Hero

by Michael Korda

  At Miranshah there was little secrecy about the fact that AC1 Shaw was Lawrence—everybody knew it, and nobody cared much. “I think that the spectacle of a semi-public character contented in their ranks,” Lawrence wrote to Trenchard, “does tend to increase their self-respect and contentment.” Flight Lieutenant Angell, the commanding officer, liked Lawrence, who never showed him a letter without having first prepared a reply for his signature. The pace of life was leisurely, with plenty of native servants to do the cleaning and polishing, even for the airmen. Lawrence worked hard on his translation of the Odyssey, despite his irreverence toward its author and its characters. “Very bookish, this house-bred man,” Lawrence wrote of Homer, and went on: “only the central family stands out, consistently and pitilessly drawn—the sly, cattish wife, that cold-blooded egoist Odysseus, and the priggish son who yet met his master-prig in Menelaus. It is sorrowful to believe that these were really Homer’s heroes and examplars.”

  Lawrence did not feel oppressed by the fact that nobody was allowed beyond the barbed wire during the day, or out of the fort at night, since he had no desire to see Waziristan. Nor was he bothered by the fact that the airmen slept with their rifles chained to a rack beside their beds, in case of a sudden attack. He went around bareheaded, to demonstrate that it was not necessary to wear a pith helmet, and often wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up instead of his tunic. He was cheerful, hardworking, and fit; he had his books, his gramophone, and his records; he was not even disturbed by the news that somebody had bought the film rights to Revolt in the Desert, which almost guaranteed a lot of unwelcome publicity about who would play Lawrence in the film. He did not expect to return to Britain before 1930, at the earliest.

  Unfortunately, by the beginning of December 1928, new rumors about Lawrence were making headlines in London. The Daily News reported that he was learning Pashtu in preparation for entering Afghanistan, either in support of or against King Amanullah. A few days later, even more sensationally, The Empire News revealed that Lawrence had already entered Afghanistan, met with the beleaguered king, “and then disappeared into ‘the wild hills of Afghanistan’ disguised as ‘a holy man’ or ‘pilgrim,’ “ to raise the tribes in the king’s support. In India, feelings ran high against Lawrence as a British arch-imperialist trying to add Afghanistan to the empire. A genuine holy man, Karam Shah, was attacked and badly beaten by a mob in Lahore when the rumor spread that he was Lawrence in disguise. In London, anti-imperialists in the Labour Party burned Lawrence in effigy during a demonstration held on Tower Hill.

  The government of India was taken by surprise, since the Air Ministry had never informed it that Lawrence was serving there. On January 3, 1929, Sir Francis Humphreys, the British minister in Kabul, cabled Sir Denis Bray, foreign secretary of the government of India in Delhi, to point out that the presence of Lawrence as an airman on the border of Afghanistan created “ineradicable suspicion in the minds of the Afghan Government that he is scheming against them in some mysterious way.” The Soviet, French, and Turkish ministers in Kabul were quick to spread these rumors, and in Moscow the Soviet newspapers carried stories that were soon spread around the world by left-wing newspapers, accusing Lawrence of being an imperialist agent responsible for the unrest in Afghanistan. Under the circumstances, Humphreys felt, the sooner Lawrence was moved as far away from Afghanistan as possible, the better. Air Vice-Marshal Salmond stoutly dismissed all this as “stupid,” but in London the foreign secretary, alarmed by the spread of these stories, ruled that “Lawrence’s presence anywhere in India under present conditions is very inconvenient,” a superb piece of British understatement.

  Trenchard and Salmond were overruled—Lawrence must be removed from India at once. Trenchard ordered Salmond to offer him a choice between Aden, Somaliland, Singapore, and coming home. Lawrence, indignant that he had been given only a night’s notice, was flown out of Miranshah to Lahore, without his gramophone or his records, and from there to Karachi, where he was embarked as a second-class passenger in borrowed civilian clothes aboard the P&O** liner RMS Rajputana, with orders to report to the Air Ministry as soon as he arrived home.

  In contrast to his journey out to India on a troopship, his journey home was comfortable. The ship was not crowded and he had a cabin to himself. In the meantime the furor about him continued to spread, causing the Air Ministry to question the wisdom of Lawrence’s disembarking from the Rajputana along with the rest of the passengers onto the dock at Tilbury, where he was sure to be greeted by a mob of reporters and photographers. Instead, special arrangements were made to take him off secretly in a naval launch when the ship reached Plymouth Harbor; but the press was so intensely interested in Lawrence that this plan leaked, and when the ship arrived it was surrounded by dozens of motor launches and fishing boats hired by reporters and press photographers.

