Wavell

Soldier and Statesman

Victoria Schofield

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781848843202
• eBook ISBN: 9781844683420
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

Archibald Wavells life and career makes a marvelous subject. Not only did he reach the highest rank (Field Marshal) and become an Earl and Viceroy of India but his character was complex. He joined the Black Watch in 1901. He stood out during the Great War, quickly earning the Military Cross but losing an eye. He was at Versailles in 1918 but between the Wars his career advanced with Brigade and General commands notably in Palestine where he spotted Orde Wingate. By the outbreak of war he was GOC-in-C Middle East. Early successes against the Italians turned into costly failures in Greece and Crete and Wavell lost the confidence of Churchill; their temperaments differed completely. Wavell was sent to India as C-in-C. After Pearl Harbor Wavell was made Supreme Allied Commander for the SW Pacific and bore responsibility for the humiliating loss of Singapore (he quickly recognized that it could not be held). Problems in Burma tested Churchills patience and he was removed from command to be Viceroy and Governor General of India. As civil unrest and demands for independence grew, in 1947 Prime Minister Attlee replaced Wavell with Mountbatten who oversaw Partition. Wavell died in 1950, after a life of huge achievement tempered with many reverses, most of which were not of his making.

Part I

The Soldier’s Son

Chapter One

A Late Victorian
Colchester … Summer Fields … Winchester

Without courage there cannot be truth: and without truth there can be no other virtue.

Sir Walter Scott¹

Famed as the name of Wavell became in twentieth-century Britain, its origins dated back to the time when a group of marauding Norsemen settled in the north-west of the Cherbourg Peninsula in northern France around ad 600 and called themselves Seigneurs of Vauville.² In 1066 the de Vauvilles crossed the Channel with their kinsman, William ‘the Conqueror’. As England became their home, their name altered to de Wauvil, Wayvil, Weyvill and, eventually, Wavell. By the nineteenth century this family history was part of the oral tradition handed down to young Archibald Wavell. His grandfather, General Arthur Goodall Wavell, was a soldier who had served not only in India but in the revolutionary armies of Mexico and Chile. ‘I have always had a liking for unorthodox soldiers and a leaning towards the unorthodox in war,’ the future Field Marshal wrote. ‘Perhaps it is inherited; my grandfather was a soldier of fortune.’³

In the mid nineteenth century Arthur Goodall settled at Somborne House, Little Somborne, in the beautiful and still unspoilt countryside of the Test valley, between Stourbridge and Romsey in Hampshire. His fourth son, Archibald Graham, was Wavell’s father. He too joined the Army and was commissioned into the newly raised Norfolk Regiment. In August 1880 he had married Eliza Bull Percival, known as Lillie, whose family came from Cheshire. Their first child, Florence Anne Paxton, was known as Nancy. The Norfolk Regiment was at that time based in Colchester in Essex and the Archibald Wavells were still living there, in a tall redbrick three-storey semi-detached house at 10, The Avenue when on 5 May 1883 Lillie gave birth to their second child, a son. He was called Archibald after his father and Percival, his mother’s maiden name. Soon afterwards Lillie was pregnant again. Her last child – christened Lillian Mary and known as Molly – was born in 1884. Lillie suffered from crippling arthritis and ‘whether owing to her naturally retiring disposition, to ill health or the fact that her husband himself ruled the family in true Victorian fashion,’ writes Wavell’s early biographer and contemporary, Jack Collins, ‘Mrs Wavell does not seem to have played any dominating part in the shaping of the character and mind of her only son.’⁴ Archibald’s relationship with his sisters was always close. In later life he confessed that he might perhaps have ‘come the man’ over them too often; but their mutual correspondence suggests a strong bond between them which broke only with his death. Of his uncles, he hardly knew his father’s eldest brother Arthur, who died in 1891, but believed that there was probably ‘a strong family likeness’ in character between him and his other uncles, William and Llewellyn, his godfather. Wavell described Llewellyn from recollection as ‘a small, wiry energetic little man, deeply religious, very charitable and with a real love of the British soldier and devoted to his welfare at a time when very few bothered about the soldier once he was off parade.’⁵ Two of Wavell’s six aunts had died before he was born.

