For almost everything that follows I gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the writer John Ashby in sharing with me the notes of the late Brian Carter of Wigan, Lancashire (though any conclusions are my own). Carter was a tireless old-fashioned journalist who made extensive enquiries, and who corresponded with R. Alan Graham-Smith, P. C. Wren’s stepson, between 1967 and 1991; Mr Graham-Smith’s own more recent death in his nineties releases these memories from a promise of confidentiality. It seems important to add that he remembered his stepfather as ‘a wonderful man – kind, generous and amusing, with a great sense of humour’.
WREN WAS BORN on 1 November 1875 at 37 Warwick Street, Deptford, in the East End of London. His parents were a schoolmaster named John Wilkins (Christopher?) Wren and Ellen, née Lasbury; his grandfather was Frederick Wren, a bricklayer and plasterer. The name on the birth certificate was ‘Percy’, and it is unclear when he adopted the style ‘Percival Christopher’, though this was certainly by the time of his arrival in India in 1903.
There is no firm evidence of his education, but his father was master of Duke Street School in Deptford (later Alverton Street, SE8). There is documentary confirmation that on 13 October 1894 – so at the age of 19 – Wren matriculated at Oxford with the Delegacy of Non-Collegiate Students (later St Catherine’s Society, and eventually St Catherine’s College); this was then a means of gaining access to an Oxford education while avoiding the full expense of membership of a college. He was apparently a keener sportsman than a student; a 3rd Class BA in history is recorded on 30 July 1898, and an automatic MA on 28 May 1901. From 29 October 1903, when India Office records (Bombay Civil List, 1917) confirm his arrival in Karachi to take up a teaching appointment, Wren’s life is at least patchily documented. According to his stepson, by that date he was married to his first wife, whose name is unknown, and they had an infant daughter.
The gaps in his record, during which it is conceivable that he served in the Legion, are thus between his leaving school and going up to Oxford in 1894 – perhaps four years covering the ages of 16 to 19; and between August 1898 and the end of 1902 at the latest – a little more than four years, between the ages of 22 and 27. His father had apparently advised him to ‘see life through as many windows as possible’, and in later years he told stories of wandering around England in his teens, with a gold sovereign sewn into his clothes for emergencies. He claimed to have worked as a navvy, costermonger and deckhand; to have fought in a fairground boxing booth; and to have enlisted as a trooper in the Queen’s Bays, although there are no surviving Ministry of Defence or regimental records in his name. The post-Oxford years would seem the more likely period for any putative Legion service, but medals found among his possessions (see below) would hint at the earlier period. If he actually did serve then he certainly did not fulfil a five-year enlistment, and desertion would be a plausible reason for him to remain silent – not because of any stigma, but for fear of the arrest to which he would be liable if he ventured on to French soil thereafter. In this connection one of his short stories is intriguing: The Deserter, in the 1917 collection Stepsons of France, explicitly imagines such an arrest, of an Englishman going ashore at Marseille with his new bride, from a steamer bound for India.
Between October 1903 and October 1907 Wren carried out various duties in Karachi, both as a school headmaster and simultaneously with the Educational Inspectorate for Sind. His stepson was told that during these years both his first wife and his daughter ‘Boodle’ died – a tragically common event – leaving him to bring up a son, probably born in 1904 or 1905 and christened Percival Rupert Christopher (nicknamed ‘Fic’). In 1903, while lecturing at a teacher training college, Wren first met Isobel Mountain, a 19-year-old trainee who would later become his second wife. He was on leave from March to December 1908, and during that time Isobel married a civil engineer named Cyril Graham-Smith. In December 1908 Wren was appointed principal of a secondary school teachers’ training college in Bombay, and during 1910 – 13 he held a post with the Educational Inspectorate at Poona. In 1910 Cyril and Isobel Graham-Smith had a son, Richard Alan (always called Alan); he was born at Behar, but the family later moved to Poona, and presumably this was when the widowed Wren renewed his acquaintance with Isobel.
