T.E. Lawrence

Lawrence of Arabia Britain's Great Adventurer 2020 Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVIwCPFKwC4

Image:
1. 1918 Emir Faisal; Lt. Colonel T.E. Lawrence - early 1918
2. T.E. Lawrence aged about 29
3. Lt Colonel T.E. Lawrence in 1918
4. Arabian Commission to Paris Peace Conference. Emir Feisal front; l-to-r, Mohanned Rustum Bey Haidar of Baalbek, BG Nuri Pasha Said, Captain Pisani, T.E. Lawrence

{[https://spartacus-educational.com/IRQlawrence.htm]}
T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)
Thomas Edward Lawrence, the illegitimate son of Sir Thomas Chapman (1846–1919), an Anglo-Irish baronet, was born in Tremadoc, Wales on 16th August, 1888. His mother, Sarah Junner (1861–1959), was Chapman's mistress and they assumed the name Lawrence after giving birth to their first child, Robert in 1885.
According to Lawrence James: "Thomas Chapman of South Hill, near Delvin, co. Westmeath, was already married when he began his liaison with Sarah Junner, who was governess to his four daughters. After making a financial settlement on his first family he and Sarah began a peripatetic existence, living successively at Tremadoc, Kirkcudbright, Dinard in Brittany, Langley in Hampshire, and Oxford, where they settled at 2 Polstead Road in 1896. In later years Lawrence liked to present himself as a child brought up in straitened circumstances and engaged in intermittent tussles with his mother. These rows reached such a pitch that he ran away and enlisted in 1905, or so he claimed. No record of his army service or of his father's buying him out has been discovered."
His mother later recalled: "He was a big, strong, active child; constantly on the move. He would pull himself up over the nursery gate some months before he could walk....He was never idle - brass-rubbing, wood-carving, putting old pottery together, etc... He was a most loving son and brother, kind and unselfish, always doing kind deeds in a quiet way; everything that was beautiful in nature or art appealed to him."
It has been claimed that Thomas (Ned to the family) was a "wilful child" who often clashed with his mother. At the age of about ten, he uncovered the truth of his parents' relationship and his own and his brothers' illegitimacy. The conflict with his parents was partly resolved by his father agreeing to build Thomas a well-provided bungalow at the bottom of the garden in 1908. Here he spent his time reading and eventually gained a Meyricke Exhibition to read modern history at Jesus College.
Lawrence was always a fairly small man, just over 5 feet 5 inches tall when he arrived at the University of Cambridge, and liked to boast, that rigorous exercise had turned him into a pocket Hercules. He was a good distance runner, but disliked team games. He became close to the writer, Leonard M. Green. He later recalled: "We decided that we would buy a windmill on a headland that was washed by sea. We would set up a printing press in the lowest storey and live over our shop."
Vyvyan Warren Richards, a fellow undergraduate, fell in love with Lawrence. in his book, Portrait of T.E. Lawrence (1936), Richards wrote: "He had neither flesh nor carnality of any kind; he just did not understand. He received my affection, my sacrifice, in fact, eventually my total subservience, as though it was his due. He never gave the slightest sign that he understood my motives or fathomed my desire... I realize now that he was sexless - at least that he was unaware of sex."
In the summers of 1907 and 1908 his father provided the money for him to undertake extended bicycle tours of France in search of castles. The following year he visited Lebanon and Syria. This research into castles provided the basis of a BA dissertation which substantially contributed to his first-class degree in July 1910. His biographer, Lawrence James, points out: "During all his excursions he wrote home regularly with vivid impressions of what he had seen. These letters are not only evidence of his powers of description, but of the warm affection which existed within his family. Past tensions had evaporated, not least because Lawrence had secured the freedom to live on his own terms and pursue his own interests."
On his return to England he began making plans to establish a publishing business with Vyvyan Warren Richards. His biographer, Desmond Stewart has argued: "Lawrence, for once, sees himself as a businessman. While Richards will have contributed energy, inspiration and design, Lawrence will have put up the capital." Lawrence wrote to his parents: We both feel (at present) that printing is the best thing we can do, if we do it the best we can. That means though (as it is an art), that it will be done only when we feel inclined. Very likely sometimes for long periods I will not touch a press at all. Richards, whose other interests are less militant, will probably do the bulk of the work."
In 1911 Lawrence was recruited by David G. Hogarth of Ashmolean Museum, to join an archaeological expedition led by Sir William Finders Petrie at Carchemish, on the Euphrates. Sir Frederic George Kenyon, the director of the British Museum, wrote that Lawrence was selected because he was "an Arabic scholar, acquainted with the country and an expert on the subject of pottery". As the dig was closed down during the summer months he used this time to explore the area. It also gave him the opportunity to learn to speak numerous Arab dialects.
Lawrence worked on the archaeological site until early 1914. His biographer, Lawrence James, argues: "As well as supervising the uncovering and cataloguing of Hittite artefacts Lawrence became immersed in the life of a turbulent region. According to his letters home he acted as a sort of consul, arbitrating disputes among Arabs and Kurds and threw himself into their intermittent squabbles with German engineers, then supervising the construction of the Berlin to Baghdad railway. As well as playing the Hentyesque Englishman, Lawrence cultivated an intimate friendship with an Arab youth, Dahoum, whose natural intelligence impressed him and qualified him for tutelage. Lawrence's enchantment with Dahoum helped convince him of the Arabs' capacity for regeneration, but on their own terms and without repudiating their traditions and culture. What he had seen in Lebanon made Lawrence hostile towards those Arabs who looked to the West for salvation and absorbed European, particularly French, values. Likewise, he despised the far-reaching modernizing projects of the Young Turks, who then controlled the Ottoman empire."
During this period he became infatuated with a 14 year old boy, Selim Ahmed (Dahoum). He decided to teach the boy to read and write: "He is beginning to use his reason as well as his instinct: He taught himself to read a little, so I had very exceptional material to work on but I cannot do much with a piece of stick and scrap of dusty ground as materials. I am going to ask Miss Fareedah for a few simple books, amusing, for him to begin on." Leonard Woolley, another member of the team of archaeologists, remembered Dahoum as "not particularly intelligent.... but beautifully built and remarkably handsome." One historian has pointed out: "Lawrence adopted the boy as a semi-permanent companion and trained him up as his archaeological assistant. They went on expeditions together, worked alongside each other, swapped clothes and were rarely apart.... in 1913 and Dahoum moved in with him."
In July 1913 Lawrence brought Dahoum back to Oxford where the two men stayed at the house in the back of the garden. They visited London where Lawrence showed Dahoum the underground railway before travelling back via the Netherlands, Austria and Alexandria. They were back in Aleppo by 24th August. Soon afterwards he carved a naked sculpture of Dahoum. Desmond Stewart has argued that the work of art proved the epicentre of a local scandal... reared in the Muslim suspicion of all representational art, the villagers took Lawrence's sculpture of a naked youth as proof of a guilty passion."

