On each trip, Lawrence travelled by bicycle. He could, he told his family, average 10 m.p.h. over long distances, making ninety miles a day but, since he muddled miles and kilometres, some of his claims were exaggerated. Once, in August 1906, he showed signs of flagging and he suggested that a motorbike would best suit his purposes. His parents seem to have ignored this oblique request and for the rest of his journeys he made do with a bicycle. Each excursion was carefully planned beforehand, and so his family and friends were able to write to him, addressing their letters to post offices along his projected route. His parents financed him, and on every trip he sent them details of his careful husbandry of their funds. Thanks to his vegetarian diet, Lawrence seems to have managed on between six and seven francs a day (about thirty to thirty–five pence), spending about four on an evening meal and bed for the night and the rest on postcards, postage and occasional tips. His cash, in sovereigns and five-pound notes, was kept in hidden pockets and he took care not to eat in out-of-the-way and therefore risky cafés. He was puritanical about accommodation, and when confronted in August 1908 by carpets and a spring mattress at Montoire, he told his parents, ‘I prefer my polished boards in the “midi” to extra pile carpets & extra piled bills.’ Back in Oxford, he duped a fellow undergraduate, Vyvyan Richards, into believing that he got by on fifty centimes (about three pence) a day.
On each excursion, Lawrence wrote extended letters home (taking great care to get exactly twenty-five centimes’ worth of news in each envelope and save extra postage). He outlined where he had been, what he had seen in the way of churches and castles, exchanged gossip and gave incidental details about his meals, spending, Frenchmen encountered and local customs. The whole collection conveys a delightful impression of a dogged, hardy English schoolboy overcoming headwinds, punctures and an alien diet in his determination to see for himself and record the splendours of Gothic France. The wonderment of discovery is infectious, but always toned down a little by the practical need to record every antiquity in scholarly detail. Lawrence sought both to share his serendipity with his family and create a set of working notes for future study. One passage, describing monuments in Lenon Abbey, examined in August 1906, may stand example for many others.
Her [Tiphaine, Countess de Beaumanoir’s] face was perfect, without any mutilation and exhibited the calm repose and angelic purity which the mediaeval sculptor knew so well to blend, with a certain martial simplicity and haughtiness.... Opposite her on the other side of the church lay her husband assassinated in 1385. He is chiefly remarkable for two gigantic curls, each supported by a sturdy angel. He has a beard, and wears a jupon, gorget, pauldrons, brassarts, coutes, and a large sword.
Each August, the Lawrence family read much more in the same vein; they were, one assumes, as well versed in the arcane vocabulary of the antiquary as Ned. There was also room for less weighty matters, even humour, but no frivolity. At Dinard, Lawrence noticed a Pomeranian dog wearing goggles seated in his mistress’s motor car; in Brittany he disparaged local over-eating, and elsewhere he noted that many Frenchmen were stout. The Limousin village dogs ‘whose duty is to bark at all tourists, above all motorists, & people in knickers’ (that is, shorts as worn by Lawrence) annoyed him, as did the dozen American tourists (‘twangs’) whom he came across at Chinon and who made him, out of national pride, tip the guide a franc (six pence). His family also heard news of old friends at Dinard, including the Chaignons, who were good-hearted hosts on each tour. Other acquaintances were followed up, and the eighteen–year–old boy recorded an earnest conversation with the Jesuit father with whom he discussed the English Anglo-Catholic movement and Oxford. His own French improved steadily and he congratulated himself on being mistaken for a native at least once on his third trip.
In May 1927, Lawrence told Liddell Hart that he had, at the age of eighteen, run away and joined the army as a private soldier. Fascinated, Liddell Hart pressed him for further details, but was disappointed, getting some inconsequential remarks about the Friday and Saturday night loutishness of his barrack mates. The same observations occurred in The Mint, but Lawrence was very wary of revealing the exact date of his service or his nom de guerre (no Thomas Edward Lawrence left the army during 1905–6), aware no doubt that they could be checked from official records. His friends and family never indicated that he was away from home for several months and he was uncertain about how long he was away, once telling Liddell Hart that it was six months. Liddell Hart was perplexed by this confession and soon after Lawrence’s death made enquiries at the War Office. An examination of enlistment and discharge papers for 1905 drew a blank and later investigations similarly failed to trace Lawrence’s service record, even though he claimed to have been attached to the Royal Garrison Artillery unit at St Mawes near Falmouth.