Wren’s first published novel, Dew and Mildew (1912), was followed by Father Gregory in 1913. Between August and October 1913 he was on special duty, preparing a manual of drill exercises and instructing a class in them, which does argue that he had previous military experience. On 16 September 1914 he was appointed principal of a Bombay high school; his third novel, Snake and Sword, was published that year, and Driftwood Spars in 1915, but none of his books had yet enjoyed any real success.
WREN’S ONLY DOCUMENTED military service began with his appointment on 1 December 1914 to the Indian Army Reserve of Officers with the rank of captain of infantry, attached to the 101st Grenadiers. (Confusingly, another Percival Wren figures in the Indian Army List for 1914, but this is clearly not our man. He was commissioned in 1895, served with the Poona Volunteer Rifles, and passed to the supernumary list in December 1913 in the rank of major – which may have confused Wren’s obituarists.)
P. C. Wren’s experience of active service would seem to have been brief and disappointing. The Indian Army provided two expeditionary forces for an attempted invasion of German East Africa (Tanganyika), and on 2 November 1914 Indian Expeditionary Force B, comprising the 27th Brigade and the Imperial Services Brigade, made a disastrous landing at the port of Tanga just south of the border with British East Africa (Kenya). Forewarned, courtesy of the Royal Navy, General von Lettow Vorbeck reinforced the garrison and had little difficulty in repulsing the attempt, and on 5 November the force re-embarked, abandoning much of its materièl. The 27th Brigade (2nd Bn Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, 63rd Palmahcotta Light Infantry, 98th Infantry and 101st Grenadiers) was withdrawn to Mombasa to join up with Indian Expeditionary Force C. The brigade was then deployed to defend the Uganda Railway between Mombasa and Nairobi against German raids from the south, strung out through unhealthy country infested with lions.
Captain Wren presumably arrived to join his regiment some time during the winter of 1914/15, but almost at once he must have joined the many who were struck down by disease, since he is listed as being on sick leave from 17 February 1915. He never served again; he left the Officers’ Reserve on 31 October 1915, and is shown as being on leave from his civil employment, under various headings, until 18 October 1916. During this time his fifth book and first collection of Legion short stories was published by John Murray; Wages of Virtue (1916) bears the byline ‘Captain Percival Christopher Wren, I(ndian) A(rmy) R(eserve)’. In later years he used the style of ‘major’, and a photograph that was in the possession of his stepson puzzlingly shows him in anonymous ‘blues’ with the insignia of that rank, but bears no date or address.
His stepson believed that Isobel Graham-Smith cared for Wren during his convalescence in Poona, where he returned to his teaching duties only between 19 October 1916 and 23 February 1917. He then took home leave; strikingly, Isobel and her son accompanied him, and they all lived with Isobel’s parents in Parkstone, Dorset, during Wren’s continued convalescence that year. His second Legion collection, Stepsons of France, and another title, The Young Stagers, were published in 1917, and Wren finally retired from the Indian Educational Service that November. He apparently supported himself in England by working as a tutor and schoolmaster, though details are vague; during these years Isobel made at least one trip back to India, presumably in the hope of obtaining a divorce.
The former légionnaire Adolphe Cooper told Colin Rickards, the Canadian historian of the Legion, that he had met Wren when the latter visited Sidi bel Abbès early in 1924. If he really was a deserter, then he presumably judged that after at least twenty years and the butchery of the Great War it was very unlikely that anyone who could recognize him was still serving. Cooper also claimed that Colonel Rollet instructed him to translate Bea
u Geste for him (if true, this must presumably have been in 1926, when Rollet was commanding 1st REI at the depot and Cooper was serving in the 3rd Battalion at Ain Sefra).
In 1925 or 1926, when Wren had achieved success with Beau Geste (in which he named the character providing the Geste brothers’ love interest ‘Isobel’), Alan Graham-Smith’s mother finally obtained a divorce, and she and Wren were married at Bournemouth Registry Office on 3 December 1927. Wren was then 52 years of age, Isobel 44, and Wren’s own son 22 or 23. Alan said that father and son had a difficult relationship; ‘Fic’ lost touch with his father early, and was said to have emigrated to the USA at some date before the Second World War.
