He was promoted to Captain 1917. He was awarded the Military Cross.[1]
He can be heard recounting some of his First World War experiences in Peter Jackson's film They Shall Not Grow Old.[3] He also features in the BBC film clip, ″The voices behind They Shall Not Grow Old″[4]
Carrington left Cambridge in 1954 to become Professor of Commonwealth Relations at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (the RIIA - Chatham House), a post he held until 1962. During that time he was also the Chatham House organiser responsible for the Commonwealth Relations conferences in New Zealand in 1959 and in Nigeria in 1962[1]
In 1955, Macmillan published Carrington's life of Rudyard Kipling, and Graham Greene praised it as "A very good biography - we are not left, as we so often are when we have closed an official life, with the thought "here is a quarry where other men in the future may dig more profitably". Mr Carrington has dug with effect. The quarry is closed".[5]Peter Quennell found the book "sound, scholarly, yet never for a moment dull".[6]
From his experiences in the First World War, Carrington wrote his memoirs of his time as an officer on the Western Front, A Subaltern's War. Written during and shortly after the war, the book was not published until 1929 and appeared under the pen-name of Charles Edmonds.[7] In 1964, he recounted his experiences of the Great War to the BBC in a series of interviews for the project The Great War. These were broadcast in 2014 and again in 2016 as part of the commemoration of the centenary of the war.[8]
InA Subaltern's War, Carrington sought to counter the widespread view that there was no other type of men who served in the war than "Prussian militarists" and "disillusioned pessimists": "No corrupt sergeant majors stole my rations or accepted my bribes. No incompetent colonels failed to give me food or lodging. No casual staff officers ordered me to certain death, indifferent to my fate".[9]
He wrote of his Second World War experiences in Soldier at Bomber Command, published in 1987.
In 1965, Carrington provided a wider picture of both the First World War and his role in it in Soldier from the Wars Returning. Carrington argued that Britain's involvement in the First World War was just and that there was no alternative to persevering until victory was won. Britain had reason to be proud of the Army's achievement.[9] He wrote positively of the effect of Army training on recruits[10]
In 1932, Carrington married firstly Cecil Grace MacGregor, and they had one daughter. The marriage was dissolved in 1954. In 1955, he married secondly Maysie Cuthbert Robertson.[1]
A Subaltern's War, Charles Edmonds [i.e. C. E. Carrington], Peter Davies Ltd. (1929).
History of England Part II, 1485-1714, C. E. Carrington and J. Hamden Jackson, Cambridge University Press, (1932)
T.E.Lawrence by Charles Edmonds [i.e. C. E. Carrington], Peter Davies, London (1935)
An Exposition of Empire, C.E. Carrington, Cambridge University Press (1947)
The British Overseas: exploits of a nation of shopkeepers, C.E. Carrington, Cambridge University Press, (1950)
John Robert Godley of Canterbury, C.E. Carrington, Cambridge University Press. (1951)
Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work, C.E. Carrington, Macmillan, London (1955).
The Cambridge History of the British Empire; Vol 3,The Empire - Commonwealth with L.E.Benians, Sir James Butler and C.E. Carrington (editors), Cambridge University Press (1959)
Chatham House and its Neighbours : A Historical Sketch, C.E. Carrington, Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1959.[11] With additions republished as Chatham House; Its History and Inhabitants, C.E. Carrington, Revised and updated by Mary Bone, Royal institute of International Affairs, 2004.
The Liquidation of the British Empire: The Reid Lectures of Acadia University 1959 , C.E. Carrington, George G. Harrap & Co, London (1961).
Soldier from the Wars Returning, C.E. Carrington, Hutchison (1965).
Soldier at Bomber Command, C.E. Carrington, L. Cooper, London (1987).
Contributor to An African Survey (1957) Surveys of international Affairs (1957–58 and 1959-60), published by Chatham House
^ abcBrian Bond, Survivors of a Kind: Memoirs of the Western Front (London: Continuum, 2008, p. 13
^"The skinny, sallow, shambling, frightened victims of our industrial system, suffering from the effect of wartime shortages, who were given into our hands, were unrecognisable after six months of good, fresh air, and physical training. They looked twice the size and, as we weighed and measured them, I am able to say that they put on an average of one inch in height and one stone in weight during their time with us. One boy's mother wrote to me complaining that her Johnny was half-starved in the Army and what was I going to do about it. I was able to convince her that Johnny had put on two stone of weight and two inches of height, and had never had so good an appetite before. Beyond statistical measurements was their change in character, to ruddy, handsome, clear-eyed young men with square shoulders who stood up straight and were afraid of no one, not even the sergeant-major. 'The effect on me,' I wrote in a letter, 'is to make me a violent socialist when I see how underdeveloped capitalism has kept them, and a Prussian militarist when I see what soldiering makes of them.' Then I added, rather inconsequently, in a phrase that dates: 'I shall never think of the lower classes again in the same way after the war.' An odd forecast but true; I never have." Charles Carrington, Soldier from the Wars Returning (London: Hutchinson, 1965), p. 230.
