Charles Doughty-Wylie

A native of Suffolk, born at Theberton Hall, Doughty-Wylie was educated at Winchester College. He graduated from the Royal Military College, Sandhurst in 1889. His military career included the Chitral Expedition of 1895 and the 1898 Occupation of Crete, between and after which he was posted in Sudan serving with Lord Kitchener in the Mahdist War (1898–99). In 1899 he took part in the final defeat of the Khalifa as brigade major to the Infantry Brigade with the flying column, and was mentioned in despatches.[2] He next served in the Second Boer War, then suppressing the Boxer Rebellion (1900) and in Somaliland (1903–04), where he commanded a unit of the Somaliland Camel Corps.

Colonel Doughty-Wylie was the British consul in Mersina, Ottoman Empire,[3] during the Young Turk Revolution of 1909. Richard Bell-Davies (later a VC recipient, then a lieutenant on the battleship HMS Swiftsure) met him at the time and gives an account in his autobiography Sailor in the Air (1967).

Massacres of Armenians in Mersina started along with the revolution, and Bell-Davies says that it was largely due to the efforts of Doughty-Wylie that these were halted. Doughty-Wylie then went to Adana, forty miles away, where he persuaded the local Vali (Governor) to give him a small escort of Ottoman troops and a bugler; with these he managed to restore order. Mrs. Doughty-Wylie (nee Lilian Adams-Wylie) turned part of the dragoman's house into a hospital for wounded Armenians. Bell-Davies says that by the time an armed party from Swiftsure arrived, Doughty-Wylie had again almost stopped the massacre single-handedly. Newspaper reports of the period record that Doughty-Wylie was shot in the arm while trying to prevent the Adana massacres.[4]

Charles Hotham Montagu Doughty-Wylie was the recipient of the Order of the Medjidie from the Ottoman Government. He was awarded the Medjidie because of his work during the Balkan Wars when he served with the British Red Cross helping the Ottoman Military.[5]

Doughty-Wylie was 46 years old, and a lieutenant colonel in The Royal Welch Fusiliers, British Army when, "owing to his great knowledge of things Turkish" according to Bell-Davies, he was attached to General Sir Ian Hamilton's headquarters staff of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force during the Gallipoli Campaign.

On 26 April 1915, following the landing at Cape Helles on the Gallipoli peninsula of the SS River Clyde, Lieutenant Colonel Doughty-Wylie and Captain Garth Neville Walford organised and made an attack through and on both sides of the village of Sedd-el-Bahr on the Old Fort at the top of the hill. The enemy's position was very strongly entrenched and defended, but mainly due to the initiative, skill and great gallantry of the two officers the attack was a complete success.[6] However, both Doughty-Wylie and Walford were killed in the moment of victory, Doughty-Wylie being shot in the face by a sniper and died instantly.

Doughty-Wylie is buried close to where he was killed, immediately north of Sedd-el-Bahr, opposite the point at which the SS River Clyde came ashore. His grave is the only solitary British or Commonwealth war grave on the Gallipoli peninsula: The Turkish authorities moved the graves of all other foreign soldiers to the "V Beach" graves except for his.[7]

His Victoria Cross, posthumously awarded for bravery[8] during a beach landing at Gallipoli in April 1915,[9] is displayed at the Royal Welsh Fusiliers Museum in Caernarfon Castle, Gwynedd, Wales. Damaged plating from the River Clyde can be seen in the Hampshire Regimental Museum in Winchester, England.[10]

Doughty-Wylie, a married man, had an unconsummated affair with Gertrude Bell with whom he exchanged love letters from 1913–1915 until his death. Bell was an eminent English writer, traveller, political officer, administrator, and archaeologist who explored, mapped in the region of Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Arabia.[11] Doughty-Wylie was a member of the Naval and Military Club from 1900 until his death.

His wife, Lilian, was the only woman on the Allied side to visit Gallipoli during the campaign, when she went to lay a wreath on his grave on 17 November 1915.[8]

Doughty-Wylie is commemorated outside St. Peter's Church in Theberton, Suffolk where his name is recorded on the war memorial. Inside the church he is depicted in a stained glass window as St. George.[12] A road in the village is named Doughty-Wylie Crescent.

• VCs of the First World War – Gallipoli (Stephen Snelling, 1995)

• Charles Doughty-Wylie at Find a Grave