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After watching the England v India one day cricket match at Lords last summer, I had a drink with Peter O’Toole and then walked with him to his car. Outside Lords Tavern we passed a large group of young Indians having a few beers to celebrate their team’s victory. The moment they spotted O’Toole they broke into a chant of "Lawrence. . . Lawrence . . Lawrence." Thinking about it later I realised how extraordinary this was. It was not O’Toole’s presence as an actor that excited them but the image of Lawrence of Arabia, a man who had lived and died before they were even born.
So 70 years after his death--an anniversary marked by a exhibition in his honour at the Imperial War Museum and the publication of a lavish new book packed with illustrations, some of them not seen before--Lawrence of Arabia rides again, exercising his fascination for yet another generation in an age where heroes are noticeably scarce.
Thomas Edward Lawrence, soldier, author, politician, secret agent, creator of nations, friend of the famous--the list could be almost endless--was only 47 when he died after crashing his motor cycle near Bovington military camp, Dorset. He was already famous for his role in fighting with Arab insurgents against the Turks in the Middle East in the First World War.
His death in circumstances which remain mysterious to this day only fuelled his fame. He became one of the most-written about Englishman in the world, almost as well-known as Winston Churchill. A list of the books and articles about him comprise books in themselves. Jeffrey Meyers’s "T.E. Lawrence: A Bibliography" (New York and London, Garland. 1974) lists 760 books and articles about him; another Lawrence bibliography by Philip O’Brien runs to 894 pages. He inspired an internationally successful play, Terence Rattigan’s "Ross", and one of the first blockbuster films, David Lean’s epic "Lawrence of Arabia, which starred Peter O’Toole as Lawrence and Omar Sharif as the Arab leader Feisal. It remains one of the most successful money-makers in cinema history. A BBC documentary on Lawrence by Malcolm Brown, author of the new book, had ten million viewers at its first showing.
Lawrence’s own account of the Arab revolt, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" is one of the best-known books in the English language, published and re-published in many languages and many editions, the rarer ones changing hands for large sums. Collectors vie to buy Lawrence ephemera, admirers retrace his journeys in Arabia, military historians lecture on his tactics.
To many Lawrence represents all that is finest in the English Imperial Hero, a man of integrity who took up his country’s burden in the Middle East and led his faithful Arabs to victory over the Turks. Then, the legend goes, believing that politicians had betrayed the Arabs, that his word pledged as an Englishman had been dishonoured, he retired from public life and buried himself in the ranks of the army and then the Royal Air Force, living a spartan life, dying tragically young, a white Arab, Prince of Mecca, uncrowned King of Arabia.
This is a difficult reputation to dent, although many have tried. When in 1968 the then associate editor of The Sunday Times, Leonard Russell, masterminded an investigation which revealed that Lawrence led a bizarre sexual life, and had persuaded a young soldier, John Bruce, to thrash him with a birch, the newspaper serialised the material in its pages not once but twice. Russell admitted that he enjoyed the idea that Lawrence had "fooled" so many eminent people--Winston Churchill, Lord Curzon, George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte. "Pity they’re all dead," Russell said. "Imagine their faces if they could have read that their old chum T.E. paid rough trade to flog him."
Lawrence then became the subject of not one but two post-mortem psychoanalyses, one by a distinguished psychiatrist from Yale University, Dr. John Mack, and the other by an equally distinguished consultant psychiatrist from Maudsley Hospital, London, Dr. Denis Leigh. Needless to say, they reached different conclusions. Mack decided that Lawrence had tried to take the guilt and troubles of the modern world on to his own shoulders, and in the words of the title of the book he eventually wrote, was "A Prince of our Disorder". Leigh, who interviewed Bruce and examined Lawrence’s medical records, put all Lawrence’s troubles down to utter physical exhaustion due to his wartime service.
Lawrence’s supporters rushed to defend him. The thrust of their letters was that they could not believe that anyone would want to tarnish Lawrence’s name. They berated The Sunday Times for opening its pages to the John Bruce story. "It suggests the hate literature of Hitler and Nasser," wrote one.
