Golden Warrior, The

by Lawrence, James

  After Guy’s transfer to the aircraft-carrier HMS Hermes, which was based at Plymouth, he occasionally visited Cloud’s Hill, joining Lawrence’s new friends from Bovington, Arthur (‘Posh’) Palmer and Arthur Russell. During 1924 this circle widened to include from time to time E.M. Forster, David Garnett, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Augustus John. In spite of the consolation of this company, Lawrence continued to hanker after the RAF and early in 1925 stepped up his efforts to win over Trenchard.

  These pleas to rejoin the RAF, increasingly morose and selfpitying in tone, began to trouble his friends. Bernard Shaw, who thought that ‘the private soldier business is a shocking tomfoolery’, wrote to the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, in May 1923 and requested a state pension for Lawrence.11 ‘Lawrence is not normal in many ways,’ he explained, ‘and it is extraordinarily difficult to do anything for him.... He will not work in any harness unless this is padlocked on him. He enlisted in order to have the padlocks riveted on him.’ A year later, having failed to persuade Lawrence to accept a commission and the post of official historian of the wartime RFC and RAF, Trenchard relented and promised to support his transfer to the RAF.

  But he was unable to sway Sir Samuel Hoare, who remained as adamant as ever, and Lawrence’s hopes were shattered. He despaired and hinted that he might take his own life. This was more than emotional blackmail since, at this time, Jock Bruce was sufficiently alarmed by his mood to secretly unload Lawrence’s revolver and hide the ammunition. Later he found Lawrence with the gun in his hand searching for the cartridges and, after a scuflle, managed to disarm him.12 Soon after, Lawrence bucked up, certain, as he told Bruce, that ‘the big wheels are grinding for me, and I’ll be back in the Royal Air Force soon.’ This was indeed the case: Shaw and John Buchan took Lawrence’s suicide threat seriously and warned Baldwin. With the publication of Lowell Thomas’s book due, Lawrence was again the centre of public attention and so Baldwin, rather than risk a scandal, overrode Hoare. On 19 August, Lawrence was taken back into the RAF and posted to its officers’ training college at Cranwell in Lincolnshire.

  Lawrence remained in the Air Force until February 1935, the official termination of his original enlistment. There were a few storms which threatened his position. During the winter of 1928/9 the fuss about his alleged undercover work in Afghanistan forced his return to Britain. He faced further trouble during the autumn of 1929 when the new Labour Minister for Air, Lord Thomson, made disapproving noises about his behaviour during the Schneider Trophy race. The Minister was irritated by the fact that Lawrence, an ordinary airman, was on familiar terms with famous and influential public figures. He suspected, correctly, that Lawrence had a penchant for intrigue which might lead to future awkwardness. Thomson was dissuaded from sacking Lawrence, but Lawrence was ordered to cease his contacts with the likes of Lady Astor, who like many of his political friends was a Tory. The restriction, which seems never to have been rigorously enforced, lapsed after Thomson’s death in 1930 in the R101 airship accident.

  There was a minor squall in March 1933 when Lawrence threatened to quit the RAF after he had been shifted from duties that involved the development and testing of high-speed launches. His part in this work had been noticed by the press and, anxious to avoid publicity about secret work, his commanding officer thought it prudent to remove the main source of interest, Lawrence. Two former friends, Sir Philip Sassoon, the Under-Secretary of State for Air, and Air Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond, the Chief of Air Staff, intervened and Lawrence persuaded them of his special fitness to continue work on the speedboat prototypes. ‘Lawrence of Arabia has decided to stay on in the Air Force’ ran the official memo, and in future he would act as its technical representative touring various commercial suppliers of engines and parts.

  Fast boats had become Lawrence’s new passion. His interest developed quickly after March 1929 when he had been posted to the Flying Boat Squadron at Mount Batten, Plymouth. Soon after, he became a part-owner of a two-seater speedboat, Biscuit, which he refurbished and piloted on excursions around Plymouth Sound. What had been a private pastime was transformed into something more significant after Lawrence had been an eyewitness to the crash of an Iris III flying-boat in February 1931. Nothing could be done to prevent nine of the crew from drowning.

