Some time in 1905, matters reached a head. That summer, Lawrence had joined his father on a cycling trip around East Anglia, making brass-rubbings, visiting ruins and sending dutiful, if stiff, reports back to Sarah. He enjoyed the expedition, but began the new term at school under a cloud. His name had been put forward for a mathematics scholarship at Oxford University, and maths was a subject which did not interest him. Instead, he wanted to study history. Sarah disapproved, sensing instinctively a move away from her. The matter became contentious: she may have tried her old tactics – bluster, violence, manipulation – but this time it did not work. Lawrence was seventeen years old and Sarah had allowed him no adolescence. He was still tied to her apron strings, and this issue was one which would affect the course of his life. He decided that he must make a final stand. He did not try to fight against her overtly: his upbringing as an Edwardian gentleman precluded that. Instead, he took the only other option open to a smothered adolescent: he ran away from home.
3. Nothing Which Qualified Him to be an Ordinary Member of Society
Last Year at School and First Years at University 1906–8
A hundred years earlier he might have run away to sea: instead he joined the army. Within days Lawrence found himself a gunner in the Royal Garrison Artillery on sentry duty at St Just in Cornwall, overlooking the estuary of the Fal. Suddenly, this girlish little pipsqueak with his ‘five pound note’ voice was rubbing shoulders with rude boys who had grown up in streets far meaner than those of genteel north Oxford. He had long fantasized about serving in the ranks, but in the reality he found much to regret. The men were astonishingly brutal, and every argument ended in either a bloody fist-fight or mass bullying of the party least favoured. They brawled drunkenly all Friday and Saturday night, frightening him with their roughness, and every morning parade saw five or six men with injuries. Lawrence was restless and uncertain, and when he witnessed one of his colleagues smashing up another who had stolen from him, it was the last straw. He disclosed his whereabouts to his father, who came to purchase the discharge of his missing son.
Lawrence later told Liddell Hart that he had served for six months: in other versions it was eight and three. Only one of these figures can be correct, and probably none is, and the ordeal lasted only a matter of days. In January 1906, Lawrence and a boy called H. E. Mather had attempted to paddle a canoe up the flooded Cherwell to Banbury, but had capsized near Islip. Sarah confirmed that in the Easter holidays that year, Ned and Will had tried again. If this is so, then Lawrence’s military service cannot have begun much before February or extended much after March 1906. There is no record of a T. E. Lawrence having served in the Artillery in 1905-6, and though he would presumably have taken an assumed name, no long absence was recalled by his school-friends or brothers. He was certainly in Oxford to take the Senior Locals examinations in May. Many biographers have concluded that the episode did not take place at all. After Lawrence’s death a painting by the Uranian artist Henry Scott Tuke, apparently showing Lawrence in army uniform, was found among his effects and claimed as evidence of his sojourn in Falmouth in 1906. Eric Kennington identified the cap badge in the picture as belonging to the Royal Garrison Artillery – rather remarkably, for it is badly smudged. Tuke was certainly living in Falmouth in 1906, and was fond of using young boys and soldiers as models. Lawrence later told an acquaintance that he had ‘often’ modelled for Tuke in his youth. Yet Tuke kept a register of his pictures, and this one was clearly recorded as having been painted in 1922 – a year, incidentally, in which Lawrence visited Cornwall. The picture is entitled Portrait of Gray and was eventually bought by a man named Gray. How it came into Lawrence’s possession is unclear, unless he himself was ‘Gray’. Did Lawrence actually meet Tuke in Oxford on a visit to his friend Charles Bell? Was his trip to Cornwall in 1922 made with the object of renewing a friendship he had first made as a seventeen-year-old gunner? As in so much of Lawrence’s life, all that can be said for certain about his early enlistment in the Royal Garrison Artillery is that his account of it is not the whole truth.