On one level, this fiction was an attempt by Lawrence to give his boyhood an adventurousness and glamour which it lacked. On another, it indicated his strong–mindedness and refusal to be overridden by his parents, since he gave a family quarrel as the reason for his flight. These qualities, confirmed by his insistence on a private bolt-hole in the garden, were certainly present in the young Lawrence. The resistance to his mother, the tireless pursuit of antiquarian lore and the resolution with which he sought withdrawal from domestic distractions were evidence of a formidable will. If he did not actually beat a path to the recruiting sergeant after having been thwarted, he may well have considered it.
III
Oxford and the Orient, 1907–1910
According to Dr David Hogarth, the true antiquary needs a ‘mind which is more curious of the past than the present, loves detail for its own sake, and cares less for ends than means’. In 1908, Hogarth, a fellow of Magdalen College and newly appointed Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, felt sure that he had found such a creature in Lawrence. What he had seen of him, first as a schoolboy who brought finds to the Museum and later as an enthusiastic undergraduate who helped catalogue pottery, convinced Hogarth that here was an interesting young man worth cultivation. Hogarth’s patronage changed Lawrence’s life, giving it a direction it had hitherto lacked. Academic doors would be opened for him and, guided by Hogarth, he was set on a course towards the Middle East and a career as a field archaeologist.
Lawrence’s final debt to Hogarth was more than that of a scholar to his master. Soon after his death in November 1927, Lawrence wrote: ‘Hogarth was a very wonderful man.... He was first of all human then charitable, and then alive. I owed him everything I had, since I was 17, which is the age when I suddenly found myself.’ He counted Hogarth’s death among his greatest losses, and confessed to Edward Garnett that ‘He was really to me the parent I could trust, without qualification, to understand what bothered me.’ Hogarth possessed ‘the most civilised wisdom I’ve ever met’. Lawrence turned to this urbane, worldly and tolerant man as to a father–‘His advice was always the last I asked for when I had a question to decide.’ At first, Hogarth had seen Lawrence as a potential academic like himself, who could be steered along a conventional course of scholarship towards a seat at college high table. It was a path which Hogarth had followed, but not without misgivings, for he had a restless spirit that was never at home within the confines of the common room or library. At heart he was an adventurer, a wandering antiquary driven by the search for ‘hidden treasure’ or the chance to uncover some ‘lode of antiquarian lore’.1 Lawrence sensed this and after his death remarked, ‘His career did not fit his character.’
Hogarth had begun what he called his ‘arduous apprenticeship’ as an antiquary in 1887 when, twenty–five years old and fascinated by the life of Alexander the Great, he enrolled at the British School at Athens. Its routines bored him so he went off, revolver on hip, to see Macedonia for himself. He travelled widely across Turkey, Syria and Palestine, living cheaply. He excavated in Cyprus (alongside M.R. James, another embryonic don and the future writer of ghost stories) and in Egypt under the direction of Professor Flinders Petrie, the most celebrated Bri
tish archaeologist of his day. In 1897 he took a turn as The Times’s correspondent in Crete, where he reported the Graeco–Turkish war. He became a don and wrote academic studies including Devia Cypria, which, to his amusement, stimulated ill-founded excitement amongst collectors of erotica.
For Hogarth, direct experience of the Middle East, ‘whose ancient monuments conspicuously exalt the past at the expense of the present’, was essential for any aspiring antiquary since it would both quicken and fix his enthusiasm. Lawrence, whom he realised was more at home in the past than the present, was very susceptible to such persuasion. By August 1908 his mind was made up. He gave exuberant notice of his decision in a letter home written at Aigues Mortes, an appropriate place for such a resolve since it was from here that St Louis and his Crusaders had taken ship for Egypt in 1249:
I felt that at last I had reached the way to the South, and all the glorious East; Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Tyre, Syria, Italy, Spain, Sicily, Crete ... they were all within reach.... I fancy I know better than Keats what Cortes felt like, ‘silent upon a peak in Darien’. Oh I must get down there, - farther out—again! Really this getting to the sea has almost overturned my mental balance....
