Few British officers have been as famous, or as misunderstood, as Thomas Edward Lawrence. He was an Oxford archaeologist who became, in the space of two years, the best-known British soldier of the First World War in the Middle East — the liaison officer in white robes who rode with Emir Faisal's Arab forces, helped to take the port of Aqaba from the landward side, and entered Damascus with the Arab army in October 1918. The name "Lawrence of Arabia" was largely the creation of an American showman, and the film of 1962 fixed the image for a later generation. Behind the legend was a real officer whose own account of the campaign, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, remains one of the great books of the war. He declined a knighthood offered by King George V in 1918, and spent the last thirteen years of his life in the ranks of the Royal Air Force, trying to escape the fame he had never sought.
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| Lawrence in Arab dress, photographed in 1918. Credit: Lowell Thomas / Library of Congress. |
Early life and Oxford
Thomas Edward Lawrence was born on 16 August 1888 at Tremadog in Carnarvonshire, Wales, the second son of Sir Thomas Chapman and Sarah Junner. The family moved to Oxford when he was eight, and he was educated at the City of Oxford High School for Boys before going up to Jesus College, Oxford, in 1907 to read history. He was already a formidable walker and an obsessive student of medieval military architecture: in the summers of 1908 and 1909 he travelled on foot through France and Syria, visiting Crusader castles for the thesis that would earn him a First Class Honours degree in 1910. The walking mattered as much as the reading — he learned to live rough and to cover long distances on foot, habits that would serve him in the desert a few years later.
Oxford also gave him his first taste of the Middle East as a working archaeologist rather than a tourist. He had studied Arabic, and he had a gift for languages and for the patient observation of places. When he graduated, he was taken on by the British Museum as an archaeologist, and his future seemed settled in scholarship, not in soldiering. Nothing in his Oxford years suggested a military career at all: he had never been in uniform, and his interests were castles, pottery and the history of the Crusades.
Archaeologist at Carchemish
From 1910 to 1914 Lawrence worked at Carchemish, the ancient Hittite city on the Euphrates in what is now the borderland of Syria and Turkey, under the direction of D. G. Hogarth and with Leonard Woolley. The excavation was real archaeology — the slow uncovering of a buried city — but it was also an education in the politics of the Ottoman Empire in its last years. Lawrence lived among Arab workmen, learned their dialects and customs, and travelled widely in the region. By 1914 he knew northern Syria and the desert fringes as few Englishmen did.
In January 1914, he and Woolley were co-opted by the British military for a survey of the Negev Desert, in the Sinai borderland between Egypt and Ottoman Palestine. The work was presented as archaeology, but its purpose was military: to map the water sources and routes that an army might use. When war broke out in August 1914, he was in England, and he joined the British Army that October.
The Arab Bureau and Faisal
Lawrence was posted to Cairo, to the Arab Bureau, the military intelligence section concerned with Arabia and the Arab peoples of the Ottoman Empire. His work was to read reports, to interview travellers and prisoners, and to build a picture of a region in which Britain was about to become deeply involved. The Ottoman Empire had entered the war on Germany's side in November 1914, and Britain was looking for allies among its Arab subjects.
In June 1916, Sherif Hussein of Mecca proclaimed the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule. That October, Lawrence was sent to Arabia to report on the revolt and on the men leading it. He met Emir Faisal, Hussein's third son and the effective commander of the northern Arab army, and the meeting changed both men's lives. Lawrence became Faisal's British liaison officer — the link between the Arab forces and the British headquarters in Cairo, responsible for advice, for the supply of money, rifles and gold, and for co-ordinating Arab operations with the wider British campaign in Palestine under General Allenby. The relationship was one of mutual respect, and Lawrence's later writing makes clear how much he admired Faisal's judgement. The revolt was a collective effort — Faisal, his brother Abdullah, the tribal leaders, Allenby's army and other British officers all had their part — and Lawrence's own role was that of adviser and go-between, not of commander.
