Lawrence of Arabia: T. E. Lawrence's links to Oxford

A soldier and military strategist, author, scholar, diplomat and archaeologist, he became famed for his role in the Arab Revolt against the Turks during WW1. He’s also one of those rare individuals sufficiently esteemed to be known by his initials in the manner of H.G. Wells, J.R.R. Tolkien, W.G. Grace, P.G. Wodehouse, J.F.K etc. I give you Thomas Edward Lawrence, T.E. Lawrence, or ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ as per the 1962 film starring Peter O’Toole. And Lawrence himself preferred initials to names.

Lawrence was born in Wales on 16th August 1888, a fortnight before the first of the Whitechapel murders in London’s East End. He was an illegitimate son of Anglo-Irish aristo Sir Thomas Chapman, 7th Baronet (1846-1919), and the governess, Sarah Junner (1861-1959), also given as Sara Maden, who referred to themselves as ‘Mr and Mrs Lawrence’ (ooh err missus). This rather irregular start in life doesn’t appear to have done young Lawrence any harm although to be fair he was the son of an aristocrat. Dubbed ‘Ned’ within the family, he was to have four brothers.

Lawrence received a form of scholarship, a travelling one, at Magdalen College, Oxford, to fund his work at Carchemish (Image: (author – Brian Robert Marshall, source – Geograph))

It was in 1896 that the Lawrences moved to Oxford (2 Polstead Road, which would be the family home until 1921). Thomas and one of his brothers became commissioned officers in the Church Lad’s Brigade (St Aldgate’s Church). When he was 15 the youngster went on a cycling tour with a schoolfriend which included visiting almost every parish church in the county of Oxfordshire and picking up any ‘finds’ from building sites they came across, presenting said finds to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, which recorded as much in its annual report of 1906. Thomas attended the City of Oxford High School for Boys (1896-1907), then studied History at Jesus College, Oxford (1907-10) where he was an enthusiastic member of the University Officers’ Training Corps or OTC. Lawrence departed Oxford with a 1st class degree. Whilst he may have been born out of wedlock in Wales and made his name in the Bible lands, he was very much a man made in Oxford.

Lawrence received a form of scholarship, a travelling one, at Magdalen College, Oxford, to fund his work at Carchemish (Image: Ed Webster)

Lawrence followed all this academia by being a junior member of the British Museum archaeological team digging about ancient Hittite remains at Carchemish on the Euphrates (1910-14) which gave him his first introduction to the desert inhabitants, his work during this time funded by a scholarship from Magdalen College, Oxford. There was undoubtedly some intelligence gathering going on too as Lawrence’s forays took him to northern Sinai and the Turkish frontier east of Suez. He’d be a prized commodity when war broke out as bods who understood Arab affairs were few and far between; those who’d travelled in Turkish-held Arab lands even rarer.

Lawrence alongside Herbert Samuel and EmirAbdullah at Amman aerodrome, April 1921 (Image: US Library of Congress)

In the early days of WW1 Lawrence volunteered to join the Army and was based at the Arab Bureau intelligence unit in Egypt before travelling around on intelligence missions. Two of his brothers would be killed in the fighting in France, a tragic and very personal reminder of the attritional slog on the Western Front, a stalemate which caused the Allies to look at campaigns against Germany’s assumed weaker ally, Turkey. As a liaison to the Arab forces, It would be Lawrence’s ability to infiltrate the ‘closed shop’ of tribal nomadism that enabled him to rejuvenate the Arab revolt (1917-18) and bid for independence against/from the Turks, which had been in danger of withering on the vine. Its first major success had been the capture of Aqaba in July 1917 and Lawrence’s stock rose accordingly as he became a Lt. Col. and received the DSO (Distinguished Service Order). It was hit-and-run guerilla warfare behind enemy lines paying dividends along with a vision of an Arab nation. Effectively commanding the levies of the Emir Faisal, Lawrence’s cooperation with General Allenby’s more conventional advance demonstrated the outstanding abilities he possessed as a leader and motivator of irregular partisans, culminating in the capture of Damascus in October 1918.

