Oxford, United Kingdom
Thomas and his brothers were educated at Oxford High School for Boys.
Turl St, Oxford OX1 3DW, United Kingdom
From 1907 to 1910, Lawrence read History at Jesus College, Oxford.
1912
Leonard Woolley (left) and Lawrence in their excavation house at Carchemish
1913
Lawrence and Woolley (right) at Carchemish
1917
Rabigh, Saudi Arabia
Lawrence in Rabigh, north of Jeddah
1919
Emir Faisal's party at Versailles, during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919; from left to right: Rustum Haidar, Nuri as-Said, Prince Faisal (front), Captain Pisani (rear), Lawrence, Faisal's servant, Captain Hassan Khadri
Oxford, United Kingdom
Thomas and his brothers were educated at Oxford High School for Boys.
Gorphwysfa, Tremadog, Carnarvonshire, Wales, United Kingdom
Lawrence's birthplace
Oxford, United Kingdom
Lawrence memorial plaque at Oxford Boys' High School
Turl St, Oxford OX1 3DW, United Kingdom
From 1907 to 1910, Lawrence read History at Jesus College, Oxford.
Jerusalem, Israel
Lawrence, Emir Abdullah, Air Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond, Sir Herbert Samuel, H.B.M. high commissioner, Sir Wyndham Deedes, and others in Jerusalem
Lawrence on the Brough Superior SS100 that he called "George V"
https://www.amazon.com/Crusader-castles-T-LAWRENCE/dp/B005CL21TK/?tag=2022091-20
1910
(At the end of World War I, T. E. Lawrence was known throu...)
At the end of World War I, T. E. Lawrence was known throughout the world as Lawrence of Arabia, the prime mover of a surprisingly unified Arab desert campaign against the Turks, the "Emir Dynamite" of one of modern warfare's most effective guerrilla operations.
https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Revolt-T-Lawrence/dp/1495965481/?tag=2022091-20
1920
(Seven Pillars of Wisdom is the autobiographical account o...)
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is the autobiographical account of the experiences of British soldier T. E. Lawrence, while serving as a liaison officer with rebel forces during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks of 1916 to 1918.
https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Pillars-Wisdom-T-Lawrence/dp/197959550X/?tag=2022091-20
1926
(This book, originally written in 1919, was printed for th...)
This book, originally written in 1919, was printed for the author and his friends, not for general publication. Lawrence abridged the original work and the present volume is about one-half the size of the original. Lawrence stated that if he was asked why he had abridged an unsatisfactory book instead of recasting it as a history, he would plead that to do so nice a job in the barracks which were his home since 1922 would need a degree of concentration amounting in an airman to moroseness.
https://www.amazon.com/REVOLT-DESERT-LAWRENCE-1927-First/dp/B00F9J9QK2/?tag=2022091-20
1927
archaeologist Diplomat military officer writer
It seems established that T. E. Lawrence was born on August 16, 1888, in Tremadog, North Wales, one of five sons of Thomas Robert Chapman, a landowner of County Meath, Ireland, and Sarah Madden, for whom Chapman had forsaken his legal wife. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Lawrence, as they came to be known, wandered from Ireland to Scotland to Brittany and back to England.
In 1896 the Lawrence family settled in Oxford, where young Thomas and his brothers were sent to Oxford High School. In time they also attended meetings of the Oxford Archaeological Association, and Lawrence, much interested in early pottery, came to the notice of D. G. Hogarth, archeologist and keeper of the Ashmolean Museum. In the summers before entering Jesus College and during the vacations that followed, Lawrence, under Hogarth's direction, cycled through France and tramped through Syria studying medieval castles.
Lawrence began his professional life as an archaeologist. In 1905 he visited castles in England and Wales, all on bicycle, while still in high school. The following two summers, as an undergraduate at Oxford, he pursued the same activities in France. In 1909 he walked some 1,100 miles through Syria and Palestine, examining more than thirty castles built during the Crusades, and a year later presented as his undergraduate thesis an examination of the influence of the Crusades on European military architecture through the twelfth century. Lawrence’s demonstration that the Crusaders continued to build traditional tower has since been confirmed, but his notion that Byzantine ("Greek style") castles had no effect on Crusader or European castles has not stood up.
In a letter to one of his biographers, quoted in T. E. Lawrence to His Biographers, Lawrence later said the thesis "was only a preliminary study, and not good enough to publish," but a year after his death, it was published as Crusader Castles (1936), in two slender volumes, with Lawrence’s photographs and drawings. The second volume consisted of letters written home between 1905 and 1909, which, as Simon Pepper in the Times Literary Supplement put it, "reveals the genesis of Lawrence’s thinking... much better than any thesis." The two volumes were published again as one in 1986, and the thesis alone in 1988.