On the outbreak of the First World War Lawrence was forced to leave Dahoum as custodian to the Carchemish site. In December 1914 Lawrence was recruited by army intelligence in North Africa and worked as a junior officer in Egypt. In October 1916 he was sent to meet important Arab leaders such as Faisal ibn Ali and Nuri es-Said in Jiddah. After negotiations it was agreed to help Lawrence to lead an Arab revolt against the Turkish Army. From November 1916 onwards Lawrence was permanently attached to Feisal's forces as a liaison officer, advising on strategy and supervising among other things the procurement of arms and delivery of Treasury subsidies. Lawrence of Arabia, as he became known, carried out raids on the Damascus-Medina Railway. His men also captured the port of Aqaba in July 1917. Sympathetic to Arab nationalism he helped established local government in captured towns.
In November 1917 Lawrence led a raiding party in southern Syria to harry Turkish communications and to stir up local opposition to France. He was captured in Deraa and identified by a Turkish officer. According to Lawrence he was led to a guard-room, consoled by Turkish soldiers and told he will be released next day "if he fulfils the Bey's pleasures". Lawrence was then taken to the bedroom of Bey (the governor of Hajjim). He has him stripped and has him punished by a Circassian riding whip, described by Lawrence as "a thong of supple black hide, rounded, and tapering from the thickness of a thumb at the grip (which was wrapped in silver) down to a hard point finer than a pencil." Held down by four soldiers, he was then whipped: "At the instant of each stroke a hard white mark like a railway, darkening slowly into crimson, leaped over my skin, and a bead of blood swelled up wherever the ridges crossed... the blows hurt more horribly than I had dreamed of... a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me." Lawrence then suffered homosexual rape. He later told Charlotte Shaw: "About that night. I shouldn't tell you, because decent men don't talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book (his autobiography), and wrestled for days with my self-respect... which wouldn't, hasn't let me."
Lawrence claims that the "corporal... the youngest and best looking on the guard had to stay behind while the others carried me down the narrow stairs". The soldier then tells him "that the door into the next room was not locked". In the room hangs a "suit of shoddy clothes". Next morning Lawrence puts them on and escapes back to the British forces. Some biographers, have refused to believe this story. This included Richard Aldington, the author of Lawrence of Arabia: a Biographical Enquiry (1955). According to Lawrence James: "Aldington began his researches with an open mind, but as he trawled through the available sources he found abundant evidence of contradictions, inconsistencies, and fabrications.... Lawrence's defenders insisted that Aldington was not only traducing a national hero, but the values he and his generation had stood for."
By December, 1917 Edmund Allenby and his army had captured Beersheba, Gaza and Jerusalem. The following year the British Army defeated General Otto Liman von Sanders and the Turkish-German Army in Palestine. Lawrence now joined Allenby's forces and entered Damascus on 1st October, 1918.
Lawrence attended Paris Peace Conference with Prince Feisal. He had meetings with Felix Frankfurter. His assistant, Ella Winter, recalled in her autobiography, And Not to Yield (1963): "The young, beautiful Prince Feisal was always followed by his group of tall, imposing, silent Arabs in long white robes and head dress, and by his shadow, Colonel T. E. Lawrence, also in native dress. Lawrence was short and fragile-looking, with a delicate, poetic face, but he appeared as much at home with the desert Bedouins and the prince he seemed so attached to as with European diplomats. Felix was as much intrigued by Lawrence's role in all the Middle Eastern politics as with his romantic appearance."
Lawrence had been converted to the cause of the Arabs and felt they were betrayed by the treaties agreed at the Paris Peace Conference. He was particularly concerned about the decision to give France control over Syria. He later wrote: "We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world they knew."
In 1921 Lawrence joined the Middle East Department of the Colonial Office. He also served as special adviser on Arab affairs to Winston Churchill, the Colonial Secretary (1921-22). Both men visited the Middle East in an attempt to deal with the growing conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.
After leaving the Colonial Office he changed his name to John Hume Ross and enlisted into the Royal Air Force. After four months reporters from the Daily Express discovered what he had done and he was discharged. In March 1923 he joined the Tank Corps as Private Thomas Shaw. Lawrence became sexually involved with John Bruce. He later told the authors of The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia (1969) that Lawrence paid him a regular retainer of £3 a week to birch him on his bare buttocks.
