Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

by Michael Korda

  Lawrence’s next brush with publicity was another tragedy, this time the crash of a seaplane—the RAF “Iris” III—in Plymouth Sound. Lawrence had been taking his morning coffee break with Clare Smith, in a sunny spot they liked for their “elevenses,” when he saw a large seaplane descend toward the water as if to land; but instead of flattening out, it dived straight into the sea and disappeared. Before the seaplane crashed, Lawrence had realized that it was in trouble, and he ran to get the rescue boat moving. He not only organized the rescue, but dived into the sea himself to attempt to rescue any survivors. of the twelve men on board, six were saved, though both pilots were among the dead. Lawrence knew at once what had happened: the senior officer on board was not qualified to fly such a large, complex seaplane—everybody at Mount Batten knew it—but once he was airborne his seniority gave him the right to insist on taking control of the aircraft, and he had done so, with disastrous consequences. Lawrence, working through Lady Astor this time, made sure the facts were known at the Air Ministry, and as a result it became RAF policy that once an aircraft was airborne the pilot had command of it—even if he was a sergeant and the senior officer on board was a wing commander or a group captain. Henceforth, the pilot was in complete command of the aircraft, like the captain of a ship. Nobody on board, no matter how high his rank, could overrule the pilot and take control. The accident also demonstrated the importance of faster rescue launches, in situations where minutes might save lives; this was one of Lawrence’s major interests and areas of expertise.

  Lawrence was obliged to testify at the RAF inquiry, which posed no problems for him, but also at a public inquest, where the press would be present. Even without Thomson, Lawrence was concerned that he would make headlines again, particularly if he was called on to criticize the officer who had taken over the controls. He was equally concerned that Wing Commander Smith might be blamed for letting an officer go up even though his incompetence as a pilot was widely known. Always the gleeful trumpeter of doom, and eager to get Lawrence out of uniform (where he did not think Lawrence belonged), Bernard Shaw wrote, “You are a simple aircraftman: nothing but an eye-witness’s police report can be extorted from you. However, as you will probably insist on conducting the enquiry, and as you will want to save your ambitious commander from being sacrificed, the future, to my vision, is on the knees of the gods. Pray heaven they sack you.”

  In the end, Lady Astor did her part splendidly—her friends the press lords played down Lawrence’s role (any other airman might have been awarded a medal for his courageous effort to save lives), Smith was not blamed for the incompetence of the pilot, and the need for faster rescue launches was widely acknowledged. Shaw’s gleefully dire prediction did not come true. Writing to thank Lady Astor for her tactful and effective intervention, Lawrence invited her upriver on Biscuit for a picnic. By this time—March 1931—Lawrence himself was beginning to feel that his best years in the RAF were coming to an end: Trenchard had left, and would shortly go on to a peerage and his next big job, as metropolitan commissioner of police; the Smiths, by now Lawrence’s surrogate family, would move on to RAF Manston, where the wing commander, promoted to group captain, would take over as commanding officer.

  As for Lawrence, he moved temporarily to Hythe, near Southampton, where he lodged in a cottage on Myrtle Road while working at the British Power Boats factory, to test and improve the prototype of the RAF 200 Class Seaplane Tender. He had made himself something of “a marine expert” (in his own words), and found in the person of Flight Lieutenant W. E. G. Beauforte-Greenwood, head of the Marine Equipment Branch of the Air Ministry, another sympathetic and appreciative commander, who knew how to make the most of Lawrence’s growing (and self-acquired) skill at designing, handling, and servicing fast boats. Indeed, Lawrence knew so much about boats by now that Beauforte-Greenwood invited him to write the official handbook on the ST 200. Lawrence undertook this project with his customary zeal, and the handbook remains today perhaps the most concise and most instructive technical manual ever published. That discriminating judge of literature Edward Garnett described it as “a masterpiece of technology,” perhaps the beginning of a new genre; and Lawrence himself boasted that “every sentence in it is understandable, to a fitter,” and to a crewman as well, for he included instructions on how to handle the boat in the wind, or in high seas, and how to effect a rescue as quickly as possible. The handbook remained in use until the ST 200 Class boats were retired, well after World War II.

