38. Augustus John sketched Lawrence in a couple of minutes during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
39. Feisal was photographed at the same time.
40. Gertrude Bell, Sir Herbert Samuel, British High Commissioner in Palestine (in white helmet), Lawrence and Sharif ‘Abdallah, photographed in Amman in April 1921.
41. A portrait of Lawrence by William Roberts, autumn 1922. In August that year Lawrence had enlisted as an aircraftman in the RAF under the name John Hume Ross. Lord Trenchard wrote, ‘He is taking this step to learn what is the life of an air man,’ but Lawrence had other, darker motives for enlistment in the ranks.
42. By 1924 Lawrence had been dismissed from the RAF and had enlisted in the army as Private Ф. E. Shaw of the Royal Tank Corps, based at Bovington Camp in Dorset.
43. In his later years Lawrence was addicted to speed, and was happiest when riding his 1000cc Brough Superior motorcycle, one of the most powerful machines of its day. Over the years he owned seven of these machines, all of which he nicknamed Boanerges and which were handmade for him by the manufacturer, George Brough.
44. The music room at Clouds Hill, with its large gramophone in the corner. Here Lawrence worked on The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,wrote scores of letters to artists, writers, composers and former colleagues, and entertained friends with musical weekends.
45. Lawrence died on 19 May 1935 and his funeral was held two days later at Moreton church in Dorset. The pall-bearers escorting the coffin included Colonel Stewart Newcombe, Sir Ronald Storrs and Eric Kennington, who was later to carve his effigy.
46 (left and above).Lawrence’s effigy in the old Anglo-Saxon church of St Martin, at Wareham in Dorset, is still visited by thousands of sightseers every year. ‘Sunlight was spilling in a cascade of dapples and brindles through the great window, falling on the crusader’s effigy of Lawrence in Arab dress, carved by his friend Eric Kennington.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am especially grateful for the advice and suggestions of John Lockman alias Jon Loken of the USA and Marten Schild of Holland – two contemporary Lawrence scholars who have managed in their different ways to examine the Lawrence myth in an original and relatively unprejudiced light.
I much appreciate the assistance of the Trustees of the T. E. Lawrence Estate for permission to see the embargoed material in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. I am grateful for the help of Jack Flavell and the staff of the Bodleian Library, and that of the staff of the British Library, Manuscripts Reading Room, the Imperial War Museum, of John Fisher and the staff of the Public Record Office, Kew, the National Library of Scotland, the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London.
I am also most grateful to the following previous biographers of Lawrence: Jeremy Wilson, Malcolm Brown, Lawrence James, Suleiman Mousa and John Mack. I much appreciate the assistance of Colin Wallace, and of Richard Belfield of Fulcrum Productions Ltd and his staff, Charles Furneaux of Channel 4, and the help and suggestions of Stephen White, Gerry Pinches and the rest of the film team which accompanied my journeys to Mudowwara and in Sinai. I would also very much like to thank Bertram Zank of Edinburgh, Sheikh Zaki M. Farsi of Jeddah, Tony Howard and Diane Taylor, Sabah Mohammad, Mifleh, Dakhillalah, Salem ‘Iid and the late Salem Abu Auda and their families of the Wadi Rum, Jibrin and Mohammad Hababeh of Aqaba, ‘Iid Swaylim of Nuwayba’, Sinai, and his family, Ronan and Leslie O’Donnell, my agent Anthony Goff of David Higham Associates, and Eleo Gordon and Lucy Capon of Penguin Books. I would like to express a special thanks to Dr Basil Hatim of the School of Arabic Translation and Interpreting, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, for his help in authenticating Lawrence’s letter in Arabic.
I would also like to thank my parents-in-law, General and Prof. Peru, for the use of their houses in Sardinia, and lastly my wife, Mariantonietta, and my son, Burton, without whom this book would not have been possible.
MICHAEL ASHER
Frazione Agnata, Sardinia, and Nairobi, Kenya
NOTES ON THE TEXT
Key
Brown Letters
The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, ed. Malcolm Brown, Oxford, 1991
Garnett Letters
The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, ed. David Garnett, London, 1938
HL
The Home Letters of T. E. Lawrence and His Brothers, ed. M. R. Lawrence, Oxford, 1954
MS. Res.
