Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart

Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart (commonly nicknamed The Brigadier) was one of the founders of UNIT and commander of its UK operations. From his second incarnation onwards, and notwithstanding some early tension between the two during the start of his third incarnation, the Doctor has long considered the Brigadier one of his most trusted Human allies and closest friends. His long association with The Doctor has caused some to include him in the rosters of the Doctor's companions.

Early life and military career
Lethbridge-Stewart was born in 1930 (NA: Blood Heat, No Future), and attended Holborough, where he first met Teddy Fitzoliver. (BBCR: The Paradise of Death)

The young Alistair suffered a lot of pressure to live up to the military traditions of the Lethbridge-Stewart family. (DWM: The Warkeeper's Crown)

He began his military career around 1953 and attended Sandhurst Military School with Major General Rutlidge. (DW: The Web of Fear, Mawdryn Undead) He joined the Scots Guards and was stationed for a time at Aldgate. (DW: The Green Death)

Relationships
In Sierra Leone, Lethbridge-Stewart met Mariatu, the daughter of a chieftan, who bore a son by him, Mariama. (NA: Transit) He also had a romantic encounter with Doris on Brighton Beach. (DW: Planet of the Spiders) However, the Brigadier would marry another woman, Fiona. (MA: The Scales of Injustice) Fiona and Alistair had one child together, who they named Kate. (MA: The Scales of Injustice, Downtime)

Formation of UNIT
The then-Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart first met the Doctor during the attack by Robot Yeti on London with web guns, spurring on the evacuation of the city. British Army troops had gone down to the London Underground. Here, for the first time, Lethbridge-Stewart met the strange little man known as the Doctor. (DW: The Web of Fear) The event would later receive the simple name the London Incident (MA: Downtime)

Shortly after, Lethbridge-Stewart had a meeting with Air Vice-Marshall "Chunky" Gilmore and learned from him of the Shoreditch Incident, in which hostile aliens had visited Earth in 1963, which Gilmore himself had helped to fight off, with the help of the Doctor. He also learned that evidence of alien visits to Earth existed which went back millennia. (MA: Downtime)

The Colonel was inspired to petition the United Nations to form a special military intelligence group to investigate alien and other unusual phenomena which might threaten the security of Earth. UNIT was soon formed, and Lethbridge-Stewart found himself appointed head of the United Kingdom branch and elevated to the rank of Brigadier. (DW: The Invasion)

The UNIT years
Four years after the Yeti invasion, UNIT was investigating the mysterious activities of electronics industrialist Tobias Vaughn. Vaughn was allied with the Cybermen in the first of their many attempts to invade and conquer Earth. With the assistance of the Doctor, the Brigadier and his men were able to thwart this invasion attempt. (DW: The Invasion)

When the Doctor was forced to undergo another regeneration and was exiled to 20th century Earth by the Time Lords, the Brigadier took on the new Doctor as UK UNIT's scientific advisor. (DW: Spearhead from Space)

The new Doctor and the Brigadier lacked the easy rapport that they had enjoyed during the Doctor's previous incarnation. Their relationship was further strained after Lethbridge-Stewart set off explosive charges around the Wenley Moor Silurian colony after promising the Doctor that he had no hostile intentions towards them. The Doctor considered this action murder, if not genocide. (DW: Doctor Who and the Silurians)

During a second encounter with the Silurians, the Brigadier's marriage to Fiona began to fail. (MA: The Scales of Injustice)


 * Fiona and the Brigadier would later divorce and Alistair would find himself estranged from his daughter, Kate.

This relationship lasted through the Doctor's next regeneration and even after the Time Lords' rescinding of the Doctor's exile. (DW: The Three Doctors) The Brigadier relied on the Doctor's scientific and technical expertise to defeat various alien and domestic threats. The Doctor's formal ties with UNIT gradually waned, all the more so in his fourth incarnation, though he did leave with the Brigadier a space-time telegraph which the Brigadier could contact him if needed. (DW: Revenge of the Cybermen) Despite this, he was openly resentful when the Brigadier proceeded to use said device to summon him back to Earth. (DW: Terror of the Zygons)

1970s and 1980s
Lethbridge-Stewart retired from UNIT and the military, taking a post as an A-level maths teacher at Brendon Public School. In 1977, the Brigadier saw and touched hands with his own future self from 1983. The time differential shorted out, causing an energy discharge - the Brigadier fell unconscious and Lethbridge-Stewart spent the next six years in a state of partial amnesia, having forgotten ever having met the Doctor. In 1983 the Brigadier encountered the Doctor, whom he did not recognize, met his past self from 1977 and in so doing completed the original temporal paradox. (DW: Mawdryn Undead)

Later, Brigadier was attending an anniversary reunion of UNIT when, along with the second Doctor, he was captured and transported to the Death Zone on Gallifrey. (DW: The Five Doctors)

In 1989, Lethbridge-Stewart conducted an investigation of the dealings of SenéNet and was captured. He was later rescued by the Doctor, who uncovered and stopped yet another invasion attempt by the Nestene Consciousness. (PDA: Business Unusual)

1990s

 * By the late 1990s, Lethbridge-Stewart married his second wife, Doris, with whom he had that memorable holiday years ago.