The reason they could not believe what they read was because the one thing we can say with certainty about Lawrence of Arabia was that he was an enigma. No one really knew or understood him, even his closest friends. Anyone so elusive becomes immune to criticism. As fast as his debunkers made new and damaging revelations about him--and I admit to being among them--the legend adapted and survived. Michael Yardley, whose interested in Lawrence began when as a young army officer he was posted to Bovington camp where Lawrence had also served, attempted to explain the fascination of the Lawrence legend.
"It has all the ingredients for several best-sellers--romantic and still-topical settings, a classic wartime adventure, political intrigue, secret agents, revelations about the famous, mysterious clues, royalty, a personal scandal, conspiracy, human interest, philosophy and a talented hero who is constantly trying to beat the system, who renounced high office to follow his chosen path among the humblest of men, and who dies in an accident which has never been fully explained. It is a dynamic story without a finite end."
This goes some of the way to enlighten us but it fails to tell us how it is that the British, supposedly an unromantic race, have developed so big a passion for this diminutive man. I believe that the answer is obvious, but apart from a few perceptive authors, most have missed it. Lawrence of Arabia was the first modern celebrity, a creation of one of the smartest public relations promoters and propagandists of the 20th century, Lowell Thomas, an American whose skills, if he were still around today, would make Max Clifford look like a beginner.
To understand what Thomas did and to appreciate the political forces behind him, we need to look at where Lawrence’s life stood in the early twenties and how he had arrived there--a mini-biography. Lawrence’s father, heir to an Irish baronetcy, had left his wife and four daughters and run away with the governess, one Sarah Junner, also known as Sarah Madden They could not marry, but they had five sons, the second of whom was T.E. Lawrence, born in Tremadoc, Caernarvonshire in 1888.
The family eventually moved to Oxford and "Ned", as he was known, won a scholarship to Jesus College. While there he came under the influence of D.G. Hogarth, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, but also a political intelligence officer specialising in the Middle East. Hogarth believed in those ideas of enlightened imperialism formulated by the Round Table, a club of influential Britons who wanted a union of all white, English-speaking nations.
Under Hogarth’s influence the young Lawrence began to study military tactics and to train his body to resist pain and exhaustion. He amazed his fellow students by walking his bicycle downhill and riding it uphill and by making a 1,000 mile walking tour of Syria. With Hogarth’s approval, he spent his summers increasing his knowledge of the Middle East, noting likely allies and enemies in the event of war with Germany. In 1914, Hogarth got him into British military intelligence and when Turkey joined the war against the Allies, he was posted to Cairo, where he ran an intelligence operation, recruiting his own agents.
In 1916 Lawrence, although only 28 and still nominally a junior intelligence officer with the rank of acting-Captain, was sent to Mesopotamia (now Iraq) to contact the commander-in-chief of a Turkish army which had surrounded a British expedition at Kut and offer him £1 million to release the British soldiers. His mission failed but while he was in Basra he spent some time trying to find an Arab nationalist who might be prepared to lead an Arab revolt against the Turks.
He was scarcely back in Cairo when Hussein, the Grand Sherif of Mecca, raised his banner in just such a revolt. Lawrence had written a paper outlining his views on the politics and strategy of the Revolt, was sent as liaison officer to Emir Feisal, the Sherif’s son and military leader of the Arabs, to ensure that it ran in Britain’s favour. To inspire the Arabs to fight, Lawrence promised them freedom and independence, all the while knowing that Britain’s Middle Eastern policy was to divide the former Turkish territories with France and Russia, leaving little worthwhile for the Arabs. Worried by this deception, he tried to work out a compromise acceptable to his conscience. But since he was above all a dedicated British officer serving his country, he carried out his mission.
He immersed himself in the ways of the Bedouin Arabs, wearing their clothes and adopting their customs so as to be able to influence Feisal. He was so successful that Feisal linked himself and his followers to Lawrence and the British for the rest of the war. Lawrence and the Arabs captured the Red Sea port of Aqaba and defeated a superior force of Turks at the battle of Tafileh.
But it was their guerrilla tactics, such as hit and run raids on Turkish supply trains on the Damascus-Medina railway, blowing up locomotives and viaducts, for which Lawrence became known. According to the military historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart, the widespread use of guerrilla warfare in the World War II can be indirectly attributed to Lawrence. But on an intelligence-gathering mission for such a raid, Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars, he was taken prisoner by the Turks and before he could escape was sexually abused and raped by the Bey of Deraa and/or his troops.
