About William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim
Field Marshal William Joseph Slim, 1st Viscount Slim (6 August 1891 – 14 December 1970), usually known as Bill Slim, was a British military commander and the 13th governor-general of Australia from 1953 to 1960. Slim saw active service in both the First and Second World Wars and was wounded in action three times. During the Second World War he led the Fourteenth Army, the so-called "forgotten army" in the Burma campaign. After the war he became the first British officer who had served in the Indian Army to be appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff. In the early 1930s, Slim also wrote novels, short stories, and other publications under the pen name Anthony Mills. == Early years == William Slim was born at 72 Belmont Road, St Andrews, Bristol, the son of John Slim by his marriage to Charlotte Tucker, and was baptised there at St Bonaventure's Roman Catholic church, Bishopston. He was brought up first in Bristol, attending St Bonaventure's Primary School, then St Brendan's College, before moving to Birmingham in his teens. In Birmingham, he attended St Philip's Grammar School, Edgbaston, and King Edward's School, Birmingham. After leaving school, his father's failure in business as a wholesale ironmonger meant that the family could afford to send only one son, Slim's older brother, to the University of Birmingham, so between 1910 and 1914 Slim taught in a primary school and worked as a clerk in Stewarts & Lloyds, a metal-tube maker. == First World War == Despite having no other connection to the university, in 1912 Slim joined the Birmingham University Officers' Training Corps, and he was thus able to be commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant into the Royal Warwickshire Regiment on 22 August 1914, on the outbreak of the First World War; in later life, as a result of his modest social origins and his unpretentious manner, he was sometimes wrongly supposed to have risen from the ranks.
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