Reserve Manuscripts Collection: Bodleian Library, Oxford
SPW, Oxford text
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Oxford text (limited edn), London, 1926
SPW, 1935
T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, London, 1935
LH
T. E. Lawrence to His Biographer Liddell Hart, London, 1938
RG
T. E. Lawrence to His Biographer Robert Graves, London, 1938
Friends
A. W. Lawrence (ed.), T. E. Lawrence by His Friends, London, 1938
Leeds Letters
T. E. Lawrence, Letters to E. T. Leeds, ed. J. Wilson, London, 1988
Wilson
Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia. The Authorised Biography of T. E. Lawrence, London, 1989
Mack, Prince
John Mack: A Prince of Our Disorder “ the Life of T. E. Lawrence, London, 1976
Introduction: The Valley of the Moon
1. SPW,1935, p. 363.
1. Apparent Queen Unveiled Her Peerless Light
1. Celandine Kennington, MS. Res., c. 228.
2. Franзois Bedarida, A Social History of England,London, 1979, p. 162.
3. RG.
4. John Betjeman, Victorian and Edwardian Oxford,Oxford, 1971.
5. Celandine Kennington, MS. Res., c. 228.
6. ibid.
7. ibid.
8. ibid.
9. Mack, Prince.
10. Celandine Kennington, MS. Res., c. 228.
11. Brown Letters,p. 325.
12. ibid., p. 326.
13. Mack, Prince,p. 7.
14. MS. Res., c. 228.
15. Proverbs 13:12.
16. Marten Schild,’ The Immaculate Hero and His Imperfect Shadow’,unpublished MS: I am most grateful to Marten Schild for the inspiration of several of the ideas on this page.
17. MS. Res., c. 228.
18. British Library, Add. MSS. 45903, Charlotte Shaw Letters.
19. ibid.
20. Mack, Prince.
21. MS. Res., c. 228.
22. British Library, Add. MSS. 45903, Charlotte Shaw Letters.
23. SPW,1935, p. 446.
24. See Arnie Lawrence in a letter to Miss Early, 17 December 1963. ‘TE had a more than customary fear of pain … nor was he a natural hero or naturally brave.’ MS. Res., b. 56.
25. Friends,p. 37.
26. ibid.
27. British Library, Add. MSS. 45903, Charlotte Shaw Letters.
28. Friends,p. 31.
29. Sir Harold Nicolson, MS. Res., 55/2.
30. SPW,Oxford text, 1926, p. 262.
31. MS. Res., 55/2.
32. SPW,1935, p. 584.
2. Dominus Illuminatio Mea
1. Jan Morris, Oxford,Oxford, 1978, p. 30.
2. SPW,Oxford text, 1926.
3. LH,p. 79.
4. T. E.Lawrence, The Mint,London (1936), 1973, p. 175.
5. Friends,p. 314.
6. Bedarida, Social History of England,p. 72.
7. HL,p. 35.
8. Garnett Letters,p. 78.
9. LH.
10. Friends,p. 591.
11. Lawrence James, The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia,London, 1995.
12. MS. Res., p. 56.
13. RG.
14. Clare Sydney Smith, The Golden Reign. The Story of My Friendship with Lawrence of Arabia,London, 1940, p. 8.
15. ibid., p. 37.
16. Friends,p. 53.
17. SPW,1935, p. 57.
18. Mack, Prince,p. 21.
19. MS. Res., 55/2.
20. Friends,p. 62.
21. Friends,p. 31.
22. A. W. Lawrence, letter to Jim Ede, 1937.
23. Brown Letters,p. 305.
3. Nothing Which Qualified Him to be an Ordinary Member of Society
1. SPW, 1935,p. 581.
2. Brown Letters,p. 67.
3. ibid., p. 45.
4. HL, p.198.
5. Suleiman Mousa, T. E. Lawrence: An Arab View,London, 1966, p. 78.
6. SPW,1935, p. 569.
7. Ronald Storrs, Daily Telegraph,in MS. Res. 55/2.
8. Garnett Letters,p. 553.
9. ibid.
10. Friends,p. 246.
11. Harold Orlans (ed.), Lawrence of Arabia – the Literary Criticism and Correspondence of T. E. Lawrence,London, 1993, pp. 29–30.
12. HL,p. 18.
13. Lawrence, The Mint,p. 102.
14. HL,p. 31.
15. Orlans, Lawrence of Arabia,p. 32.
16. HL,p. 24.
17. ibid., p. 52.