The Arabs played an important part In the British army’s drive on Damascus. They had been enthused by a new British declaration that any territory the Arabs liberated themselves would become independent. But when Damascus fell, ending 400 years of Turkish rule, the British commander, General Edmund Allenby, told Feisal that the Arabs were to have nothing to do with the civil governing of Damascus. Lawrence, after hard words with Allenby, suddenly packed up and returned to Britain, his military career effectively over.
He now devoted his time to pushing for a political settlement in the Middle East, no easy task. The Zionists were preparing to hold Britain to its promise of a national home for Jews in Palestine. But the Arabs understood that Palestine had been promised to them, so a campaign was mounted with Lawrence to the fore, to persuade the Arabs to accept this new situation. In 1919 Lawrence went with Feisal to Paris for the Peace Conference, where Britain and France began to divide the spoils of victory. As a member of the Colonial Office team he accompanied Churchill to the Cairo Conference in 1921 where the Middle Eastern question was finally "settled". France was to have Syria, Britain Mesopotamia (Iraq). Palestine was to remain a British mandate . Feisal was "elected" King of Iraq, the chief opposition candidate having been kidnapped by the British. All the promises to the Arabs had taken second place to the Britain’s hunger for oil.
Although Lawrence said publicly that all promises to the Arabs had been fulfilled, he was depressed by his failure and wrote to a friend saying, "{T]he balance after all is in being quit of things, and as soon as I can get the nomad out of me and be quite peaceful, I shall not want to hear of the East again."
There was no chance of that happening. For while Lawrence had been fighting a tenacious rearguard action to implement his plan for the Middle East, the American journalist Lowell Thomas was turning Lieutenant-Colonel T. E. Lawrence, a soldier most people had never heard of, into the Prince of Mecca, the Deliverer of Damascus. Almost overnight the newly-elected Fellow of All Souls, Oxford University, a saddened recluse at work on his manuscript, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom", became as Lawrence of Arabia, the centre of a great fashion, the first modern celebrity.
When the United States had entered the First World War in April 1917, it was not with the whole-hearted approval of he American people. Historically reluctant to be drawn into Europe’s troubles, most Americans wanted to remain neutral. Even after the United States had declared war, enlistments were so poor that the government had to raise a conscript army. To inspire the nation to fight, a propaganda campaign was needed to inspire what President Wilson’s private secretary called "the people’s righteous wrath".
So in the summer of 1917 the Administration approached Lowell Thomas, a Chicago reporter, and asked him to go to Europe, find material there that would that would encourage the American people to support the war, and hurry back with it. Thomas was well-known for his talent for writing simple but exciting stories and Washington thought stories of war heroes would change the national mood.
Thomas liked the idea but had bigger plans. He was intrigued by the possibilities provided by the rapidly-developing art of documentary film and dreamed of not only writing about the glamour of war but filming it as well. An indication of his ambition is that he budgeted his expedition at $75,000, nearly a million dollars in today’s money.
This was too much even for the American government, so Thomas turned to a group of eighteen wealthy Chicago meat-packers. It seems that these businessmen owed him a favour because he had exposed in his newspaper a confidence trickster who had been trying to blackmail them--without publishing the damaging blackmail material. Grateful for Thomas’s discretion, they readily agreed to finance him and he rewarded them with his enigmatic dedication in his book With Lawrence in Arabia: "To eighteen gentlemen of Chicago this narrative of a modern Arabian knight is gratefully dedicated".
Thomas arrived in France in the summer of 1917 accompanied by his recently-acquired wife, Fran, and a skilled cameraman called Harry Chase. It did not take Thomas long to realise that he had come to the wrong war. The mechanised slaughter of the Western Front did not offer the sort of propaganda images the American government had in mind.