Lawrence served until he was dismissed from the service in 1925. This was partly because he had developed a relationship with a young soldier, R.A.M. Guy, who was described as being "beautiful, like a Greek god." According to Desmond Stewart, the author of T. E. Lawrence (1979), Lawrence dismissed because he was about to be exposed as being involved in a sexual scandal: "Lawrence had unwisely attended flagellation parties in Chelsea conducted by an underworld figure known as Bluebeard, and Bluebeard's impending divorce case threatened to release lubricious details concerning Lawrence and one of his aristocratic friends which had already been hinted at in a German scandal-sheet.... Sacrificing caution, he wrote to the Home Secretary asking for the expulsion of Bluebeard and a ban on the German magazine."
Lawrence purchased Clouds Hill in 1924 and began work on his autobiography. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom was published privately in 1926. It included illustrations by his friend, Eric Kennington. Later that year he rejoined the RAF and served for two years on the north-west frontier of India. He continued to write and other books by Lawrence include Revolt in the Desert, The Mint and a new translation of Homer's Odyssey.
On 26th February 1935 Lawrence left the RAF. Soon afterwards he was contacted by Henry Williamson, a member of the British Union of Fascists, suggesting a meeting that "might prevent another war". Williamson later recalled that he obtained "Lawrence of Arabia's name to gather a meeting of ex-Service men in the Albert Hall, with his presence and stimulation to cohere into unassailable logic the authentic mind of the war generation come to power of truth and amity, a whirlwind campaign which would end the old fearful thought of Europe (usuary-based) for-ever. So that the sun should shine on free men."
Lawrence held very nationalistic views. He had said of his experiences in the First World War: "I am proudest of my thirty fights in that I did not have any of our own blood shed. All our subject provinces to me were not worth one dead Englishman." E. M. Forster once said that Lawrence "hated war but liked soldiers". Lawrence also expressed racist views about black people in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: "Their faces, being clearly different from our own, were tolerable; but it hurt that they should possess exact counterparts of all our bodies."
Lawrence loved riding his motor-bike. George Brough, who manufactured his bikes, described him as: "One of the finest riders I have ever met. In the several runs I took with him, I am able to state with conviction that T.E.L. was most considerate to every other road user. I never saw him take a single risk nor put any other rider or driver to the slightest inconvenience."
On 13th May, he went for a ride on his Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle when he swerved to miss two 14 year-old, cyclists, Frank Fletcher and Albert Hargreaves. Corporal Ernest Catchpole of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, was the first to reach the site of the accident. He later claimed that he was passed by a black motor car just before the crash: "I saw the bike twisting and turning over and over along the road. I saw nothing of the driver (of the black car). I ran to the scene and found the motor-cyclist on the road. His face was covered with blood which I tried to wipe away with my handkerchief". Lawrence never regained consciousness and died on 19th May 1935.
Desmond Stewart has argued: "Bovington Camp reacted to this as something more than an ordinary traffic accident. All ranks were warned that they came under the Official Secrets Act. The boys' fathers were told to keep them silent. Catchpole was cautioned that, since he had not seen the accident, he should not confuse matters by mentioning the black car. Two plain clothes detectives were posted on Lawrence duty: one sat by his bed, while the other rested on a cot outside the door... His brother, Arnold Lawrence, returned from a holiday in Spain to hear reports that officials from the Air Ministry had removed secret papers from Clouds Hill." Arnold Lawrence later told the Dorset Daily Echo that a "special guard" had been sent to Clouds Hill to "protect my brother's valuable books".
Frank Fletcher told a reporter of a local newspaper: "We were riding in single file. I was leading.... I heard the noise of the motorcycle and then the crash.... The man who had gone over the handle bars had landed with his feet about 5 yards in front of the motor cycle which was about five yards ahead of where I fell." According to the newspaper: "The boy said there was no motor car or other vehicle on the road at the time.
After his death rumours circulated that Lawrence had been murdered by foreign agents. Desmond Stewart believes that Catchpole's evidence is of vital importance and that the black car was involved in the death of Lawrence. "If Catchpole was right and the black car existed, the failure of its driver to come forward (the news of the accident was in every newspaper and every news bulletin) suggests that he was involved, either accidentally or deliberately, in Lawrence's crash. Everyone who has ridden a motor cycle knows how easily a sudden swerve can be induced; harmless to the driver of a car, on a narrow road it could be fatal to a cyclist without a helmet."
Another story emerged that the secret service faked his death so as to allow him to undertake, incognito, important work in the Middle East. The supporters of this story believed he died in Tangiers, Morocco, in 1968.
By John Simkin ( [login to see] ) © September 1997 (updated January 2020).