The first five years of young Archibald’s life were spent in Britain. A typical child, one of his earliest recollections was of attempting to turn a somersault while paddling in the sea at Dornoch, a holiday resort with beautiful golden sands on the north-east coast of Scotland. Soaked clothes were the inevitable result, and years later he still remembered the ‘ignominy’ of walking back home through Dornoch, wet and in disgrace.⁶ In the autumn of 1888 Major Wavell rejoined his regiment in Gibraltar after a period in a staff appointment. Lillie and her three small children went with him, and another recollection was of nearly creating an ‘international incident’ when he inadvertently ‘tumbled’ across the Spanish frontier and had to be retrieved.⁷ The Gibraltar posting lasted only a few months, and the regiment then moved to India; yet again, the family followed. The Norfolk Regiment was at Wellington, a station in the Nilgiri Hills, south-west of Bangalore in southern India. Here the small boy learnt to ride, and one of the first photographs of him shows a relaxed child sitting on a fat white pony. For the rest of his life Wavell remembered India as a place ‘where the sun and air of a fine climate gave my body a good start in life’.⁸

When the Norfolks were ordered to Burma in 1891 Major Wavell decided to exchange regiments. To live in India with one’s family was considered acceptable; to do so in Burma, with its unhealthy climate, was not. A fellow officer recently promoted to command the 2nd Battalion, The Royal Highland Regiment (The Black Watch) wished, for financial reasons, to serve abroad. Since Wavell was in line for a command, the two men agreed to an exchange. Promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, Archibald Graham Wavell took over the new battalion in Limerick; the following year, 1893, The Black Watch – as the regiment was familiarly known, from the ‘watch’ they had kept on the Highlands and the dark tartan they wore – was transferred to Maryhill Barracks on the north-west side of Glasgow.⁹ The family had no Scottish blood, but by this exchange Wavell’s father started a connection with the regiment that was to be continued by future generations.

Colonel Wavell’s return to Britain meant he could educate his son in England without having to consign him to the care of spinster aunts during the holidays, the fate of so many boys sent to boarding schools ‘at home’ while their parents remained abroad. Until now, Wavell had shared his sisters’ governess. Already he had developed a love of reading; family folklore has it that when visitors arrived he would disappear under the table with his book to avoid interruption. He had also acquired a love of poetry that was to endure his whole life, and exhibited an exceptional memory. ‘Horatius’, ‘with its arresting stanza about Lars Porsena and his Nine Gods’, was the first poem he learnt by heart: ‘Admiring aunts used to give me three pence for reciting it from beginning to end; a wiser uncle gave me sixpence for a promise to do nothing of the kind.’¹⁰ Like any Victorian child, much of his life was spent with his sisters in the nursery. He was shy and sometimes tongue-tied in adult company.¹¹ Archibald Wavell’s contemporary Kenneth Buchanan, who lived in Lanarkshire, not far from the Wavells’ home on the outskirts of Glasgow, recalled that one afternoon Archibald and his father rode over from Maryhill Barracks to Cambuslang, five miles from Glasgow, to return his father’s call on the regiment. It was a ride of some fifteen miles, through the city of Glasgow, which Buchanan considered ‘no mean achievement’ for a young boy. His first observation of Archibald Wavell was that ‘he was shorter than myself, but stocky and probably half a stone heavier’. Buchanan, already at the school Wavell was shortly to join, remembered telling his family that he’d found him to be ‘a funny, quiet sort of chap!’¹² Wavell celebrated his tenth birthday in May 1893, and the next decade of his life fashioned the man he became.

