David Henderson (general)

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Lieutenant General Sir David Henderson was born in 1862 and, following officer training at the Royal Military College Sandhurst, was commissioned into the British Army on 25 August 1882. In 1901 he was appointed Director of Military Intelligence and his works Field Intelligence: Its Principles and Practice (1904) and The Art of Reconnaissance (1907) did much to establish his reputation as the Army's authority on tactical intelligence.

In 1911, at the age of 49, Henderson learned to fly, making him the world’s oldest pilot at that time. In 1913 he was appointed Director of Military Aeronautics and, with the outbreak of World War I, he took up command of the Royal Flying Corps in the field. By 1915 Henderson returned to London to take up the post of Director-General of Military Aeronautics. This meant that when, in 1917, General Jan Smuts was writing his review of the British Air Services, Henderson was well placed to assist. Whilst seconded to General Smuts, Henderson wrote much of what came to be called the Smuts Report. It has been argued that he had a better claim to the informal title "father of the Royal Air Force" than Sir Hugh Trenchard.

After the end of the Great War, Henderson became Director-General of the League of Red Cross Societies in Geneva, where he died in 1921.