Primary Sources
(1) Sarah Junner Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence by his Friends (1937)
He (T. E. Lawrence) was a big, strong, active child; constantly on the move. He would pull himself up over the nursery gate some months before he could walk....He was never idle - brass-rubbing, wood-carving, putting old pottery together, etc... He was a most loving son and brother, kind and unselfish, always doing kind deeds in a quiet way; everything that was beautiful in nature or art appealed to him.
(2) Vyvyan Warren Richards, Portrait of T.E. Lawrence (1936)
He had neither flesh nor carnality of any kind; he just did not understand. He received my affection, my sacrifice, in fact, eventually my total subservience, as though it was his due. He never gave the slightest sign that he understood my motives or fathomed my desire... I realize now that he was sexless - at least that he was unaware of sex.
(3) T. E. Lawrence, letter to Charlotte Shaw (26th March, 1924)
About that night. I shouldn't tell you, because decent men don't talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book, and wrestled for days with my self-respect... which wouldn't, hasn't let me. For fear of being hurt, or rather, to earn five minutes' respite from a pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with - our bodily integrity... You may call this morbid: but think of the offence, and the intensity of my brooding over it for these years. It will hang about me while I live, and afterwards if our personality survives."
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Lawrence of Arabia Biography - The life of Lawrence of Arabia Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2KO6jsuKI0

