Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Wavell, Arthur John Byng
WAVELL, ARTHUR JOHN BYNG (1882–1916), soldier and explorer—one of few who have made the Mecca pilgrimage successfully in an assumed character—was born in London 27 May 1882. His father, Colonel Arthur Henry Wavell, was the son of an adventurous soldier and fellow of the Royal Society, and his mother, Matilda Clara Beatrice, daughter of the Rev. John Byng, was a collateral descendant of the unfortunate admiral of that name. Before going to Sandhurst he spent three years at Winchester; the school's peculiar football game was to suggest to him ten years later a comparison between a ‘loose hot’ and the struggling mob of pilgrims before the black stone of the Kaaba. Commissioned in the Welsh Regiment in 1900, he saw service in the South African War before he was nineteen, and after the peace went on to Swaziland, Bechuanaland, and other ill-known northern districts to do military intelligence work. He left the army in 1906, and took a farm at Nyali, near Mombasa, where he learned Arabic, and interested himself in the religion of Islam. From this study grew a desire to explore Arabia, to which end he believed, like Sir Richard Burton, that the accomplishment of the Meccan pilgrimage would conduce. In 1908 he proceeded to realize his idea by starting from England as a Zanzibari, with a Turkish passport, in the company of a Moslem Swahili friend, to whom he added at Marseilles an Aleppine Arab, long resident in Berlin. The trio reached Damascus and ultimately Medina without serious difficulty. What risk of detection they ran there; how they journeyed by caravan to Yambo and by ship to Jiddah; their experiences in Mecca and at Arafat, and their ultimate return to Jiddah—these things were written down by Wavell in A Modern Pilgrim in Mecca, published in 1912. Though he had awkward moments, and appears to have been suspected in both Medina and Mecca, he was not unmasked; and his feat, which he regarded merely as a means to greater ends, was not represented by him as in any sense a desperate undertaking. The present writer saw him both before and after his pilgrimage.
In 1910 Wavell tried to turn this success to account by pushing up to Sanaa in Yemen, in hope of finding a way thence into south central Arabia. Going without disguise as a British hadji, he found native Zeidite fanatics and Turkish authorities alike suspicious; and though he braved both and outwitted the latter more than once, he was rounded up in the end and sent back to Hodeida. The chief interest of his experience arises from the fact that he was in Sanaa during its siege by the Zeidite imam, Yahya, whom he would have joined, had he not given his word to the British vice-consul before he left the coast. Though, strictly speaking, he had a right, under the Capitulations, to travel where he would in the Ottoman dominions, the British Foreign Office accepted the not unreasonable plea of the Turkish authorities that, with Yemen in revolt from end to end, they were bound, in Wavell's interest as much as their own, to arrest his progress; and he got no satisfaction. His own account both of this journey and of his dispute with the Foreign Office appeared in the latter part of his Modern Pilgrim in Mecca.
Neither of Wavell's Arabian adventures did much to increase science. Both were undertaken merely as preliminaries to serious exploration, and under circumstances prohibitive of scientific work. Unfortunately, a subsequent plan of his to penetrate Arabia under the aegis of another rebel, the Idrisi of Asir, came to nothing; and he had no further opportunity to show that he was equipped with the diligent curiosity and acquired competence of a scientific explorer, as well as the ambition, address, and daring of an adventurer. In any case he had the gift of narrating adventures vividly and with humour.
Wavell returned to his farm, and was still there at the outbreak of the War, for which he had prepared as long ago as 1909 by joining the special reserve of his old regiment. Detained in East Africa, as being necessary for its defence, he raised, from water-carriers and other Arabic-speaking natives, a force widely known as ‘Wavell's Own’; and as early as 25 September 1914, at the cost of severe wounds, he held the road to Mombasa against a superior force of the enemy. Promoted major and put in charge of Mwele, on the Uganda Railway, he received the military cross and proved conspicuously successful in handling natives, till, on 8 January 1916, he marched out against a German column reported in his neighbourhood, and fell into an ambush. In spite of desperate hurt in the legs from the explosion of a bomb-box, he kept on firing till shot through the chest, and the Germans, who buried him on the field, set up a cross to mark the grave of a very gallant foe. A statue stands to his honour in Mombasa as the saviour of the town. He was unmarried.
[Biographical note by Major Leonard Darwin in reissue (1918) of the first part of A Modern Pilgrim in Mecca; private information; personal knowledge.]