Joining in the conquest of the air as an ordinary mechanic also satisfied that strong vein of evangelicalism instilled into Lawrence as a child. He would not only tend the machines, but use his influence to animate his fellow rankers with a sense of pride in their duties. While Trenchard led from the top, Lawrence would enthuse from below those who performed what he called their ‘inarticulate duty’. ‘You can see better at the bottom of the ladder than at the top,’ he remarked to one of his commanding officers. Early in 1935, he expanded on his philosophy to Robert Graves: ‘It is the airmen, the mechanics, who are overcoming the air.... The genius raids, but the common people occupy and possess.’ In the same letter he expressed satisfaction that he had done something to make them aware of the value of their work and future inheritance.
Lawrence never bothered to learn to fly. He had enjoyed being flown during the war and continued to make trips; his flight from Miramshah to Karachi at the end of 1928 had been some compensation for expulsion from India and a year later he flew in a dual-control Moth. His need for risk and speed was satisfied by his succession of high-power Brough motorbikes—‘Boanerges’ and ‘Georges I to VII’—which he rode throughout the 1920s and 1930s, often at great speed. ‘Voluntary danger’ as he called it, such as racing a Bentley along the serpentine country roads of south-western England, gave him a ‘melancholy joy’ compounded of the knowledge that his life was in jeopardy. Friends noticed that he never liked the stability of the motor car.
Gadgetry had always fascinated Lawrence and he rightly thought himself a good mechanic. Service to and mastery of machines was for him part of the essence of maleness. ‘No woman, I believe, can understand a mechanic’s happiness in serving his bits and pieces,’ he told Robert Graves, adding that joining the world of men so employed was a modern form of monastic withdrawal. This admission suggests that Lawrence was yearning for those all-male brotherhoods he had shared during his childhood and youth. Those who devotedly tended machines inhabited a separate world.
Lawrence always recognised that service as a craftsman in the RAF was a form of social degradation: he never forgot that he had chosen to live among those whom he considered his inferiors. Once he wrote, ‘I backed out of the race, and sat down among people who were not racing,’ and often he elaborated on what, for such correspondents as Mrs Bernard Shaw and Lionel Curtis, were the coarse horrors of day-to-day working-class existence. Yet throughout his years as a ranker, Lawrence alternated the roughness of the barrack hut with the refinement of the college high table or the countryhouse party. It could be confusing; once at Miramshah in 1928, he was overcome with anxiety about whether he would remember which knife and fork he should use when dining as a guest at the mess of the Guides Cavalry. Such niceties never troubled his fellow aircraftmen.
The chasm which separated All Souls, the Colonial Office and the literary salons of the 1920s from the barrack huts filled with what Lawrence described as ‘a cross section of unemployed England’ was vast, perhaps as wide as that which divided the Englishman from the Beduin. The war fought in the trenches had whittled away some of the barriers which, before 1914, had cut off the upper and middle from the working classes. Some of Lawrence’s friends hoped that they could continue this process: Robert Graves became a Labour councillor and, like Edmund Blunden, joined a village cricket team. Others, whom Lawrence had known during the war, went further: Sir Wyndham Deedes gave up a post-war diplomatic career to settle in Bethnal Green, where he became a Labour councillor working tirelessly for the poor, and Colonels Wedgwood and L’e Malone became radical Labour MPs.
E.M. Forster thought that, like them, Lawrence may have ‘wanted to get in touch with people’ and share their life and work.2 There may have been an element too of returning to his roots, for his mother had come from the artisanal class. In making this journey, he took with him the intellectual baggage which he had collected in his early life and a strong urge to share it with those who might be interested. While his mother and elder brother Robert undertook missionary work in China, Lawrence went among the unenlightened in the barracks spreading a cultural gospel. His proselytising was often fruitful. In August 1928 he told Mrs Bernard Shaw how gratifying it was to listen to ‘People who belong to the News of the World class discuss Beethoven and Mozart at meals.’