Between 1924 and 1939 the Wrens lived at at least seven addresses in Dorset, Kent, Hampshire, Buckinghamshire and London. The longest period was from August 1928 to February 1934 at Westwood House, a luxurious eight-bedroom home set in two acres adjoining a golfcourse at 9 Elgin Road, Talbot Woods, Bournemouth; during work on the house Wren had a builder embellish it with a fort-like crenellated extension including a billiard room. He suffered from periodic ill-health, but by the time of his death he had published a total of 33 novels and collections of stories, the last (Odd – But Even So) in 1941.
P. C. Wren died of a heart attack at Moor Court private hotel near Stroud, Gloucestershire, on 22 November 1941, at the age of 66, and was buried at Holy Trinity Church, Amberley. He guarded his privacy to the last, and his obituaries are long on generalizations but short on facts and dates. (Even that in The Times makes him ten years too young, and gives him an inaccurate family history; attempts to link his descent to the great seventeenth-century architect’s brother and to Borough Court, a country house in Devonshire, seem to be groundless, since no Wren lived there before 1890.) Isobel Wren suffered a severe stroke in 1951, and died in 1960.
AMONG WREN’S POSSESSIONS, Alan Graham-Smith inherited a full-size Médaille Militaire, and a set of three miniatures made up after the First World War – the Médaille, a Croix de Guerre avec Palme, and a Médaille Coloniale with the clasp ‘Afrique Occidentale Francaise 1900’. Wren had told his stepson that he had been awarded the first two, but these decorations pose more questions than they answer. A cynic might point out that anyone can buy medals, and French decorations are not named to the recipient. The portrait photo showing Wren in major’s uniform seems to show six ribbons; one might be the Médaille Coloniale, but none are easily identifiable. His Indian Army service, however brief, would still seem to have entitled him to four British decorations: the 1914 – 15 Star, War Medal, Victory Medal and Africa General Service Medal.
The Croix de Guerre was instituted only in April 1915, and was often awarded as a compliment to Allied personnel who served alongside French troops; however, there were no French troops in British or German East Africa in November 1914 – February 1915. A retrospective wartime award to a sick British officer who had already returned to India seems odd. However unlikely, it is not wholly inconceivable in the interwar years of Wren’s celebrity, when some far murkier retrospective awards of far higher French decorations caused a national scandal (in which the former intelligence officer Francois de La Rocque, mentioned in this book, played an indignant part).
The Colonial Medal clasp for campaigns in French West Africa was first awarded in 1900, with retrospective entitlement. The first Legion deployment to that theatre was of a mounted half-company formed from men of both Foreign Regiments, which embarked at Oran on 6 August 1892 and arrived at Kayes on the Senegal river (now in south-west Mali) on 2 September, with 4 officers, 120 rankers and 93 mules. They operated in Guinea and Ivory Coast with Naval Troops columns led by Colonels Archinard and Combes, and by the time of their return to Kayes in May 1893 they had taken part in 14 combats and had marched about 1,860 miles. They were then shipped back to Algeria, and were disbanded at Sidi bel Abbès on 24 June 1893. This deployment thus coincides with Wren’s undocumented late teenage years. (A different medal was awarded for the 1892 Dahomey expedition.) The only other Legion elements to serve in French West Africa were the two infantry companies between February 1894 and January 1895 (see end of Chapter 5). Wren is known to have been studying at Oxford from October 1894, and a successful desertion that spring – from Segou, and many hundreds of miles down the Niger and Senegal rivers to the coast – seems highly unlikely.
The Legion Historical and Information Service does not provide records of former légionnaires to any but their proven next of kin, and without the name under which a man enlisted there is no way of even attempting such an enquiry. In 1967 they held no record of a Percy Wren, and stated their belief that he had obtained his information from a former légionnaire discharged in 1922.
In the absence of some further documentary discovery, the mystery of whether or not P. C. Wren actually served in the Foreign Legion would seem to be insoluble.
Notes and Sources
Preface
1 Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons (Sceptre, 2006)
2 Quoted by Woolman, p.125, from Rosita Forbes, The Sultan of the Mountains (New York, 1924)
3 Dr Anderson – head of War Studies at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst – was attached to 1st Battalion, Royal Anglian Regiment; he is quoted by permission.