In the autumn of 1893 Archibald Wavell left his family to attend Summer Fields, a prep school in Summertown, north Oxford, established in 1864 by Gertrude Isabella Maclaren, the second wife of Archibald Maclaren, pioneer of gymnastics and founder of the Oxford University Gymnasium. The idea was that Gertrude, or ‘Mrs’ as she was known by the boys, would teach them, and her husband would look after their physical well-being. Initially ‘Mrs’ had relied on the local vicar to teach the boys divinity, and the organist to teach them music. But in 1870 a Welshman and graduate of Brasenose College, the Reverend Charles Eccles Williams, had arrived, followed soon afterwards by the Reverend Hugh Alington; known as ‘Doctor’ and ‘Bear’, they married the Maclaren daughters. Mrs Maclaren’s husband had died in 1884, but the mens sana in corpore sano motto of the school continued to be upheld. In 1891, as Summertown grew into a suburb ‘and Summerfields, Summerhills and Sommervilles arose in such numbers that letters were constantly going astray’, Mrs Maclaren had changed the school’s original name of Summerfield to Summer Fields.¹³

By the time Archibald Wavell started at Summer Fields in 1893, it was a flourishing school of ninety boys and ten masters. Mrs Maclaren had virtually handed over its running to her son-in-law Dr Williams and her own son, Wallace. Three forms were taught, seated on benches, in the large, wood-panelled ‘New Room’, overlooking the playing fields. On the walls were hung wooden boards listing in red script the names of those who had won scholarships, whose achievements it was hoped the boys might emulate.¹⁴ The academic timetable was mainly classical. In the top form the boys were expected to be able to compose prose and verse in Latin and Greek and to understand works such as St Mark’s Gospel and part of the Acts in the Greek Testament; the Ajax of Sophocles; and selected passages from the works of Herodotus, Livy, Xenophon, Virgil’s Aeneid, The Odyssey, Ovid and Horace. In later years, contemporaries marvelled at the breadth of Archibald Wavell’s classical mind: undoubtedly the origins lay in his early education.¹⁵ There was no chapel in the school grounds and so every Sunday, their three penny pieces in their pockets, the boys went in a crocodile to the local church of St John the Baptist, across the Banbury Road.¹⁶

In addition to football and cricket in their season, once a week the boys walked to the gym. There were ‘Fives’ courts in the playground, and the boys also played golf with hockey sticks and fives balls on a primitive golf course. A ‘unique’ amusement, called ‘Torpids’ after the Oxford boat races, consisted of hurdle-races on the bumping principle, each competitor taking the name of a college boat club at either Oxford or Cambridge. They also had a ‘dribbling’ game, which involved dribbling a football around the hurdles until a boy could shoot it through the goal at the end. In summer the boys went swimming in the Cherwell River, which skirted the grounds of the school, and where they had a specially reserved bathing place.

However, life was very different from the comfort, even luxury of prep schools today. During term time the boys saw little of their parents. As noted by old boy Nicholas Aldridge: ‘Schoolmasters were remote and often unpredictable giants. Big boys seldom deigned to notice little boys, except to cuff them, and were in turn feared or worshipped by the little boys, who behaved in the same way themselves when their turn came to be cocks of the roost.’ There was also a ritual about clothing. Like every other boy, young Archibald Wavell would have been instructed that he must always wear a vest, change his shoes when going outside, and wear a felt hat if the sun was shining. Surprisingly, for sport ‘one simply flung off one’s jacket and sometimes one’s waistcoat and then weighed in, braces, boots, trousers and all.’¹⁷ Caning was a regular occurrence, and the ‘Black Book’ recorded misdemeanours. Apprehensive new boys received Mrs Maclaren’s good-night kisses.¹⁸ Already nearly 60 when Wavell arrived at the school, she had become very short-sighted and sometimes wore two pairs of glasses ‘when she meant business!’¹⁹ Wavell appears to have settled into Summer Fields without any difficulty, and never showed any signs of being homesick; an often-repeated story describes how ‘as soon as he arrived at the school, he was introduced to a group of boys, began to play with them, and after a few minutes strolled over to his parents, remarking, “You can go now. I shall be quite all right.”’²⁰