  After the Odyssey, Lawrence put in good order a compilation of poems he had liked over the years: Minorities, consisting, with his typical taste for paradox, of minor works by major poets, or major works by minor poets. He had kept this in the form of a manuscript over the years, and gave it for a time to Charlotte Shaw. Some of the poems and poets in Minorities are not really minor, in fact. Lawrence included Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth,” a poem that Winston Churchill would quote to great effect in a speech on April 27, 1941, at one of the most difficult moments for Britain of World War II. Interestingly, Lawrence remarks that he had “read it at Umtaiye, when the Deraa expedition was panicking and in misery: and it closely fitted my trust in Allenby, out of sight beyond the hills.” These were not so much “minor poems,” in fact, as poems that had meant a lot to Lawrence at difficult points of his life.

  From time to time he was tempted by further literary projects, among them a life of Sir Roger Casement, the Anglo-Irish British consular official who had been among the first to expose and document the atrocities that were committed in King Leopold of Belgium’s Congo Free State—the background and subject of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—where it was routine to chop off the right hand of any native who was slow to collect or carry ivory and rubber. Casement was made a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George for his revelations about the Congo, and was later awarded a knighthood for his extraordinary journey through the Amazon and his courageous attempts to protect the indigenous native population from slavery and mass murder at the hands of rubber planters. Casement was an adventurer very much like Lawrence, and something of a British hero for his humanitarian work, but in time he became one of the leading Irish nationalists and eventually resigned from the British Consular Service. Just before World War I he went to Germany, where, once the war had begun, he tried to recruit prisoners of war from Ireland for an “Irish Brigade” to fight the British. Early in April 1916 he was landed in Ireland, just three days before the Easter Rising, by a German submarine; he was captured by the British and tried for treason. The defense at his trial was hampered by references to Casement’s “black diaries,” which contained explicit descriptions of homosexual acts; these diaries almost certainly played a part in turning the jurors against him. He was found guilty and hanged in August 1916, despite pleas for clemency from W. B. Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the archbishop of Canterbury, and G. Bernard Shaw. Shaw had offered to write Casement’s speech in his own defense at the trial, an offer that Casement turned down but should probably have accepted. (Casement became an Irish hero and martyr after his death, and in 1965 his body was exhumed from its lime-pit grave at Pentonville Prison, and repatriated to Ireland, where he was given a state funeral attended by more than 30,000 people.)

  For many reasons, Casement would have been an excellent subject for Lawrence, and both Charlotte and Bernard Shaw pressed him to write this biography. But in the end Lawrence decided that unless the British government allowed him to read and quote from the “black diaries,” it would not be an honest book; and no British government, Labour or Conservative, was likely to let Lawrence, of all people, see Casement’s diaries, which many of his supporters believed had been forged by the intelligence services in order to ensure his execution. “As I see it,” Lawrence wrote to Charlotte Shaw, “he was a heroic nature. I should like to write upon him subtly, so that his enemies would think I was with them till I finished my book and rose from reading it to call him a hero. He has t
he appeal of a broken archangel. But unless the P.M. will release the ‘diary’ material nobody can write of him.” This was not likely to happen only fifteen years after an event about which emotions ran high on both sides, so Lawrence never began the book. He gave some thought to a kind of spiritual autobiography, and Charlotte Shaw was enthusiastic about the idea, but he never did more than talk about it. His translation of the Odyssey was the last work he wrote, and it seems fitting that when he went into a bookshop looking for something to read, the salesclerk tried to sell him The Boy’s Book of Colonel Lawrence at a reduced price, since he was in RAF uniform. He told her that he knew the fellow, “and he was a wash-out.”

  Lawrence always managed to have the last word about himself.

