T.E. Lawrence was dubbed "Lawrence of Arabia"
by the press following his time fighting in the Middle East. But what the public knows
about him from pop culture is only a small part of the story. This is the tragic real-life
story of Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence's beginnings were, according to his
biographical profile, quite scandalous for Victorian Britain. His father, the Irish nobleman
Thomas Chapman, left his wife and two daughters to elope with their Scottish governess, Sarah.
The pair then adopted the name "Lawrence" and lived under it as husband and wife, eventually
having five sons together. T. E. was born August 16th, 1888 in Wales. Later, the family
moved to Oxford. T. E.'s youngest brother, Arnold, once remarked
that the Lawrence boys' tumultuous childhood was harder on T. E. than the war. Some of
that trauma was the result of great expectations. Sarah Lawrence thought T.E. was destined for
an extraordinary life. It wasn't enough that he be a high achiever; he had to be perfect.
Eventually, T. E. moved out of the family home and into a cottage at the edge of the
property. Lawrence thrived as a student, first in high
school and later at Oxford where he studied history and wrote his thesis on Crusader castles.
When World War I broke out, Lawrence was on an archaeological dig in Syria. The British
Army assigned him to the map-making department in Cairo where, again, Lawrence distinguished
himself. A desk job wasn't enough for the driven Lawrence.
He was anxious to do more, especially after his brothers, Will and Frank, were killed
in action on the Western front. According to this survey of Lawrence's life, losing
Will and Frank was one of his main motivations for joining the Arab Revolt against Turkish
forces in 1919. He felt horribly guilty that his brothers
had sacrificed their lives for the cause of freedom and wanted to be part of history rather
than just a witness to it. "I deem him one of the greatest beings alive
in our time. We shall never see his like again." In 1916, Arabs living in the Hejaz region
of what is now Saudi Arabia, launched a revolt against the oppressive practices of the Ottoman
Empire. Because the Ottoman Empire had aligned itself with Germany, the British took the
side of the Arabs, sending T. E. Lawrence to the conflict zone to act as a liaison officer
to Prince Feisal, the son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca. According to this review of a recent
biography in the Christian Science Monitor, Lawrence, having eschewed Western dress for
flowing robes and the keffiyeh headpiece, led a motley band of fighters to an unlikely
victory, relying primarily on a set of guerrilla tactics Lawrence invented himself. His battlefield heroics caught the attention
of the American journalist Lowell Thomas, who, as this PBS piece details, saw in Lawrence
a dashing matinee idol sure to capture the public's imagination. Thomas filmed Lawrence
on location in Feisal's camp and turned that footage into a reel he debuted in New York
and London. Lawrence later accused Thomas, whom he described as vulgar, of exploiting
his image. Lawrence's fame only grew when he published his memoir, The Seven Pillars
of Wisdom, in 1926. The press and the public hounded him. He became, at 30, a reluctant
celebrity. Having spent his youth courting adventure and attention, he now entered the
Royal Air Force and the tank corps as an enlisted man under a series of assumed names. On one hand, hundreds if not thousands of
Arab soldiers and compatriots considered T. E. Lawrence an inspiration and a hero. The
same can be said for school kids growing up in 1920s and 1930s Britain and America. Lawrence
was undoubtedly brave and dashing and brilliant. Having received absolutely no combat training
before he joined up with Prince Feisal in his fight against the Turks, Lawrence showed
himself to be a cunning and often ruthless military strategist. On the other hand, Lawrence was a product
of his time. He embraced the Arab culture, but, according to Commonweal Magazine, he
could be cruel in his attitude toward Arabs he considered beneath him. He was, in some
ways, a classic colonialist, dismissing 20th century Arabs as illogical and city Arabs
as not worth knowing. He wrote in his memoir, "The perfectly hopeless vulgarity of the half-Europeanised
Arab is appalling. Better a thousand times the Arab untouched." In addition, many of the guerrilla warfare
tactics that he invented for use against the much more powerful Turks, including improvised
explosive devices or IEDs and the strategic and systematic destruction of lines of communication,
are still used today, particularly in Middle Eastern conflicts. Meaning that Lawrence might
have been successful in helping Arabs fight the Turks, but he also undeniably has modern
blood on his hands. In January 1917, Lawrence, by then embedded
with Bedouins, had one of his best days as a leader in the so-called Arab Revolt and
one of his worst. The month began with a successful raid on Turkish soldiers in which, according
to this examination of his life and legacy, Lawrence and a group of 35 armed tribesmen
were able to capture two Turks and bring them back to their camp for questioning. It ended,
however, with Lawrence feeling like he had no choice but to execute a member of his own
militia in order to forestall a blood feud. The killing haunted Lawrence the rest of his
life. During this time, Lawrence was very ill, struggling
with boils, dysentery, and malaria. He was also plagued with uncertainty about the mission. He worried constantly that, as he and his
band of brothers swept across the desert toward the coastal city of Aqaba, blowing up railways
and collecting Bedouin soldiers as they marched, that it was all for naught, that the Arabs
were being played for fools, and he wrote in his personal journal that he wanted nothing
more than to flee the fight or be killed. Neither happened, of course, and Lawrence
remained in the fray until the bitter end. In his memoir, Lawrence writes lovingly of
a man named Selim Ahmed, nicknamed Dahoum, which, in Arabic, means "the little dark one."