  The Air Ministry consistently underrated both Lawrence’s celebrity and the ingenuity of the press, and this was a good example of both. Wing Commander Sydney Smith, the commanding officer of RAF Cattewater (the nearest RAF station to Plymouth) and former chief staff officer at Cranwell (where he and his wife, Clare, had befriended Lawrence), was sent out on the launch in civilian clothes with instructions to escort him to London with the least possible publicity. But despite all the precautions, every moment of Lawrence’s transfer from the Rajputana to the deck of the naval launch was caught on film, and would appear in newsreels and in newspapers the world over. It was even front-page news in The New York Times. In London, one headline above a front-page photograph summed up the situation from the point of view of the press and public: “GREAT MYSTERY OF COLONEL LAWRENCE: SIMPLE AIRCRAFTMAN—OR WHAT?”

  Here was one of the first modern “media feeding frenzies"—a forerunner of those that would later be triggered by every event in the life of Princess Diana. The photographers with their long telephoto lenses bobbed up and down in the swell of the harbor, while Lawrence, in his airman’s uniform, descended slowly on a rope ladder thrown over the side of the Rajputana, then walked across the deck of the launch to its tiny cabin, hands in the pockets of his RAF raincoat in a most unmilitary way, with a faint, sardonic smile on his face. He seemed to be thinking, “All right, you bastards, you got me this time, but next time you bloody well won’t!”

  AC1 Shaw returns to England, 1929.

  The comparison between Lawrence and Princess Diana is by no means far-fetched. They were both magnetically attractive—she was the most often photographed person of her generation, he the most often photographed, drawn, painted, and sculptured person of his; they both had a natural instinct for adopting a flattering pose in the presence of photographers and artists without even seeming to know they were doing it; they both played cat and mouse with the press, while complaining of being victimized by it; they both simultaneously sought and fled celebrity; they both—always a tricky task in Britain—managed to cross class lines whenever they chose to, she by making friends of her servants, he by serving in the ranks of the RAF and the army. Both of them were on the one hand intensely vulnerable, and on the other, exceedingly tough. Of course one recognizes the differences—Lawrence was an internationally acclaimed war hero, a scholar, and a writer of genuine distinction, perhaps even genius; and in the sixty-two years that separated their deaths in road accidents Great Britain changed radically (though not radically enough to save Diana’s marriage or her life). But it will help modern readers to understand Lawrence’s problems if they bear in mind that from 1919 to his death Lawrence was as famous, as sought after, as admired, and as persecuted by the press as Diana was. To this situation he added, by his own efforts to keep out of sight and the bungled efforts of the RAF to hide him, something of the mystery that surrounded Howard Hughes in Hughes’s later, reclusive years. Lawrence, hidden away from the press in India or at RAF stations in England, provoked exactly the same unrelenting press interest as Hughes did when he was locked away in a hotel suite in Las Vegas, and the same kind of intense, almost prurient
curiosity and speculation on the part of the public. Lawrence was perhaps the first in the long line of twentieth-century celebrities who became victims of their own fame. A journalistic tradition was born on February 2, 1929, when Lawrence was greeted at sea by the RAF wing commander and the Royal Navy lieutenant commander and taken ashore through a floating gauntlet of what would now be called paparazzi.

  Not surprisingly, Wing Commander Smith was no more successful at avoiding press headlines than his successors in the role of “media handler” have been since then. To avoid the Plymouth railway station, which the press was sure to have staked out, Smith rushed Lawrence to Newton Abbott; but they were discovered as soon as they boarded the train to London, and when they reached Paddington Station in London the platform was crowded with an unruly mob of photographers and journalists, jostling and pushing to get close to Lawrence, who had been presented with a letter from Trenchard firmly warning him to say nothing. When Smith and Lawrence got into a taxi, they were followed by lines of cars and taxis full of photographers; meanwhile, their taxi driver, who may have been bribed by journalists, deliberately drove slowly and took them the longest way to the flat of Smith’s sister-in-law on Cromwell Road. The wing commander rushed Lawrence into the flat in such a hurry that Lawrence literally bumped into Clare and almost sent her flying to the floor. The New York Times reported the car chase on its front page the next day under the headline: “LAWRENCE OF ARABIA HIDES IN LONDON: FLEES REPORTERS ON ARRIVING FROM INDIA.”

  The reporters could get nothing out of Lawrence, who was only quoted as denying that he was Lawrence, and saying, “No, my name is Mr. Smith.” This didn’t do him a lot of good. Whatever the expertise of the Air Ministry was in other areas, its ability to keep Lawrence’s arrival a secret was zero, much to Trenchard’s embarrassment. Lawrence grew increasingly concerned, for he was afraid that all this publicity would get him thrown out of the RAF. Nightfall finally enabled the Smiths to get Lawrence out of the flat by the back door and to the comparative safety of his old attic hideaway above Sir Herbert Baker’s office. He then spent the weekend in the seclusion of the Trenchards’ home, the last place the press would have looked for him.