Lawrence spent three years in Syria working as an archaeologist and as foreman to some two hundred Arabic workmen. He adopted their dress, learned the language, or at least dialects, and came to know the desert very well. He read, he dreamed, and he began work on a travel book about seven Middle Eastern cities, to be called Seven Pillars of Wisdom, remembering the words in Proverbs: "Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn it out of seven pillars." He soon burned the manuscript, later calling it "a youthful indiscretion book" according to Weintraub in British Writers, but saved the title for later use. His diary entries and other jottings from this period were later published by his brother Alexander, as Oriental Assembly (1939). Lawrence’s survey of the northern Sinai desert, undertaken as a temporary spy for British military intelligence, written with fellow-spy and archaeologist Leonard Wooley, was subsequently published as The Wilderness of Zin (1914).
Shortly after World War I began in 1914, Lawrence found himself as a junior officer in Cairo, where he worked on maps and gathered scraps of information, including intelligence about the Turkish Army organization. By 1915 he and his friends were talking about the possibility of creating an Arab revolt against Turkish rule; by 1916 he was writing an intelligence bulletin for the British Foreign Office’s Arab Bureau - the Arab Bulletin. When these were published as Secret Despatches in 1939, it was possible to see that the politics and tactics he proposed for the Arab revolt were ones he used himself, when the time came, and when he wrote Seven Pillars, as Weintraub stated in British Writers, "he was able to describe how his theories had worked in actual practice. He had followed them himself."
After the war, Lawrence’s inability to make good on his promises that the Arabs would be able to govern their own territories bothered him greatly, and he had been deeply troubled during his exploits in the desert that his promises were false. "We are calling them to fight for us on a lie," he wrote in 1917, "and I can’t stand it." In refusing to accept his medals, he told King George V that "the part I had played in the Arab Revolt was dishonourable to me, personally, and to the country and government."
Lawrence attempted to redeem those promises at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, but failed. He flew to Cairo to collect diaries and photographs; on the way, his plane crashed in Italy, killing the pilot and leaving Lawrence with broken ribs, a broken collar-bone, and a severe concussion.
Back in Paris, Lawrence began work on the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It was not his first account of the war; in 1918, the London Times had published three installments of his anonymous account of the desert campaign. These were subsequently published in 1968 in Evolution of a Revolt, Early Postwar Writings of T. E. Lawrence, with two additional Times installments Lawrence wrote in 1920. (Lawrence’s purpose with the articles was to help shape public opinion.) According to Richard Percival Graves in Lawrence of Arabia and His World (1976), in Paris, Lawrence produced as many as thirty thousand words in a twenty-four-hour period; he finished the first draft in just a few months.
Early in 1920 Lawrence spent thirty days writing ninety-five percent of the book again. Two years later, after revising Seven Pillars, he destroyed the 1920 manuscript. Much of the manuscript was written in a friend’s attic, and Lawrence deliberately worked hungry, cold, and sleepless, tying "himself into knots trying to reenact everything, as he wrote it out." The 1922 manuscript weighed in at 330,000 words - over 1,300 manuscript pages - and Lawrence had eight printed copies made. One copy went to Rudyard Kipling, and then to George Bernard Shaw. Shaw worked with Lawrence to reduce the manuscript down to 1,100 pages, and it was this version that was elegantly printed in a subscription edition in 1925 - of just 127 copies - with illustrations by John Singer Sargent, among others.
As biographers have pointed out, Lawrence by this time was emotionally drained by the book, by feelings of self-loathing for his failed promises, by guilt for being an illegitimate child (his father having run off with his first family’s governess, who became T. E.’s mother), and by humiliation for the homosexual assault and beating he experienced in 1917 at the hands of an Arab chief, and he sought "the oblivion of activity" by joining the R.A.F. as an ordinary enlisted man - under the name John Hume Ross - with the assistance of a friend who happened to be Chief of Air Staff. His ruse was that he had "ink fever" and now wanted write a book about the Air Force. Within a few months, however, the press got wind of his enlistment and Lawrence was tossed out of the R.A.F.
Shortly after, again with the help of a highly placed friend, Lawrence joined the Army Tank Corps, this time as T. E. Shaw. As Richard Graves puts it, Lawrence "loathed" the Army. In 1925, after yet another failed attempt to rejoin the R.A.F., he wrote to his friend Edward Garnett, threatening suicide. Two other friends went to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who got Lawrence back into the Air Force.
Again, Lawrence was able to work on the limited subscription edition of Seven Pillars, with the help of George Bernard and Charlotte Shaw. In order to cover printing costs, Lawrence prepared a shorter version called Revolt in the Desert (1927). He stated in Lawrence to His Biographers he did the abridgement "in two evening’s work, by himself, with the help of two airmen," and he half-seriously said his method was to throw away the first seven chapters, cut every other paragraph or consecutive pages elsewhere, and more whole chapters. The personal and subjective parts of Seven Pillars - "the heart of the book," according to Weintraub in British Writers - vanished. Reviewers nevertheless were generous in their praise.