Aqaba and the railway war
Lawrence's most famous exploit came in the summer of 1917. The Arab forces were besieging Medina, the holy city held by a large Ottoman garrison, and the campaign was stalled. Lawrence argued that the Arabs should bypass Medina altogether and strike instead at Aqaba, the small port at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, which the Turks believed safe because it was protected by the desert to its landward side. With Auda Abu Tayi, the formidable chief of the Howeitat tribe, and his fighters, Lawrence led a force of several hundred men on a long march across the desert the Turks had left unguarded. At Aba el Lissan they defeated the Ottoman force blocking the approach, and on 6 July 1917 Aqaba fell to the Arabs after an overland attack the garrison had never expected. After the victory, Sherif Nasir gave Lawrence his own jambiya, the curved dagger that, with the white robes, became the emblem of the Lawrence legend.
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| Auda Abu Tayi and his kinsmen on the march from Wejh, 9 May 1917 — photographed by Lawrence. Credit: Imperial War Museum. |
Aqaba changed the campaign. It gave the Arabs a port through which British supplies could flow, and it opened the way north towards Damascus. For the next year Lawrence's work was the railway war: repeated attacks on the Hejaz Railway, the single line that supplied the Ottoman garrison at Medina. With small parties of Arab fighters, he blew up bridges and culverts, derailed trains and ambushed repair parties, forcing the Turks to tie down thousands of men guarding hundreds of miles of track — never offering battle to a stronger enemy, always striking where he was weakest, and disappearing into the desert afterwards.
In January 1918, at Tafilah, south-east of the Dead Sea, Lawrence took part in a hard-fought engagement in which Arab regulars under Jafar Pasha al-Askari first held and then routed an Ottoman force. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his leadership at Tafilah, gazetted on 10 May 1918, and promoted to lieutenant-colonel. He had already been appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath on 7 August 1917, and the French had honoured him with the Légion d'honneur in 1916 and the Croix de guerre in April 1918. He had also been mentioned in despatches three times. But the honours sat uneasily with a man who was coming to believe that Britain's promises to the Arabs — of independence after the war — would not be kept.
Damascus and the end of the war
The final campaign of 1918 was Allenby's. In September, Allenby's army broke the Ottoman lines at Megiddo and drove north through Palestine. Lawrence's Arab forces, operating on Allenby's right flank, harried the retreating Turks, cut the railway at Deraa, and pushed on towards Damascus. The advance was darkened by the fighting at Tafas, on 26 September, where Ottoman troops massacred the villagers and Arab forces in return killed their prisoners — an episode Lawrence recorded in his own account with evident distress, and one that shows the campaign at its most brutal. On 1 October 1918, Arab forces entered Damascus, with Lawrence among them, ahead of the main British advance. The city had fallen; the Ottoman Empire's hold on Syria was broken.
Damascus was the end of Lawrence's war, and it was also the beginning of his disillusionment. The Arab administration he helped to set up in the city lasted only days before the French and British imposed their own arrangements under the Sykes–Picot Agreement, the secret wartime understanding that divided the Ottoman Arab lands between Britain and France. Lawrence had argued for Arab independence at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, attending as a member of Faisal's delegation, but the settlement that emerged gave Syria to France and left the Arab leaders with far less than they had been promised. On 30 October 1918, at a private audience at Buckingham Palace, King George V offered Lawrence a knighthood for his services in the Arab Revolt. He declined it, on the grounds that British policy had betrayed the Arab cause. It was a public act of conscience from a serving officer, and it was remembered.
Post-war service: the aircraftman
After the war Lawrence worked briefly at the Foreign Office, and in 1921–22 he served as adviser on Arab affairs to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office, helping to settle the new states of Transjordan and Iraq. But he was tired of politics and of fame, and in 1922 he did something extraordinary: he enlisted in the Royal Air Force as an aircraftman, under the assumed name of John Hume Ross. When his identity was discovered and the press found him, he was discharged, and in 1923 he enlisted again, this time in the Tank Corps at Bovington, under the name T. E. Shaw — a name he later adopted legally. In 1925 he returned to the RAF, and he served as an enlisted man for the rest of his service, including a posting to India, working on the RAF's marine craft and rescue launches. He had held the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the war; he chose to spend thirteen years in the ranks, as an aircraftman, because the ordinary life of the service gave him the anonymity and the comradeship he wanted.
