Golden Warrior, The
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In preparing this edition I am indebted to Professor Fred Crawford, Mrs Elspeth Huxley, Lord Kennett, Hugh Leach, Denis MacDonnell, Andrew Lownie, Professor Suleiman Mousa, Nicholas and Jane Roe, Alan Samson, Colin Simpson, Dr Sidney Sugarman and Andrew Wille. My wife Mary and sons Edward and Henry have again shown remarkable good humour and patience.
St Andrews, January 1995
PART ONE
FROM BIRTH TO MANHOOD
August 1888─August 1914
I
Ancestry and Inheritance
T.E. Lawrence’s birth, upbringing and education were not an obvious preparation for his later life. What he ultimately became was decided by the outbreak of war in August 1914. By offering himself to the British army, he put aside his private ambitions and, like millions of others, surrendered his future to forces beyond his control.
At this time, Lawrence was at a loose end. He was twenty-six, a gifted, personable scholar who had travelled extensively in Syria and Palestine; he was competent in Arabic and well along a road which seemed to lead towards a distinguished academic future. He was not sure whether he wanted to continue the journey. ‘I am not going to put all my energies into rubbish like writing history, or becoming an archaeologist,’ he had written three years before. ‘I would rather write a novel even, or become a newspaper correspondent.’ These dreams suddenly evaporated. He became a soldier and was posted to Military Intelligence where he proved useful to his commanders and found an outlet for energies and talents which had been hitherto hidden. He had a quick mind, relished his new tasks and exploited the chances which they offered. But the forces which a public emergency released in him were already there, implanted by heredity and the influences of family, friends and tutors, who in turn embodied the attitudes and preoccupations of the age in which Lawrence grew to manhood.
Thomas Edward Lawrence (‘Ned’ to his family and companions) was born on 16 August 1888 at Tremadoc in North Wales where his parents had rented a small house. His father, who called himself Thomas Lawrence, had the immediately recognisable bearing and manners of a gentleman, which he was. He had been born in 1846, Thomas Robert Chapman, grandson of an Irish baronet, and on the death of an elder brother had inherited a country house and estate at South Hill, two miles from the small town of Castletown Devlin in Westmeath. His family had counted for something in Westmeath since the Elizabethan conquest and colonisation of Gaelic Ireland. Then the Chapmans had been granted lands through, it was believed, the backstairs influence of a courtier kinsman, Sir Walter Raleigh. They were already a family on the move, having in a few generations risen from the counting house to the squirearchy of Tudor Leicestershire.
At some stage in his youth, Lawrence had discovered his father’s family history and all his life he set some store by his gentle blood and Irish ancestry. He also knew something about his maternal grandmother’s family, the Vansittarts, and took an interest in their activities. Lawrence’s attachments to his lineage and roots were strong and sentimental. In 1927 he had a daydream about buying some acres in Westmeath ‘to keep some of Walter Raleigh’s gift in the family of which I have the honour of being not the least active member’. Two years later he told the Labour MP Ernest Thurtle that his ‘experience in many camps’ had convinced him he was ‘a very normal sort of Anglo-Irishman’. Just what qualities this stereotype might possess, Lawrence hinted elsewhere. Irishmen, he thought, were generally a disappointing breed. ‘They go so far, magnificently, and cease to grow,’ but there were exceptions like the playwright Sean O’Casey.
Lawrence could freely romanticise his Irishness, but he was unable to enjoy the prestige of his pedigree openly, or assume his father’s patrician port. He was illegitimate. In 1873 Thomas Chapman had married a cousin, Elizabeth Hamilton Boyd, the daughter of a neighbouring squire. In nine years she gave her husband four daughters and much distress. A mean-spirited and vixenish woman, Mrs Chapman suffered from a manic religiosity which drove her to hand out Protestant tracts to the local Catholic peasantry. Their priests nicknamed her the ‘Holy Viper’.
