Hero

by Michael Korda

  Lawrence enjoyed Bridlington, despite its melancholy ambience of an unfashionable summer resort in midwinter, and was comfortable at the Ozone Hotel, where he had a tower room looking out over the harbor wall to the sea. Officers seldom put in an appearance—one who did recalled him wearing a blue pullover, a scarf, an old sports jacket, and a pair of gray flannels. Lawrence ordered the few NCOs around with consummate tact, while they responded by calling him “Mr. Shaw,” as did his formidable landlady. The equipment officer at RAF Catfoss, Flight Lieutenant R. G. Sims, had known Lawrence in Iraq, and Lawrence became a close friend of Sims and his wife, once more crossing what would have been for anyone else the rigid class barrier that separates other ranks from officers in the British armed forces. The Simses took Lawrence to concerts in Hull, and he became a frequent dinner guest in their cottage. Reggie Sims, as so many other people had, occasionally spotted the undiminished presence of Colonel Lawrence in AC1 Shaw, as on the day he came into a room where Lawrence was absorbed in studying a blueprint. For a moment Lawrence ignored his presence, then his head rose, and “his eyes blazed forth for a moment or two in what Sims took to be scorn or hate. Then there was a sudden half-smile of recognition. ‘Oh, I am so sorry, Sir.’ A. C. Shaw murmured apologetically, ‘but for a moment I took you for a reporter.’ ”

  His capacity for extracting awe and respect from his superiors was also undiminished. When a senior officer inspecting the boatyard had a question and was told he should ask Aircraftman Shaw, he snapped back, “When I want the advice of an A.C.1 I will ask for it!” The following night Lawrence and the senior officer—who in the meantime had agreed to an entire list of requests for tools and equipment Lawrence had requested—were seen dining together amiably. Nor had his habit of dining with the great and famous changed. He applied for weekend leave to accept an invitation to Lympne, the country house of Sir Philip Sassoon, where he dined in his airman’s uniform, seated next to Lady Louis Mountbatten, whom he enlisted to persuade the undersecretary of state for air to take some hats out to Singapore, for Clare Smith, whose husband had been posted there, and who apparently had not been prepared for the elaborateness required of ladies at official functions in the colonies.* His past was always catching up to him, sometimes in improbable ways: he was obliged to interview an imposter who had been arrested for pretending to be Lawrence of Arabia; a woman wrote to the local police complaining that he was her husband who had abandoned her; the amateur theatrical society of Bridlington put on, with great fanfare, a performance of Shaw’s Too True to Be Good, which Lawrence at first elected not to attend on the grounds that too many people in Bridlington already knew that “Mr. Shaw” was “Lawrence of Arabia” and would recognize him as “Private Meek.” “They would have cheered, or jeered, probably: cheered, I’m afraid, so I funked it,” he wrote to Charlotte, but then he changed his mind and went to see it with a party of RAF officers and their wives, laughed through the whole performance, and stood around afterward signing people’s pro-grams—again the dichotomy between avoiding fame and relishing it that makes Lawrence such a puzzle. He applied for another weekend leave to spend two days being painted by Augustus John in his airman’s uniform and peaked cap—a startlingly ambiguous portrait in which Lawrence’s face and pose are those of a tough-minded general, while his uniform is that of a simple airman. Unlike most portraits of Lawrence in Arab dress, this one has a certain specific gravity; instead of looking weightless, here he looks solidly rooted, massive, more like a monument than a man. John, despite his famously blustery, aggressive nature, had a sixth sense as an artist, and may have already concluded that Lawrence’s future was unlikely to be a quiet retirement in his Dorsetshire cottage, translating French novels and tinkering with his motorcycle.

  The Simses gave a dinner party for Eric Kennington, one of Lawrence’s favorite artists, when Kennington visited Lawrence at Bridlington. By this time it no longer seemed to matter to anyone that Lawrence was merely an AC1—and Lawrence, preparing himself for the inevitable, made a friend of Pilot Officer A. J. Manning, in command of the “armament school” at Catfoss. He confided to Manning that he wanted to steer a middle course between being a pauper and having more money than he felt comfortable with. “He wanted to establish a balance, ensuring his independence,” recalled Manning, who went on to become an air commodore.

