Sir Graeme Thomson Knight Giand Cross of St. Michael and St. George Knight Commander of the Bath was a British civil servant in the Admiralty, who served as a colonial civil servant and then governor in several British colonies.
Education
Graeme Thomson was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford and joined the civil service in 1900, being assigned to the Admiralty. He and Alfred Faulkner were then permitted to compile a register of ships suitable for requisitioning as transports, after they had completed their normal work each day.
Career
Some years before World War I, following the Agadir Crisis in 1911, he asked about the plans to get the British Expeditionary Force to France in the event of war and found they were scanty. This they did, thus enabling the British Expeditionary Force rapidly. Shortly after the outbreak of war, he received extremely rapid promotion, from a superintending clerk to Civil Assistant Director of Transport in September 1914 and to at the Admiralty in December, succeeding Admiral Savory.
Winston Churchill praised him after stating over a million troops had been moved:
The cr for these arrangements lies very largely with the head of the Admiralty Transport Department, Mr.
Graeme Thomson—one of the discoveries of the War, a man who has stepped into the place when the emergency came, who has formed, organised, and presided over performances and transactions the like of which were never contemplated by any State in history. Indeed, so smoothly and unfailingly has this vast business, the like of which has not been previously witnessed, been carried through, that we have several times been compelled to remind the soldiers whom we serve, and I now think it right to remind the House, that, after all, we are at war.
The Adelaide Advertiser described him in 1915 as:
A tall, soldierly-looking man with the face of a diplomat, the forehead of a thinker, a square chin, and a bushy moustache, Mr. Thomson"s appearance conveys the impression of a rare combination of organising ability, accuracy, judgment, resource, and rapid assimilation of ideas.
In 1917, the Directorate of Shipping for the Ministry of Shipping and Admiralty was created and Thomson was placed in charge of lieutenant
After the war, government involvement in shipping declined and his post was abolished. He then joined the, being appointed as Secretary for Ceylon in 1919, then Governor of British Guiana in 1922 and of Nigeria in 1925, and finally of Ceylon in 1931. He died at Aden in his way home from there.