The only documented record of Wren's military service records his appointment on 1 December 1914 as a reserve officer attached to an Indian infantry regiment – the 101st Grenadiers. Between 19 he also worked with the Educational Inspectorate for Sind and lectured at a teachers' training college. In 1903, he joined the Indian Education Service as headmaster of Karachi High School.

Wren worked as a boarding school teacher for a few years, during which he married Alice Shovelier, and had a daughter (Estelle, born 1901). Wren subsequently claimed to have worked as a navvy, deckhand, costermonger and fairground boxer during a three-year period between school and Oxford, as well as enlisting briefly as a cavalry trooper in the Queen's Bays (2nd Dragoon Guards). He graduated with a Master of Arts degree from St Catherine's Society, now St Catherine's College, Oxford but then a non-collegiate institution for poorer students. His literary influences included Frederick Marryat, R. Percival Christopher Wren was born in Deptford, South London, England, the son of a schoolmaster. This was one of 33 novels and short story collections that he wrote, mostly dealing with colonial soldiering in Africa. He is remembered best for Beau Geste, a much-filmed book of 1924, involving the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. Percival Christopher Wren (1 November 1875 – 22 November 1941) was an English writer, mostly of adventure fiction.

Percival Rupert Christopher Wren (1904–).

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