18. Wilson, Authorised,p. 143.
19. ibid.
20. Vyvyan Richards, Portrait of T. E. Lawrence, The Lawrence of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom,London, 1936, p. 21.
21. ibid.
22. SPW,1935, p. 547.
23. Brown Letters,p. 36.
24. ibid., p. 33.
25. Friends,p. 588.
26. Brown Letters,p. 29.
27. Richards, A Portrait of T. E. Lawrence.
28. Orlans, Lawrence of Arabia,p. 239.
29. Richards, A Portrait of T. E. Lawrence,p. 45.
30. Friends,p. 48.
31. HL,p. 61.
4. The Sultan Drank Tea as Usual
1. HL,p. 62.
2. Randall Baker, King Hussain and the Kingdom of the Hejaz,Cambridge, 1979, p. 10.
5. A Rather Remarkable Young Man
1. Friends, p.55.
2. HL,p. 81.
3. ibid.
4. SPW,1935, p. 36.
5. Brown Letters,p. 325.
6. ibid., p. 305.
7. Lawrence, The Mint.
8. Mack, Prince,p. 69.
9. George Lloyd, Blackwood’s Magazine.
10. Wilson, Authorised,p. 53.
11. RG,p. 67.
12. HL, p. 31.
13. Philip Knightley and Colin Simpson, The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia,London, 1969, p. 20.
14. Brown Letters,p. 359.
15. ibid., p. 531.
16. Garnett Letters,p. 62.
17. HL,p. 98.
18. Garnett Letters,p. 63.
19. HL,p. 74.
20. ibid.
21. ibid., p. 97.
22. ibid.
23. ibid., p. 103.
24. ibid.
25. ibid., p. 104.
26. T. E. Lawrence, Crusader Castles,London, 1936, p. 95.
27. HL,p. 106.
28. ibid.
29. Friends,p. 77.
30. ibid.
31. Leeds Letters,p. 8.
6. Mr Hogarth is Going Digging
1. Mack, Prince,p. 66.
2. After the war, Lawrence gave a sum of money to Janet Laurie – this was part of Will’s inheritance from his father, which Lawrence received after Will’s death. This money would have come to Janet had she married Will, that is, if he had not been killed in the war, so Lawrence considered it rightfully hers. This gift was a sign of generosity and a sense of duty, but not evidence of personal attraction.
3. Brown Letters,p. 117.
4. HL,p. 208.
5. Leeds Letters,p. 10.
6. Lawrence, The Mint,p. 82.
7. Leeds Letters,p. 25.
8. ibid., p. 13.
9. HL,p. 144.
10. Friends,p. 115.
11. ibid.
12. HL,p. 141.
13. Friends,p. 87.
14. HL,p. 169.
15. ibid., p. 170.
16. ibid., p. 115.
17. ibid., p. 170.
18. Friends,p. 92. Neither Woolley nor Lawrence ever confirmed that Dahoum’s name was Salim Ahmad. This idea came from Tom Beaumont, who served with Lawrence as a machine-gunner in the Syrian campaign and whose testimony is dubious. However, whether or not Dahoum was actually called Salim Ahmad or Sheikh Ahmad he seems to be the best candidate for the subject of ‘To SA’ – Lawrence frequently changed names when it suited him.
19. C. Leonard Woolley, Dead Towns and Living Men, being Pages from an Antiquary’s Notebook,London, 1932, pp. 24–5, 18.
20. HL,p. 114.
21. ibid., p. 172.
22. Brown Letters,p. 40.
23. ibid.
24. SPW,1935, p. 354.
25. ibid.
26. Friends,p. 92.
27. HL,p. 161.
28. ibid., p. 162.
29. ibid., p. 161.
30. Bell, Lady, The Letters of Gertrude Bell,London, 1927.
31. T. E. Lawrence, 1911 Diary,London, 1939, p. 31.
32. HL,p. 161.
7. The Baron in the Feudal System
1. HL,p. 181.
2. LH,p. 54.
3. HL,p. 190.
4. ibid., p. 195.
5. Woolley, Dead Towns,p. 152.
6. ibid., p. 156.
7. ibid.