  To Robert Graves, who had written to say that the Times had asked him to update its obituary of Lawrence—not a premonition on anybody’s part, but merely something that was done regularly for famous people—he replied cheerfully and at great length, urging that his work with Churchill in the Middle East after the war, and particularly his part in developing high-speed motor launches for the RAF, should not be put in the shadow of what he had done in Arabia during the war. “The conquest of the last element, the air,” he wrote, “seems to me the only major task of our generation; and I have convinced myself that progress to-day is made not by the single genius, but by the common effort.”

  On Monday, February 25, 1935, dressed for once in uniform, Lawrence presented himself more formally to Pilot Officer Manning. “Aircraftman Shaw, sir, interview before discharge,” said the flight sergeant as Lawrence came smartly to attention. After a brief chat, Manning signed the discharge form, ending Lawrence’s career in the RAF.

  Leaving behind the Brough motorcycle, Lawrence set off on a bicycle tour, dressed in his sport jacket and gray flannels and wearing a thick scarf, hoping thereby to avoid the press. He intended to reach Clouds Hill in stages, counting on the fact that few journalists would notice a middle-aged man in civilian clothes riding a bicycle on country roads—though it has to be said that not many men Lawrence’s age would have attempted a bicycle trip of more than 200 miles in February. One of his gunners from the Arabian campaign, with whom he had been in correspondence for several years, had leaked the story that he was leaving the RAF, and The Daily Express ran a long article about it on February 17, thus alerting all the other newspapers to the story. Lawrence had had a few days of leave coming to him, and had taken his discharge early, hoping to avoid publicity, but a photographer still managed to get a picture of him on his bike, leaving Bridlington, with his hair still trimmed short on the sides, RAF-style, but, as usual, unruly.

  Once on the road he was free. He had intended to ride south and visit Frederic Manning, the author of Her Privates We, one of the best novels written in the English language about the horror of life and death in the trenches. It could be published only in expurgated form during Manning’s own lifetime (and under his serial number rather than his name), but even in that diminished form it had deeply impressed not only Lawrence, but Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound as well. Lawrence had come to like Manning—a lonely Australian who, like Lawrence, never married, led a withdrawn and solitary life, and was haunted by the war. Unfortunately, two days into his journey, Lawrence learned that Manning had died. “How I wish he hadn’t slipped away in this fashion; but how like him,” Lawrence remarked. “He was too shy to let anyone tell him how good he was.”

  Lawrence changed course for Cambridge to see his brother Arnold, who was at that time reader in classical archaeology at Cambridge University. From there he went by stages toward Clouds Hill, where, when he arrived, he found his way blocked by an unruly mass of reporters and photographers.

  Horrified—he needed and had anticipated peace and quiet—he bicycled to London. Sir Herbert Baker had given up his offices on Barton Street, so Lawrence no longer had access to his old attic room; instead, he stayed in lodgings under (yet another) assumed name, while taking out membership in the Youth Hostels Association, since he vaguely intended to tour around the country by bicycle until interest in him had died down. He must have been aware that this was unlikely, for he wrote a letter complaining about the behavior of the press to the Hon. Esmond Harmsworth, who was chairman of the Newspaper Proprietors Association and the son of that most shameless of press lords Lord Rothermere. Stranded away from his only home, he missed the RAF e
normously, and complained to Kennington that he felt like “a fallen leaf.” He must have been given some reason to believe that the siege of his cottage had been called off, for he went back there and found it deserted, to his relief.

  The relief was short-lived. Within a few days the press was back in force: reporters were hammering on his door and demanding that he appear and make a statement, and photographers were climbing to his roof and breaking the tiles in order to get a picture of him through the window. Infuriated, he made his escape through the garden, so fiercely hounded by the reporters that he gave one of them a black eye—the only record of any violence on Lawrence’s part toward anyone since he reached Damascus in 1918.

