Lawrence, T(homas) E(dward)

I

Introduction

Lawrence, T(homas) E(dward) (1888-1935), sometimes referred to as Lawrence of Arabia, British adventurer, soldier, and author who became famous for his role in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

II

Early Life

Born in Tremadoc, north-western Wales, on August 15, 1888, one of five boys (two of whom would die in World War I), Lawrence grew up in Oxford, where his parents settled in 1896. He was educated at Oxford City High School, before attending Jesus College, Oxford, where he secured a first-class degree in modern history in 1910.

From an early age he stood out from his contemporaries at Edwardian middle-class Oxford. This is partly because of his exotic family background: his father Sir Thomas Chapman, heir to a baronetcy, had run away from the family home in Ireland with the governess Sarah Lawrence, leaving his wife and four daughters behind. This was an enduring source of shame and worry for Lawrence’s parents. Lawrence’s peculiar drive and sense of difference found fulfilment in a variety of remarkable exploits.

It started with bicycling trips around France in 1906 and 1907, where Lawrence first developed a passion for castles. After a walking tour of Lebanon and Syria in 1909 (where he started to learn Arabic), he produced a brilliant undergraduate dissertation on crusader castles in 1910 entitled The Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture—to the end of the 12th century. This led to an introduction to D. G. Hogarth, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and possibly someone connected to Britain’s espionage community, who started him on archaeological digs at Carchemish in Syria in 1911. Lawrence stayed in the Middle East until 1914, ending up as the archaeologist on a military mapping expedition to the Sinai. He described his experiences in The Wilderness of Zin (1914), which he wrote with C. L. Woolley, a book that remains an important document on the archaeology of the region.

III

Desert War

The war years were Lawrence’s most important years. At the outbreak of of the conflict in 1914 Lawrence joined the British Military Intelligence Service in Cairo. Here he developed an expertise in Arab nationalist movements. From 1916 to 1918 he served as a British liaison officer in Arabia and the Levant with Hashemite Arab forces fighting alongside the British around the cities of Mecca and Medina against the Ottoman Turks. Extension of the revolt northwards resulted, in October 1918, in the apogee of Lawrence’s military career when he and the Arabs led by Faisal (later King Faisal I of Iraq) entered Damascus in the vanguard of the advancing British army. He ended the war as a full colonel. In 1919 he went to the Paris Peace Conference with the Arab delegation; the same year he was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. After 1920, and having failed in his ultimate aim of Arab independence, Lawrence was urged by Winston Churchill to join the Colonial Office to help establish a political settlement in the Middle East.

Then, in 1922, in an attempt to escape press publicity, Lawrence made the remarkable decision to give up his rank and position and join the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a ranker under the pseudonym J. H. Ross. Discovered by the press, he was discharged from the RAF, and then in 1923 he joined the Tank Corps under the name T. E. Shaw, where he stayed until 1925. In 1925 he re-joined the RAF under the name of Shaw and remained there until a few months before his death in 1935. Lawrence produced a candid account of life in the RAF in his 1929 book The Mint. His premature death came in a motorcycle crash in Dorset on May 19, 1935—Lawrence had long been obsessed by machinery and speed, and he owned a succession of state-of-the-art Brough motorcycles while serving in the RAF and Army.

IV

Reputation

Since the 1950s scholars have studied every aspect of Lawrence’s life from his illegitimate family background and his sex life to his psychological condition. Too often, these examinations pander to those interested in salacious detail, and they say as much about the time in which they were written as they do about Lawrence. Traditional scholarship focusing on Lawrence’s role in shaping history—exemplified by Jeremy Wilson’s magisterial official biography Lawrence of Arabia: Authorized Biography of T. E. Lawrence (1992)—struggles against the personalized, polarized literature of Lawrence’s admirers and detractors.

Lawrence was undoubtedly a remarkable man who made his biggest mark in World War I. Lawrence described his war in his carefully crafted book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (privately published in 1922 and then publicly available from 1935). The military importance of the Arab Revolt and Lawrence’s role in it have been exaggerated, a situation not helped by Lawrence’s sometimes fanciful account in Seven Pillars. Lawrence was one of a number of British officers attached to the Hashemite Arabs, although he was the liaison officer closest to Faisal. However, as an advocate and practitioner of guerrilla warfare, Lawrence’s style of fighting in Arabia attracted much post-war interest, not least his ideas of mobilizing local people against the ruling power.