PENGUIN BOOKS
LAWRENCE
‘Asher probably gets nearer to the truth about him than any of his previous biographers… By the end of this conscientiously researched book, the more impressive for Asher’s knowledge of the Bedu tribes, one is left wondering whether he regrets the journey he has made to prove his childhood hero to be somewhat flawed’ Simon Courtauld, Spectator
‘This excellent biography is in part a pilgrimage, performed by an admirer with a felicitous blend of reverence and wry scepticism and a marvellous ability to convey a sense of place’ Lawrence James, Literary Review
‘Asher has written a book about his childhood hero that is thoughtful and balanced… Moreover he reaches a conclusion about Lawrence that encompasses all other biographies, one that takes the ground out from under the never-ending controversy about probably the best-known Englishman, after Winston Churchill, this century’ Phillip Knightley, Mail on Sunday
‘This may well emerge as the best biography currently available’ Contemporary Review
‘He writes well and has new things to say – not an easy thing in this desperately overcrowded field. His life of “the Uncrowned King of Arabia” has the balance that Aldington’s polemic so lamentably failed to provide’ Robert Irwin, London Review of Books
‘Asher himself, a former SAS man, is one of the greatest living desert explorers. Unlike other biographers, he gains his insights not only through the dust of libraries, but through the dazzling light of the dunes… what follows is… a careful exploration, stripping away myth (while avoiding crass revisionism), gazing into the complexity beneath a legend’ Catherine Lockerbie, Scotsman
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Asher has served in the Parachute Regiment and the SAS, and studied English at the University of Leeds. He has made expeditions in many countries, always preferring to travel on foot or with animal transport. He lived for three years with a Bedu tribe totally unaffected by the outside world and, with his wife, Arabist and photographer Mariantonietta Peru, made the first west-east crossing of the Sahara on foot with camels – a distance of 4,500 miles – without technology or back-up of any kind. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has won both the Ness Award of the Royal Geographical Society and the Mungo Park Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for Exploration. In 1997 he and Mariantonietta Peru presented the documentary In Search of Lawrence for Channel 4, which was watched by 2.4 million people. Michael Asher has travelled a total of 16,000 miles by camel and is the author of eight books. Of these, Penguin also publish Shoot to Kill: A Soldier’s Journey through Violence, Thesiger: A Biography and The Last of the Bedu: In Search of the Myth.
LAWRENCE
The Uncrowned King of Arabia
Michael Asher
With colour photographs by Mariantonietta Peru
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published by Viking 1998
Published in Penguin Books 1999
12
Copyright © Michael Asher, 1998
Colour photographs copyright © Mariantonietta Peru, 1998
Maps copyright © Reg and Marjorie Piggott, 1998
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN:978-0-14-191009-3
For Mariantonietta
Arian Hok Buda
‘The story I have to tell is one of the most splendid ever given to a man for telling.’
T. E. Lawrence to Vyvyan Richards
‘Il faut souffrir pour être content.’
T. E. Lawrence to Charlotte Shaw
CONTENTS
List of Plates
List of Maps
Introduction: The Valley of the Moon
PART ONE: THE WANDERER, 1888–1916
1. Apparent Queen Unveiled Her Peerless Light
2. Dominus Illuminatio Mea
3. Nothing Which Qualified Him to be an Ordinary Member of Society
4. The Sultan Drank Tea as Usual
5. A Rather Remarkable Young Man
6. Mr Hogarth is Going Digging
7. The Baron in the Feudal System
8. Peace in Mesopotamia Such as Has Not Been Seen for Generations
9. The Insurance People Have Nailed Me Down
10. Cairo is Unutterable Things
PART TWO: THE WARRIOR, 1916–1918
11. The Biggest Thing in the Near East Since 1550
12. Fallen Like a Sword into Their Midst
13. Not an Army But a World is Moving upon Wejh
14. I Do Not Suppose Any Englishman Before Ever Had Such a Place
15. It is Not Known What are the Present Whereabouts of Captain Lawrence
16. An Amateurish Buffalo-Billy Sort of Performance
17. Ahmad ibn Baqr, a Circassian from Qunaytra
18. The Most Ghastly Material to Build into a Design
19. My Dreams Puffed out Like Candles in the Strong Wind of Success
PART THREE: THE MAGICIAN, 1918–1935
20. Colonel Lawrence Still Goes on; Only I Have Stepped Out of the Way
21. In Speed We Hurl Ourselves Beyond the Body
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Text
Bibliography
Index
LIST OF PLATES
COLOUR PHOTOGRAPHS
Photography by Mariantonietta Peru
1. Lawrence’s Spring, Jordan
2. Pharaoh’s Island, off Sinai
3. Ruins of a traditional house, Yanbu’, Saudi Arabia
4. Ruins of mud houses, Hamra village, Saudi Arabia
5. Fallen locomotive, Hediyya station, Saudi Arabia