By the beginning of 1885, Chapman had taken a mistress, Sarah Junner. Sarah, a fine-featured and strong-willed Scottish girl, had entered South Hill in 1879 as a nanny. A capable body she soon took over the management of the household from Mrs Chapman, whose mind was elsewhere, and introduced some joy into what must have been a gloomy menage. Sarah had been born in Sunderland in 1861, the illegitimate daughter of Elizabeth Junner and John Junner, a shipwright who may have been a kinsman. After her mother’s death (from drink when she was eight or nine) Sarah was placed with her grandparents in Perthshire, and when they died, she was passed to an aunt, the wife of a Scottish Episcopalian minister at Blairgowrie in the same county. She followed this couple to Skye from where she was recruited to the Chapman household, no doubt recommended by her links with the kirk. Until her death in 1959 she spoke with a slight Scottish burr.
When Victorian gentlemen became dissatisfied with their wives, they often found mistresses from the lower classes whom they would establish in discreet homes. Thomas Chapman went further; he abandoned his wife and South Hill and set up house with Sarah thirty miles or so away in Dublin. Here their first son, Montague Robert, was born at the end of December 1885. Chapman family tittle-tattle alleged that the couple, pretending to be man and wife, had been discovered by a former servant who overheard Sarah call herself Mrs Chapman when ordering groceries. What is certain is that the pair could not hope to sustain the pretence of being man and wife in Ireland and so fled to anonymity in North Wales.
Divorce was impossible. The 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act permitted legal separation on the grounds of one act of misconduct by the wife, and two by the husband. Mrs Chapman’s life was impeccable, so her husband could not start proceedings; nor would he abandon Sarah. His own desertion and infidelity gave his wife adequate grounds for a suit, but her religious views ruled out such an action. The problem was simply but illegally resolved by Thomas and Sarah who took the surname Lawrence and behaved to the world as if they were married.
Soon after Ned’s birth, his parents embarked on a nomadic life which lasted eight years. From Tremadoc they passed to Kirkcudbright, where their third son, William, was born in 1889, and then into exile at Dinard on the Normandy coast. There was a brief excursion to Jersey in 1894 for the birth of their fourth son, Frank, who, if he had been born on French soil, would have been liable for conscription. By the end of the year, the Lawrences were back in England and set up house in a red-brick villa at Langley in the New Forest. Their travels ended in 1896 when they settled at 2 Polstead Road, a newly built villa in North Oxford, where their fifth and last son, Arnold, was born in 1900.
This restless way of life was forced on the Lawrences by fear of public exposure. Had they been Bohemians or radicals embracing the novel and outrageous doctrines of free love, they could have cocked a snook at the mores of the rest of society and flaunted their liaison. But they were not. Mr and Mrs Lawrence were conservative and conventional by temperament, and upheld the prevailing morality. Once, when T.E. Lawrence mentioned Oscar Wilde, he was rebuked by his parents, who shared the widespread revulsion against a writer whose vices had made him a moral outcast. Yet while they might have reviled Wilde, the Lawrences must have been uncomfortably aware of two other recent scandals, the Dilke and Parnell affairs, both of which involved adultery and triggered spasms of typically British prurience and sermonising. In order not to fall victim to their own morality, the couple always had to be wary.
Even after they had put down roots in Oxford, Mr and Mrs Lawrence were circumspect. Over-intimate social contacts could have led to the exposure of their secret and so were avoided. Mr Lawrence was always polite but aloof, and his wife did not make the customary social calls. She was also noticeably uneasy in the company of those whom she had been brought up to regard as her ‘betters’, but more at ease with workmen who came to her house. As a result those acquainted with the Lawrences remarked on what seemed the
social disparity between the pair. When he was old enough to understand such matters, T.E. Lawrence also sensed it.
He had been born into a society which was deferential and hierarchical, but not rigid. The able and determined could move up, while the feckless slipped down. Lawrence came to believe that his father had been socially diminished by his liaison with his mother while she had been elevated. He was aware of the lowliness of her origins and made no attempt to gloss over or glamorise them. In a confessional letter written in 1927 to Mrs Bernard Shaw, he described his mother as ‘a child of sin’ nurtured on Skye by a ‘biblethinking Presbyterian’, and in another he called her ‘a charity child’. She had risen in the world and, impelled by motives of possession, had ensnared and tamed a wild Irish milord. Or, in Lawrence’s words, ‘She was wholly wrapped up in my father, whom she carried away jealously from his former life and country, against great odds; and whom she kept as the trophy of her power.’ His father had been degraded by these events. Lawrence had contrived for himself a picture of his father’s previous existence which came straight from the pages of R.S. Surtees or Somerville and Ross. For his son, at least, Thomas Chapman of South Hill was a boisterous Irish squireen whose life was a harum-scarum rout of hard riding, shooting and drink, but not, it seems, womanising. By the time he had reached suburban Oxford, this fellow had been recast by his wife into a benevolent, passive bourgeois.