Such exchanges were commoner at Cloud’s Hill, where Lawrence had set up a small salon to which converts from the Tank Corps at Bovington and RAF friends came to relax, read literature and listen to classical music on the gramophone. Lawrence had grown to love fine music late in life and he once told Meinertzhagen that listening to it was gradually softening the ‘hard’ side of his nature. His tastes were romantic and melodic: Holst’s suite, ‘The Planets’, in particular the Saturn movement, was an early favourite and later he developed a profound admiration for the music of Elgar. In December 1933 he wrote to the composer:
This is from my cottage and we have just been playing your 2nd Symphony. Three of us, a sailor, a Tank Corps soldier, and myself. So there are all the Services present: and we agreed that you must be written to and told (if you are well enough to be bothered) that this Symphony gets further under our skins than anything else in the record library at Cloud’s Hill. We have the Violin Concerto, too; so that says quite a lot. Generally we play the Symphony last of all, towards the middle of the night, because nothing comes off very well after it.
Lawrence discovered that men whose education had been truncated and who lived by manual labour possessed sensitivity and responded to it in others. There were setbacks. On leaving the Drigh Road depot at Karachi, he bequeathed his collection of classical records to his fellow aircraftmen who, soon after, exchanged them for an officer’s Sophie Tucker discs. This news must have disheartened Lawrence, who detested the alien disharmonies of jazz.
Mixing two worlds gave Lawrence amusement at the expense of others. His appearance in khaki alongside the Hardys at Glastonbury prompted a Frenchwoman to comment, ‘Very democratic aren’t we.’ Lawrence answered in French, ‘Sorry, Mr Hardy doesn’t understand French. May I offer myself as an interpreter?’ Playing the same game in reverse, Lawrence irritated Robert Graves by saying he had become a ‘simple fitter’ who read Tit Bits and Happy Magazine and by shamming ignorance of simple academic matters. These remarks, and what Graves called Lawrence’s ‘garage English’, may have been symptoms of a mutual disenchantment during the early 1930s. It owed much to Lawrence’s hostility towards Graves’s mistress, the poet Laura Riding, whom he considered an ‘intellectual freak’ and whose verses displeased him.3
Graves, like many of Lawrence’s friends, found his enlistment inexplicable, not least because he seemed to have exchanged a familiar and comfortable world for one which was hostile and incommodious. The sections of The Mint which cover the two months of his induction at Uxbridge are a chronicle of shock and disillusionment. The aspirant pioneers of the air are overwhelmed by a regime of menial chores and drill supervised by hectoring officers and NCOs. None of this seemed necessary or useful for men destined to serve machines.
When, in January 1922, he had renewed his appeal to Trenchard for permission to join as a ranker, Lawrence insisted that the lives of his fellow aircraftmen would provide the raw material for a projected book. He outlined his literary ambitions and explained that they had not been achieved by the Seven Pillars, but might be realised through the RAF. The demands of the Colonial Office were too great to give Lawrence the time he needed to write and routine administration bored him.
Trenchard liked and understood Lawrence. ‘He was the sort of man,’ Trenchard recollected, ‘who, on entering a roomful of people, would have contrived to be sick on the spot had everyone stood up to applaud him. Yet if, on entering the same room, nobody stirred or showed the faintest sign of recognition, Lawrence might well have reacted by standing on his head.’4 After much cajolery and some histrionics on Lawrence’s side, Trenchard relented. (During one meeting at Trenchard’s house, when Lawrence threatened suicide
, the Air Marshal riposted, ‘All right, but please go into the garden. I don’t want my carpets ruined.’) Churchill agreed, so too did Sir Frederick Guest, the Secretary for Air, although his successor Sir Samuel Hoare was kept in ignorance of the plot.