Throughout Wavell’s time at Summer Fields, Dr Williams was impressed by his all-round mental and physical capacity. ‘Words like “capital”, “grand”, “most promising” sparkled through his reports from Archibald’s first day in the school to the last.’²¹ In December 1894 Williams wrote to Colonel Wavell: ‘The Villain has again won his Form Prize, you see. He has been first in most subjects, as usual. We think him a child of great capacity and what pleases us most is that he goes up gradually accumulating knowledge and experience without the slightest effort, having his foundations very firm and sound.’²² Contemporaries remembered him as a sturdy, quiet-mannered boy, a little small for his age, ‘handsome and with a quick, shrewd gleam of humour in his eyes’. They also recognized his exceptional ability to learn. ‘Lessons appeared to come easy to him, in fact he seemed to do less work than the average,’ recalled Kenneth Buchanan. He was already demonstrating the quiet reserve and detachment, which became the hallmark of his character for the rest of his life. Buchanan described him as inclining to be ‘shy and uncommunicative’, rather untidy in appearance, ‘yet meticulously tidy in his work’.²³ ‘About his intelligence there was never any doubt,’ wrote another contemporary. ‘His mind flowered quickly; he absorbed knowledge with an almost daunting ease, and remembered everything he learned.’²⁴ With another boy, Norman Grundy, Wavell started a school paper – ‘written in long hand and passed around the Vth form (scholarship form) and to others who wanted it. It was rather primitive.’²⁵

Like any schoolboy, Wavell enjoyed things that made him squeal. Nearly fifty years later he wrote to a contemporary, Robert Lightfoot: ‘I can remember our finding an earwig and someone, and I think it was you, telling a gruesome story about earwigs which got into one’s ear while one was sleeping and ate their way through the brain and came out quite white at the other ear!’²⁶ According to Buchanan, Wavell did not shine particularly at games ‘but used to go very straight for his man at football’.²⁷ By his own admission he was not a good cricketer, but in his last year he captained the Second XI, and played several times for the First XI. And for at least one boy Wavell was a ‘schoolboy hero’. Robert Dundas was a year younger and thought the older boy ‘terrific’, recalling ‘a very solid little boy, with resolution and a low centre of gravity, and very hard to knock over at soccer’.²⁸

Within eighteen months of Archibald’s arrival, Dr Williams had written to Colonel Wavell suggesting that his son had a good chance of a scholarship to Eton or Winchester, ‘if you would like that’.²⁹ The following year...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Illustrations
• Maps
• Map-01
• Map-02
• In Memoriam
• Part I The Soldier’s Son
• Chapter 1 A Late Victorian
• Chapter 2 Life in the Army, 1901–8
• Chapter 3 Staff College, Russia and the War Office
• Part II Wavell’s Ascent
• Chapter 4 War in 1914
• Chapter 5 Palestine with Allenby, 1917
• Chapter 6 Peacetime
• Chapter 7 Manoeuvres
• Chapter 8 Prelude to War
• Part III Commander-In-Chief
• Chapter 9 Middle East Command, 1939
• Chapter 10 Holding Africa, 1940
• Chapter 11 All Fronts, 1941
• Chapter 12 Churchill’s Axe, 1941
• Chapter 13 Conflict of the Hemispheres, 1941
• Chapter 14 Supreme Commander, 1942
• Chapter 15 Adversity’s General, 1942
• Chapter 16 Field Marshal, 1943
• Part IV From Soldier to Statesman
• Chapter 17 Designated Viceroy, 1943
• Chapter 18 Wartime Viceroy, 1944–5
• Chapter 19 Viceroy at Peace, 1945
• Chapter 20 Unity or Partition, 1946
• Chapter 21 Dismissal, 1947
• Chapter 22 The End
• Chapter 23 Wavell’s Legacy
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Notes-1
• Acknowledgements
• Sources and Bibliography