Lawrence’s imagination may have run wild, but there was a practical reason for him to undertake an expedition to the Middle East. An examination of the then little–known Crusader strongholds in the Lebanon, Syria and Palestine was a natural outcome of his studies of fortification in England, Wales and France. Furthermore, Oxford’s examination statutes permitted historians to submit a thesis as part of their Final Examinations. Supported by Hogarth, Lawrence planned to offer such a study in which he would explain and demonstrate the exchange of ideas about castle–building between the Crusader states and the West. It was an ambitious project which required extensive field work in a remote region, but, if successful, it could do much to advance Lawrence’s academic career.
This certainly needed promotion. The most outstanding feature of Lawrence’s progress through Oxford had been his eccentric behaviour. His arrival at Jesus in October 1907 was a moment of liberation which released him from the chafing bonds of schoolmasters and parents. Like many other undergraduates he felt that now he could do as he liked and his new freedom was marked by a regime of waywardness. Fortunately, Edwardian Oxford was essentially a benign and tolerant society in which all kinds of unconventionality were more or less accepted. Even so, his quirkiness stood out and irritated some. A.G. Prys–Jones, a contemporary, recollected an exchange which followed one of Lawrence’s visits to his rooms and which provoked the ire of one of the college ‘hearties’.2
In his blunt Anglo-Saxon way he said ‘I’ve just passed that lunatic Lawrence on the staircase. What’s he been doing in our territory?’ ‘Seeing me,’ I replied. ‘My God, Prys, the man’s barmy. Don’t you know that?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘either that or some kind of genius. I can’t tell yet. Give me time, old man: I’ve only just met him.’ ‘You Welshmen do seem to have a knack of picking up the queerest fish. I know he’s barmy. He doesn’t run with the boats, he doesn’t play anything. He just messes about on an awful drop–handled bicycle. And if he ever wore a bowler hat he’d wear it with brown boots.’
Lawrence’s activities gave plenty of cause for such outbursts. Although he had rooms in college, he lived at home where, after the autumn of 1908, he used his garden bungalow as study and bedroom. He ignored established college routines by which men read and attended lectures in the morning, took athletic exercise after lunch, and between tea and dinner either worked or chatted. ‘No gentleman works after dinner’ was the custom, but Lawrence often studied well into the early hours of the morning. He seldom dined in college, indeed he was rarely seen to eat a square meal. Sustained by nibbling biscuits, cake, apples and raisins, Lawrence went in for occasional bouts of endurance, once working and fasting for forty–five hours at a stretch. Another bizarre form of self–discipline involved at least one nocturnal dip in the frozen Cherwell, which must have been particularly astringent for a man who had a passion for hot baths.
At night, Lawrence came alive. He would wander around Oxford after dark for some unknown purpose: he claimed that sometimes he navigated the city’s sewers in a canoe. These had some attraction for him, since he descended them on another occasion with a revolver which he fired to disturb those walking above. This revolver was used at other times, once in the street to celebrate the end of his forty–fivehour fast, and again outside Prys–Jones’s rooms to announce Lawrence’s return from Syria. Strangely, Lawrence avoided the attentions of the university proctors and bulldogs, who were more accustomed to dealing with collective undergraduate rowdiness than with the pranks of a solitary night-walker.
Lawrence was a man apart, at least in outlook and behaviour. He kept clear of communal ragging and social junketings such as Eights Week. He avoided such regular college activities as rowing; he drank water rather than beer or wine; he showed no interest at all in women and so stayed silent when his companions discussed sex, and he never swore. Yet men were drawn into his company. There were undergraduates, willing to overlook Lawrence’s oddities or finding them refreshing, who became part of his small circle. For them, his presence was intriguing. He arrived without warning at their rooms, shunned chairs and sofas, and chose instead to sit cross-legged on a cushion. Often he would remain frozen in the same position for hours on end, listening carefully to the flow of conversation with an enigmatic, sometimes unnerving smile fixed on his face.
