The stress distributions at and near the surface due to a single edge dislocation and to a group of uniformly spaced edge dislocations on an oblique glide plane have been calculated. For the evaluation of the stress an Airy stress function, previously derived, was used after a change in sign of one of the terms. The shear stress at the surface develops an increasingly sharp maximum at the acute angle between the surface and the glide plane as the single dislocation or the leading dislocation of the array approaches the trace of the glide plane. This stress is superimposed additively on the applied stress. Over the region of the stress maximum the probability for the generation of dislocations with a Burgers vector of opposite sign on parallel glide planes is increased compared with that for their generation elsewhere at the same surface. This leads to a possible explanation of the frequent occurrence of clusters of activated glide planes in close‐spaced pairs.