T E Lawrence
In December 1910 he sailed for Beirut, and on arrival went to Jbail (Byblos), where he studied Arabic. He then went to work on the excavations at Carchemish, near Jerablus in northern Syria, where he worked under D.
He would later state that everything that he had accomplished, he owed to Hogarth. As the site lay close to the Turkish border, near an important crossing on the Baghdad Railway, knowledge gathered there was of considerable importance for military intelligence. While excavating ancient Mesopotamian sites, Lawrence met Gertrude Bell, who was to influence him during his time in the Middle East.
In late summer 1911, Lawrence returned to England for a brief sojourn.
By November he was en route to Beirut for a second season at Carchemish, where he was to work with Leonard Woolley. In January 1914, Woolley and Lawrence were co-opted by the British military as an archaeological smokescreen for a British military survey of the Negev Desert.
Woolley and Lawrence subsequently published a report of the expedition's archaeological findings, but a more important result was an updated mapping of the area, with special attention to features of military relevance such as water sources. Newcombe, Lawrence did not immediately enlist in the British Army; He held back until October, when he was commissioned on the General List.
Arab Revolt
At the outbreak of World War I Lawrence was a university post-graduate researcher who had for years travelled extensively within the Ottoman Empire provinces of the Levant (Transjordan and Palestine) and Mesopotamia (Syria and Iraq) under his own name.
As such he became known to the Turkish Interior Ministry authorities and their German technical advisors. He was eventually posted to Cairo on the Intelligence Staff of the GOC Middle East.
Contrary to later myth, it was not Lawrence or the Army that conceptualised a campaign of internal insurgency against the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East: it was the Arab Bureau of Britain's Foreign Office.
The Arab Bureau had long felt it likely that a campaign instigated and financed by outside powers, supporting the breakaway-minded tribes and regional challengers to the Turkish government's centralised rule of their empire, would pay great dividends in the diversion of effort that would be needed to meet such a challenge. The Arab Bureau was the first to recognise what is today called the "asymmetry" of such conflict.
The Arabs were then able to direct most of their attention to the Hejaz railway that supplied the garrison. This tied up more Ottoman troops, who were forced to protect the railway and repair the constant damage.
In 1917, Lawrence arranged a joint action with the Arab irregulars and forces under Auda Abu Tayi (until then in the employ of the Ottomans) against the strategically located port city of Aqaba.
In newly liberated Damascus – which he had envisioned as the capital of an Arab state – Lawrence was instrumental in establishing a provisional Arab government under Faisal. Lawrence, Emir Abdullah, Air Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond, Sir Herbert Samuel H.B.M.
high commissioner and Sir Wyndham Deedes and others in Palestine
Immediately after the war, Lawrence worked for the Foreign Office, attending the Paris Peace Conference between January and May as a member of Faisal's delegation.
Lowell Thomas's film was seen by four million people in the post-war years, giving Lawrence great publicity. Until then, Lawrence had little influence, but soon newspapers began to report his opinions. He was soon exposed and, in February 1923, was forced out of the RAF.
He was unhappy there and repeatedly petitioned to rejoin the RAF, which finally admitted him in August 1925. At that time he was forced to return to the UK after rumours began to circulate that he was involved in espionage activities.
He purchased several small plots of land in Chingford, built a hut and swimming pool there, and visited frequently.
Among the books Lawrence is known to have carried with him on his military campaigns is Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur; accounts of the 1934 discovery of the Winchester Manuscript of the Morte include a report that Lawrence followed Eugene Vinaver - a Malory scholar - by motorcycle from Manchester to Winchester upon reading of the discovery in The Times.
Death
Lawrence on a Brough Superior SS100
At age 46, a few weeks after leaving the service, Lawrence was fatally injured in a motorcycle accident while piloting a Brough Superior SS100 in Dorset, close to his cottage, Clouds Hill, near Wareham. He was profoundly affected by the incident and consequently began a long study of what he saw as the unnecessary loss of life by motorcycle dispatch riders through head injuries and his research led to the use of crash helmets by both military and civilian motorcyclists.
The famous stone effigy of Lawrence can be seen at the Saxon church in Wareham.
Writings
Throughout his life, Lawrence was a prolific writer. In 1919 he had been elected to a seven-year research fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, providing him with support while he worked on the book.