Images:
1. Lawrence of Arabia - A Legend in His Lifetime. Lawrence died in 1935 in a motorcycle accident
2. George Brough and Thomas Edward Lawrence AKA 'Lawrence of Arabia' seated on his Superior SS100 in 1930
3. T.E. Lawrence, Prince Feisal and others pose after taking Aqaba. July 1917
4. Grave of T.E. Lawrence

{[https://telsociety.org.uk/about-lawrence]}

ABOUT LAWRENCE
A Brief Biography of T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935)
August 16 1888
Thomas Edward Lawrence was born at Tremadog, in North Wales. He was the second of five boys to be born to Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman, of the Anglo-Irish landowning class, and Sarah Junner.
In the mid 1880s, Lawrence’s father had left behind his wife, Edith, and four daughters at the family estate in County Westmeath, Ireland, to set up home with Sarah, who was the family’s governess. Thomas Chapman was never divorced from Edith, and the stigma that surrounded living out of wedlock at the time caused Thomas and Sarah to move many times over the next few years to avoid detection. Lawrence was an assumed name. Their first child, Montague Robert (Bob), was born in Dublin in 1885.
The port of Porthmadog in North Wales was the landing point for the ferry from Ireland, and it was in a rented house in nearby Tremadog that Thomas Edward (Ned) was born.

1889-96
The Lawrences continued to move around as more sons arrived.
William George (Will) was born in Kirkcudbright, Scotland, in 1889. The family lived in Dinard, on the coast of Brittany, France, from 1891, moving temporarily to St Helier, Jersey, for the birth of Frank Helier in 1893. In 1894 they returned to England to live in the New Forest.

1896-1907
In 1896 the family moved to Oxford so that the boys could attend the fee-paying City of Oxford High School, which had recently been opened, primarily to serve the needs of the sons of University lecturers. A fifth son, Arnold Walter, was born in 1900. Although Lawrence’s parents were devout Christians, they were ‘living in sin’ as it would have been called at the time. Yet there is ample evidence that they were a happy, united family. They were regular worshippers at St Aldate’s Church where an evangelical brand of Christianity was practised. During his boyhood, Lawrence became increasingly absorbed in the medieval world, and began to undertake a series of ambitious bicycle journeys around England, Wales and France to further his studies.