  Lawrence was affected by what he had seen and at the inquest spitefully and unjustly blamed the plane’s pilot for the accident, saying that the men were unwilling to fly with him. After this mishap he threw himself into work on the sea trials of the new fast tender, the RAF 200. He had a natural aptitude for engines, and his experience tinkering with the Biscuit, and a revival of his dormant sense of purposefulness made him indispensable. As in previous endeavours, he soon came to dominate those working around him by a combination of energy and single-mindedness. Even officers bowed before his knowledge and competence. One, Flight-Lieutenant Sims, remembered Lawrence at Bridlington expounding the virtues of the new, fast speedboats being tested there for towing targets.

  A slight upright blue-clad figure stood high up in the bows of a boat, with one electric light turning his hair into gold. He was giving a masterly lecture on the major features of the boats. The officer was listening in rapt silence, supported by two other Air Ministry officers. Behind them stood the contractor and engineer, one or two workmen with bared heads stood hushed on each side, and a couple of odd airmen formed the rest of the congregation.13

  The Air Ministry was now keen to exploit Lawrence’s blossoming talents. Wearing his standard mufti (slacks, polo-necked sweater and hacking jacket), he was detailed to tour various civilian contractors in the Midlands as the Air Ministry’s representative, discussing problems and laying down standards. The final two years of his service career were marked by a revived vitality and satisfaction in his duties; as in Arabia, he showed himself to be the brilliant amateur, able to penetrate and master a new world into which chance had thrown him. He faced the final days of his RAF life with many regrets.

  Outwardly there seemed to be tranquillity and order in Lawrence’s existence after 1929, although within two years of his return from India he was seeking and receiving beatings from Bruce and others, as well as other forms of ‘discipline’. This pattern of behaviour appears to have continued until at least January 1935, if not beyond. And yet, those people unaware of his secret addiction portrayed him during these years as acquiring stability and apparently coming near to an accord with himself. Reading The Golden Reign (1940), the affectionate testament of Clare Sydney Smith, the wife of Lawrence’s commanding officer at Mount Batten between 1929 and 1931, it is difficult to believe that she is writing about the man who submitted to a whipping so ferocious that it made one onlooker physically sick.

  Mrs Smith’s memory was of a different, almost avuncular Lawrence. When she, her husband and Lawrence had first met in Cairo in 1921 they had been equals. Eight years later this familiarity was revived, even though Lawrence, the one-time Colonial Office official, was now Wing-Commander Sydney Smith’s clerk. Very quickly ‘Tes’, as they called him, became a frequent and welcome intruder into the Sydney Smiths’ family circle of one daughter and two dogs. Lawrence joined in family occasions such as picnics, was a favourite with the dogs, and Mrs Smith was a regular passenger and sometimes pilot of Biscuit. Still the occupant of a serviceman’s hut, where he installed his gramophone and wireless set, Lawrence’s intimacy with the Smiths brought him back into more familiar social circles. With them he attended luncheon parties and moved among the local gentry.

  Another acquaintance from the past, Lady Astor, was MP for Plymouth and she was anxious to cultivate the hero-turned-airman she had once met at All Souls. Something of a lion-hunter, she considered Lawrence ‘a beau’ and was able to draw him into her circle of the great and famous based at Cliveden. Their reintroduction had been accomplished through their mutual friends, the Shaws. While other distinguished acquaintances, such as Churchill and John Buchan, moved in and out of Lawrence’s life, his link with the
Shaws had remained unbroken since their first meeting in 1922.

  Lawrence was always flattered by Bernard Shaw’s attention, but Mrs Shaw came to mean much more to him. As their regular exchange of letters developed, she became a kind of mother-confessor, the willing and understanding recipient of a series of candid revelations about Lawrence’s inner self. It was a two-way process, although Lawrence destroyed most of her letters. A few survive, such as that of May 1927, which was a response to Lawrence’s earlier exposure of his feelings about his own mother. Mrs Shaw, too, admitted to a ‘managing and domineering’ mother and a feeling that she had inherited these unattractive qualities. She also echoed Lawrence’s admission that knowledge of his own parents’ union had made him certain he would never have children–‘My own home life made me firmly resolve never to be the mother of a child who might suffer as I had suffered.’