Lawrence confessed later that the sense of inadequacy he felt with other men led him to compensate with what he called ‘elaboration – the vice of amateurs’. In a world of bigger, more athletic, more physically powerful boys, his skills of ‘elaboration’ were a protective mechanism which gave him an aura of being much more than he appeared. Though he was capable of building a sustained edifice of falsehood, as he was later to do with John Bruce, his tendency was less to fabricate than to inflate the prosaic into something of an altogether more heroic order. His grand gesture of rebellion in running away to the army was spoiled by a quick and ignominious retreat, yet Lawrence salvaged his defeat by turning it into a darkly romantic tale – notably a tale involving elements of violence, suffering and degradation about which he fantasized. Fantasy, exaggeration, and distortion are tools of masochism, and one expression of Lawrence’s masochism was a running fantasy of self-degradation, of being bound for life to servitude as a ‘beast’ in the ranks, of working among the outcasts of many nations on the docks at Port Said: ‘There seemed a certainty in degradation,’ he wrote, ‘a final safety. Man could rise to any height, but there was an animal level beneath which he could not fall.’1 One early discovery he made about human beings was that almost everyone – even the erudite – will believe what they want to believe, and most want to believe the romantic rather than the prosaic. This was a great revelation to Lawrence, and it enabled him to hone his skills as a bluffer to the highest degree. ‘A reputation as a classical scholar is easily gained,’ he would boast to his mother from Beirut, having dropped a quote from Theocritus he had just acquired into the conversation, while visiting the American College.2 As a young intelligence officer he would report with delight that ‘The War Office people are very easily to be deceived into a respect for special knowledge loudly declared.’ Lawrence’s ‘lily gilding’ was precisely that, for often he had no real reason to ‘elaborate’. Take two letters, for instance, both written in 1912, concerning the purchase of some camel-bells Lawrence later had on display at his house. The first, dated 18 February, is to James Elroy Flecker, the second, dated 20 March, is to his mother:
Today there came through the bazaar a long caravan of 100 mules of Baghdad, marching … to the boom of two huge iron bells swinging under the belly of the foremost … I went and bought the bells … And I marched home triumphant making the sound of a caravan from Baghdad …3
You will like my camel bells: I met a camel caravan coming swinging down the spice market in Aleppo to the booming of two huge iron cylinders under the belly of the foremost: and I stopped the line and bought the bells and walked back to the hotel making a noise like a caravan from Baghdad.4
The animals were either mules or camels, and at least one of the accounts is untrue: it is hardly likely that Lawrence could have forgotten in the space of a month what kind of animals they were. One might ask, ‘What does it matter if they were mules or camels?’ and this is precisely the point: whether they were mules or camels is supremely unimportant, and there is no conceivable motive for lying. One can only conclude that either Lawrence enjoyed misleading others, or he had a very uncommon conception of the truth. Indeed, his attitude to fact would be well demonstrated years later, when he advised Robert Graves that the best way of hiding the truth was by making mystifying, contradictory or misleading statements.5 Working with the Arabs during the war, he would admit that he did not tell the whole truth either to them or to his British masters, but designed a version of reality which suited himself. He would write that he himself often could not tell where his ‘leg-pulling’ began or ended, confess to having lied even in his official dispatches and reports, and would add: ‘I must have had some tendency, some aptitude, for deceit, or I would not have deceived men so well.’6 Ronald Storrs, who worked closely with him in Cairo during the war, would say that he could be ‘reckless in speech, irresponsible, misleading, tiresome, exasperating, maddenin
g, stating as facts things which he knew nobody could or would accept – a street Arab as well as an Arab of Arabia’.7
His quick withdrawal from the Artillery in 1906 may have shattered his own illusion that he was the ‘hard man’ he craved to be, yet in another sense the gambit had been eminently successful. Sarah no longer tried to force her will on him, no longer had recourse to the stick. Any freedom he felt himself to possess in the following years began the moment he showed his mother that he was capable of separating himself from her. Long afterwards he wrote that seventeen was the age at which he found himself.8 The incident had disturbed the family’s smooth running, but the respectable façade had to be maintained for the world. On his return the waves closed over him swiftly, and the episode was hushed up. In exchange for his silence, he got his wish to have his name put forward for a history scholarship, and sat the Senior Locals examinations that summer with a more peaceful mind.
