A passionate Francophile who spoke fluent French, Townshend preferred to be addressed as "Alphonse" – something which often annoyed his colleagues, who regarded his "Frenchified" manners as extremely snobbish and off-putting. An intensely ambitious man, he was constantly writing letters to friends, relatives and anyone who might be able to help him achieve promotion, saying that he desperately needed one and asking them to "pull some strings" to help him. Townshend's biographer, the British historian A.J. Barker noted, "Anybody who could further his career was invariably called up to help, often in the most pleading of terms". Sean McKnight, the Deputy Head of War Studies at Sandhurst, called him "just about the most dramatically ambitious senior officer I think I've ever come across. He's never content, he's always looking for the second or third job down the line, and one of the most irritating facets of him is, even when he's got something he should be very happy with, he's not content". Townshend's endlessly ambitious streak, together with his tendency to view whatever position he held as insufficient for him, and a penchant for writing letters attacking whoever was his commanding officer as incompetent to their commanding officer, made him very unpopular with other officers, who viewed him variously as a treacherous intriguer forever scheming for promotion, a pathetic whiner who was never happy with what he had, and a dangerous megalomaniac whose vainglorious quest for yet another promotion led him to take gratuitous risks. The British historian Geoffrey Regan described him as an officer whose high intelligence and abilities were marred by his egomania.