Raglan’s Adjutant-General was Sir James Estcourt. In his thirty-four years of service in the Army, James Bucknall Bucknall Estcourt had never seen action, yet on 21 February 1854 he was made a Brigadier-General and was appointed Adjutant-General to the expeditionary force in the Crimea. He was regarded as being quite incapable of fulfilling his new role and it is said that Raglan did not even ‘pay him the compliment of attempting to transact business with him’. Nevertheless, he was a friend of Raglan and he was promoted to Major-General on 12 December 1854. It soon became apparent that Estcourt was out of his depth and the Secretary of State for War, the Duke of Newcastle, demanded that both Estcourt and Richard Airey (see below) should be recalled. Estcourt, however, was struck down by cholera during the siege of Sevastopol and he died on the morning of 24 June 1855.