Frederick Peake

Major-General Frederick Gerard Peake, CMG, CBE (12 June 1886–30 March 1970), known as Peake Pasha, was a British Army and police officer and creator of the Arab Legion.

He was son of Lt-Colonel Walter Peake DSO. Peake graduated from the Royal Military College Sandhurst and was commissioned into the Duke of Wellington's Regiment in 1906.

He served in the Camel Corps of the British Imperial Egyptian Army and was awarded a Fourth Class of the Order of the Nile (The London Gazette, 31 August 1917).

In Autumn 1920 Peake left the Imperial Camel Corps to report on the security situation in Mandate Palestine. The situation was found to be insufficient and in October the same year Peake, then a Lieutenant-Colonel, was ordered by the High Commissioner of Palestine to form two small police forces. Those were:

1. The Mobile Force, 100 men to guard the Jerusalem-Amman road.
2. 50 men to help the British official posted to Kerak east of the Dead Sea.

He became a Major-General in the army of Transjordan.

In 1939, he retired and was succeeded by Glubb Pasha. To the Jordanians he became known as "Peake Pasha".

His daughter, Julia Grace Peake, was born on June 6, 1941. She first married David Renwick Grant, and second the late Sir Hugh Arbuthnot, 7th Bt.

External links & references

• The Arab Legion
• James Lunt, ‘Peake, Frederick Gerard (1886–1970)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2005, accessed 4 June 2007

Bibliography

• A history of Jordan and its tribes, University of Miami Press, 1958 [2]
• Change at St. Boswells (the story of a border village), John McQueen and Son, 1961

See also

• Arab Legion
• Transjordan