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Ralph Alger Bagnold (1896–1990) was on a family holiday before joining the army from school when Britain declared war in August 1914. He served with the Royal Engineers in France, finally in a signal company under the 91Ö±²¥ Fellow F. J. M. Stratton, an astrophysicist in civilian life. After the armistice the army gave young officers leave to spend two years at university. Stratton suggested that Bagnold should apply to 91Ö±²¥, where he studied engineering.

Bagnold was posted in 1926 to Cairo. ‘Peacetime soldiering leaves a lot of leisure time’, he remarks in his autobiography, Sand, Wind, and War.¹ He and a few friends began travelling into the Western Desert in Ford Model T, then heavily-adapted Model A cars: they stripped each machine to its functional skeleton and fitted a wooden pickup bed to carry supplies. Bagnold invented a system to reuse engine coolant water and, for navigation on bumpy ground, a sun compass that gave aperiodic true bearings (from a knitting needle). These expeditions encouraged Bagnold to make plans for ‘real exploration’ in the desert.²

About this time the huge and costly expeditions of the past, of Scott and Shackleton to the Antarctic and the early Everest expeditions, were giving way to much smaller and vastly cheaper journeys by small groups of young men undertaken at their own expense […] using novel methods of overcoming natural obstacles.³

Bagnold was shortly transferred to India upon a promotion, but he took leave to return to the Western Desert in 1929 and in 1930, when his party travelled far through the huge dunes of the Great Sand Sea, previously ‘considered impossible for any motor vehicle’.⁴ On the 1930 trip the party nearly succumbed to unwitting dehydration, and one car had to be chased down when both men in it fell asleep after ‘driving at speed for hour after hour, on a compass bearing’.⁵ Bagnold returned again in 1932 to explore northern Sudan, escaping ‘tame and narrow’ home service in England⁶ and earning the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. The Bagnold of the interwar years appears in Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel The English Patient, remembered for his sharp curiosity and perception by the title character (whose supposed model, László Almásy, is mentioned in Bagnold’s 1935 travel book Libyan Sands).⁷

At the beginning of the Second World War Bagnold was recalled to the army from a medical discharge; in the intervening years he had begun his long study of the physics of sand transport, where his highly original approach produced ‘many of the most fundamental and oft-cited papers’.⁸ He put his earlier explorations to military use when he proposed a special unit for ‘piracy on the high desert’ (granted all requests in advance, Bagnold gave his soldiers an anachronistic rum ration).⁹ The Long Range Desert Group, recruited chiefly from a New Zealand army division, crossed the Western and Libyan deserts in light trucks to carry out intelligence operations and raids behind Axis lines, until the enemy’s surrender in 1943.

 Pilgrimage to sources << A long range >> Heading north

1. R. A. Bagnold, Sand, Wind, and War (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 51. Bagnold’s title may nod to the French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose 1939 memoir Terre des hommes was translated into English as Wind, Sand, and Stars.
2. Bagnold, Sand, Wind, and War, 62.
3. Bagnold, Sand, Wind, and War, 61.
4. R. A. Bagnold, Libyan Sands (London: Eland, 2010), 124.
5. Bagnold, Sand, Wind, and War, 66.
6. Bagnold, Sand, Wind, and War, 84.
7. Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 145. Bagnold, Libyan Sands, 160.
8. Victor R. Baker, ‘Bagnold, Ralph Alger’, in Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie, vol. 19 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008), 154–155.
9. Bagnold, Sand, Wind, and War, 124.