T. E. Lawrence

Thomas Edward Lawrence was born on August 16, 1888, at Tremadog in Caernarfonshire, north Wales ^[1]. His parents were not married. His father, Thomas Chapman, was an Anglo-Irish landowner who had left his wife and daughters in Ireland to live with Sarah Junner, the governess of his children. The couple adopted the surname Lawrence and moved repeatedly to avoid recognition, settling in 1896 in Oxford, where the five Lawrence boys grew up ^[2]. The circumstances of his birth remained a private wound; Lawrence learned the truth as a young man and referred to it obliquely for the rest of his life.

At Oxford High School for Boys and then at Jesus College, Oxford, Lawrence showed an early and intense interest in the medieval world. He cycled through France photographing and measuring castles, and in the summer of 1909 he walked more than a thousand miles through Ottoman Syria on foot, alone, to study Crusader fortifications ^[2]. The resulting thesis, on the influence of the Crusades on European military architecture, helped him take first-class honours in modern history in 1910 ^[1].

The Syrian walk mattered as much as the degree. It gave Lawrence his first sustained contact with Arab villagers, his first working Arabic, and a taste for hard travel on little money. Those habits, formed before he was twenty-two, shaped everything that followed in the T. E. Lawrence biography that the public would later come to know.

From 1911 to 1914 Lawrence worked as an archaeologist at Carchemish, a Hittite site on the Euphrates near Jerablus, on excavations run for the British Museum first by D. G. Hogarth and later by Leonard Woolley ^[3]. He supervised local workmen, catalogued finds, and improved his Arabic to the point of easy conversation. Colleagues remembered his unusual rapport with the Arab labourers, in particular a young donkey boy named Dahoum, who became a close companion and, many biographers believe, a lasting emotional presence in his life ^[2].

In January 1914 Lawrence and Woolley joined a survey of the Negev desert and northern Sinai for the Palestine Exploration Fund. The published result, The Wilderness of Zin, was genuine archaeology, but the survey also served British military intelligence, mapping a strategically sensitive frontier of the Ottoman Empire in the last months of peace ^[3]. When war came in August 1914, Lawrence's combination of fieldcraft, languages, and detailed knowledge of Ottoman Syria made him an obvious recruit. By December he was in Cairo working for military intelligence, drawing maps, interviewing prisoners, and writing assessments of Arab politics ^[1].

The revolt of Sharif Hussein of Mecca against Ottoman rule began in June 1916, and that October Lawrence was sent to the Hejaz to report on its leaders. He judged Hussein's third son, the Emir Faisal, the figure best able to hold the tribal forces together, and attached himself to Faisal's army as a British liaison officer ^[1]. Anyone asking who was T. E. Lawrence usually means the man of the next two years: a junior officer in Arab dress, moving by camel between tribal encampments, carrying gold, advice, and explosives.

Lawrence argued that the Arab irregulars should not besiege the Ottoman garrison at Medina but strangle it, raiding the single-track Hejaz railway so that the line stayed barely alive and kept thousands of Turkish troops tied down guarding it ^[4]. He took part personally in demolition raids on bridges and rolling stock. In July 1917 he shared in the revolt's most celebrated stroke, the overland seizure of Aqaba. Arab forces under Auda abu Tayi approached the port from the desert, the direction its defences did not face, and took it, giving the revolt a supply base on the Red Sea and linking it to General Allenby's campaign in Palestine ^[1].

The later war brought harder experiences. Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom that he was captured, beaten, and sexually assaulted at Deraa in November 1917 while reconnoitring the town in disguise, an episode whose details historians still debate because it rests on his own account ^[2]. In September 1918, near the village of Tafas, Arab forces under his command killed Turkish prisoners after finding villagers massacred, a scene he described with unsparing bleakness. On October 1, 1918, Australian cavalry and Arab forces entered Damascus, and Lawrence spent chaotic days trying to install an Arab administration before leaving for England, exhausted, at the end of the month ^[4].

Lawrence came home convinced that Britain owed the Arabs the independence its wartime correspondence had appeared to promise, and that the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which divided the Ottoman Middle East between Britain and France, betrayed that understanding ^[4]. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 he served on Faisal's delegation, sometimes in Arab headdress, translating and lobbying. The effort largely failed. France received the mandate for Syria and expelled Faisal from Damascus in 1920, while Britain took Mesopotamia and Palestine ^[1].

A partial correction came in 1921, when Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, recruited Lawrence as an adviser to the Middle East Department. At the Cairo Conference that March, the British settlement placed Faisal on the new throne of Iraq and recognised his brother Abdullah as ruler of Transjordan, arrangements Lawrence helped negotiate and later described as the best achievable discharge of Britain's promises ^[4]. He resigned in 1922, telling friends the political work was done and that he wanted nothing further from public life.