  Lawrence wrote a heartfelt letter to “Dear Winston,” imploring him to intercede with Harmsworth, and bicycled over to see Churchill at Chartwell, his country house. Perhaps Churchill managed to deal with Harmsworth—he had, from long experience, a way with press lords—or perhaps the press had published enough about Lawrence’s leaving the RAF to satisfy readers—but in either case, by the third week of March the siege ended, and Lawrence was left in undisputed possession of his own home. His nerves were badly shaken by the intensity of the press, and he was still undecided about what to do with himself now that he was a civilian again. For the moment, he collected his few belongings and the motorcycle he was no longer sure he could afford, and settled back into Clouds Hill, like a man waiting for the next act but in no hurry for it to arrive.

  The Shaws had set out on a world tour, and his mother and his brother Bob had returned to China, but Lawrence kept up his industrious correspondence, both with the great world and with those who had served with him in the ranks. He tinkered with his house, feeling the slight bewilderment and loss of a familiar routine that comes over many people when they retire. He had expressed a wish to have a “porthole” in the bedroom of his cottage, and T. B. Marson, Trenchard’s former private secretary, found him exactly what he was looking for in a ship breaker’s yard, and sent it off to Lawrence by rail. Lawrence spent a good deal of time and effort cleaning it up and installing it in the wall, and scratched Marson’s initials in the polished brass rim “in memory.” Thanking Marson, he added: “All here is very quiet, but I am still calling the RAF ‘we’ in my talk. That is very sad.” He had any number of pet projects he wanted to carry out in the cottage, and therefore may not have taken Nancy Astor seriously when she wrote to him, “I believe when the Government re-organizes you will be asked to re-organize the Defence forces. I will tell you what I have done already about it.” She invited him to lunch at Cliveden, to meet Stanley Baldwin, who would shortly replace Ramsay MacDonald as prime minister in the coalition national government, but Lawrence gracefully refused both the invitation and any such job. “Wild mares would not take me away from Clouds Hill,” he wrote to her, “… so do not commit yourself to advocating me.”

  Lady Astor’s suggestion that he would soon be offered the job of reorganizing Britain’s defenses should be taken with a grain of salt. As a member of Parliament and the wife of the immensely wealthy owner of The Observer she was in the habit of assuming that all her suggestions would be taken seriously. Except for Winston Churchill, there was nobody whose advice on matters of defense Stanley Baldwin was less likely to take seriously than Nancy Astor; nor did defense and foreign policy hold much interest for Baldwin to begin with—he was reported to sleep soundly through cabinet meetings whenever either of these subjects was discussed. His motto might have been peace at any price: not just peace in Europe, but also peace from Lady Astor’s importuning him. Nor is it even remotely likely that Baldwin would have given Lawrence a place in reorganizing the national defenses, first of all because his policy was to let sleeping dogs lie, and second because Lawrence, like Churchill, represented exactly the kind of enthusiastic and publicity-attracting amateur strategist whom Baldwin most distrusted.* Baldwin’s ambition was to rely as much as possible on solid Tory party figures and professional civil servants—the more cautious, the better—and until very late in the day he continued to believe that Hitler could be bought off by territorial concessions or would come to his senses like a reasonable man, as did Lady Astor, for that matter.

  On May 12, 1935, Lawrence wrote what was almost certainly his last letter, to K. T. Parker, “keeper” of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, to express his pleasure that Augustus John’s portrait of Hogarth would be hung in the Ashmolean—where, as a child, Lawrence had left pottery shards he had dug up, for Hogarth’s scrutiny. “At present I am sitting in my cottage and getting used to an empty life,” he wrote, but without any trace of self-pity or depression. Indeed, he ended the letter on a hopeful note.

  He had, in the meantime, received a letter from Henry Williamson, an acquaintance who was the author of Tarka the Otter, a book Lawrence had greatly admired. Williamson was a member of the British Union of Fascists, but the purpose of his letter was not to convert Lawrence to Sir Oswald Mosley’s cause, but to get advice about a manuscript that had been entrusted to Williamson by V. M. Yeates, the author of Winged Victory, before his death. Yeates was also an author Lawrence admired—Winged Victory, a harrowing semiautobiographical account of a fighter pilot’s experience of air combat during the war, was regarded as a classic by most readers at the time—so it is hardly surprising that Lawrence invited Williamson to have lunch with him at Clouds Hill. If there was anybody who knew everything there was to know about editing and publishing an account of war, it was Lawrence. There is no reason to believe that Lawrence was becoming more interested in Fascism, or that Williamson was coming to recruit him.