It was a deliberate choice by a man who had seen what fame did to him and wanted no more of it. He was a skilled mechanic, he took his duties seriously, and his fellow airmen remembered him as a quiet, hard-working colleague who asked for no special treatment. He left the RAF in February 1935 and returned to his cottage at Clouds Hill in Dorset, the small house he had bought in the 1920s and made his home.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the legend
Lawrence's account of the Arab Revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was published in a subscribers' edition in 1926, with an abridged version, Revolt in the Desert, following in 1927. It is a remarkable book — part campaign history, part confession, part meditation on guerrilla war — and it is also, as Lawrence himself knew, his own account, written years after the events and disputed in places by other participants and by later historians. It should be read as the testimony of a man who was there, not as an uncontested record.
Much of that legend was the work of the American journalist Lowell Thomas. In August 1919 Thomas launched a multimedia show in London, "With Allenby in Palestine", with Lawrence at first in a supporting role. It soon became clear that the photographs of Lawrence on campaign — in Arab dress, with the robes and the jambiya Sherif Nasir had given him — had captured the public imagination. Thomas photographed him again in the white robes and relaunched the show in early 1920 as "With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia". It was seen by more than three million people between 1920 and 1924, and it made Lawrence a household name. David Lean's film Lawrence of Arabia (1962), with Peter O'Toole in the title role, renewed the legend for a new generation, but the film is a dramatisation, not history, and its version of Aqaba and of Lawrence's character should not be mistaken for the record.
Later life and legacy
Lawrence's life ended suddenly and early. On 13 May 1935, two months after leaving the RAF, he was riding his Brough Superior motorcycle near his cottage at Clouds Hill when he swerved to avoid two boys on bicycles in a dip in the road. He was thrown from the machine and suffered a severe head injury. He never regained consciousness, and he died six days later, on 19 May 1935, at the hospital at Bovington Camp, aged forty-six. He was buried on 21 May 1935 at St Nicholas Church, Moreton, in Dorset. His cottage at Clouds Hill was given to the National Trust by his brother Arnold in 1937, and it is preserved today as it was in his lifetime.
His death had one unexpected consequence. The neurosurgeon who attended him after the crash, Hugh Cairns, began studying motorcycle head injuries, and his work underpinned the later case for crash helmets — a legacy Lawrence never intended but which has saved many lives. His robes and his jambiya are held by the National Army Museum, and his papers and photographs are among the most studied of any British officer of the First World War.
Lawrence's legacy is a complicated one, and it should be stated plainly. As a soldier he was an outstanding liaison officer and guerrilla leader, whose knowledge of Arabia and whose personal courage helped to make the Arab Revolt a real military factor in Allenby's campaign. He was not its commander, and the revolt was not his work alone: Faisal, Auda Abu Tayi, Jafar Pasha and the Arab regulars, and Allenby's army, all did more than any single man could. As a writer he left one of the great books of the war. As a public figure he became a symbol — of the romance of the desert war, of the promise of Arab independence, and of the betrayal of that promise — and the symbol has often obscured the man. The honours he accepted, the knighthood he refused, and the thirteen years he spent in the ranks all point to the same thing: a man who understood the cost of what he had done, and who chose, in the end, to be judged as an ordinary serviceman rather than as a hero.
Sources
- National Army Museum, "Lawrence of Arabia: The man behind the robes" — https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/lawrence-arabia-man-behind-robes
- National Army Museum, "Silk robe worn by T E Lawrence, 1916 (c)" — https://collection.nam.ac.uk/detail.php?acc=2016-10-3-1
- The London Gazette, No. 30222, 7 August 1917 (Companion of the Order of the Bath)
- The London Gazette, No. 30681, 10 May 1918 (Companion of the Distinguished Service Order)
- Imperial War Museum, Lawrence collection photographs, including Q 59187 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:T_E_Lawrence_and_the_Arab_Revolt_1916_-_1918_Q59187.jpg
- Lowell Thomas portrait of Lawrence, 1918, Library of Congress — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Colonel_T._E._Lawrence_in_Traditional_Costume.jpg
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