1907-10
Lawrence read history at Jesus College, Oxford, graduating with First Class Honours. In summer 1909, he undertook an arduous 1,000-mile walking tour of Syria to study Crusader castles for his thesis, The Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture—to the End of the XIIth Century.

1910-14
Lawrence was awarded a Senior Demyship
at Magdalen College, Oxford. Under the
influence of David Hogarth, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, he spent four
seasons working as an archaeologist on the British Museum’s excavations of the Hittite city of Carchemish, on what is now the border between Turkey and Syria. It was at Carchemish that he met Dahoum, a young Arab boy working as an assistant on the site, who became his great friend and is widely assumed to be the ‘S.A.’ in Lawrence’s dedication in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In January 1914, Lawrence and his fellow archaeologist Leonard Woolley assisted in a survey of the Sinai Desert funded by the Palestine
Exploration Fund, publishing their findings as The Wilderness of Zin.

1914-16
Lawrence left Carchemish for the last time in June 1914. Following the outbreak of war, he spent a short time working in London in the Geographical Section of the War Office. He was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant and moved to Cairo where he worked in the Military Intelligence Department. In 1915, Lawrence learned of the deaths of his brothers Frank, killed in action in France on May 9, and Will, missing in action in an observation plane over France on October 23 and presumed dead. In April 1916, Lawrence went to Basra in Mesopotamia to take part in negotiations for the release of Allied soldiers besieged in Kut.

1921-22
Winston Churchill approached Lawrence and, despite his initial reluctance, he accepted an appointment as Adviser on Arab Affairs at the Colonial Office. Lawrence attended a new peace conference in Cairo, which resulted in the establishment of the map of the Middle East which largely remains to this day.

1922
By summer 1922, Lawrence had completed a third draft of Seven
Pillars of Wisdom – the so-called Oxford Text. In August he enlisted in the ranks of the RAF under the assumed name of John Hume Ross.
It was his early service in the training depot at Uxbridge which provided much of the material for his book The Mint, which was not to be publicly available until 1955. It was in late 1922 that Lawrence embarked on his passion for Brough Superior motorcycles which provided him not just with transport, but with a mental escape.

1923
In January, Lawrence was discharged from the RAF after his real identity was revealed in the press. In March he enlisted in the Tank Corps in Bovington, Dorset, as a private soldier under the assumed name of Thomas Edward Shaw. It was while here that he continued to establish many important friendships including that of Thomas Hardy who lived nearby in Dorchester. Lawrence took a lease on a semi-derelict cottage near Bovington Camp – Clouds Hill – which was to become his refuge and, following its purchase, eventually
his home. During this year he made his translation of Adrien Le Corbeau’s Le Gigantesque (Forest Giant).

1924-26
Lawrence spent much of his free time during these years preparing the Subscribers’ Edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which enabled him to indulge his passion for fine printed books. Offered at a price of 30 guineas, each copy was individually bound for the subscriber. The text of this version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom is the one best known throughout the world today. However, the effort exhausted him. He was also deeply unhappy in the Tank Corps. Following pressure on the government from his friends, concerned about his health, in 1925 he was readmitted to the RAF, stationed at Cranwell.

1927-8
The Subscribers’ Edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom appeared at the end of 1926, followed in March 1927 by Revolt in the Desert, an abridged version made available to the general public. In late 1926 he was posted to Karachi, which was then part of India, and then
Miranshah near the Afghan border. During this time he completed The Mint and began translating Homer’s Odyssey.

1929
In January, Lawrence returned to England following press stories that he had been involved in an insurrection in Afghanistan. He was stationed at RAF Cattewater (later Mount Batten) in Plymouth, from where he resumed his friendships with artists, politicians and writers. During the summer, he acted as personal assistant to his commanding officer, Wing Commander Sydney Smith, during the preparations for the prestigious Schneider Trophy seaplane race over the Solent.

