There were strong echoes of the Uranian muse in Lawrence’s description of his two Arab servants, Dawd and Farraj, who shared an ‘eastern boy and boy affection’. Lawrence had employed them ‘because they looked so young and clean’ (was this the attraction of Dahoum?) and he tolerated their homosexual liaison, for ‘Such friendships often led to manly loves of a depth and force beyond our flesh-steeped conceit.’ They could be mischievous and earned several beatings and once, on Lawrence’s orders, ‘a swinging half-dozen each’. The phrase and circumstances recall Lawrence’s undergraduate reading, Corvo’s Don Tarquina. This contained instances of chastisement and humiliation; a page-boy given ‘vii criss-cross weals on his plunging hams with a cane’, another spat upon by his companions, and a slave given ‘commodious action on the flesh of his back bulk’.
Corvo devised erotic fantasies; Lawrence recorded what he and others saw. Their reactions were very different from his. ‘The whole community is infected and saturated with vices of which nature abominates the idea,’ wrote a disgusted Colonel Charles Vickery in his account of the early days of the Arab movement.22 Another of Lawrence’s foes, Sir Arnold Wilson, in his review of Revolt in the Desert, contemptuously cited passages which he had clearly read in its source, the Seven Pillars.23
‘The bird of Minerva,’ wrote Landor, ‘flies low and picks up its food under hedges.’ Lawrence’s hermaphrodite deity flies lower than Landor’s bird, and seems to have a preference for the cesspool, but we must be grateful to be spared, in this edition, more detailed references to a vice to which Semitic races are by no means prone. To most (English) readers his Epipyschidon on this subject will be incomprehensible, to the remainder, unwelcome.
Lawrence’s remarks on Beduin homosexuality worried his friends, who successfully persuaded him to excise one passage from the 1922 version of the Seven Pillars in which a young British soldier and an Arab are discovered committing a homosexual act. The Arab was given a hundred lashes in accordance with Quranic law, a sentence which Lawrence had halved, and the English other-ranks gave sixty to their comrade, rather than have him face court martial and imprisonment. Lawrence considered the crime loathsome but understood the feelings of its perpetrators.
This stretches credulity to breaking point, for Lawrence would have had to secure the collusion of his local superior, Joyce, and other officers who would have been unlikely to have shared his tolerance for homosexuality. Moreover, there might have been sturdy objections to compounding one offence with another: flogging had been illegal in the British army since 1882. No one else present has ever drawn attention to this bizarre incident and, in 1968, Lawrence’s surviving brother, Arnold, was anxious that it remained unknown, claiming that the soldier involved was still alive.24
This episode and Lawrence’s reactions to it, along with his approving account of homosexual behaviour among the Beduin, reveal a tolerance then confined to certain intellectual circles. His reluctance to condemn homosexuality out of hand may have had its roots in his Uranian contacts at Oxford, but it may also be a reflection of his own, inner inclinations. Whatever its source, Lawrence’s attitude in these matters attracted unfavourable gossip among those, such as Vickery and Arnold Wilson, who disliked him and, like most men from their background, detested homosexuality.
Lawrence took issue with them, and his views, together with his intimacy with the Arabs, aroused suspicions that he was a homosexual. In the unpublished diaries of Lady Scott (the widow of the Antarctic explorer Sir Robert Scott) is a passage in which she recounts a meeting with Vickery on 25 February 1921. She was already acquainted with Lawrence, of whom she was carving a bust, and may have imagined that he was in love with her.