8. Leeds Letters,p. 137.
9. Garnett Letters,p. 161.
10. Friends,p. 91.
11. Leeds Letters,p. 137.
12. HL,p. 218.
13. Woolley, Dead Towns,p. 171.
14. Leeds Lottery,p. 43.
15. Woolley, Dead Towns,p. 172.
16. ibid., p. 129.
17. HL,p. 125.
18. ibid., p. 229.
19. ibid.
20. ibid., p. 232.
8. Peace in Mesopotamia Such as Has Not Been Seen for Generations
1. Garnett Letters,p. 152.
2. Brown Letters,p. 51.
3. ibid.
4. RG, p.67.
5. Leeds Letters,p. 76.
6. HL, p. 442.
7. ibid., p. 443.
8. Garnett Letters,p. 155.
9. SPW, 1935, p. 96.
10. Friends,p. 96.
11. ibid., p. 80.
12. Garnett Letters,p. 161.
9. The Insurance People Have Nailed Me Down
1. Friends,p. 105.
2. HL, p. 285.
3. Garnett Letters, p.167.
4. Leeds Letters,p. 99.
5. Garnett Letters, p.161.
6. Leeds Letters,pp. 102–3.
7. Garnett Letters,p. 185.
8. ibid., pp. 185–6.
9. ibid. p. 187.
10. RG, p. 81.
11. Richard Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry,1955, p. 124.
12. Baker, King Hussain and the Kingdom of the Hejaz,p. 43.
13. ibid.
10. Cairo is Unutterable Things
1. Mack, Prince,p. 132.
2. Friends,p. 160.
3. HL,p. 305.
4. Friends,p. 138.
5. Brown Letters,p. 72.
6. John Buchan, Greenmantle,p. 24.
7. HL,p. 302.
8. Brown Letters,p. 72.
9. SPW, 1935, p. 56.
10. Ronald Storrs, Orientations,London, 1944, p. 224.
11. ibid., p. 219.
12. Garnett Letters,p. 196.
13. George Antonius, The Arab Awakening,London, 1938, p. 158.
14. Garnett Letters,p. 196.
15. ibid., p. 197.
16. ibid.
17. James Morris, Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat,London, 1978, p. 191.
18. Garnett Letters,p. 199.
19. Brown Letters,p. 72.
20. Lawrence, The Mint,p. 35.
21. MS. Res., 55/2.
22. James, The Golden Warrior,p. 198.
23. Garnett Letters,p. 198.
24. ibid., p. 197.
25. Elie Kedourie, In the Anglo-Arabian Labyrinth – the McMahon – Husayn Correspondence and Its Interpretations 1914–1939,Cambridge, 1976, p. 67.
26. ibid.
27. HL,p. 308.
28. ibid.
29. Brown Letters,pp. 78–9.
30. Antonius, The Arab Awakening, p. 175.
31. Wilson, Authorised,p. 259.
32. Friends,p. 123.
33. Sulayman Fayzi, interviewed by Suleiman Mousa, in MS. Res., c. 569.
34. ibid.
35. RG, p.81.
36. From Wilfred Owen, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, Poems,1918.
37. Eric Linklater, A Highland Regiment.
38. SPW,1935, Introduction.
39. ibid., p. 58.
40. Garnett Letters.
11. The Biggest Thing in the Near East Since 1550
1. David Hogarth, ‘War and Discovery in Arabia’, Geographical Journal,March 1920.
2. Antonius, The Arab Awakening, p.196.
3. Baker, King Hussain and the Kingdom of the Hejaz,p. 102.
4. Abdallah, King of Jordan, Memoirs,ed. Philip Graves, 1950, p. 147.
12. Fallen Like a Sword into Their Midst
1. Robertson–Murray Correspondence, British Librrary, 1 October 1916.
2. ibid., 17 October 1916.
3. Storrs, Orientations,p. 203.
4. SPW,1935, p. 67.
5. James, The Golden Warrior,p. 175.
6. Wilson, Authorised,p. 302.
7. SPW,1935, p. 446.
8. ibid. p. 92.
9. ibid.
10. LH,p. 188.
11. ibid., p. 189.
12. T. E.Lawrence, Secret Despatches from Arabia,ed. Malcolm Brown, London, 1991, p. 70.
13. Pierce Joyce Papers, King’s College, London, 27 September 1917.
14. LH,p. 189.
15. SPW,1935, p. 63.
16. RG,p. 51.