He moved to Italy hoping to find something better and it was there that he first heard about General Edmund Allenby and his campaign against Turkey in the Middle East. Thomas wrote later that he decided that Allenby’s war was what he wanted to cover and that he had immediately sent off a letter to the Foreign Office in London asking that he be allowed to go there. By chance, Thomas wrote, the letter came to the attention of John Buchan, Director of Intelligence in the British Ministry of Information. Buchan realised that the then untold story of Allenby’s fight to drive the Turks out of the Holy Land, aided by Arab tribes revolting against centuries of Turkish oppression, was just the sort of material Thomas was seeking, and although Buchan himself did not meet Lawrence until after the war, he had heard of him and his guerrilla campaign. He quickly arranged for Thomas to be accredited as a war correspondent to Allenby’s army.
Thomas and Chase filmed Allenby’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem and it was there, in the spring of 1918, that Thomas first met Lawrence. The story of the meeting is almost too good to be true and readers will have to make up their own mind whether Thomas might have allowed his talent for journalistic exaggeration to get the better of him.
He says he saw a mysterious blue-eyed Arab in the garb of a Prince wandering in the street and later asked the Governor, Ronald Storrs, who this might have been. Without a word, Storrs opened the door to an adjoining room where Lawrence sat reading a book on archaeology. Storrs then said, "I want you to meet the Uncrowned King of Arabia".
Thomas soon learnt that Lawrence could provide him with exactly the sort of story he had been looking for--a slight, blue-eyed Englishman who wore Arab costume, lived with Bedouins, and directed their guerrilla warfare against the occupying armies of the Turks. What was more, he had the story to himself. At that stage no one outside the Middle East had heard of Colonel T.E. Lawrence.
Thomas and Chase joined Lawrence in Aqaba and spent time with him there and in the desert. How long is disputed--Thomas says several weeks, Lawrence says only several days. The two men differ too on whether Lawrence co-operated with Chase, who has never received the credit he deserved for his photography. The popular image of Lawrence in his costume as an Arab leader is directly due to Chase’s evocative photographs.
Lawrence later claimed that he had been "tricked" into being filmed and photographed. Thomas said that Lawrence was a willing model (and the nature of the images bear this out) but that to please Lawrence he had gone along with the "trickery story" while Lawrence was alive. But in 1937, two years after Lawrence’s death, Thomas admitted in "Lawrence by his Friends", that when asked by an acquaintance if Lawrence had posed for the photographs, "I gave the same cock-and bull story I had put about in my book. Harry Chase and I had tricked ‘Aurens’ . . . Now that he is gone, no such rot is necessary."
With the war drawing to a close, Thomas decided not to rush back to America with his Lawrence story but carefully kept it to himself. He had big plans for it. Early in 1919 he began to work on an illustrated lecture about the war. The idea was that he would tell "dramatic stories" while Chase’s film was shown to the accompaniment of "appropriate music synchronised into the background." The lecture opened at the Century Theatre in Central Park West in March 1919. It included accounts of the American Expeditionary Force in France, the Italian front, and Allenby and Lawrence in the Middle East.
The British impresario Percy Burton happened to see one of the performances and offered to bring Thomas to London to repeat it there. On the ship crossing the Atlantic, Thomas, his wife Fran, Chase and Dale Carnegie (later famous for his book "How to Win Friends and Influence People") wrote "a tight, swiftly-moving show" called "With Allenby in Palestine". It opened at Covent Garden on 14 August 1919 and combined an appeal to all the senses in a manner that was years ahead of its time.
The band of the Welsh Guards warmed up the audience and provided the musical accompaniment. When the curtain went up, several exotically-dressed young women performed the Dance of the Seven Veils in front of a set which portrayed the Nile with the distant pyramids faintly illuminated by the moon. A lyric tenor then sang a haunting musical pastiche of the Islamic call to prayer. As Thomas himself came on stage, braziers in the theatre aisles poured Oriental incense into the air.
Thomas began with, "Come with me to lands of mystery, history and romance" and went on to lecture for two hours while up in the projection room, Harry Chase employed a new technique he had developed to illustrate Thomas’s words. This involved using three arc-light projectors simultaneously and a fade-and-dissolve device that no one had seen before.
Audiences loved it - and they loved the parts about Lawrence best of all. Thomas called Lawrence, "Shereff Lawrence, the uncrowned King of Arabia" and described the "triumphant twentieth Crusaders sweeping back the Turks on the plains of Sharon where the Moslem hordes of Saladin vanquished the flower of feudal chivalry."
