T. E. Lawrence
Thomas Edward Lawrence CB DSO (16 August 1888 – 19 May 1935) was a British archaeologist, army officer, diplomat, and writer who became renowned for his role in the Arab Revolt (1916–1918) and the Sinai and Palestine Campaign (1915–1918) against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. The breadth and variety of his activities and associations, and his ability to describe them vividly in writing, earned him international fame as Lawrence of Arabia, a title used for the 1962 film based on his wartime activities.
"Lawrence of Arabia" redirects here. For the 1962 film, see Lawrence of Arabia (film). For the 1989 book, see Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorised Biography of T. E. Lawrence.
T. E. Lawrence
Thomas Edward Lawrence
T. E. Shaw, John Hume Ross
Lawrence of Arabia
16 August 1888
Tremadog, Carnarvonshire, Wales
19 May 1935 (aged 46)
Bovington Camp, Dorset, England
United Kingdom
- 1914–1918
- 1923–1935
- First World War
He was born out of wedlock in August 1888 to Sarah Junner (1861–1959), a governess, and Sir Thomas Chapman, 7th Baronet (1846–1919), an Anglo-Irish aristocrat. Chapman left his wife and family in Ireland to cohabit with Junner. Chapman and Junner called themselves Mr and Mrs Lawrence, using the surname of Sarah's likely father; her mother had been employed as a servant for a Lawrence family when she became pregnant with Sarah. In 1896, the Lawrences moved to Oxford, where Thomas attended the High School and then studied history at Jesus College, Oxford, from 1907 to 1910. Between 1910 and 1914 he worked as an archaeologist for the British Museum, chiefly at Carchemish in Ottoman Syria.
Soon after the outbreak of war in 1914 he volunteered for the British Army and was stationed at the Arab Bureau (established in 1916) intelligence unit in Egypt. In 1916, he travelled to Mesopotamia and to Arabia on intelligence missions and became involved with the Arab Revolt as a liaison to the Arab forces, along with other British officers, supporting the Arab Kingdom of Hejaz's independence war against its former overlord, the Ottoman Empire. He worked closely with Emir Faisal, a leader of the revolt, and he participated, sometimes as leader, in military actions against the Ottoman armed forces, culminating in the capture of Damascus in October 1918.
After the First World War, Lawrence joined the British Foreign Office, working with the British government and with Faisal. In 1922, he retreated from public life and spent the years until 1935 serving as an enlisted man, mostly in the Royal Air Force (RAF), with a brief period in the Army. During this time, he published his best-known work Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), an autobiographical account of his participation in the Arab Revolt. He also translated books into English, and wrote The Mint, which detailed his time in the Royal Air Force working as an ordinary aircraftman. He corresponded extensively and was friendly with well-known artists, writers, and politicians. For the RAF, he participated in the development of rescue motorboats.
Lawrence's public image resulted in part from the sensationalised reporting of the Arab revolt by American journalist Lowell Thomas, as well as from Seven Pillars of Wisdom. On 19 May 1935, six days after being injured in a motorcycle accident in Dorset, Lawrence died at the age of 46.
Aldington controversy[edit]
In 1955 Richard Aldington published Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry, a sustained attack on Lawrence's character, writing, accomplishments, and truthfulness. Aldington alleged that Lawrence lied and exaggerated continuously ("Seven Pillars of Wisdom is rather a work of quasi-fiction than history",[237] "It was seldom that he reported any fact or episode involving himself without embellishing them and indeed in some cases entirely inventing them."),[238] that he promoted a misguided policy in the Middle East, that his strategy of containing but not capturing Medina was incorrect, and that Seven Pillars of Wisdom was a bad book with few redeeming features.[239]
Aldington argued that the French colonial administration of Syria (resisted by Lawrence) had benefited that country[240] and that Arabia's peoples were "far enough advanced for some government though not for complete self-government."[241] He was also a Francophile, railing against Lawrence's "Francophobia, a hatred and an envy so irrational, so irresponsible and so unscrupulous that it is fair to say his attitude towards Syria was determined more by hatred of France than by devotion to the 'Arabs' – a convenient propaganda word which grouped many disharmonious and even mutually hostile tribes and peoples."[242]
Aldington wrote that Lawrence embellished many stories and invented others, and in particular that his claims involving numbers were usually inflated – for example claims of having read 50,000 books in the Oxford Union library,[243] of having blown up 79 bridges,[244] of having had a price of £50,000 on his head,[245] and of having suffered 60 or more injuries.[246]
Prior to the publication of Aldington's book, its contents became known in London's literary community. A group Aldington and some subsequent authors referred to as "The Lawrence Bureau",[247] led by B. H. Liddell Hart,[248] tried energetically, starting in 1954, to have the book suppressed.[249] When that effort failed, Hart prepared and distributed hundreds of copies of Aldington's 'Lawrence': His Charges – and Treatment of the Evidence, a 7-page single-spaced document.[250] This worked: Aldington's book received many extremely negative and even abusive reviews, with strong evidence that some reviewers had read Liddell's rebuttal but not Aldington's book.[251]
Notwithstanding the furore caused by Aldington's assault on the Lawrence legend, many of Aldington's specific claims against Lawrence have been accepted by subsequent biographers. In Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: A Cautionary Tale, Fred D. Crawford writes "Much that shocked in 1955 is now standard knowledge – that TEL was illegitimate, that this profoundly troubled him, that he frequently resented his mother's dominance, that such reminiscences as T. E. Lawrence by His Friends are not reliable, that TEL's leg-pulling and other adolescent traits could be offensive, that TEL took liberties with the truth in his official reports and Seven Pillars, that the significance of his exploits during the Arab Revolt was more political than military, that he contributed to his own myth, that when he vetted the books by Graves and Liddell Hart he let remain much that he knew was untrue, and that his feelings about publicity were ambiguous."[252]
This has not prevented most post-Aldington biographers (including Fred D. Crawford, who studied Aldington's claims intensely)[253] from expressing strong admiration for Lawrence's military, political, and writing achievements.[254][255] Despite the generally deprecatory tenor of his "biographical inquiry", Aldington himself was not without words of praise for Lawrence; in outlining his goal of "clearing the ground a little and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge", he says that his doing so is "not to deny that Lawrence was a man of peculiar abilities", and calls him an "extraordinary man".[256]
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