  The intimacy and empathy which grew up between Mrs Shaw and Lawrence suggest that he may have seen her as a surrogate mother. After 1922 he was determined to place a distance between himself and his mother and to resist her emotional demands, a task made easier after 1925 by her prolonged absences in China as the helpmate of her missionary son Robert. Mrs Shaw’s care and concern in sending Lawrence food hampers, looking after his affairs in Dorset while he was in India and, on his return, joining with her husband to give him a new Brough motorbike suggest a maternal concern for his well-being. On the other hand, the content and tone of their correspondence clearly indicate that both parties were driven by an urge to find a sympathetic listener. Neither seeks guidance, but rather each delivers autobiographical fragments which, by their nature, could not pass between kinsfolk. ‘Homes are ties,’ Lawrence once wrote, ‘and with you I am quite free, somehow.’ At other times, he had felt similarly free to unburden himself to Meinertzhagen and Robert Graves.

  Clare Sydney Smith, Lady Astor and Mrs Shaw all represented ‘safe’ women from whom Lawrence need never have feared any demands for the sexual intimacy which so repelled him. Once, when busy on the Biscuit’s engines, he remarked to Clare Sydney Smith that machines needed ‘constant attention like an exacting female’. Later at the very end of his mechanical career he assured Robert Graves, ‘There are no women in the machines, in any machine,’ which was very much in their favour. What lay behind these seemingly incompatible claims was Lawrence’s knowledge that the machine possessed reassuring predictability and that he, its master, was always in control.

  In the same letter to Graves, Lawrence endorsed his view that RAF life was essentially monastic. He had, by enlisting in 1922, followed a course of action which would have been more understandable and understood in the Middle Ages than in the twentieth century. Yet while an aspirant monk completely abandoned his former life and its trappings, Lawrence clung to much of what he had left behind. He never totally submitted himself to all the discipline that his new life demanded of him; rather, he lived it, according to his own terms, both as ranker and as gentleman.

  V

  Death of a Hero

  In February 1935 Lawrence was cast adrift from the RAF. He was forty-six years old and uneasily aware that he was ageing. Past exertions, recurrent malaria and injuries from minor bike accidents had taken their toll. Harold Nicolson, who had known him during the Paris Peace Conference, met him again in August 1933 and was struck by how he had changed. ‘He has become stockier and squarer. The sliding lurcher effect is gone. A bull terrier in place of a saluki.’1

  Yet Lawrence’s charisma was undiminished. On the eve of his retirement, Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England, asked Sir Francis Rennell to discover whether he might consider an appointment as the Bank’s secretary. No knowledge of routine banking would be needed since the post was an administrative one, requiring what Norman believed were the ‘Elizabethan’ qualities of ‘leadership and inspiration’, qualities which Lawrence possessed in plenty. Lawrence was flattered but refused.2

  He was in no clear mind about what he might do next. He considered several projects: the composition of an apologia to be called ‘Confession of Faith’; the revival of a thirty-year-old dream to run his own press on which he could print The Mint; or a leisurely rediscovery of the English countryside on his bicycle. There were outside pressures as well. He was concerned about the adequacy of the country’s defences against aerial attack, and Churchill and Lady Astor wanted him to join them and alert Britain to the need for rearmament. Henry Williamson wanted him as a recruit for Fascism.

  On the morning of 13 May Lawrence wired Williamson to suggest a meeting. Returning on his Brough to Cloud’s Hill from the post office at Bovington camp, he was thrown over the handlebars, struck the road and fractured his skull. He was taken, in a coma, to the hospital at Bovington camp, where he died without regaining consciousness six days later. The cause of death was congestion of the lungs and an autopsy revealed that, had he survived, he would have been paralysed and without the powers of reason or speech.