According to PBS, Lawrence met Dahoum while on an archaeological dig in Carchemish on
what is now the Turkey/Syria border. Lawrence was impressed with the young man's intelligence
and started giving him English and math lessons. In return, Dahoum taught Lawrence Arabic.
The two were inseparable for several years, going on expeditions together and fueling
rumors that their relationship was not strictly platonic. In June 1914, Lawrence left Dahoum behind
in Carchemish in order to serve as a liaison between the British Army and the Arab rebels
fighting Turkish forces. Four years later, while Lawrence prepared for the pivotal battle
for Damascus, he heard that Dahoum had died of typhus during a famine that wiped out thousands
of lives in 1916 and 1917. When all the fighting was over and Lawrence
was back in his native Britain, he dedicated The Seven Pillars to "S. A.," whom most scholars
believe was Selim Ahmed. And Lawrence prefaced the book with a poem in which he claims that
his stint as a soldier was always motivated by his love for "S. A.," writing, "I loved you so I drew these tides of men
into my hands and wrote my will across the stars to earn you Freedom." Almost from the beginning of the Arab revolt
against the Turks, Lawrence had misgivings about how the conflict would end and what
sort of life his Arab friends could count on, once Britain and France became involved.
Lawrence, who attended the Paris peace talks in 1919 and the Cairo conference in 1921,
both of which were convened at least in part to negotiate Arab independence was deeply
disappointed in the outcomes of such discussions. Rather than hammer out the details of a peace
agreement with Arabs in good faith, British and French dignitaries simply divvied the
Middle East up between them. This mockery of diplomacy became known as the Sykes-Picot
agreement. Lawrence, still intent on furthering the Arab
caused, went to work for Winston Churchill in 1920 to try to exert some influence, but
it was all to no avail and he ended up so disillusioned that, according to the Virginia
Quarterly Review, he declared Arab unity, quote, "a madman's notion." Around this time, a Scotsman confessed to
the London Sunday Times that Lawrence hired him to administer periodic beatings. Whether
this sadomasochistic behavior was guilt-based and tied somehow to Lawrence's powerlessness
in the face of imperial Britain and France, or if it was something else, is unknown and
a matter of some speculation. T. E. Lawrence had all the qualities of a
leading man of stage and screen. He seemed to live his life in search of the next great
adventure. He went from unearthing treasures as an archaeologist, to the battlefield, where,
alongside kings, princes, and tribesmen, he helped an oppressed people defeat their Turkish
overlords. So far, so dreamy. And so very masculine, at least in the conventional, Victorian
understanding of the term. "Cross my heart and hope to die, it's all
perfectly true." What many casual fans might not know is Lawrence
was almost certainly homosexual. Aside from his relationship with Selim Ahmed, he took
no small pleasure in the company of two very closely bonded young Arab servants, of whose
obvious attachment he makes this observation: "They were an instance of the eastern boy
and boy affection which the segregation of women made inevitable. Such friendships often
led to manly loves of a depth and force beyond our flesh-steeped conceit. When innocent they
were hot and unashamed." Lawrence, it would appear, was not unashamed.
He was successful in keeping his sexuality hidden from the public until his early death
in 1935. Even now, whether he was gay or perhaps asexual is up for debate. Back from the battlefield and having gotten
his fill of fame, T. E. Lawrence tried to retreat to private life and, in 1922, entered
the Royal Air Force under the assumed name, John Hume Ross. According to History, Lawrence
only spent a few months as a pilot. The press outed him as Lawrence of Arabia, even going
so far as to suggest he might be working as a spy in India, and he was kicked out of the
service. Lawrence was not one to rest on his laurels.
He soon entered the Royal Tank Corps, again under an assumed name. This time he picked
Thomas Edward Shaw, in homage to the Irish playwright and Lawrence's good friend, George
Bernard Shaw. Lawrence was, again, discovered and expelled from the tank corps, too. His
plan to become a recluse wasn't going so well. In 1925, he reenlisted in the RAF. Ten years
later, he retired, having finally, it seemed, achieved his goal of near obscurity. He was,
at this time, living in a small, spartan cottage in Dorset. He had no time to enjoy his freedom,
though. A few months after his retirement, he was killed in a high-speed motorcycle crash. T. E. Lawrence was an unabashed motorbike
enthusiast. According to the Telegraph, he owned eight expensive and state-of-the-art
Brough Superior motorcycles, top of the line bikes. On the morning of May 13th, 1935, Lawrence,
known to try to race a plane on occasion, was speeding through his neighborhood of Dorset
when he spotted two boys on bicycles. He swerved to avoid the boys, sideswiping one of them.
The impact caused Lawrence to hurtle over his bike's handlebars and, six days later,
he died of his injuries. The circumstances of the accident itself seemed
rather cut-and-dry back in 1935, but a letter he wrote to the head of the Royal Air Force's
publicity department, unearthed decades after his death, has some scholars wondering if
the crash wasn't actually deliberate on Lawrence's part. In the letter, Lawrence wrote that,
facing retirement from the RAF, he wished he were dead. He also expressed dismay at
the prospect of trying to find another job. He knew the press would follow him wherever
he went and ruin his chances of success. He ended the letter by saying he did not want
to grow old. Ever. Tragic irony of ironies, Lawrence got his
wish, and the world was robbed of one of its most legendary and intriguing figures. Of
course, nothing feeds legend and intrigue like an early death. If you or anyone you know is having suicidal
thoughts, please call or chat online with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at
1-800-273-TALK (8255).