6. Hediyya bridge
7. Guweira plain from the Nagb ash-Shtar pass, Jordan
8. Atwi station, Jordan
9. Tent in the Wadi Rum, Jordan
10. Howaytat woman, Wadi Rum
11. The author with Sabah ibn ‘Iid at Mudowwara well, Jordan
12. Loading a camel, Mudowwara well, Jordan
13. Wrecked railway wagon, Mudowwara
14. Bedui filling a waterskin
15. Bedui of the Haywat, Jordan
BLACK AND WHITE
1. T. E. Lawrence aged about ten or eleven, a studio photograph in Oxford, c. 1900
2. Sarah Lawrence with her children, in the porch of their home at Fawley, c. 1894
3. The City of Oxford High School for Boys. Lawrence surrounded by his form mates and their teacher, c. 1900
4. Portrait of Gray by Henry Scott Tuke
5. In the summer of 1909 Lawrence visited Kala’at al-Husn (Crak des Chevaliers
)
6. The castle of Sahyun
7. The Norman keep at Safita, and Harran
8. Lawrence with Leonard Woolley at Carchemish
9. Carchemish
10. Salim Ahmad, nicknamed Dahoum, and Sheikh Hammoudi at Carchemish, 1911
11. Workmen at Carchemish, 1911
12. Lawrence in Arab dress
13. Lieut-Col. Stewart Newcombe, Royal Engineers
14. Camels, as ridden by Lawrence
15. Sharif ‘Abdallah and Ronald Storrs at Jeddah, October 1916
16. Sharif Feisal’s army falling back on Yanbu’ on the coast of the Red Sea, December 1916
17. Feisal’s camp at dawn, December 1916
18 and 19. Feisal and his army captured Wejh in January 1917 and made it their headquarters for the next six months
20. Auda Abu Tayyi and his kinsmen, photographed by Lawrence in May 1917
21. Auda and Sharif Nasir at Wadi Sirhan, June 1917
22. Mohammad adh-Dhaylan with other Howaytat tribesmen
23. A Turkish patrol repairing a stretch of railway track near Ma’an
24. The bridge at Tel ash-Shehab
25. Nasib al-Bakri, one of the founders of the Arab Revolt
26. Dakhilallah al-Qadi, hereditary law-giver of the Juhayna
27. The capture of Aqaba, 6 July 1917, photographed by Lawrence
28. Aqaba fort from inland
29. The interior of Aqaba fort
30. Ja’afar Pasha, Feisal and Pierce Joyce at Wadi Quntilla, August 1917
31. Nuri as-Sa’id
32. The gate tower at Azraq
33. Turkish prisoners near Tafilah fort, January 1918
34. Sharif Zayd and other Arab leaders with captured Austrian guns at Tafilah
35. Lawrence at the army headquarters in Cairo, 1918
36. General Allenby stepping out of his armoured car in Damascus, 3 October 1918
37. The Hejaz Camel Corps rounding up Bedouin pillagers after the capture of Damascus, 2 October 1918
38. Lawrence by Augustus John, 1919
39. Feisal, photographed at the same time
40. Gertrude Bell, Sir Herbert Samuel, Lawrence and Sharif ‘Abdallah in 41. Amman, April 1921
41. Lawrence by William Roberts, 1922
42. Lawrence as Private T. E. Shaw of the Royal Tank Corps.
43. Lawrence’s 1000cc Brough Superior motorcycle
44. The music room at Clouds Hill
45. Lawrence’s funeral at Moreton church in Dorset
46. Lawrence’s effigy in the old Anglo-Saxon church of St Martin at Wareham in Dorset
ILLUSTRATION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce black and white photographs:
The Lawrence Estate and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for nos. 1, 2, 3, 42, 43
The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London, for nos. 8–20, 22–24, 26–34, 36, 37, 40
The National Trust Photographic Library for no. 4
The Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London, for nos. 5, 6, 7, 21, 25, 35, 39, 44
St Martin’s, Wareham, for no. 46 (both photographs)
The National Portrait Gallery, London, for no. 38
The Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, for no. 41
LIST OF MAPS
1. General map of Greater Syria in 1909
2. Hejaz Operations, 1916-17
3. Syrian Operations, 1917-18
4. Medina, 1916
Introduction:
The Valley of the Moon
On a hot morning in April I climbed a hillside in the Wadi Rum, in Jordan, pausing occasionally to savour the breath of the desert wind which was peeling off the canyons I could see below me, gnarled in ancient orange light. They might have been remnants of some great Martian city warped and buckled by time – indeed, the Bedu of Rum call it the Valley of the Moon and believe that it crashed to earth from the stars. I was looking for a place known as Lawrence’s Spring, where T. E. Lawrence – ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ – had bathed during his sojourns in the wadi in 1917. In my knapsack I carried nothing but an enamel mug and a battered copy of his Seven Pillars of Wisdom – a book I had read and re-read over many years. Today, though, it felt as heavy as a millstone. I had just left the tent of some Bedu of the Howaytat – descendants of tribesmen who had actually ridden with Lawrence on his raids – and what they had had to say astonished me. ‘Lawrence wasn’t the leader of the Arab Revolt,’ one of them told me. ‘He was just an engineer who knew how to blow up the railway – a dynamite man – that’s all he was!’ T. E. Lawrence had been a childhood hero for me as for thousands of others, and the words of these Arabs struck an almost blasphemous note in my ears.