1931-35
Lawrence started work on the development of high-speed rescue boats for the RAF, after witnessing the fatal crash of an RAF flying boat in Plymouth Sound. It was this work that occupied most of his final years in the RAF, taking him to postings in Hythe, Southampton and Bridlington. 1932 saw the publication of his translation of the Odyssey.

February 1935
Lawrence retired from the RAF and cycled from his last posting in Bridlington to Clouds Hill.

May 13, 1935
Lawrence fell from his Brough Superior motorcycle when he was in collision with two boys on bicycles on the road between Bovington Camp and Clouds Hill. He never regained consciousness.

May 19, 1935
Lawrence died as a result of his injuries.

May 21, 1935
Lawrence was buried at Moreton, Dorset. His funeral was attended by a large crowd including Winston Churchill, writers and artists including Augustus John, Eric Kennington and Siegfried Sassoon, and friends from his service days. Lawrence’s mother Sarah and brother Bob were travelling along the Yangtze river on their return from China, where Bob had been working as a medical missionary, when they received the news of his death; his brother Arnold was the only family member present at the funeral.

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Young Indiana Jones Historical Documentary 03 - T.E. Lawrence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frt3v2UBKmk

Images:
1. 1921 Cairo Conference excursion to Great Pyramid and Sphinx T.E. Lawrence [red arrow]
2. RAF Lt Colonel T.E. Lawrence circa 1925
3. The arrival at the 1920 Cairo Conference of Sir Herbert Samuel, H.B.M. high commissioner, etc. Col. Lawrence, Emir Abdullah, Air Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond and Sir Wyndham Deedes

