Background
John Bagot Glubb was born in 1897 in Preston, Lancashire, United Kingdom.
John Bagot Glubb was born in 1897 in Preston, Lancashire, United Kingdom.
John Bagot Glubb was educated at Cheltenham College and the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, he joined the Royal Engineers in 1915.
John Bagot Glubb served in France during World War I, during which he was wounded three times. After the war he applied for assignment to Iraq. He helped quell a revolt there and was an administrative officer in the new Iraqi government. In 1930 he was sent to the British mandate of Transjordan (now Jordan) to aid Colonel Frederick G. Peake, founder of the Arab Legion, which had been established as a desert police force to help the British maintain law and order in the mandated territories of the Middle East that had been assigned to Britain. In 1939 Glubb succeeded Peake as commander of the legion and soon made it the strongest and best disciplined army in the Arab world. Besides policing the desert Bedouin tribes, it won victories for the Allies in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria during World War II. It spearheaded the attack against Israel in 1948, but under Arab rather than British sponsorship.
Glubb, who held the rank of lieutenant general in the Arab Legion, was a captain in the British army reserve until his retirement in 1947. As head of the legion, he was under private contract to the government of Jordan and retained his British citizenship. Fluent in Arabic and well versed in Arab customs, Glubb Pasha, as he was known, became one of the most powerful men in the Middle East. He was dismissed by the Jordanian king on Mar. 2, 1956, in the rising tide of Arab nationalism. On his return to England Glubb was made a knight commander of the Order of the Bath by Queen Elizabeth.
Fluent in Arabic and well versed in Arab customs, Glubb Pasha, as he was known, became one of the most powerful men in the Middle East.
John Bagot Glubb was married to Muriel Rosemary Forbes. The couple had a son, Godfrey (named after the Crusader King Godfrey of Bouillon) born in Jerusalem in 1939, and another son was born in May 1940 but lived only a few days. In 1944, they adopted Naomi, a Bedouin girl who was then three months old, and in 1948 they adopted two Palestinian refugee children called Atalla, renamed John, and Mary.