He was also allowed to make the cycling tour around the Côtes du Nord in France that he had long been planning with his friend Scroggs Beeson. To this end he ordered a new bicycle from the Morris Company – a specially designed lightweight model with racing drop-handlebars and a unique three-speed gear, which, he liked to say afterwards, had been made by Lord Nuffield’s own hands when he was just plain Mr William Henry Morris. Cycling was a relatively new phenomenon at the turn of the century. Though the rear chain-driven bicycle with pneumatic tyres had been invented before 1895, it remained an expensive luxury item until 1900, when it was first mass-produced. Thomas Lawrence had been an enthusiast even in the early 1890s when the family lived at Dinard in Brittany, and Ned had acquired his first bike as a schoolboy in 1901. Whether his special racing model of 1906 was actually made by Lord Nuffield’s own hands remains unknown. It is a typically Lawrentian story, and Nuffield emphatically denied it, though since he is known to have made bicycles in Oxford High Street until 1908, it is at least theoretically possible. Whatever the case, there is no more poignant symbol of Lawrence’s youth than his racing bicycle, which was later remembered vividly by his friends, almost as if it had been an extension of himself. Edward Leeds recalled how it would vanish surely and swiftly up the road, ‘almost before one had turned one’s back’, while Vyvyan Richards remembered with pleasure how the machine would ‘slide silently into the Iffley Road after midnight’. Lawrence was to make eight cycling trips to France and to cover several thousands of miles on this machine.
He left England on a ferry bound for St Malo on 3 August 1906, in expansive mood. The examinations were over at last, he was away from his mother, and the brave new world seemed full of light. There was an appropriately magnificent sunset, and Lawrence stood on deck for hours, letting long stanzas of romantic poetry wash through his head, and taking in the glory of the moon reflected in the waters. Leaving England again more than twenty years later, he would remember this night as a dream of delight: the beginning of his voluntary travels.9 He was to remain in the Cotes du Nord for a month and cover the best part of 600 miles by bicycle, travelling with Beeson in a long figure of eight around the north-east of the region, staying in modest hotels and lingering among great cathedrals, churches and the ruins of ancient châteaux. The delight he experienced in escape is reflected in his letters home, and towards the end of his holiday he described the glories of the Breton coast to his mother in a stream of verse from Keats and Shelley, concluding with a subliminal message to Sarah, that it was all so wonderful ‘because there was no-one else there’. This letter evidently reflects a near rapturous mood, for Lawrence was generally happier extolling the virtues of man-made objects than the beauties of nature. His letters contain descriptions of architecture and church interiors which sometimes run for pages, and though they were written principally for his own future reference they were also a barrier to real emotion, which – apart from some superficial expressions of familial affection – these letters lack almost totally. In this sense, Lawrence’s 1906 letters are a perfect showcase of his profound aloofness from his family, from the mother who believed they should have no secrets from each other. If Sarah must know everything, Ned felt, then he would tell her all, but instead of the expressions of warmth she hungered for, he would give her only dry stones. While human passions could be wild and unpredictable, architecture was a triumph of human order, a successful fusion of the conscious and the unconscious, a symbol of the human ability to transform matter. He would later assert – more than half seriously – that there could be no true creative work into which the hands did not enter, and would become convinced that the human mind was expressed most completely in the manipulation of material, whether stone, clay, wood, cloth, skin or steel: by contrast with frail human flesh, human artefacts seemed solid and enduring. Another impulse behind these endless descriptions, though, was the sheer compulsion to describe. It is as if the things Lawrence saw and heard had no objective existence unless he described them to someone else. He admitted years later that his writing practice had been to put down more and more exactly what he had seen and felt. His talent for description became both his strength and his weakness as a writer: his sense of detail was photographic, but his skills were episodic and lacked economy and continuity. George Bernard Shaw would later conclude that Lawrence was ‘one of the greatest descriptive writers in English literature’,10 while Francis Yeats-Brown would add that his ‘itch for description … developed into a mania’.11
