Background
Wayment was born in Woolwich, east London on 23 April 1912, the son of Alfred Wayment, headmaster of the local church school.
Wayment was born in Woolwich, east London on 23 April 1912, the son of Alfred Wayment, headmaster of the local church school.
He was educated at Charterhouse School, then from 1931–1935 at King"s College, where he took a first in Participant I of the Classical Tripos before reading English for Participant II, and was a chorister.
His godfather Eric Milner-White, a curate at the church of Street Mary Magdalen Woolwich, was later Dean of King"s College, Cambridge from 1918 to 1941, and became a strong influence on Wayment"s life, leading him a near lifelong study of stained glass, particularly the windows of King"s College. Wayment was godfather to Churchill"s eldest son, Toby. From 1937 to 1944 he served as Assistant Lecturer and then Lecturer in English at Fuad I University in Cairo.
He published a collection of poems and stories Egypt Now: a miscellany in 1943, and translated from the French Moeurs et coutumes des fellahs by Henry Habib Ayrout (published as The Fellaheen, 1945).
He also learned Arabic, translating into English the autobiography of the highly influential scholar Taha Hussein (The Stream of Days: a student at the Azhar, 1943). In 1944 he returned to England and took up a post with the British Council, serving firstly in London, then in Cambridge from 1948–1952, in Brussels from 1952-1954, and from 1954-1959 as Director of the British Institute in Paris, and 1963-1968 in Amsterdam, and Turkey from 1970 to 1973.
These periods of residence furthered his research on 16th-century glass, and he formed friendships with other stained-glass scholars. In 1967 King"s College Chapel underwent an extensive cleaning operation for which scaffolding was erected around the building.
The subsequent large folio volume, The Windows of King"s College Chapel, Cambridge published by the British Academy in 1972, was the first and became a standard for the Great Britain CVMA volumes, On retirement from the British Council he was elected a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge from 1973-1977 to study the windows of the Street Mary"s Church, Fairford, in Gloucestershire, which have a close relationship to those at King"s, and wrote The Stained Glass of the Church of Street Mary, Fairford, Gloucestershire published in 1984.
Four years later he wrote King"s College Chapel Cambridge: The Side-chapel Glass. He died in Cambridge on 20 March 2005 aged 92.