  By 1932, if he had been anyone else, Lawrence would have been wearing three stripes and a brass crown on his sleeves. Indeed, had he been willing to accept a promotion, he would have been yet another of those hugely competent middle-aged men on whom the RAF (like the Royal Navy) depends: the grizzled flight sergeant or chief petty officer who knows more about his area of expertise than any officer does, whether it is guns,marine engines, or anything else; who can repair anything; and whose word is law when it comes to his specialty. It had startled Lord Thomson to hear the NCOs at Calshot referring to AC1 Shaw as “Mr. Shaw,” but they were merely recognizing that Shaw had the quiet authority of a man who knew how to get things done, and was reaching an age when he no longer looked like the glamorous young adventurer. He was still muscular and wiry, but photographs show that his hair was graying, cut now very short at the sides, though still long and unruly on top; his face had acquired a certain weather-beaten maturity; his body had filled in. He was not by any stretch of the imagination fat, but he was solid. With his strong jaw, powerful nose, and piercing eyes, he would have looked right at home in the sergeants’ mess.

  The sea made much the same appeal to Lawrence’s imagination as the desert, with its emptiness and its sudden dangers. All things considered, he was where he wanted to be, and doing what he wanted to do. Much of his work around the boatyard he could do in civilian clothes, a sports jacket, baggy gray flannels, a sweater, and a scarf (Lawrence was never a natural collar-and-tie man). When Lawrence’s new commanding officer showed up at Hythe, Lawrence sent himself home on leave, having already typed up the leave ticket for his signature.

  With Lord Thomson’s death, Lawrence’s busy social life resumed much as before—he often visited Cliveden, the Astors’ big country house, arriving for dinner on his motorcycle; and he kept up his correspondence with the great and famous. Harold Nicolson describes his arrival at a tea party in RAF uniform, looking “stockier and squarer … a bull terrier in place of a saluki.” The notion of Lawrence as a lonely man is belied by his letters—he wrote to Edward Marsh, to Lord Trenchard, to Sir Edward Elgar, to C. Day Lewis, to Siegfried Sassoon, to John Buchan, to Lionel Curtis, and to Robert Graves. He met and liked Noël Coward (after being taken to a rehearsal of Private Lives), and sent Coward the manuscript of The Mint to read, a gesture of great intimacy and trust. Coward replied with a letter that begins memorably: “Dear 338171 (May I call you 338?).” Lawrence also began the lengthy correspondence with B. H. Liddell Hart that would eventually produce the best book about Lawrence as a military leader and innovator, Colonel Lawrence: The Man behind the Legend. He even corresponded with W. B. Yeats, one of the poets he most admired.

  Jock Bruce had not altogether vanished from Lawrence’s life, though he appeared less frequently, as if the intensity of Lawrence’s demons was declining. According to Bruce, he was called down to whip Lawrence in 1929, when Lawrence returned from India, and again in 1930—he continued to receive his £3 a week, whether he was called on to apply the birch or not. Bruce claimed that the worst beating of all, a kind of marathon of torture, took place in the autumn of 1930, when Lawrence traveled all the way from Cattewater to Aberdeen with a new set of demands from the unappeasable old Man. These included swimming in the North Sea (“The water was freezing cold and very rough,” Bruce wrote, certainly a torture to somebody who hated the cold and disliked swimming as much as Lawrence did), and riding lessons, some of them bareback, which Lawrence hated, to be followed by a severe whipping. oddly enough, Lawrence managed to write a long letter to Frank Doubleday, the American publisher, from the cottage Bruce had rented for all this punishment, making it sound like a jolly weeklong seaside holiday, and describing Jock Bruce, not inaccurately, as “the roughest diamond of our Tank Corps hut in 1923.” Judging by the date, it is possible that this particularly sophisticated and elaborate series of punishments was intended to atone for the success of Revolt in the Desert. Nothing quite like it was repeated, although Bruce claims to have whipped Lawrence again in 1931, in 1935, and “six or seven times” after that. Charlotte Shaw was certainly aware of much of this—Lawrence was more frank about himself with her than with anyone else—though it seems doubtful that she passed any of it on to her husband, who was busy writing a play about Lawrence, Too True to Be Good. But then there was much about herself that Charlotte hid from her husband, including the sheer volume and intimacy of her correspondence with Lawrence, which, for once, deeply shocked the normally imperturbable Shaw when he discovered it after her death.