Again he vowed not to take any fees from the publication, partly to appease the subscribers to Seven Pillars who had paid dearly for their editions. As Lawrence left for military service in India at the end of 1926, he set up the "Seven Pillars Trust" with his friend D.
Hogarth as a trustee, in which he made over the copyright and any surplus income of Revolt in the Desert. He later told Hogarth that he had "made the Trust final, to save myself the temptation of reviewing it, if Revolt turned out a best seller."
The resultant trust paid off the debt, and Lawrence then invoked a clause in his publishing contract to halt publication of the abridgment in the UK.
However, he allowed both American editions and translations, which resulted in a substantial flow of income. Doubleday still controls publication rights of this version of the text of Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the USA.
Most scholars, including his official biographer, are sceptical of such claims.
Lawrence did not discuss his sexual orientation or practices but in a letter to a homosexual man, Lawrence wrote that he did not find homosexuality morally wrong, yet he did find it distasteful. In the book T. is Selim Ahmed, also called Dahoum, a young Arab who worked with Lawrence at a pre-war archaeological dig at Carchemish, with whom Lawrence is said to have had a close relationship, and who apparently died of typhus in 1918.
In Seven Pillars, Lawrence claims that, while reconnoitering Deraa in Arab disguise, he was captured, beaten, and raped. Modern biographers have questioned whether the incident ever occurred: in part, because there are problems with the chronology of Lawrence's account, in part because his subsequent sex life revolved around male flagellation, and also, because the Ottoman commander whom he accuses of whipping and sodomising him went on to lead a blameless post-war life.
During this time he recruited men from the service and told them a story about a fictitious uncle who, because Lawrence had stolen money from him, demanded that he enlist in the service and that he be beaten. The play Ross (1960) by Terence Rattigan, as well as the famous David Lean film Lawrence of Arabia, helped introduce the idea into popular culture.
Vision of Middle East
Lawrence's post-World War I vision of the Levant.
A map of the Middle East that belonged to Lawrence has been put on exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London.
In Young Indiana Jones, Lawrence is portrayed as being a life-long friend of the title character.
Theatre
Lawrence was also the subject of Terrence Rattigan's controversial play Ross, which explored Lawrence's alleged homosexuality. Johns accepted him, and sent a warning to the induction centre that a new recruit who had strong establishment influence, and who 'dined with Cabinet Ministers on his weekends' was arriving.
As recounted in Thomas' With Lawrence In Arabia, Lawrence, while on a pre-war archaeological trip to Mesopotamia, was attacked by an Arab bandit intent on stealing his gun, a Colt .45 Peacemaker.
Lawrence was also known to carry a Broomhandle Mauser, and later, a Colt M1911 semi-automatic.
Travel
Jordanian attempts to promote the Hejaz railway as a tourist attraction with a Lawrence Special running from Aqaba to Wadi Rum were derailed in September 2006 when a freight train ran off the track close to one of Lawrence's detonation points, causing similar damage to the permanent way.
A road in the Mount Batten area of Plymouth, where Lawrence was stationed, has been named Lawrence Road in his honour.
Other
Oxford legend holds that, while an undergraduate at Jesus College, Lawrence crept into the deer park of Magdalen at night and stole a deer; by the morning, he had managed to transfer the deer to the front quad of All Souls, which is normally off limits to undergraduates.
At the time Lawrence was going under the name Shaw, and signing himself, for example in the guest book at Philip Sassoon's Port Lympne estate, as "338171 A/C Shaw", Noel Coward in a letter to him asked "May I call you 338?"
In 2002 the german metal band Running Wild made a song in his honour called "The Ghost". Pennsylvania, (Ann Arbor, MI University Microfilms International).
Graves, Robert, Lawrence and the Arabs, London, Jonathan Cape, 1927 (published in the USA as Lawrence and the Arabian Adventure, New York, Doubleday, Doran, 1928).
Hoffman, George Amin, T.
(Lawrence of Arabia), 1963.
Penaud, Guy, Le Tour de France de Lawrence d'Arabie (1908), Editions de La Lauze (Périgueux, France), 336 pages, 2007/2008, ISBN 978-2-35249-024-1.
Stang, Charles M., editor, The Waking Dream of T.