T.E. Lawrence -- the Irishman Who Reluctantly Became Lawrence of Arabia

In August of 1922, a thirty-four-year old man named Thomas Lawrence enlisted in Britain's Royal Air Force under the assumed name of John Hume Ross. He took on the rank of aircraftsman, the lowest rank in the service. Ross was hiding his past. He was hiding his real identity that was illuminated in the celebrity of heroic achievement. The same day that Lawrence enlisted in the RAF he had sent a letter to the Irish literary giant George Bernard Shaw modestly requesting that Shaw evaluate his autobiography, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Soon the British press was aware of his ruse; Ross was exposed as ex-Lt. Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, T.E. Lawrence, an international celebrity since he was thirty-one-years old, the man known throughout the world as Lawrence of Arabia. An RAF officer finally recognized Lawrence and tipped off the press for a fee of 30 pounds. Soon rumors circled that the RAF was using Lawrence as a spy.

Undaunted by his unmasking, two months later Lawrence enlisted again in the Tank Corps of the army using the alias of T.E. Shaw, a name he would legally adopt in 1927. He was able to stay in the Tank Corps without being bothered about his celebrity until he was granted a transfer back to the RAF in 1925 where he stayed until mandatory retirement on February 25, 1935. To say that "T.E. Shaw's" reputation preceded him was an understatement; as Lord Berneis, a British composer and painter said of Lawrence: he had a "genius for backing into the limelight."[i] By the end of the century Lawrence would be the focus of over 40 biographies and the main character of one of the most celebrated motion pictures of the century, David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. He wrote that, "I was an Irish nobody. I did something. It was a failure. And I became an Irish nobody again."

Thomas Edward Lawrence was born 1888 in Tremadoc, Carnarvonshire, Wales, though he always considered himself an Irishman. Known to his family as Ned, he was the second eldest of five sons of Thomas Chapman. Chapman's wife Edith did not grant him a divorce, so he was unable to marry his true love Sarah Lawrence. The couple moved to Tremadoc, North Wales from Ireland and took the name of Lawrence. Biographer Richard Aldington believed that Lawrence's "illegitimacy" explained his remarkable gifts, enigmatic behavior, and his questionable actions and traits. [ii]

Lawrence became interested in the Middle East by reading Charles Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), studied Arabic, and in 1909, at the age of twenty-one, traveled 1,100 miles through Syria, Palestine, and parts of Turkey gathering data for an Oxford thesis which was published posthumously (Crusader Castles, 1936). In 1911-14, he joined an expedition to excavate the Hittite [iii] site of Carchemish on the Euphrates, a stretch of time that may have been the happiest of his life. He was able to make the digging amusing by turning it into a game and punctuating each discovery with a blast from his pistol, the more shots the more dramatic the find. The archeological study was under the pretext to spy on Turkish influence in Palestine just before the outbreak of World War I.

Lawrence was somewhere between 5 feet 2 inches tall (according to journalist Lowell Thomas) and 5 feet 6 inches tall (Lawrence's declaration in his book The Mint). Either way he was not a towering, physically charismatic man. It was with his wit, intelligence, and use of languages that he was able to win the confidence of his fellow British military men.

Lawrence would become a major figure in the British warfare of the Middle East during 1914-16. He became a staunch ally of Arabian military forces interested in both defeating the Ottoman Empire and winning an independent Arab homeland. He fought with the son of Sherif Hussein of Mecca, Emir Faisal, who would eventually become the King of Iraq. Lawrence engaged in guerilla warfare against Turkish soldiers allied with Germany's forces during World War I; his activity won him several promotions that eventually provided him the title of Lt. Colonel. His role in the capture of Aqaba and Damascus became legendary due to the coverage of American journalist Lowell Thomas. Lawrence showed little interest in Thomas's portrayal of him as a heroic, bigger-than-life British soldier. Though Lawrence did write prolifically and successfully about his own life, publicly he shunned attention and refused offers of distinguished positions, citations, and medals. Lawrence died of injuries due to a motorcycle accident only a few weeks after leaving military service. He was 46.

Sources

Aldington, Richard. Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry, Collins, London, 1955.

Lawrence, T.E. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Doubleday, Doran and Co., Garden City, New York, 1935.

[i] Swainson, Bill (ed.), Encarta Book of Quotes, St Martin's Press, New York, 2000, p. 550.

[ii] Aldington, Richard. Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry, Collins, London, 1955, p. 23. In a letter to friend B.E. Leeson, Lawrence wrote, "Because I don't drink or smoke or dance, all things can be invented. Please believe that I don't either love or hate the entire sex of women. There are good ones and bad ones, I find: much the same as men and dogs and motor bicycles."

[iii] Member of an ancient Indo-European people who populated Anatolia (in modern Turkey) and north Syria from the beginning of 2,000 B.C. to 1193 B.C. when they were assimilated into other cultures. By 1150 B.C. the Hittite kingdom had completely disappeared.