Background from {[https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/young-te-lawrence]}
The Young T.E. Lawrence
An Ambiguous Legacy
By Jeffrey Meyers
He mainly excavated Hittite ruins in Carchemish, about sixty miles northeast of Aleppo, in the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence and his colleagues, behaving as if they owned the site, took everything they wanted both for their sponsor, the British Museum, and for themselves. During the Balkan war of 1912 the local Arabs also took advantage of the power vacuum by plundering tombs and destroying buildings.
Lawrence and his four brothers were the illegitimate sons of the hard-drinking Irish baronet Sir Thomas Chapman, who scandalously ran off with the family governess. To avoid discovery the family moved frequently during Lawrence’s childhood, from his birthplace in Wales to western Scotland, the island of Jersey, Dinard on the coast of Brittany, and The New Forest in Hampshire before finally settling in Oxford, where he read history and archeology at the university. Fearing exposure, he never saw his four Chapman half-sisters. But alluding to the Renaissance poet who first put the Odyssey into English, he slyly called his own translation of the epic “Chapman’s Homer.”
Lawrence’s learned and brilliant undergraduate thesis on medieval military architecture in the Middle East, where he traveled (most unusually) on foot, was based on his personal inspection of the buildings. Opposing the prevailing view that the East influenced the West, he definitively concluded that “the early Crusader castles erected in Syria were of a purely western pattern.” Lawrence then worked with the three greatest Middle Eastern archeologists of his time: his mentor David Hogarth, director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, who taught him (he said) “a tremendous lot about everything from digging to Greek erotic verse”; Sir Flinders Petrie, a pioneering Egyptologist; and Sir Leonard Woolley, who later discovered the Sumerian city of Ur in Mesopotamia.
Lawrence found Carchemish, a huge mound on the banks of the Euphrates, exceptionally attractive: “It is very pleasant in the moonlight, to look down, on one side to the rushing Euphrates, & on the other over the great plain of Carchemish, to the hills of the Salt Desert on the South.” He swam in the river, shot birds on a nearby island, and built an elaborately decorated house with precious carpets and mosaics (quite different from his spartan postwar quarters at Clouds Hill, Dorset). Though he made no great discoveries, he told Hogarth, “it is exciting digging” and described his break-and-grab tactics: “a plunge down a shaft at night, the smashing of a stone door, and the hasty shoveling of all objects into a bag by lamp-light.” He also had to fend off the German construction of the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway that ran perilously close to his own excavations.
During this time Lawrence began to wear Arab dress. At first he wore a Magdalen College blazer and shorts, with a tasseled Kurdish sash around his waist, then took to Arab costume with puffed trousers, embroidered jacket, and full headdress. Later, when he rode camels and led the Arab revolt, he changed to billowing white robes and a golden head-rope. His vast knowledge as traveler, linguist, and archeologist perfectly prepared him, when the war broke out, to become an intelligence officer, diplomat, and spy.
In The Young T. E. Lawrence, Anthony Sattin repeats received ideas rather than questioning them. He states that the Arabs were “the people [Lawrence] loved,” but Lawrence’s attitude was ambivalent and complex. The character of the Arabs, so baffling to the West and now so frightening, was both attractive and repellent to him. Their colorful embroidered garments satisfied his theatrical narcissism; their inhuman endurance matched his own need for self-punishment. But he wanted the tribesmen to remain primitive and colorful, like the murderous and heroic Auda in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and he despised the westernized, citified Arabs as degenerate and spineless: “The perfectly hopeless vulgarity of the half-Europeanised Arab is appalling. Better a thousand times the Arab untouched.” Surprisingly, and against the prevailing English view, he was also pro-Jewish. He wrote that in Roman times “Palestine was a decent country and could easily be made so again.... The sooner the Jews farm it the better: their colonies are bright spots in a desert.”
Sattin, well acquainted with the Arab world, takes a “closer look” at the five prewar years Lawrence spent working in the Middle East. But his familiar story has been told many times in scores of books on Lawrence, most recently in Ronald Florence’s Lawrence and Aaronsohn (2007) and Michael Korda’s Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (2010). Despite the grandiose claims on the dust jacket, Lawrence’s illegitimate birth has been known since Richard Aldington’s biography of 1955. His “tortuous relationship with a dominant mother” in this book amounts to little more than Lawrence’s desire to protect his privacy and reassure her, while he was traveling, that he was not in danger. In fact his mother—a strait-laced, shame-filled woman—was remarkably tolerant. She and his father built a special bungalow behind the main house for Lawrence’s use, helped support him during his long years abroad, agreed to his rejection of an academic career, and allowed him to defy convention by bringing two gaudily dressed Arab workers home for the summer.
Sattin ignores a lot of persuasive evidence about Lawrence’s sexuality. In the very first chapter of Seven Pillars, Lawrence boldly challenged conventional morality by celebrating “friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace.” Though usually sensitive to Arab customs, Lawrence scandalized the local people by sculpting an Arab youth named Dahoum in the nude. Leonard Woolley declared, “To make an image was bad enough, but to portray a naked figure was proof to them of an evil of another sort.” Nevertheless, Sattin claims that Lawrence’s relations with Dahoum were entirely innocent.
Sattin also accepts Lawrence’s dubious statement that his most pressing motive for leading the Arab Revolt was his love for Dahoum: “I liked a particular Arab very much, and I thought that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present.” But Dahoum, a barely literate boy who knew nothing beyond his narrowly confined life, could not have understood Lawrence’s gift. In any case, he died of typhus in 1916. In his inconclusive conclusion, Sattin quotes all twenty lines of Lawrence’s fulsome dedicatory poem to Dahoum in Seven Pillars.
After the war, Lawrence clear-sightedly told his biographer Basil Liddell-Hart that “Arab unity is a madman’s notion—for this century or next.” To fulfill his promises to the Arabs and assuage his tender conscience, he helped establish Arab kings in Arabia, Iraq, and Transjordan. But these rulers, though pro-British, were unable to govern. By fulfilling their dynastic ambitions, he created a time bomb in the Middle East. His political legacy, sustained by the brilliantly effective propaganda in Seven Pillars, has been catastrophic."

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