During these same years he was becoming a legend against his will, and partly with his cooperation. The American journalist Lowell Thomas had filmed him briefly in Arabia in 1918, and from 1919 Thomas's illustrated lecture show, seen by millions in London and around the world, fixed the romantic image of "Lawrence of Arabia" in the public mind ^[5]. Lawrence attended performances himself, fascinated and repelled by the figure on the screen.

In August 1922 Lawrence enlisted in the Royal Air Force as an aircraftman under the false name John Hume Ross, seeking anonymity, routine, and escape from his own celebrity. A newspaper exposed him within months and the RAF discharged him. He then joined the Royal Tank Corps in 1923 as T. E. Shaw, a surname he adopted legally in 1927, before securing a transfer back to the RAF in 1925, where he served contentedly until early 1935 ^[2]. His postings included a spell in Karachi and, in his final years, skilled work on the development of high-speed rescue boats for the air force at Southampton ^[1].

The same period produced the book on which much of his reputation rests. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his account of the Arab Revolt, had a tortured composition: he lost most of the first draft at Reading railway station in 1919 and rewrote the enormous text from memory and notes. A lavish subscribers' edition appeared in 1926, and an abridgement, Revolt in the Desert, was published in 1927 and sold widely, its royalties assigned by Lawrence to charity ^[2]. The full text reached the general public only after his death, in 1935. He also wrote The Mint, a raw record of RAF barrack life published posthumously in 1955, and a prose translation of Homer's Odyssey issued in 1932 ^[1].

Among T. E. Lawrence achievements, the literary work counts alongside the military record. Seven Pillars of Wisdom mixes campaign narrative, landscape writing, and self-examination in a manner that has kept critics arguing about its accuracy and its art in roughly equal measure. Winston Churchill was among its loudest admirers, and the book has never gone out of print ^[5].

Lawrence never married and left no children. He was a compact, fair-haired man, about five feet five inches tall, careless of food and comfort, generous with money he rarely kept, and devoted to fast motorcycles, owning a succession of Brough Superiors that he rode hard on Dorset roads ^[2]. His friendships crossed unusual boundaries: private soldiers in his barrack rooms, and at the same time Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, and George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte, with whom he kept up one of the great correspondences of the period ^[2].

His inner life has drawn as much study as his campaigns. Biographers established after his death that from 1923 onward he arranged, through an invented story about a punishing uncle, for a fellow serviceman to flog him at intervals, behaviour usually linked by scholars to the trauma he described at Deraa ^[2]. His sexuality remains uncertain; there is no reliable evidence of a physical relationship with anyone, and his own letters speak of a deep discomfort with bodily intimacy. He dedicated Seven Pillars of Wisdom to "S.A.", initials he never publicly explained, which many students of his life connect with Dahoum, who died of typhus in 1918 ^[3].

From 1923 his fixed point was Clouds Hill, a small brick cottage near Bovington in Dorset that he restored and filled with books and a gramophone. It had no kitchen worth the name and, for years, no bed for guests, and he loved it. The cottage now belongs to the National Trust and is kept much as he left it ^[6].

Lawrence left the RAF in February 1935 and retired to Clouds Hill. On the morning of May 13, 1935, riding his Brough Superior back from Bovington post office, he swerved to avoid two boys on bicycles, was thrown from the machine, and suffered severe head injuries. He died without regaining consciousness on May 19, 1935, at Bovington Camp hospital, aged 46, and was buried at Moreton in Dorset ^[1]. One of the doctors who attended him, the young neurosurgeon Hugh Cairns, was moved by the case to research head injuries among motorcyclists, work that contributed to the eventual adoption of crash helmets ^[7].

The reputation has never settled. Admirers point to the Aqaba campaign, the railway war, and his advocacy for Arab self-government; critics note his talent for self-dramatisation and question details of his own narrative, a debate sharpened by Richard Aldington's hostile 1955 biography and continued by scholars since ^[2]. David Lean's 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, with Peter O'Toole in the title role, won seven Academy Awards and renewed the legend for later generations, even as historians pointed out its liberties ^[5].

The basic T. E. Lawrence facts remain remarkable however they are weighed: an Oxford archaeologist who helped lead a desert revolt before his thirtieth birthday, refused honours from his king, hid twice in the ranks under false names, and wrote a war memoir still read a century on. His theories of guerrilla warfare, set out in Seven Pillars of Wisdom and a 1920 essay, are still cited in military studies of insurgency ^[4]. Few lives of the twentieth century have been examined so often and agreed upon so little.