The Doctor changed time to a minor extent so that he could attend the wedding, even though originally he had missed it because he had known of it. (DWM: A Romantic Evening)

The Brigadier worked with UNIT again during yet another attempt by the Great Intelligence to conquer Earth, together with two of the Doctor's former companions, Victoria Waterfield and Sarah Jane Smith. He reunited with his estranged daughter, Kate and for the first time met his grandson, Gordon. (MA: Downtime)

The Brigadier would come out of retirement briefly to help UNIT and its new commander, Brigadier Winifred Bambera, deal with an invasion from a parallel universe by the sorceress Morgaine. Once again, he met up with the Doctor, now in his seventh incarnation and together defeated Morgaine. Lethbridge-Stewart distinguished himself during these events, singlehandedly taking on the Destroyer and dispatching him, armed only with a revolver loaded with silver bullets. (DW: Battlefield)

In 1997 the Brigadier collaborated with the Doctor's eighth incarnation and Bernice Summerfield during an interplanetary crisis between the United Kingdom and Mars. At the end of the Martian crisis, Lethbridge-Stewart was promoted to the rank of General, although he still preferred to be called "Brigadier." Later, he was also knighted. (NA: The Dying Days'')

In 1999 he enlisted the help of an earlier Doctor and his companions Tegan and Turlough to stop an invasion of Earth by the Jex. (PDA: The King of Terror)

2000s
While teaching at Sandhurst Military School, the Brigadier met the Doctor, now in his tenth incarnation. (DWM: The Warkeeper's Crown)


 * This event has no date given, but the mid-1990s would seem one possibility. The renewal of his youth had not yet occurred.

At some point prior to the current series of Doctor Who Lethbridge-Stewart was knighted, and is now officially Brigadier Sir Alistair. He has continued his association with UNIT, and indeed with Sarah Jane Smith SJA. During the attempted Sontaran invasion in 2009, Colonel Mace mentioned that Sir Alistair was stranded in Peru (DW: The Poison Sky). Sarah Jane Smith wanted his help to break into the Black Archive a UNIT base where they stored alien objects that were potentially dangerous. He did so but was interrupted in his brief with Cal Kilburne. He got Sarah Jane and Rani Chandra into the Black Archive to get the scroll who they where getting for a Bane called Mrs Wormwood. As he escaped with Sarah Jane he was chased by UNIT officers (SJA: Enemy of the Bane)

2010s
Lethbridge-Stewart attended the wedding of Bernice Summerfield and Jason Kane in 2010, and during the course of these events his youth was restored. Lethbridge-Stewart thus managed to live on considerably past the normal span for Humans of his time, dying at last sometime in the 2050s. (NA: Happy Endings, PDA: The King of Terror)

During a boat outing with Doris, Lethbridge-Stewart's boat capsized and Doris was drowned, an event which haunted him for years. (EDA: The Shadows of Avalon)

Alternate Brigadiers

 * The Earth of Inferno is known to have had its own version of the Brigadier, known as the Brigade Leader. Loyal to the fascist leader who governed his version of Britain, the Brigade Leader was the antithesis of the Brigadier. He was shot and killed by Section Leader Elizabeth Shaw while trying to force the Doctor at gunpoint to escape his doomed Earth (DW: Inferno).


 * In another timeline, both the Brigadier and the Doctor died saving Humanity from a hostile Silurian faction during the Wenley Moor incident. Humans and Silurians made peace with each other anyway. (DWM: Final Genesis)


 * In another reality the Doctor died at Wenley Moor and the Silurians took over Earth in a hostile manner, leaving the Brigadier and the remnants of UNIT to fight for thirty years against the Silurians. The Doctor and his companions arrived in that universe and assisted in a reconciliation between the species. (NA: Blood Heat)


 * In another timeline, the Doctor's exile on Earth in 1997 rather than the earlier part of the 20th century. During this time, Lethbridge-Stewart lived out his retirement running a bar in Hong Kong. He then went off with the Doctor in the TARDIS. (DWU: Sympathy for the Devil).

Nicknames
As noted above, he was often referred to simply as the Brigadier and on rare occasions as "the Brig." During his second and third incarnations, the Doctor sometimes called him by his surname, while in his fourth incarnation, the Doctor at least once addressed him as Alistair.

Quotes

 * Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart - Quotes

Appearances

 * The Brigadier first appeared onscreen with the Second Doctor. He has since appeared with the Third, Fourth, Fifth and Seventh Doctors. In the The Five Doctors, he appeared with Richard Hurndall as the First Doctor (Nicholas Courtney, had however, appeared with the original First Doctor, William Hartnell playing Bret Vyon rather than the Brigadier) and in the arguably canonical Dimensions in Time with the Sixth Doctor. In audio form he has appeared with the Sixth Doctor in The Spectre of Lanyon Moor and with the Eighth Doctor in Minuet in Hell. He has not (so far) appeared with the Ninth Doctor. The Brigadier has appeared with the Tenth Doctor in The Warkeeper's Crown comic in Doctor Who Magazine though not, to date, in any other form.

=See also=
 * Lethbridge-Stewart family