  On the morning of Monday, May 13, Lawrence rode to the nearest post office, at Wool, the village just outside Bovington Camp, with a parcel of books he wanted to send to a friend. He also sent Williamson a telegram: “LUNCH TUESDAY WET FINE. COTTAGE ONE MILE NORTH BOVINGTON CAMPSHAW.”

  In keeping with the mysteries that surround Lawrence’s life, much has been made of this seemingly innocuous telegram, suggesting some urgency on Lawrence’s part. But since Williamson had concluded his letter to Lawrence with, “I’ll call in anyway on Tuesday unless rainy day,” Lawrence’s “WET FINE” had no such connotation. He was simply saying, in effect, “Come for lunch Tuesday, never mind the weather,” a very sensible reply in England. The cryptic quality that some scholars find there is merely a reflection of the way people compressed telegram messages to the bare minimum of words and punctuation. Lawrence was not wealthy, and every word had to be paid for. Having completed his errands he got back on his motorcycle and set out for home, a trip of about a mile and a half.

  The road between Bovington and Lawrence’s cottage should have presented no special problems. It was and remains a narrow country road with several bends, but no sharp curves. The sides of the road are either steep or heavily wooded. There are three dips, deep enough so that any one of them might conceal an oncoming vehicle momentarily; and in 1935 the surface was still tar, on top of which loose gravel had been sprinkled. For obvious reasons this is not an ideal surface for a motorcycle—loose gravel always presents a danger—but Lawrence knew the road well, and was an experienced rider. What appears to have happened was that he approached one of the dips in the road at about thirty-eight miles per hour or less (the motorcycle was found still in second gear after the accident), and did not realize that two local boys on bicycles were in front of him, since they were concealed in the dip. Instead of riding one behind the other, they were riding side by side, going in the same direction as he was, so when Lawrence suddenly saw them, he had no easy way to get around them. He must have swerved sharply to avoid hitting them and braked hard at the same time, but he hit the rear wheel of one of the bicycles, at which point he lost control of his motorcycle; the brakes may have jammed, the bike may have skidded, and he was thrown forward over the handlebars. The bike fell away to the right, spinning in the loose gravel and gouging a mark in the road, while Lawrence landed on his head, then slid off the road, coming to a sto
p as his head hit a tree trunk. The first impact was hard enough to kill him, though it did not. He was unconscious, however, and bleeding heavily.

  Probably no vehicle accident up until Princess Diana’s has received more detailed scrutiny than Lawrence’s. His death has been variously ascribed to a foreign or domestic assassination, or to some combination of death wish and speed, or suicide. True, Lawrence had written “In speed we hurl ourselves beyond the body,” and he loved riding at high speeds, but it was subsequently established that he was going less than forty miles an hour when he was killed, so he was neither a victim of high-speed driving nor a successful suicide. As for the assassination theory, there seems no very good reason why either the British or the German intelligence service would have wanted Lawrence dead. Although The Daily Express would claim that he carried “the plans for the defence of England in his head,” that too seems a typical Fleet Street exaggeration. Certainly Lawrence had ideas on the subject, but he was not privy to any secrets.

  Though nobody said so at the inquest, his death was yet another proof that a motorcycle accident at any speed is dangerous. The helmets of the day were not scientifically designed to prevent head injury, and in any case Lawrence never wore a proper helmet—in extremely bad weather he sometimes wore a leather flying helmet, which would have offered no protection from impact. If he had landed on his side he might have suffered nothing worse than a few broken bones, but he was thrown forward and instead landed on his head, fracturing the skull.

  The subsequent inquest and many further investigations by private individuals do not provide much more than this in the way of fact. A soldier, Corporal Catchpole, who heard the crash and ran to the site of the accident claimed to have seen a black car speeding away from the scene; the boys denied that they were riding side by side, no doubt warned by their parents not to admit that they had been breaking the law, though they were notorious for larking about on the road; and some people have speculated that the front brake cable in Lawrence’s Brough may have snapped, although this seems unlikely: Lawrence was always conscientious to the point of fussiness about maintaining his bikes.