25 February. Well, well. Heard the most hair-raising stories from Vickery (Gunner) about L[awrence]. He was in Arabia at the same time. According to him, L[awrence] took credit for a great landing [i.e. at al Wajh on 23 January 1917] that took place when in reality he and [illegible, presumably Faisal] arrived the following day saying they’d lost their way, but as they had the sea for a flank it seems that was impossible. Says that it is common knowledge that he [Hussein] is a ‘royal mistress’, that that is the reason you never hear him spoken of in Arabia. When V [ickery] referred to Hussein to him once, he replied, ‘Don’t talk about that boy to me.’ Once a rather beautiful young Arab came to him for a passport for Egypt and said he could pay, and produced a slab of gold as big as two men’s hands and said ‘That is the price of a night with Faisal’ and so on. Countless–tales! Well, well.25
There had been a professional and personal antipathy between Lawrence and Vickery when they had served together between January and April 1917. The former suspected that Vickery, an excolonial administrator, had no sympathy for the Arab movement and was angered by what he imagined to be his contempt for Arabs in general. Vickery considered Lawrence a bumptious prig (he had been offended when the colonel had swigged whisky in Faisal’s presence) whose advice hindered operations.26 It was also clear from his allegations that Vickery believed that Lawrence was a homosexual. Vickery was a plain-spoken man who freely criticised his superiors, but he was an officer, a gentleman and a country squire.27 It was, therefore, astonishing that he should break the conventions of his class so outrageously and rail against a brother officer in this manner before a common acquaintance. Presumably, he must have been ready to support his allegations if the need ever occurred.
Even more astonishing was Lawrence’s answer to the charges. He met Lady Scott again on 11 May 1921 and she recorded his conversation in her diary:
11 May, Colonel Lawrence. He had a drunken father. Whilst drunken, first, dull, son born. Reformed; and had had then another; killed; then one in India very remarkable; and a young one consumptive. Admitted his proclivities, but didn’t affect his life. Said Vickery was a medal hunter and only out for himself.
This was the only occasion when Lawrence admitted his homosexual tendencies directly. And yet, in December 1927, he told E.M. Forster that he had revised his feelings on the subject after reading Forster’s homosexual short story ‘Dr Woolacott’.
The Turks, as you probably know (or have guessed, through the references of the Seven Pillars) did it to me, by force: and since then I have gone about whimpering to myself Unclean, unclean. Now I don’t know. Perhaps there is another side to the story. I couldn’t ever do it, I believe; the impulse strong enough to make me touch another creature has not yet been born in me.28
This must have puzzled Forster, who would have read in the Seven Pillars that Lawrence’s abuse at the hands of the Turks had triggered a sexual response. ‘A delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me.’ The 1922 version of Dera went further, concluding with a faltering admission that Lawrence felt strangely impelled to seek a repetition of the experience, much as a moth is drawn towards a flame. After his final return from the Middle East in December 1921, and in a deeply troubled frame of mind, Lawrence told Robert Graves that he had enjoyed being whipped and buggered.29 These revelations place a new perspective on those experiences he claimed to have had at Dera.
At the time when Lawrence confided his feelings, if not before, he had become briefly entangled in that underworld network which satisfied such tastes. The evidence for his misadventures is fragmentary and oblique, but it deserves to be aired, for it suggests that Lawrence may have come uncomfortably close to involvement in a scandal. It appears that during or before 1922 he was present at flagellation sessions held in Chelsea by a German, Jack Bilbo, who was also known as Bluebeard. In the autumn of 1922 this pander was considering selling his confessions, which implicated Lawrence and an aristocrat, to a German magazine. Lawrence appealed to the Home Secretary, asking for Bilbo’s deportation and the suppression of the journal.
Contrary to what Lawrence imagined, the Home Secretary had no powers of deportation, which could only be exercised by a court after the deportee had been convicted. Bilbo was not prosecuted, nor does he seem to have attracted police attention, for the M
etropolitan Police possess no file on him. He did, however, leave Britain, for by October 1932 he was in Berlin and contemplating publication of his memoirs. Lawrence somehow got wind of his plans and approached his distant cousin and friend, Sir Robert Vansittart, at the Foreign Office. Backed by a departmental legal adviser, Vansittart agreed to contact the Berlin embassy which would exert pressure for the book to be banned. It is unclear whether any action followed as there is no reference to Bilbo or his activities in those Foreign Office files for the winter of 1932–33 which are publicly available
This intriguing tale has generated controversy. Its substance rests on two of Lawrence’s letters, once held by the Bodleian Library, which were seen and, in one case, transcribed by Colin Simpson in March 1968.30 They were removed shortly after, and Lawrence’s brother persuaded Simpson not to publish them on the grounds that they referred to an attempt to blackmail Lawrence, who was utterly innocent. Why Lawrence of all people should have been chosen by Bilbo is hard to understand; he was not notably rich nor, on the surface, was there any reason why he should resort to one of those establishments which catered for sado-masochists, and which were usually run by women.31
When the story was finally brought to light by Desmond Stewart in 1977 it provoked a lively exchange of letters in the Sunday Times. Jeremy Wilson, then designated Lawrence’s official biographer, dismissed the tale as ‘a sensationally garbled version of a real but insignificant incident’.32 It was so insignificant that he omitted it from his biography of Lawrence. Nonetheless, Bilbo’s allegations were taken seriously by Lawrence and Vansittart and may have contributed to the former’s distressed state of mind during the first half of 1922, and even, perhaps, his decision to take extended leave from the Colonial Office on 1 March and his resignation three months later.