To avoid the publicity which would accompany the printing of the limited edition of Seven Pillars and Revolt in the Desert, Lawrence got himself transferred to India in December, 1926. Several months later, he officially changed his name to T. E. Shaw, and in 1928, at a remote R.A.F. station near Afghanistan, working as a clerk and typist, he began a prose translation of the Odyssey. After publication in 1932, classics scholar Paul Shorey in Books called it "perhaps the most interesting translation of the world’s most interesting book."
The 1926 version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom was finally made available to the general public by Doubleday in 1935, after Lawrence’s death. The book was highly praised. Writing in the Nation, Mark Van Doren said it was "a history which is a tragedy, as Thucydides’s was, and which is as true to the modern demands of that form as Thucydides’s was to the ancient." Vincent Sheehan in Books said: "To contemplate the man and his book is to perceive them with the utmost finality, as a single composition ... differently only from the works of (say) Proust and Tolstoy in that the actual historic fact is here inextricable from the moral entity - the person - through whom we receive it."
When Lawrence joined the Royal Air Force in 1922, he began taking notes about the experience. But he lost "the rhythm" after he was forced out of the R.A.F. in 1923, and when he later returned, he wrote only "scraps." The notes and scraps were published as The Mint, though not until 1955; Lawrence forbade earlier publication because of some of the things he said about his fellow servicemen (although a limited edition did appear in 1936; copies were offered at the price of 500,000 pounds).
Between 1916 and 1928, in the desert and in his later military career, Lawrence developed the habit of copying poems which had personal significance. This private anthology of 112 poems was published as Minorities: Good Poems by Small Poets and Small Poems by Good Poets in 1971; Lawrence once described them in a letter to Edward Garnett as "good poems by small poets, or small poems by good poets." Some of Lawrence’s six thousand letters - saved by their recipients - have been collected and printed. David Garnett’s Thomas Edward Lawrence: Letters (1939) covers Lawrence’s life from his days as an archaeologist to his last year; most come from the post-war period.
Lawrence was discharged from the R.A.F. in February, 1935. The previous year he had been offered the Secretaryship of the Bank of England but said he would have preferred the post of nightwatchman instead. In March he wrote to Lady Astor that he "would not take on any job at all. ... Am well fed, full of company, and innocent-customed." On May 13, he suffered head injuries in a motorcycle crash, and died six days later without regaining consciousness.
Today, T. E. Lawrence remains one of the most iconic figures of the early 20th century. His life has been the subject of at least three movies - including one considered a masterpiece - over 70 biographies, several plays and innumerable articles, monographs and dissertations.
Winston Churchill once remarked that T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom "ranked with the greatest books ever written in the English language." He also said, in Great Contemporaries, that as "a narrative of war and adventure... it is unsurpassed." Millions of movie-goers know of him as a World War I war hero from the 1962 epic film Lawrence of Arabia, but Lawrence was also a scholarly archaeologist, military analyst, writer, translator of Homer’s Odyssey, and author of some six thousand letters which are "among the most compelling in English by a twentieth-century writer," according to Stanley Weintraub in British Writers.
Lawrence was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath and awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the French Legion of Honour - though in October 1918 he declined appointment as a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. A bronze bust of Lawrence by Eric Kennington was placed in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, London, on January 29, 1936, alongside the tombs of Britain's greatest military leaders.
(This book, originally written in 1919, was printed for th...)
1927(Seven Pillars of Wisdom is the autobiographical account o...)
1926(At the end of World War I, T. E. Lawrence was known throu...)
1920Lawrence was brought up in an evangelical branch of the Church of England. His family held daily prayers, and as a child, he attended services at St. Aldate's Church in Oxford, as well as Bible classes given by Canon Christopher, the vicar of St. Aldate's and a noted evangelical preacher.
As an adult, however, Lawrence ceased to observe any formal religion and went out of his way to avoid religious ceremonies.
Lawrence found despair as necessary as ambition. He lived on the masochistic side of asceticism, and part of his self-punishment involved creating within himself a deep frustration to immediately follow, and cancel out, high achievement by denying to himself the recognition he had earned. At its most extreme, this impulse involved a symbolic killing of the self, a taking up of a new life and a new name.
Quotations:
"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster."
"All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!"
"Isn't it true that the fault of birth rests somewhat on the child? I believe it's we who led our parents on to bear us, and it's our unborn children who make our flesh itch."
Quotes from others about the person
Winston Churchill: "In Lawrence we have lost one of the greatest beings of our time. I had hoped to see him quit his retirement and take a commanding part in facing the dangers which now threaten the country."
There is no reliable evidence for consensual sexual intimacy between Lawrence and any person. His friends have expressed the opinion that he was asexual.
