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Ralph A Bagnold (1896-1990)

April 3, 2021 – Today is the 125th birthday of Ralph A. Bagnold (1896-1990). To me, he was one of the most fascinating figures of the last century. A polymath, he retired a Brigadier in the British Army following his successful creation and leadership of the Long Range Desert Group in the North African theater of World War 2. But he was also an explorer extraordinaire and an award-winning scientist. I want to introduce him to those who are unfamiliar.

The Explorer:
Later awarded the Founder’s Gold Medal by the Royal Geographic Society, Bagnold’s early life was characterized by a childhood spent in India, England, and Jamaica as the son of a British Army engineering officer. He went on to serve in World War 1 on the Western Front in France. Following the war, he was assigned to Egypt. That began his official exploratory years. Bagnold was the leader of a small group of British officers who began to explore the deep deserts of Egypt and Libya in Ford Model Ts and Model As. They created ingenious modifications and gear including a steam capture and re-condensation system for the radiator, the sun compass (because magnetic compasses are problematic in metal vehicles), sand ladders to get out when stuck, and others. They truly earned their expertise in desert travel and found ancient ruins, petroglyphs and traveled to oases that no European had visited. Bagnold chronicled their travels in a 1935 book, Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World [1]. It’s a fascinating account of the challenges they overcame and the places they explored. Bagnold’s writing is skilled and comes with the added benefits of his attention to details as well as his personal modesty. To give you an idea of the extent of some of their explorations, the 1932 expedition traveled over 3,700 miles of different desert terrain, almost all without roads, in a circuit from Cairo to Tekro, El Fasher, and Wadi Halfa and returning to the starting point. They returned at their planned time. In modified Model As and Ts. Well before the ‘Ford Tough” motto.

A sometimes companion and sometimes competitor, Count Almasy of Hungary, later became the basis for the classic movie, The English Patient. He played the role of spy in WW2 and historians are still unsure whose side he was on, the Italians, the Germans, or the British. Or maybe all three.

The Warrior:
Bagnold was 18 when World War 1 broke out in August of 1914. Like many young men of his generation, and especially with his family’s military background, he went to war on the Western Front in France after being made an engineer officer. The war must have impacted him even as it decimated a generation. But unlike another British officer and desert warrior, T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), Bagnold was to make his name in World War 2.

Bagnold’s desert explorations between the wars eminently qualified him for the North African front. He and his fellow explorers were probably the most expert officers in the British army on traversing and surviving in desert of Egypt and Libya. The army of course, like all armies, in its infinite bureaucratic wisdom, assigned him to India. The ship carrying him to India was damaged and had to put into Port Said in Egypt during the trip. British HQ in Cairo found out that Bagnold was on that ship and commandeered him for the desert. It’s not clear exactly how they knew. One wonders if the troops on the ship were given liberty and Bagnold was able to link up with some of his old pals from his Egypt days. But regardless of how Allenby’s HQ found out, the rest, as they say, is history. Or so it will be when I finish this post.

Interviewed at HQ, Bagnold recounted a story from his exploration days. Somewhere in the desert, his expedition ran into an Italian military unit of a type called an auto-Saharan company. The Italians were fighting tribesmen and, to overcome their desert familiarity, had pioneered the use of companies of cars, light trucks, and light armored vehicles to range far into the desert accompanied by small aircraft. They had success against the tribesmen and, not being at war with the British, the Italian officers invited the expedition to join them for dinner. Over food and wine, the Italian commander became somewhat boastful of the desert prowess of his military command and described a scenario in which, if they did ever tangle with the Brits, these auto-Saharan companies could range far into the desert and strike out at British supply lines and outposts along the Nile almost at will. HQ realized the importance of mitigating this risk and authorized Bagnold to create a unit to do so.

The Long Range Desert Group is a story of its own. Their initial probes convinced the Italian invasion force moving on Cairo that maybe the British could flank them even though the British were outnumbered by as much as 15:1. Their later operations through the deep desert brought invaluable intelligence back to British HQ and made Britain the master of the deep Libyan desert even though the Italians had spent the previous two decades fighting there. The LRDG also provided transport to the Special Air Service (SAS) on its first early raids of Axis airfields and taught them how to work in the desert.

The Scientist:
While Bagnold always maintained that he was an amateur scientist, his contributions are still felt today. For an amateur, his awards were impressive: for hydraulics and related fields the G.K. Warren prize of the National Academy of Sciences, the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America, and the Sorby Medal of the International Society of Sedimentologists. And, perhaps the highest honor in Great Britain for a scientist, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. His earliest scientific papers were published in the 30’s on the topic of sand movement. But he was not just aware of this from his desert explorations, he had performed rigorous wind tunnel experiments on the topic and was seeking physics equations for the movement of particles in a fluid. At the time, and still today, much of the equations in hydraulics and hydrology are based on experimentation and empirical relationships rather than on derived physics equations (e.g. Darcy’s Law). Bagnold’s method was to start there but then to try to develop pure physics equations. His book, The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes, originally published in 1941, is still the classic text on the subject. He always sought the bigger picture. In his preface to the 1954 edition, he wrote:

“But intriguing though the shapes and movement of desert dunes may be, the physics of wind-blown sand has a potentially wider interest much nearer home. On the first page of the Introduction, written fourteen years ago, I referred to the wider problem of the transport of granular material of any kind by fluids in general, to the case of its carriage by liquids, both in rivers and, industrially, through pipes, and to the greater difficulties of observation in this case. These difficulties have been so great that research on lines conventional to hydraulic engineers has advanced very little our knowledge of the basic principles involved. There is, however, an essential unity underlying the internal dynamics of the flow of all fluids, whether gases or liquids, and this unity must extend to the interaction between the fluid flow and the movement of grains within it.”

Following his retirement as a Brigadier from the British Army in 1944, Bagnold went on to a diverse career in which he worked for Shell Oil on issues of dune movement and desertification, wrote a series of papers commissioned by the US Geological Survey on sedimentation in water and movement of sand on shorelines, and even wrote a paper on random word distributions in language. As late as 1981, at the age of 85, Bagnold was employed by NASA to look at moving sand, but this time on Mars.

His son, in the Biographical Afterword of Libyan Sands, listed several traits he believed his father exhibited that made his life so remarkable. Maybe these traits are part of the reason I’ve admired his work for decades:

  • Toughness, fortitude and self-sufficiency shared by all of the men willing to go deep in the desert and rely on their own skills, planning, ingenuity and ability to overcome new challenges.
  • A firm grasp on reality and willingness to try things for himself coupled with a keen intellect.
  • An understanding of the value of planning.
  • An engineering mindset and understanding of science and machinery.
  • An insatiable curiosity and an unwillingness to just accept the opinions of others, even experts. But a desire to explore and test those opinions himself.
  • The willingness to accept a challenge – especially if the “experts” said it was impossible.
  • And a sense of personal modesty and willingness to share the credit with those around him.

It’s difficult for me to imagine that the world would not be a better place if there were more men and women with these qualities.

Bagnold, R.A. Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World (Eland Publishing, 2012). Kindle edition. (Originally published 1935)

Bagnold, R. A. The Physics of Blown Sands and Desert Dunes (Dover Publications, 2012). Kindle Edition. (Originally published 1941. Republished 1954. This version contains the preface to the 1954 edition and the Biographical Afterword by Stephan Bagnold)


Bagnold, Ralph A. Sand, Wind, and War: Memoirs of a Desert Explorer (Tucson: University of Arizona Press Century Collection, 2019). (Originally published 1990)