By early 1922, Lawrence was prepared to submit himself to a regime of beatings undertaken by men who had their price and whose discretion could be relied on. Just how these arrangements were made was recalled by John Bruce in a memoir he delivered to journalists at the Sunday Times in 1968 which became a series of sensational articles published during the summer of that year. Bruce’s memory was often inexact, he tended to embellish stories about his relationship with Lawrence, and he appears to have been ignorant of the sexual aspect of the tasks he was called upon to perform. But, given his youth and provincial lower-middle-class background, such naivete would have been unremarkable.
Bruce’s story was that, aged seventeen, he had been offered a job in a London merchant bank by Dr Alexander Ogston, his family doctor. Bruce travelled from Aberdeen to an interview in a Mayfair flat owned by Lawrence’s friend and fellow Arab Bureau officer, Francis Rennell, who had, in March 1922, left his Foreign Office post suddenly and without official permission to join an expedition to the French Sahara.33 Lawrence was present but silent at the interview which concluded with Bruce being asked to undertake an initiative test. When he had successfully accomplished it, he was formally presented to Lawrence whom, he was told, was in trouble and would have to endure ‘some unpleasant things’.34
Bruce discovered the nature of Lawrence’s predicament in July. He told him that he had fallen into debt and dishonoured his family and could only expiate his misdeeds through abject submission to ‘The Old Man’, an otherwise nameless kinsman who was the author of a rigorous regime contrived to bring the scapegrace to his senses. It included regular corporal punishment. This was all fiction, but Bruce was taken in and, soon after Lawrence’s first departure from the RAF early in 1923, he began to play the part cast for him by his new friend and the implacable ‘Old Man’. While not denying Bruce’s association with Lawrence from 1923, Professor Lawrence claimed in November 1969 that the account of two men’s various encounters during 1922 had been invented by Bruce and that Rennell (who died in 1978 as Lord Rennell of Rodd) had no connection whatsoever with the matter.35
What was beyond question was that Bruce had enlisted with Lawrence in the Tank Corps in 1923 and remained close to him at Bovington. From then until the end of 1934 Bruce, acting as the instrument of ‘The Old Man’, beat Lawrence regularly. The proceedings followed a bizarre formula, devised by Lawrence, in which a mythical uncle known as ‘The Old Man’, or latterly ‘R’ and ‘G’, demanded that his nephew suffer punishment for misdemeanours which had disgraced himself and his kinsfolk. The indictments, written by Lawrence, listed real and fanciful misdeeds such as insolence to the King and falling foul of Jewish moneylenders. Precise instructions followed about the punishment and the type of whips to be used. Sometimes beating was combined with a tough course of physical exercise, including sea swimming and riding, The whippings were delivered on the bare backside, consisted of up to seventy-five strokes and ended in Lawrence’s sexual orgasm. The frequency of these sessions varied (Lawrence recorded five between June and October 1933) and some were undertaken in Aberdeen, Perth and Edinburgh. Bruce was not the only agent employed; there were at least two others, one ‘a service companion’, who stood in when Bruce was absent, and, on occasions, other men were present as witnesses.36
Once the flogging was over, Lawrence reverted to his role as the stern mentor and by letter asked for clinical details of what had occurred during the session. In these letters there was much lingering over the mechanics of the chastisement (‘the birch is quite ineffective’ or ‘I was making up my mind to ask you to use your friend’s jute whip’) and the victim’s responses (Hills [Bruce] reports that after birching Ted [i.e. Lawrence] cried out quite loudly and begged for mercy’). There are curious but significant echoes of the description of the whip used at Dera, which was ‘of the Circassian sort, a thong of supple black hide, rounded, and tapering from the thickness of a thumb at the grip ( which was wrapped in silver ) down to the hard fine point, finer than a pencil’. One wonders how many victims of a punitive flogging could have remembered so exactly the features of the whip used on them.