One further factor may have influenced Lawrence and possibly swayed his fellow conspirators. As mentioned earlier, he was being menaced by an underworld figure, Jack Bilbo, who was considering making public Lawrence’s attendance at flagellation parties in Chelsea. In May 1922, Lawrence took steps to hire John Bruce, an eighteen-year-old Scot from Aberdeen, who was retained for £3 a week without any clear indication of what his duties might be. This is what Bruce recalled over forty years later and his memory for dates has been called into question. What is beyond doubt is that on 19 March 1923 Lawrence signed on for seven years in the Royal Tank Corps as a private soldier and Bruce, also lately enlisted, joined him in Hut F12 at Bovington camp. According to Bruce, he had been in contact with Lawrence during January and February and had joined up at his suggestion. Within a month of their arrival at Bovington, Lawrence had asked Bruce to perform the first of many ritual beatings. 5
If, as seems possible, during 1922 Lawrence could have become connected with a homosexual scandal (in an approach to the Admiralty for a storekeeper’s job, he had suggested a foreign posting), this would have had grave repercussions for his high-ranking friends and provoked ridicule abroad. Unlike Oscar Wilde some twenty-five years before, Lawrence was an admired and respected national hero whose fall from grace would discompose the establishment. The beatings delivered by Bruce indicate that he was unable to break completely with this addiction. How much of this was known to those in authority is not clear, but if even a hint of it had come their way, it would have been a good reason not to object too strongly to Lawrence’s strange urge for anonymity within the armed services.
Two days after Christmas 1922, Lawrence’s cover was blown by the Daily Express under the headline ‘“Uncrowned King” as Private Soldier’. His identity had been known to many of his colleagues since his arrival at Uxbridge, but they had shown discretion and, when Farnborough camp was swamped with pressmen, did what they could to fend them off. Lawrence rightly believed that he had been betrayed by an officer who had been paid for his tip. The publicity and revelation of how he had been admitted to the service embarrassed the Air Ministry and left Hoare with no choice but to insist on his immediate discharge.
Lawrence was distraught. Having survived the unwelcome and, for him, pointless regime of drill and bull at Uxbridge, he was looking forward to his new duties as part of the photography unit at Farnborough. The cocoon of service life suited him and he was furious at being forced to shed it. In desperation he appealed to the War Office, where the Adjutant-General, Sir Philip Chetwode, who had served with him in the Middle East, permitted him to join the Royal Tanks Corps under the name T.E. Shaw.
On acceptance into the army, Lawrence had been promised that, if he conducted himself properly, a transfer to the RAF might be sanctioned later. Determined to accelerate this process and disturbed by the harshness of his new environment, Lawrence was soon writing to his influential friends with accounts of his misfortunes. Between March and June 1923 Lionel Curtis, Fellow of All Souls, received a series of baleful letters in which Lawrence outlined the physical and mental horrors of life in Hut F12.6
As he told Robert Graves, he had now struck ‘bedrock’ among the lumpenproletariat. When he remarked to one of his new companions, tactlessly perhaps, that he was now with men who instinctively hurled stones at cats, he got the reply, ‘What do you throw?’ For Lawrence the nightly bedtime chatter about sex was excruciating. ‘Bollocks’ and ‘twats’ were the staple of conversation before lights out and he was nauseated by its baseness. He may also have felt utterly excluded; five years later, he wrote to Robert Graves, ‘about fucking ... I haven’t ever and don’t much want to.’7 As described in Hut F12, or for that matter in RAF huts, it can hardly have seemed pleasurable.
In despair, Lawrence was forced to admit that he could never find it in himself to deploy his talents for ‘moulding men and things’ on such unresponsive clay as he found at Bovington. There was a ‘moral difference’ between the inhabitants of what he called a ‘Rowton House [doss-house] without cubicles’ and the men he had briefly encountered in the RAF. Yet for all this, his life at Bovington was not irredeemably bleak.