Lawrence is on the left of this picture of the 1921 Cairo Conference (Image: American Colony (Jerusalem) photo department, source – US Library of Congress).)

His extraordinary empathy for the Arabs, their cause, and their religion was laid bare in ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ (1926), Lawrence’s account of the revolt and his part in it: ‘I was sitting alone in my room … when the Muedhins began to send their call of last prayer through the moist night … One, with a ringing voice of special sweetness, cried into my window from a nearby mosque … 'God alone is great: there is no god – but God' … and softly added “And he is very good to us this day, O people of Damascus'. (from ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’, written 1919-20, describing the capture of Damascus on 1st October 1918). It is written with genuine affection, reverence and warmth.

The Emir Faisal’s party at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919. Lawrence is third from the right (Image: Lowell Thomas, source – from the Lowell Thomas papers))

Lawrence would attend the Paris peace conference (1919) as a delegate but was to be disappointed at his inability to secure all he had hoped for the Arab cause, a letdown perpetuated during his subsequent service as an adviser on Arab affairs at the Colonial Office (1921-22). He regarded the decisions reached on Arab affairs as a betrayal and was more than ready to condemn them. He took the blow hard though and having failed to achieve for the Arabs in peace what he had set out to achieve for them in war, he cut a disillusioned figure, electing to withdraw from public life, in his own words turning his back on ‘the shallow grave of public duty’. He even refused the Order of the Bath from King George V. He now operated in relative obscurity as an enlisted man, firstly as ‘John Hume Ross’ (August 1922) in the RAF before joining the Army Tank Corps as ‘T.E. Shaw’ (March 1923) which is how he came to be based at Bovington in Dorset close to where he would eventually lose his life. He’d be restored to the RAF as Aircraftsman Shaw in 1925 and would work on seaplanes and tenders, his later years lacking an identity and purpose. His discharge from the RAF would come in February 1935 and Lawrence would head back to Dorset and retirement at a little cottage down the road from Bovington. He was a sociable animal despite opting for obscurity, corresponding fulsomely and having a network of artists, writers and even politicians that he chewed the intellectual cud with.

Lawrence (right) at the excavations at Carchemish, Syria, c.1912-14 (Image: ‘Dead Towns and Living Men’, C.L. Woolley, 1920 / Archive.org))

His seminal works included his autobiographical account of the Arab revolt, ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ (1926), also published as ‘Revolt in the Desert’ (1927), plus ‘Oriental Assembly’ (edited by A.W. Lawrence, 1929), ‘Crusader Castles’ (posthumously 1936) and ‘The Mint’ (posthumously 1955), which told of his time in the RAF, as well as translations of works into English such as Homer’s Odyssey (1932). He was a talented man for sure. Various biographies of Lawrence have been written including by Robert Graves (1927) of ‘I, Claudius’ fame, and then after his death by Richard Aldington (1955), Lowell Thomas (1958) and Jean Beraud Villars (also 1958). Lawrence’s letters were published in 1964 (edited by Garnett) whilst the Rattigan play, ‘Ross’ (1960), is also notable. Lawrence had been able to work on his own war memoir courtesy of another fellowship, this one from All Souls, Oxford.

The effigy of Lawrence by Eric Kennington in St Martin’s Church, Wareham (Image: (author – Ronald Searle, source – Geograph))

T.E. Lawrence died six days after a motorbike accident close to Bovington Camp, in Dorset, on 19th May 1935 aged 46. As with many public figures who died before their time, conspiracy theories continue to circulate about the precise circumstances of Lawrence’s death. The school he attended in Oxford was to close in 1966 but not before one of its four houses had been renamed ‘Lawrence’ in honour of its most famous son. It’s good that happened at the time as the man himself had denied himself the recognition he so richly deserved. Oxford though has never forgotten him.

Lawrence alongside Herbert Samuel and EmirAbdullah at Amman aerodrome, April 1921 (Image: Steve Roberts)