  One has the impression that in some ways Lawrence’s glamour as a hero was fading slightly. The public had come to accept him as “Aircraftman Shaw,” and however odd his decision to serve in the ranks still seemed to many people, it was no longer news, even after Shaw’s play opened. Lawrence paid a visit to Janet Laurie Hall-Smith, to whom he had once proposed marriage, and who was now a married woman and the mother of four children. It may be that Janet had asked for his help—her husband was a difficult man, whose ambition to be a great artist had failed, and who, in order to support his rapidly growing family, was stuck in a bank teller’s job in the small seaside town of Newquay, in Cornwall, then a rather stuffy summer resort. Hall-Smith had won the DSO in the war, and he may have resented Lawrence’s cavalier disregard for his own honors, as well as his fame and the fact that he had given Janet money early in her marriage, when the couple were virtually penniless. Janet herself had changed, not surprisingly, from the slim, tomboyish girl Ned had loved to a plump, matronly woman with more than her share of troubles; this may have dismayed Lawrence. In any event, as seen through the eyes of Janet’s daughter Emma, Lawrence fades into insignificance. He had agreed to join the Hall-Smiths for “a beach picnic,” but turned up very late, a “small man, made smaller, dwarfed, by the size of [his] motorbike,” as Emma remembers him. Whereas the children are wearing bathing suits, Lawrence “is wearing a uniform of thick, scratchy material, heavy, clumpy boots, and knee-breeches. Our legs are bare, but his are bandaged from the ankles up, by what are called, we know, puttees. How horribly hot and uncomfortable he’s bound to be, poor man, inside his layers of stuffy clothing.” When her sister Pam says that she is Lawrence’s godchild, he replies, with undisguised annoyance, that he has too many godchildren to count, mortifying the two little girls. “I didn’t think he’d be so little,” Pam says sadly, and the girls are doubly disappointed when their father and Lawrence appear to quarrel—Mr. Hall-Smith had hoped to achieve fame at last by painting his portrait, but Lawrence refuses and roars away on his motorcycle without saying good-bye to the girls.

  Although Lawrence appears to have been quite good with the children of his friends, he was not always at ease with children he didn’t know. For example, Anthony West, the illegitimate son of H.G.Wells and Rebecca West, describes meeting Lawrence, and being more impressed by his Brough motorcycle, “the best motorcycle out,” than by Lawrence himself. He remembered Lawrence as a name-dropper who blushed easily. When his aunt—who,like his governess, falls almost instantly under Lawrence’s spell—tells him that he should make allowances because Lawrence is an extraordinary person, the young West says uncompromisingly: “I didn’t want to have to make allowances for him….1 wanted him to be a hero.”

>   “ ‘Ah, yes—that—’ said Aunt Gwen. ‘One does. And that’s his great problem. It’s the problem all heroes have to cope with—when you’ve made your gesture you’ve got the rest of your life to live.’

  “ ‘Do you think it’s very difficult for him—being a hero?’

  “ ‘Oh, yes, it’s very hard work wearing a halo—or any other mark of distinction for that matter.’ ”

  Aunt Gwen had a point—the point, in fact—whether she really said it, or Anthony West is speaking through her words: it is very hard work being a hero, much harder than becoming one; and although Lawrence spent the better part of his adult life, from 1918 to 1935, trying to escape from his own reputation, he never succeeded. Perhaps nobody with so enormous a reputation as his could have. Children, for whom he was a kind of mythic hero, sensed, perhaps more quickly than adults, the curious contrast between the heroic legend and the small airman with the diffident and curiously remote manner. Adults knew what Lawrence had been or done, and understood how hard he had tried to put all that behind him; children merely saw that he did not resemble what they thought of as a legendary hero like King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, and were correspondingly disappointed.

  Lawrence returned to RAF Mount Batten in 1931, but found it had lost its appeal now that the Smiths were no longer there. In addition, the Air Ministry decided to end “boat testing and experimenting” at Mount Batten, so Lawrence was left with nothing of any personal interest to do.