The main business of the tour, however, was medieval castles, and the jewel of them all was Tonquedoc, a thirteenth-century Norman château standing on a hill overlooking the wooded valley of the Guer. Lawrence and Beeson reached the ruins after riding from Lannion on the eve of Lawrence’s eighteenth birthday and spent four hours exploring them in idyllic sunshine. As he examined the castle, tower by tower, stone by stone, Lawrence found himself playing out a mental game of attack and defence – placing himself in the position of the besieged: ‘… the place would have been impossible to enter,’ he decided triumphantly. ‘An enemy would have had to make two bridges before he could reach the door. The drop to the ground was about 40 feet. …’12 He declared that Tonquedoc was the best castle he had ever seen, and felt he had somehow lessened its glory by describing it. He had brought no camera with him on this trip, and to Beeson was assigned the task of sketching. The friends enjoyed each other’s company, but inevitably they argued. Beeson thought Lawrence needlessly reckless, jumping moats instead of using bridges and clambering up walls full of loose stones. He guessed that this was not boldness so much as bravado, and this was confirmed once when he noticed Lawrence’s legs quaking in fear as he struggled to climb some perilous rocks, and offered his hand only to have it brushed aside indignantly. Beeson was an enthusiastic naturalist, and noted that Lawrence was unusual in having not even the normal schoolboy’s interest in natural history. This grew, perhaps, from a subconscious disgust he felt for the idea of reproduction, which would become more apparent in his later life, when he would regard the word ‘animal’ as a term of abuse, conjuring up the ‘beastly’ instincts of the unconscious mind. Of all things in the world, he wrote later, it was ‘animal spirits’ that he feared most.13 Lawrence nursed a grudge against Beeson for being ‘such an ass’ in slowing the pace of their cycling, but the truth may be that Beeson lacked Lawrence’s special three-speed gears, whose superiority he demonstrated proudly once on the flat sands at Erquy by covering a measured half-kilometre in thirty seconds. Even this remarkable speed did not satisfy him, though, and he dropped hints in a letter to his family about the efficacy of a motorcycle.
After Beeson left on 19 August, Lawrence stayed on for another two weeks, and shortly before leaving received the anxiously awaited results of the Locals examinations. They were excellent. He had come thirteenth out of more than 4,500 candidates, and had collected first place in English and third in religious knowledge. His place in Oxford University seemed assured, yet the result did not satisfy him: ‘… on the whole,’ he wrote, ‘[it is] not as good as
I’d hoped.’14 Such dissatisfaction would haunt him throughout his life. No matter to what heights he scaled, it would never seem good enough for the perfectionist soul within: ‘It does not seem to me,’ he would write, ‘… as though anything I’ve ever done was quite well enough done. That is an aching, unsatisfied feeling and ends up by making me wish I hadn’t done anything.’15 This was evidently true of the 1906 cycling tour. Lawrence had covered 600 miles, and had even ridden 114 miles from. Dinard to Fougéres and back on one of the hottest days of the year. Yet this was not good enough. On returning to Oxford, he told Scroggs Beeson that he had continued the tour alone, ‘eager to set his own pace’, and presented such ‘glowing descriptions of what was to be seen in Normandy and the Loire Valley’ that Beeson was stimulated to meet him there the following year. But Lawrence’s letters make clear that he never went near Normandy or the Loire Valley in 1906, spending the two weeks after Beeson left him based at Dinard, where – apart from occasional excursions – he went bathing almost every day.
That autumn, while Lawrence and Beeson worked for their ‘Repositions’ – the Oxford University entrance examination – several major building projects were taking place in the city, particularly in Cornmarket Street, at various university colleges, and in the High. Lawrence, ever alert to the possibility of archaeological treasures, would make a round of these sites almost daily, slipping the labourers a few pennies to preserve their finds. After months of persistence, he and Beeson had assembled a superb collection of pottery, glazed ware, bottles, pipes, coins and tokens, and though it was disappointingly modern for Lawrence’s taste – dating mainly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – it was interesting enough to present to the Ashmolean Museum, where Lawrence had already made the acquaintance of the junior Assistant Keeper, Leonard Woolley. Woolley, who would come to know Lawrence better than most in the pre-war era, was then twenty-five, and had recently graduated from New College. He was just embarking on the career which would bring him a knighthood in recognition of his brilliant work as an archaeologist. A kind, energetic and sensitive man, Woolley was one of the few who never succumbed to the spell of Lawrence’s later fame, and confessed that though he had found the young Lawrence charming, even talented, he had not recognized in him any special ‘genius’. He characterized their early acquaintance in Oxford as ‘slight’. The Ashmolean’s Art Curator, Charles Bell, took a greater interest in Lawrence, however, and soon accepted him at the museum as an unofficial acolyte. He gave him odd jobs such as sorting out collections of brass-rubbings and pottery, and Lawrence quickly became more familiar with the medieval collection than the museum’s own staff.
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