There were some regular features in Lawrence’s university life. In the Michaelmas Term 1908 he joined the cyclist detachment of the university Officers’ Training Corps. His elder brother Robert had taken the same course while reading medicine at St John’s and Ned may have been keen to exploit the opportunities for cycling and shooting. He was an apt cadet who proved himself a good shot and capable scout, although his failure to master the skills of tying puttees vexed his sergeant-major. His volunteering was a reminder that he came from a patriotic family for whom service to their country was a natural duty. For some years, like his brothers, he had been a leader in the St Aldate’s Church Lads’ Brigade. The Boys’ Brigade movement had been started in 1883 as a vehicle for the moral regeneration of working-class youth and by 1909 it had over 60,000 members. Lawrence and other middle-class young men acted as leaders and guides, steering their charges towards Sunday School and Bible classes and away from street-corner gangs, public houses, music halls and cheap sensational newspapers. Each unit wore uniform, performed military-style drill and held summer camps. By 1910, Lawrence had abandoned his duties to the Church Lads and their Sunday School. According to a friend, departure had been occasioned by his reading to his class a religious story by the unmentionable Oscar Wilde.3 Mrs Lawrence may have been upset, but she had some consolation in the knowledge that her son was doing his duty by his country, if not God, in the ranks of the OTC.
Undergraduates who had contact with Lawrence at Oxford were all taken by the depth of his knowledge about the Middle Ages. He told them that it was a ‘real’ period, unlike its successor, which was heralded by twin demons of gunpowder and printing. Others were bowled over by his antiquarian passions. Warren Ault, an American Rhodes scholar, and Vyvyan Richards, a Welsh-American, neither of them run-of-the-mill men, were among those who found in Lawrence something worth knowing. Each was converted to brass-rubbing, and Richards recalled being relentlessly badgered into seeing the prehistoric Rollright Stone Circle twenty miles north-west of Oxford. Meeting Lawrence was ‘love at first sight’ for Richards, who would compose a warm memoir soon after his friend’s death. Lawrence, as a freshman, was flattered by the admiration of the thirdyear man whom he later described as an ‘unworldly, sincere, ill-mannered Welsh philosopher’.4 They quickly became intimates although it was an association of which Mr and Mrs Lawrence did not approve.
Richards guessed that Mrs Lawrence was dimly aware of Ned’s undergraduate escapades. Nothing of this sort marred her other sons�
�� passages through university. Robert, a medic, went through St John’s without a hitch; William, a Classicist who turned Modern Historian, followed him with a scholarship worth £100 a year and gained a Half-Blue as a miler: while Frank, who went up to Jesus as an exhibitioner, made his mark in the college soccer eleven and as a rifle shot. Their wholesome manliness was not to Richards’s taste and he found Ned’s brothers ‘a dull lot’.
Ned was very different. Richards thought him an exotic original who ‘lived in a world of old things’ and who opened his mind to the beauties of medieval art and literature. Lawrence released his previously repressed aestheticism and, in return, received utter devotion. Together they dreamed out a joint future in which they would live together in contrived Gothic surroundings as creative artist-craftsmen in the manner advocated by visionary William Morris. The dream combined both the traditional, Victorian pattern of manly friendship, which had its roots in the Platonic ideal of love between young men in ancient Greece, and a shared passion for Morris’s Gothic idealism. The present, industrial, capitalist world was unbearable and its tastes an abomination. Intelligent, sensitive men could escape from its hideousness by returning to an idealised Middle Ages in which were produced works of beauty and integrity. Richards did find Lawrence physically attractive, but the essential bonds between the two were intellectual rather than carnal.
Women of his own age were all but unknown to Lawrence, whom Richards found strangely without any interest in sex. His home life had been deliberately masculine thanks to his mother, who kept girls at bay. So too and with equal vigour did the Oxford collegiate authorities. Lawrence may not have needed these artificial barriers for he cared little for girls, either in the abstract or in the particular, and was hazy about just what was involved in heterosexual behaviour. Such gaps in the knowledge of middle–class youths were not uncommon. Years later, Lawrence, by turns shocked and fascinated by the coarse ribaldry of his RAF hut–mates, sought enlightenment from Robert Graves. Graves was surprised and in February 1930 informed Siegfried Sassoon, ‘It doesn’t take long to fuck: but perhaps you don’t know about it. T.E. [Lawrence] is similarly ignorant.’5
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