Following its success at Covent Garden the show moved to the Albert Hall, then to the Queen’s Hall where it had a Royal Command performance. Lawrence went to see it and left a note for Thomas which read: "Saw the show last night and thank God the lights were out." But he became a frequent visitor to it. The show went on a nationwide tour then to Australia and New Zealand, Southeast Asia, India and then the United States and Canada. It is estimated that four million people went to see it and that it made Thomas at least $1.5 million (more than $20 million in today’s money).
But there was more to the whole business than was realised at the time. The impresario Burton was encouraged to produce the Lawrence of Arabia show by the English-Speaking Union, of which Thomas was a member and whose committee included Winston Churchill and the newspaper proprietor Lord Northcliffe. The union’s aim was to emphasize the common heritage of Britain and the USA, to draw the two countries closer together and to forge a common sense of future destiny. If Lawrence could be portrayed as an old-style British hero and, more importantly, a representative of the new benevolent British imperialism, then the American liberal misgivings, now ironic, about Britain as an oil-hungry , greedy, oppressive power in the Middle East might be dispelled.
Lawrence knew nothing of this. All he knew was that the Lowell Thomas spectacular show turned him an international star. Even his own country had not previously heard of him and now, suddenly, he was "an imperial hero, a young archaeologist who without a day’s military experience had become the idolised leader of a Bedouin army, driven the Turks from Arabia and restored the caliphate to the descendants of the Prophet, the most romantic figure of the war".
Thomas was inundated with commissions for articles about Lawrence. The first appeared in the American Asia Magazine in September 1919 under the heading "Thomas Lawrence--Prince of Mecca". Others followed (some written with Lawrence’s help) and they eventually evolved into a book, "With Lawrence in Arabia", the first edition of which was published in 1924, two years before Lawrence’s own book, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom". Thomas’s book was the first to tell Lawrence’s story and despite its exaggerations and hyperbole, its simple, popular and immediate style makes it an exciting and illuminating read.
Later Lawrence, like many a celebrity, made it clear he did not appreciate all the benefits of stardom. He instructed Robert Graves to write in Graves’s potboiler "Lawrence and the Arabs", "The advertising of his Arabian adventure, both by the Press and Mr. Lowell Thomas’s cinema-lecture, proved most unwelcome to him." He told Charlotte Shaw that Thomas was the man who made "my vulgar reputation". Lawrence’s bitterest critic, Richard Aldington, maintained that all this was a ploy. "Lawrence was always careful to foster the illusion that he was frantically avoiding publicity, which created the illusion that he had something of great public interest to conceal." If it were a ploy, then it worked because it created such curiousity about Lawrence that it continues to this day.
There are two views about what happened to Lawrence in his remaining years. The first, held by the majority, is that he was psychologically scarred by whatever happened to him at the hands of the Bey of Deraa, that the beatings he sought from John Bruce (and others) were, as his brother the late Professor A.W. Lawrence, believed, "to achieve a subjection of the body by methods advocated by the saints whose lives he had read." All that he sought was a quiet life but tragically this was denied him by the celebrity status created for him by Lowell Thomas and the British press.
It is certainly true that trying to hide in the ranks of the Army and the Air Force under other names did not help because the press sooner or later winkled him out. Even a posting by the RAF to Miranshah on the North-West frontier of India, a bleak fort with a detachment of Indian Scouts and a few airmen, did not work. The British press found him and decided he must be on a mission. "Lawrence of Arabia Fights Soviet in India", the headlines said, "British Hero Said To Be Leading Secret Crusade Against Bolshevists".
The other view, to which I subscribe, is that Lawrence was torn by the guilt he felt at Britain’s betrayal of the Arabs and his role in it. That said, these emotional wounds were incurred in the service of is country and he did his best to further Britain’s aims and thus he was not only representative of his time and class but also of the policy and tactics adopted by a great power to protect its interests.
In short, he was what he always wanted to be: the Imperial Hero. But he was more than that. If he were merely an Imperial Hero then he would be like those generals whose bronze statues litter London, men no one recognises or remembers. But T.E. Lawrence was a tragic hero and tragic heroes endure for all time.
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