  There were no eyewitnesses to the crash and this, coupled with the hamfisted reaction of the authorities, created the conditions for rumour to flourish. First, all troops in Bovington camp were cautioned about the Official Secrets Act, and the fathers of Frank Fletcher and Albert Hargreaves, two boy cyclists whom Lawrence seems to have swerved to avoid, were told to see that they did not talk to newspapermen. A pair of detectives maintained a vigil by Lawrence’s bedside and other policemen were placed as a guard over Cloud’s Hill, as a deterrent against headstrong journalists who might have tried to get in. All communiques concerning Lawrence were issued by the War Office.

  The inquest was held inside the camp in the normal way, with a civilian coroner and jury. Evidence was heard from Frank Fletcher, who, with his companion, had been cycling in the same direction as Lawrence. He heard a crash, was struck by his friend’s bike, and then saw the motorbike lying on its side. Too scared to approach Lawrence, who was lying with blood over his face, Fletcher was joined within minutes by another cyclist and some soldiers. Corporal Catchpole of the RAOC, who had been walking his dog nearby, believed he had seen a black car or van travelling towards Lawrence. A dip in the ground prevented him from seeing what followed, but he saw the motorbike swerving, having passed the car. He was officially told not to refer to this car in his evidence and neither boy remembered seeing any motor vehicle. A subsequent examination of Lawrence’s Brough revealed that it had jammed in second gear, which indicated that he could not have been doing more than 38 m.p.h.

  Neither then nor later was anything more established about the black vehicle: if it existed (and Corporal Catchpole stuck resolutely to his story) its driver never came forward, not surprisingly perhaps. Its disputed existence troubled the coroner and at least one juryman, but their uncertainties did not prevent a verdict of ‘accidental death’. This fudge and the furtiveness of the camp authorities led to wild speculation about a cover-up, although of just what no one seemed willing to say.3

  At the core of the business were rumours that Lawrence had been involved with preparations for Britain’s aerial defence, a matter very much in the public mind at the time, and that secret documents had been taken from his cottage. If, as Desmond Stewart suggests, police or military officials did go through Cloud’s Hill, they would have found a day book and letters with details of Lawrence’s ritual floggings. What they would have made of such material can only be guessed.

  Following his wishes, Lawrence was buried in the graveyard of Moreton church, not far from Cloud’s Hill. Arnold Lawrence led the mourners, who included Churchill, Lady Astor, Lord Lloyd, Lionel Curtis and Augustus John. Lawrence’s coffin was carried by Eric Kennington, Aircraftman Bradbury, Private Russell of the Tank Corps, Pat Knowles (Lawrence’s neighbour) and, from another world, Sir Ronald Storrs and Colonel Newcombe. A message came from George V (who had celebrated his Silver Jubilee a fortnight before) to Arnold Lawrence: ‘Your brother’s name will live in history and the King gratefully recognizes his distinguished services to his country an
d feels that it is tragic that the end should have come in this manner to a life still so full of promise.’

  There were many other tributes. ‘A fine comrade, courteous, though reserved, and he had a rare sense of humour’ was the judgement of one who had served alongside him at Uxbridge. Old adversaries were forgiving. Le Temps wrote:

  Lawrence had in him the cold violence of the Conquistador, the fierceness of the Irishman, the honest Puritanism of the Scot, the sangfroid of the Anglo-Saxon and the keen intelligence and contemplative spirit of the savant.

  The official Nazi news agency was more fulsome with praise for ‘a man of exemplary devotion to duty, disinterestedness, and self-sacrifice, and an almost mythical figure among British heroes’. Within four years, Dr Goebbels’s filmmakers had produced Uprising in Damascus, in which Lawrence is portrayed as the devious agent of British imperialism and Zionism. He was universally lamented in the United States, where the New York Herald Tribune linked his name with Gordon’s. ‘Millions of Americans have delighted in Lawrence,’ claimed its obituarist, ‘and will sincerely mourn his untimely end which robs the whole world of the most romantic figure that the world has brought forth in modern times.’ The only sour note came, predictably, from Turkey, where one newspaper remarked on the death of ‘a notorious spy’ who in his time had been ‘King of the Desert’.