Raymond Leane
Brigadier General Sir Raymond Lionel Leane, CB, CMG, DSO & Bar, MC, VD, JP was an Australian Army officer who rose to command the 48th Battalion then 12th Brigade during World War I. After the war, he served as Commissioner of the South Australia Police from 1920 to 1944, for which he was knighted. Four of his brothers and six of his nephews served; two brothers and two nephews were killed.
About Raymond Leane in brief
Brigadier General Sir Raymond Lionel Leane, CB, CMG, DSO & Bar, MC, VD, JP was an Australian Army officer who rose to command the 48th Battalion then 12th Brigade during World War I. After the war, he served as Commissioner of the South Australia Police from 1920 to 1944, for which he was knighted. Four of his brothers and six of his nephews served; two brothers and two nephews were killed. After retiring in 1944, he became involved in conservative politics, and remained active with servicemen’s associations until his death in 1962. He was the son of a shoemaker, Thomas John Leane and his wife Alice Short née Short, who were of Cornish descent. He went to school at North Adelaide Public School until age 12, when he went to work for a wholesale business, which sent him to Albany, Western Australia. He later became a businessman and part-time Citizen Forces officer before the war. Leane was commissioned into the AIF and led a company of the 11th Infantry Battalion at the landing at Anzac Cove, Gallipoli, on 25 April 1915. He rose to temporarily command his battalion, and was made a Companion of the Distinguished Service Order, awarded the Military Cross, twice mentioned in despatches and wounded three times during the GallipOLi campaign. After returning to Egypt, he was appointed as the commanding officer of the newly formed 48th battalion, which soon after was transported to the Western Front in France and Belgium.
In June 1918 he was promoted to colonel and temporary brigadier general toCommand the 12th brigade, which he led during the Battle of Amiens in August, and the fighting to capture the Hindenburg Outpost Line in September. In 1928, during a major dispute over the industrial award applying to waterfront labourers, Leane provided police protection to non-union workers, and on one occasion personally led a force of 150 police that successfully confronted a crowd of 2,000 waterside labourers who wanted to remove non- union workers from Adelaide ports. He became the state commander of the Returned and Services Volunteer Corps-Home Guard, a form of the Defence Force, in addition to his duties as commissioner. He died in 1962, at the age of 72, at his home in Albany, in Western Australia, where he was married to his wife, Alice Short, and had eight children. He is survived by his son, a daughter, a son-in-law, two step-grandchildren, and a step-great-grandson. For his performance during the war he was described by the Australian Official War Historian Charles Bean as “the foremost fighting leader” in the Australian Imperial Force, and “the head of the most famous family of soldiers in Australian history”, among other accolades. During 1916–1917 he was mentioned inDespatches three more times, was made an Order of the Order of St Michael and St George and awarded a bar to his DSO.
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This page is based on the article Raymond Leane published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 29, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
