra with that from other sources such as the Y service, prisoner of war interrogations, aerial reconnaissance and ground reconnaissance behind enemy lines by the Long Range Desert Group.

After the war, Williams became a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford; the Warden of Rhodes House, Oxford; and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. As secretary to the Rhodes Trustees, he was concerned with the selection and subsequent well-being of nearly two hundred Rhodes scholars each year.

Early life Edgar Trevor Williams was born in Chatham, Kent, on 20 November 1912, the second of the three children and oldest son of (Joseph) Edgar Williams, a clergyman, and his wife, Anne Ethel Evans. His father served as a chaplain in the Royal Navy during the Great War, and served on the Western Front. After the war the family moved to Wolverhampton. Trevor (known to his friends as "Bill") was educated at Tettenhall College, Staffordshire, and then at King Edward VII School in Sheffield after his father was posted there in 1928. He secured a postmastership at Merton College, Oxford, where he played soccer and cricket, and obtained a First in modern history in 1934.

Williams remained at Merton as a Harmsworth senior scholar, then became an assistant lecturer at the Liverpool University in 1936. He returned to Merton in 1937 as a junior research fellow, studying the Cabinet of the United Kingdom in the 18th century. He earned a Master of Arts degree in 1938, and commenced work on his PhD, in which he argued that it was the Treaty of Waitangi that granted Britain sovereignty over New Zealand, and the land was not terra nullius. Today his argument is universally accepted. After the Second World War broke out in September 1939, his unit became an armoured car regiment in the 2nd Armoured Division. The division was sent to Cyrenaica, where, on 24 February 1941, Williams was in command of a troop of C Squadron, 1st King's Dragoon Guards when it was ambushed near El Agheila. It became the first British unit to encounter the German Afrika Korps (DAK).

The desert sun affected his already weak eyes, so he was sent to recuperate in Cairo, where he was posted to General Headquarters (GHQ) Middle East Command and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order on 1 June 1943, appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire on 29 June 1944, and made a Companion of the Order of the Bath on 24 January 1946.

Later life Williams was elected a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford in 1945, but he never completed his work on the 18th century British cabinet. As secretary to the Rhodes Trustees from 1959, he was also concerned with the selection and subsequent well-being of nearly two hundred Rhodes scholars per annum (one of whom was Bill Clinton).

At Oxford, Williams was a member of the Hebdomadal Council, a Curator of the Chest (or finance committee), and latterly a Pro-Vice-Chancellor. He also served as a Radcliffe Trustee, as a member of the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust, and was knighted in the 1973 New Year Honours.

Williams worked for the United Nations Security Council Secretariat in New York from 1946 to 1947. In 1959 he was a member of the Devlin Commission on Nyasaland, and he was an observer at the 1980 Southern Rhodesian general election.