He still had the means of escape to a more agreeable milieu. He had obtained and renovated the cottage at Cloud’s Hill where he spent every weekend and two or three evenings each week. He gathered there a handful of rankers who were susceptible to enlightenment and with whom he could discuss art, literature and music. His motorbike gave him swift access to his new friends, the Hardys, with whom he regularly took tea on Sunday afternoons. One fellow ranker noticed that Lawrence seemed to enjoy a somewhat charmed life in camp. He avoided parades with impunity (excused perhaps on account of his duties as a Quartermaster’s clerk in charge of recruits’ clothing and equipment), managed to secure an abundance of leave passes, had free access to the civilian canteen and had his hut chores magically undertaken by others, presumably by Bruce.8
Lawrence, or ‘Broughie Shaw’ as he was nicknamed, was well liked. His past came to be known, but it was his Brough Superior bike which drew admiration from men for whom it represented two years’ pay. He was, one recalled after his death, ‘a real gentleman’, generous with his time and sometimes with his cash. At Bovington, he discovered that a sergeant who had fractured his ankle had received inadequate treatment. ‘The MO’s do not always do the best for their non-commissioned patients,’ he told Mrs Bernard Shaw, and asked her to procure an appointment in Harley Street for the man for which he would discreetly foot the bill. His openhandedness extended to buying extra provisions for his mates; once an extensive larder of jam, tinned milk, fruit salad, and cheeses turned up at Bovington, bought by Lawrence to supplement the hut’s diet. Later, when back in the RAF, he shared the contents of Fortnum and Mason’s hampers sent him by Mrs Bernard Shaw.
Always Lawrence stood apart. ‘He was, possibly unique,’ one fellow ranker remembered; ‘he neither drank, smoked, gambled, nor took any interest in women; he played no games, backed no horses, and filled in no football coupons.’ Yet he commanded affection, even deference; at Bovington it was noticed that some men moderated their sexual language in his presence and did what they could to ward off prying journalists.
One reason for Lawrence’s acceptance was the knowledge that he possessed power. For a while after his discovery at Farnborough, it was believed that he was a spy under orders from the Air Ministry to uncover what the other ranks thought. In fact, his behaviour revealed the opposite: Lawrence repeatedly acted as the champion of the underdogs with whom he had chosen to live and he proved a valuable ally. He had direct access to a wide range of powerful men within and outside the services with whom he was on intimate terms, and so he was well placed to vent the grievances of his fellow rankers. He complained about the regulation swagger sticks which were then part of walking-out dress, bayonets on rifles which he thought a needless encumbrance for airmen, and, with less success, for the abolition of compulsory Sunday Church Parades. And he was suspected of having been instrumental in the removal of at least one unpopular NCO.
No doubt his brother airmen were reassured by the sight of him walking with Trenchard across Farnborough golf course or by the knowledge that he could lay their grievances in person before him, Churchill or Lady Astor. He was an asset in other ways. Once when his training squad was under crude verbal assault from an NCO at Uxbridge, a voice from the ranks called to him, ‘Give him a gob of your toffology.’ None came, but it was heartening that ‘toffology’, that compound of superior knowledge and command of language which was invariably the coercive weapon of ‘them’, could be pressed into the service of ‘us’. It was a situation which satisfied many who served alongside Lawrence and created some entertaining stories, perhaps fresh Lawrenc
e ‘legends’, in which he turned the tables on authority.
One airman remembered how Lawrence, then thirty-four, had been asked by an Uxbridge NCO why he wore no war-service medal ribbons. The next day Lawrence appeared on parade with his ribbons stitched to his tunic–including presumably the immediately recognisable DSO–which discountenanced the NCO.9 Whether or not such an incident occurred cannot be known for certain, although in The Mint Lawrence mentioned that he had once been questioned about what he had done in the war and claimed that he had been interned at Smyrna by the Turks for the duration.
There was genuine affection for Lawrence from many who served with him and in some cases lasting friendship. Between 1922 and 1924 he created a new circle from his RAF and RTC hutmates which frequently assembled as a kind of salon at Cloud’s Hill. At Farnborough he had discovered A.E. (‘Jock’) Chambers and the strikingly handsome R.A.M. Guy, whom he addressed as ‘my rabbit’ and ‘Poppet’ and to whom he was a benevolent patron. At the end of March 1923, he paid a Savile Row tailor £16 1s for a fine Cheviot overcoat for Guy and £33 8s for two blue cashmere suits, one for Guy, the other for himself.10 Leaving the RAF severed Lawrence from Guy just as their friendship was deepening. In December 1923, he wrote to him, ‘People aren’t friends till they have said all they can say, and are able to sit together, at work or rest, hour-long without speaking. We never got quite to that, but were near it daily ... since S.A. [Salim Ahmed, that is Dahoum, died in September 1918 at Karkamis, probably from typhus] I haven’t any risk of that happening.’
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