Archibald Wavell

Biography

Archibald Wavell was born in Colchester in 1883, the son of an army officer. He was educated at Winchester College and Sandhurst and commissioned into the Black Watch in 1901, serving in the Second Boer War and on the North-West Frontier of India before graduating from the Staff College at Camberley. He spent a year with the Russian army to learn Russian before 1914.

In the First World War he lost his left eye at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, then served as liaison officer to the Russian army in the Caucasus and as a senior staff officer in the Palestine campaign. Between the wars he commanded a brigade and a division, led British forces in Palestine during the Arab revolt and took over Southern Command.

Appointed to Middle East Command in July 1939, he defeated the Italians in Egypt, Libya and East Africa in 1940–41, but the diversion of troops to Greece and Crete and defeats by Rommel led Churchill to swap him with Auchinleck in mid-1941. As commander-in-chief in India, and briefly head of the ABDA command, he faced the Japanese conquest of Malaya and Burma.

From October 1943 to February 1947 he was Viceroy of India. He sent the army to relieve the Bengal famine, released Gandhi, and tried to move India toward self-government with the Wavell Plan and the Simla Conference of 1945, but could not reconcile Congress and the Muslim League amid rising communal violence, and in February 1947 he was succeeded by Mountbatten. Created an earl in 1947, he became Constable of the Tower and Lord Lieutenant of the County of London, and died in 1950. He also published a popular poetry anthology, Other Men's Flowers.