Thomas Lawrence had not only been forced to jettison his pastimes and indulgences; his standard of living had fallen. His rents and investments were still his, but they had to be divided between two households. This was a thin time for Irish squires, a period of agrarian wars between landlords and tenants (Westmeath was a major centre of disorder in the 1870s and 1880s), Gladstone’s Land Acts and an agricultural depression. Thomas Lawrence did not suffer the full effects of a dwindling rent roll for, like others of his kind, he had shifted capital into industrial and government stocks. When deductions had been made for the upkeep of Mrs Chapman and his daughters at South Hill, he was left with about £400 a year to support his Oxford household. Yet his son believed that the burden of the two establishments had ‘reduced his means to a craftsman’s income’. This was not only untrue but showed how little Lawrence understood of other people’s lives. In the years when he was growing up, a skilled artisan lucky enough to be in permanent employment earned between £75 and £100 and was considered to be among the aristocracy of labour. Wherever Thomas Lawrence the elder stood in the social order of Oxford, he kept his family without having to work. He was, as he called himself when his sons were enrolled at Oxford High School, of ‘independent means’, and his annual income placed him securely in the ranks of the professional middle classes who lived around him in North Oxford. But what social position did he bestow on his sons?
The question was an important one for the young Lawrence. The private knowledge of his gentle ancestry meant much to his self-esteem, which was understandable in an age which set store by the medieval notion that moral virtue was inherited with nobility of blood. The cult of the English gentleman was at its height when Lawrence was growing up. Its dogmas would have been familiar to him from the example and advice of his father, the counsel offered in the popular boys’ magazines available at home and what he heard from clergymen and schoolmasters. As a Church Lads’ Brigade leader, in his teens, he would have been responsible for broadcasting these ideas to young men from the working classes. In essence they were simple and derived from a late-Victorian appreciation of the principles of Christian knighthood, so the English gentleman was expected to show a respect and reverence for women, and generosity and protectiveness towards the poor and weak, and above all to live according to high principles of honour and truth. These virtues were the natural inheritance of those born gentlemen and it was not surprising that men on the make often concocted noble ancestors. Oscar Wilde invented a kinship with a Cromwellian swashbuckler, Colonel de Wilde, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wove fantasies about the ancient Doyles, whom he believed were Norman warlords. This sort of fancy was taken to characteristic extremes by Lawrence’s first biographer Lowell Thomas, who embellished the Lawrence family tree with a Crusader and a brace of Victorian warrior proconsuls, Sir Henry and Sir John Lawrence. This fiction was further evidence that noble blood conveyed more than quarterings: it transmitted nobility of character and courage.
Lawrence was unsure where exactly he fitted in. From his first days in Oxford, if not earlier, he had been fascinated by the chivalric past and its trappings, and so the blood links with Raleigh and his Chapman forebears, with their seat at Killua Castle, must have had a special significance for him. As a schoolboy and undergraduate, he was profoundly interested in the highest expressions of the chivalric ethic, the Crusades and the chansons de geste which extolled the bravery and honour of semi-legendary knights who, like Sir Galahad, incidentally offered models for late-Victorian and Edwardian boyhood. As a historian, Lawrence was never blind to the greed and inhumanity of the Crusaders, whose activities he studied with the cold eye of the historian of war. Yet his admission that he had been driven by ‘impulses’ deep within him suggests a belief that warrior adventurousness could be carried in the blood.