For the psychologist, these precise accounts of the victim’s iniquities and punishment suggest a powerful sexual masochism. Consider this letter, written in 1836 to the madam of a brothel specialising in correction: ‘I am an ill-behaved young man and quite incorrigible! The most celebrated tutors in London have chastised me, but have been unable to correct my wilfulness.’ He promised to bring his own chains, a pound if blood was drawn and five if he was rendered senseless. 37
Lawrence, pretending to be the exasperated kinsman, wrote in the same vein and later dwelt on the efficacy of the various astringents applied. Lawrence had always been deeply interested in talking about his humiliation and ill-usage. He had spoken often of that escapade in which he had been arrested, flogged and imprisoned at Urfa in 1912, which was, in a sense, a dress rehearsal for Dera. Details of the incident, provided by Lawrence, had become common knowledge in Cairo by the summer of 1917.38 He may well have talked about it to his friend, the poet James Elroy Flecker, whom he had first met in Beirut in 1911. ‘Whipping’ had been a topic which they discussed, no doubt with enthusiasm, for Flecker was a masochist.39
Masochism can be the result of a yearning for degradation and chastisement for hidden sins. It may take many forms although, in the broadest sense, the masochist is tormented by guilt for which forgiveness can only be obtained through painful abasement. One source of guilt can be self-contempt; another can be secret fantasies which are impossible to fulfil because the practices involved would offend the subject’s inner moral code or shatter his self-esteem. According to Dr Mack and Arnold Lawrence, his brother’s ‘affliction’ was an effort to suppress rather than stimulate his sexuality. Like the ascetics of the mediaeval church, Lawrence conquered carnality through bouts of pain. And yet, this pain produced an unmistakable form of sexual satisfaction.
To judge by what Lawrence wrote and said, he was never inclined to explore let alone discover the sexual attractions of women. He once told Mrs Bernard Shaw that knowledge of his mother made him sure that he would never marry or father children. Heterosexuality remained a myst
ery to him and one he was glad not to have unravelled. It is, therefore, odd that he required extreme methods of self-control to suppress desires which were dormant anyway.
There was a sexual element to Lawrence, but it was unconnected with women. He admitted that what he said he had endured at Dera had given him an erotic sensation. Afterwards, he created an elaborate rigmarole in which men whipped him until he reached orgasm. The charade opened with Lawrence’s accomplices being given a humiliating account of how he had disgraced himself and ended with him setting down a meticulous recital of what had occurred, including his own reactions to the pain. All this was conducted in private, and those involved, save Lawrence, were known by pseudonyms. This circumspection was wise since such activities would certainly have been considered acts of indecency between consenting males and therefore contrary to the criminal law of the time. Well aware of the fate of Oscar Wilde, Lawrence must have known what would have happened if his behaviour was publicly revealed.
During his lifetime there were rumours that Lawrence was a homosexual. They were so strong that Lowell Thomas took the extraordinary and, in the circumstances, somewhat risky step of denying them in an encomium to Lawrence, edited by his brother and published in 1936. The canards had been deliberately spread by ‘certain of his enemies’ and Lowell Thomas refuted them by the weak claim that Lawrence never revealed any of the camp affectations of speech, dress or mannerism which were commonly imagined to be the hallmarks of a homosexual.40 In other words, Lawrence did not act like a 1930s’ stereotype ‘pansy’ which proved nothing. Indeed, there were some who encountered him, even close friends, who sensed intuitively that he might be a homosexual.41
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