It took me only twenty minutes to find what I was looking for: the spring lay in a V-shaped cleft where water plunged down from the head of Rum mountain, thousands of feet above, gurgling into a rock cistern from which ribbles of silver liquid streamed out through shallow pools and luxuriant growths of mint and wild thyme. I filled the mug with water from the cistern and tasted it – it was sweet and deliciously cool. Then I sat down in the shade of the rock wall, opened Seven Pillars at the pre-marked page, and began to read: ‘… a rushing noise came from my left,’ Lawrence had written, ‘by a jutting bastion of a cliff over whose crimson face trailed long, falling runners of green leaves… on the rock bulge above were clean-cut Nabataean inscriptions and a sunk panel … and Arab scratchings, some of which were witnesses of forgotten migrations, but my attention was only for the splashing of water in an opening under the shadow of an overlying rock.’1 I glanced up to find the Nabataean inscriptions and Arab tribal marks, exactly where Lawrence had seen them almost eighty years before. I took in the rushing of the water, the green, fragrant streamers of the wild herbs, and was momentarily stunned by the immediacy of the description. It was as if Lawrence of Arabia, who died eighteen years before I was born, was actually there beside me: I could almost sense his presence, as if he were peering over my shoulder. Glancing back at the page, I had the irrational but powerful feeling that he was speaking directly to me – that he had somehow known that I would follow in his footsteps, and had written this especially for me to read at this very moment, on this very day.
I have often experienced such transcendent visions while travelling in the desert. The vastness, the silence, the emptiness, induces a timeless feeling that is almost palpable: I have picked up prehistoric hand-axes lying on the surface, knowing that my hand was the first to touch them since they were discarded by their makers 100,000 years ago. Somehow, in the desert, the human spirit can leap over even such a gap as this. I was certain that Lawrence felt it too, for Seven Pillars is permeated by a sense of spiritual awe which is, for me, the essence of human experience in the desert. T. E. Lawrence has affected my life with particular power. Without Lawrence I would probably not have become an Arabic speaker and a camel-rider, would not have covered 16,000 miles by camel, nor made the first ever west-east crossing of the Sahara – a distance of 4,500 miles – nor lived with a traditional Bedu tribe for three years. Without Lawrence I would probably not have served in the Special Air Service Regiment, simply because without Lawrence there would probably never have been an S A S. The words of my Howaytat hosts still burned in my head, and as I sat there I wondered, as so many others had wondered before me, who Lawrence had really been. To his adulators, everything he said or wrote is held up as true, while his critics have gone to extraordinary lengths to prove the reverse. Surely, I thought, eighty years on, it must be possible to attain a more reasonable, more honest, and more balanced view.
For two years, I tracked Lawrence from library to library and thousands of miles across the deserts of the Middle East, some of it by camel and on foot. Occasionally, in unexpected places – in a shaded nook of the Ashmolean, in the gate-tower of Azraq castle, on the ridge at Mudowwara – I felt his presence and heard his voice once more. Sometim
es – when I rode across Sinai, or climbed the Hafira pass – I felt he was simply a few steps ahead, laughing at me, and that if I hurried fast I could catch him up. My quest for Lawrence acquired the character of a pilgrimage, and I came to see that biography was itself a religious act, a form of ancestor-worship, a re-affirmation, a re-invention of the past. I searched and read and travelled, but the moment I thought I had Lawrence in my grasp, he eluded me, laughing, and appeared somewhere else. In the end, I realized that there was no ‘real’ Lawrence at all. There was only my own reflection in a glass: Lawrence and I were two facing mirrors reflecting each other to eternity. At last, in those far-off deserts, I finally knew that the observer is part of his subject: and I understood that there could be no definitive Lawrence, but only an infinite number of Lawrentian images, like crystals in the eyes of his beholders. What I discovered was my Lawrence and my truth, for ‘truth’ is of more than one kind: the kind which remains static, and the kind which bends and shifts according to the individual and the time.
PART ONE
THE WANDERER 1888 – 1916
1. Apparent Queen Unveiled Her Peerless Light
Early Childhood 1888–96
In 1879, a beautiful young woman called Sarah Lawrence alighted from a ferry at Dublin to begin the great adventure of her life. She was to be governess to the children of a wealthy gentleman called Thomas Chapman, who owned a mansion and a vast estate near Delvin in County Westmeath. Though just eighteen, Sarah was a woman of extraordinary dominance and ability, who had already overcome social barriers which many would have found insurmountable. Born the illegitimate daughter of a Tyneside shipwright named John Lawrence, deserted by her father and orphaned at nine by her own alcoholic mother, she had been brought up by an Episcopal minister and his wife in the highlands of Scotland and the Isle of Skye. In the late Victorian era, when illegitimacy attracted dire social stigma, when the classes were almost as fixed in their orbits as the celestial bodies, she was determined to leap the gulf between deprived working-class orphan and respectable, middle-class housewife. If she could not become a queen or a lady of the manor, she could at least use her power to captivate the heart of a nobleman – and that is precisely what she did.
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