Gentle blood may have contained rare essences of leadership and knightly courage, but for Lawrence it could not ensure entry into the gentlemanly caste. His birth was one disbarment, his early education another. The public schools, temples of the cult of the gentleman, were beyond the purse of Mr Lawrence, whose boys were sent to Oxford High School to learn alongside the sons of tradesmen. Oxford University followed and, with it, the everyday company of men who by birth and public school education had acquired the status of gentlemen. Then and later at army headquarters at Cairo, Lawrence penetrated their society. Their reactions to him were mixed; those, like Sir Ronald Storrs and George Lloyd, who were impressed by his perceptiveness, charm and learning became his friends. Others had misgivings. There was, according to Mrs Winifred Fontana, the wife of the British Consul at Aleppo, ‘something uncouth in Lawrence’s manner contrasting with a donnish precision of speech’. ‘He had none of a gentleman’s instincts,’ remarked Henry (‘Chips’) Channon, a minor Tory politician and social butterfly, who resented Lawrence’s ‘strutting about the [Versailles] Peace Conference in Arab Dress’. Flamboyance together with unmuted cleverness were not gentlemanly traits. In fact they were just the sort of affectations which public schools existed to excise.1
There was always something socially incongruous about Lawrence. His father had given him the blood of the gentry, the class which traditionally bore arms and ruled. He was proud of his connections, and could even joke about how they were flawed. ‘Bars Sinister,’ he told Lionel Curtis, ‘are rather jolly ornaments. You feel so like a flea in the legitimate prince’s bed.’ He could also stand back and make fun of some features of the gentlemanly code. He mocked the punctilious rituals of the army, jesting which was shared by a handful of public school brothers-in-arms. Yet he had to fight back an urge to enforce the code when, in 1922, he was confronted at Uxbridge with an RAF Commanding Officer who brutally hectored new recruits. Lawrence was appalled ‘that an officer should so play the cad’, and wanted to strike him. By then he had found himself a satisfactory social position, a gentleman ranker who divided his life between the barrack hut and the salons of the nation’s literary and political elite. It was oddly fitting for a man who, as a child, had listened to details of his noble pedigree and witnessed his mother’s familiarity with workmen.
Mrs Lawrence could offer her son no distinguished family tree. Her blood, as Lawrence knew, was Scottish with a trace of Norse, presumably from her father, who may have been Norwegian. There were some faint grounds for speculation about a kinship of blood and spirit with General Gordon, with whom Lawrence was sometimes compared. When Bernard Shaw made the link, fearful that Lawrence might reveal the same fanaticism, he replied, ‘There is only a superficial likeness I think: though my mother was a Gordon.’ This may have b
een so, but Sarah Lawrence gave her son something more formidable than a tenuous connection with a famous clan.
Throughout her life, Mrs Lawrence bore the stamp of the Evangelical creed she had absorbed in Scotland. Her profound religious faith, which gave her an inner strength and sense of purpose, rested upon a simple theology. Like all who felt the saving Grace of Christ, she served Him, and ordered her life according to the ordinances of the Bible, whose literal truth was unquestionable. As an Evangelical, she was bound to spread the Word and reveal its power by the example of her own life.
Yet, when tempted, Sarah Lawrence had followed her instincts and taken a man from his wife, another devout woman. Her action had been sinful, cutting her off from the community of believers and even, if she failed to repent, from salvation itself. In the language of her own faith, Sarah Lawrence was a licentious woman. By becoming and remaining Thomas Chapman’s common-law wife — preachers used a blunter word — she was living in breach of God’s law. She found the weight of sin unbearable. All her life, she was haunted by this anguish. In her eighties and during a bout of flu, she was heard to murmur several times, ‘God loves the sinner, hates the sin. God hates the sin, loves the sinner.’2
Mrs Lawrence’s inner suffering was eased by the spiritual comfort of an Anglican Evangelical, Canon Alfred Christopher, the Rector of St Aldate’s, Oxford. Mr and Mrs Lawrence first encountered this determined clergyman in 1895 at Ryde where he was on one of his many missions of conversion. He not only offered comfort, but probably encouraged the Lawrences to make their permanent home in Oxford. The city had much to offer; the new high school gave the boys the chance of a good academic education which would not stretch the family income, and the Lawrences would be welcomed into the St Aldate’s congregation.