Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/586

 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.

 WEBB, PHILIP (SPEAKMAN) (1831–1915), architect, was born in Beaumont Street, Oxford, 12 January 1831, the second of the eleven children of Charles Webb, by his wife, M. E. Speakman. His grandfather was the well-known medallist, Thomas Webb, of Birmingham. His father, who died in 1848, was a medical man of standing in Oxford, with many accomplishments, including a taste for drawing and an aptitude for natural history. Philip Webb was brought up in the house in St. Giles's which formerly belonged to the dukes of Marlborough and is now used as the judges' lodgings. He was educated at Aynho grammar school. He early developed that intimate knowledge of wild life shown in all his designs. He was articled to John Billing, architect, of Reading, and after serving his time entered the office of George Edmund Street [q.v.] in Beaumont Street, Oxford. Here he met William Morris [q.v.], and their subsequent friendship brought him into the brilliant group whose story is so well known. 560