4 Dunn, Resistance, p.256
Prologue: ‘Bloody Week’
1 The Reality of War, p.133
2 Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War (1961), p.57
3 Morel, p.50; Porch, Foreign Legion, pp.164 – 5; Bergot, Foreign Legion, pp.89 – 91; Geraghty, pp.82 – 3. The RE absorbed the 10th (Depot) Co of the 7th Line, and drafts from the 12th, 21st, 68th, 69th and 71st Line. (Michael Cox, Orbatinfo)
4 Porch, Foreign Legion, p.166; Livre d‘Or, p.130; Garros, pp.37 – 8; Bergot, Foreign Legion, pp.94 – 5
5 Porch, Foreign Legion, p.166; Garros, p.38; Bergot, Foreign Legion, p.96
6 Garros, p.39; Bergot, Foreign Legion p.97; Livre d‘Or, p.130
7 The eventual ‘paper’ strength of the National Guard of Paris was more than 340,000 men aged 20 – 45, of whom 104,000 formed the ‘active’ regiments, with 227,000 older ‘sedentary’ reservists. Given a total city population of some 2 million, these are extraordinary figures.
8 Tombs, pp.5, 45 – 7, 50 – 51; Horne, pp.265 – 75
9 Tombs, p.53
10 Bergot, Foreign Legion, p.98; Grisot and Colomb, pp.338 – 46, 358
11 In 1870 a French infantry regiment had 3 battalions, each of 8 companies; in wartime each bn normally took only 6 coys into the field, leaving the 7th and 8th to form a depot. A rgt at field strength mustered c.2,000 all ranks, so each bn c.660, and a coy c.110, with three officers.
12 Choisel, RHdA, 1981/2
13 Tombs, p.14
14 The M1866 Chassepot was a breech-loading, bolt-action rifle taking an 11mm black-powder cartridge made of paper, card, gauze and rubber. This was supposedly self-consuming – i.e. the detonation both propelled the bullet and burned the cartridge away instantaneously, so no empty case had to be extracted before the next was loaded. In fact the build-up of residue soon caused fouling, even obliging men to urinate into the hot chamber in attempts to clear it. Sighted up to 1,200m, the Chassepot had twice the range of the Prussian Dreyse; although this encouraged men to open fire too soon, the Chassepot was very effective, and its flat-nosed 25g (0.9oz) soft lead bullet made terrible, mangling wounds. In contrast to modern warfare, the majority of deaths in the Franco-Prussian War were caused by rifle fire. (Vuillemin, pp. 8 – 22)
15 Rank-and-file prisoners only returned in any numbers after the final Treaty of Frankfurt on 10 May. Only some 25 per cent of the Army of Versailles would be composed of ex-POWs, in régiments provisoires of IV and V corps (Tombs, p.99)
16 Tombs, pp.57 – 62, 93
17 ibid, pp.101 – 16
18 ibid, p.24. Throughout this text chasseurs à pied – ‘hunters on foot’ – is translated for simplicity as Light Infantry.
19 ibid, pp.78 – 9; Horne, p.308
20 Patry, p.259
21 The ‘snuffbox’ anyway had only half the range of the Chassepot, and misfires, fouling of the chamber and extraction problems with its brass-based cartridge case were also common. (Vuillemin, pp.23 – 30)
22 Tombs, pp.80 – 90; Horne, pp.309 – 11
23 Unless otherwise indicated, the account of RE operations against the Commune before 24 May is taken from Grisot and Colomb, p.354 et seq (Grisot was then an officer with V/RE). After that date their account is integrated principally with Gen Montaudon’s memoirs, Tombs (Ch 9) and Horne (Ch 24 and 25).
24 Tombs, p.201. Until 15 Apr, Gen Montaudon’s command was designated 5th Div of I Corps, and thereafter as 3rd Div. It comprised: 1st Bde (Gen Dumont) – 30e Bn Chasseurs à Pied, 39e Rgt de Marche, Rgt Étrangère 2nd Bde (Gen Lefèbvre) – 31er and 36e Rgts de Marche, 119e Rgt de Ligne Cavalry Bde (Gen Gallifet) – 9e and 12e Chasseurs à Cheval (detached)
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 87