  He was right to be concerned about his future in the RAF. Trenchard was more amused than irritated by all these goings-on, but by this time questions about Lawrence were beginning to be asked in the House of Commons, and these posed a more serious problem for him. The accusations that Lawrence had stirred the tribes of eastern Afghanistan to rise against their king did not interest Labour members so much as why Lieutenant-Colonel Lawrence had ever been allowed to enlist in the RAF as an airman under a false name. Secretary of State for Air Sir Samuel Hoare replied to these questions reluctantly and with exceedingly bad grace, as was hardly surprising, since he had consistently been opposed to Lawrence’s enlistment. Now, just as he had predicted, he was under attack for something he had resisted from the first. Hoare decided that Lawrence was now a nuisance and an embarrassment to the government.

  Despite a weekend with the Trenchards, during which Lawrence must have received a lot of good advice, he elected instead to behave as if he were dealing with an insurgent tribal leader, walking alone and unarmed into the leader’s tent. No sooner had Trenchard driven him back to London than Lawrence went to the House of Commons and asked to see Ernest Thurtle, the Labour member who had been the first to ask why Lawrence had been allowed to enlist under a false name. Thurtle had not been satisfied by Hoare’s reply to his question in the House, and had given notice that he and his colleague James Maxton intended to pursue the matter further. Thurtle was, in his own way, as dedicated a man as Lawrence—an ex-serviceman with a particular interest in improving the life of servicemen in the ranks and making discipline more humane and sensible. He and Maxton must have been surprised when the object of their questions appeared in the lobby of the House of Commons, dressed in an airman’s uniform, asking to see them. To do Thurtle credit, he was willing to listen to Lawrence’s side of the story, and indeed sympathetic, once Lawrence made it clear that he was not an officer and a secret agent, but merely an airman burdened by more publicity, and more inaccurate newspaper reporting, than he could handle. Lawrence explained that any inquiry into his enlistment might have the unintended effect of deeply embarrassing his mother and his surviving brothers. He described to Thurtle “the marriage tangles of [his] father.” Thurtle was not only mollified but convinced, and he and Lawrence thereafter became close friends, thus demonstrating the good sense of Lawrence’s suggestion to Trenchard about how to deal with the murderous and obstinate Feisal el Dueish at Ur. Lawrence and Thurtle worked closely together on many of Lawrence’s pet reform schemes for the armed services.

  The famous Lawrence of Arabia appearing at the House of Commons in an airman’s uniform did not go unnoticed; on the contrary, he caused a sensation, and Sir Samuel Hoare complained strongly to Trenchard, who called Lawrence into the Air Ministry and warned him sternly against any further appearances in Westminster. Lawrence apologized gracefully, though he asked if Trenchard could not find some way to shut up The Daily News, and Trenchard, patiently, asked him with gruff amusement, “Why must you be more of a damned nuisance than you need be?”

  Lawrence walking around London in uniform was a constant target for journalists—as he wrote to E. M. Forster, “I am being hunted, and do not like it.” Trenchard, who was anxious to get him away, moved quickly to have him posted to RAF Cattewater, near Plymouth, where Wing Commander Smith was the commanding officer. In the meantime, Lawrence received an unexpected and welcome present from Bernard and Charlotte Shaw: a new Brough “Superior” SS-100 motorcycle.* He arrived on this motorcycle at RAF Cattewater, where his friend Clare saw him pull up at the camp gates. “On it,” she wrote, “was a small blue-clad figure, very neat and smart, with peaked cap, goggles, gauntlet gloves and a small dispatch-case slung on his back.” Lawrence was back in the RAF again, on a working station, serving under a commanding officer whom he admired and liked, and whose family made him one of their own. When Clare Smith wrote her description of Lawrence’s years at RAF Cattewater, she called the book The Golden Reign, for Lawrence was the sovereign, casting over all their lives a glow of glamour, excitement, and adventure. It was as if he had been adopted by the Smiths and their children rather than merely posted to a new RAF station. This was perhaps as close to domestic bliss as Lawrence had ever been, and he loved every moment of it.

  He was also about to enter on a period of his life when he found, at the same time, contentment of another sort. RAF Cattewater was a seaplane base, so boats, launches, and speedboats were a necessary part of its equipment, although the actual seaplane squadron had not yet arrived. It was here that Lawrence began a new career as a largely self-taught expert in the building and running of the RAF’s high-speed rescue launches. During a six-year period Lawrence would make an extraordinary contribution to the revolutionary design of the boats that would be used to “fish” out of the water RAF pilots shot down over the Channel in the summer of 1940. Many of these men would owe their lives to the unconventional ideas, and the awesome ability to reach friends in high places in the Air Ministry and the government, of 338171 AC1 Shaw, T. E.

  He described his new home in a letter to a friend: “Cattewater proves to be about 100 airmen, pressed pretty tightly on a rock, half-awash in the Sound: a peninsula really, like a fossil lizard swimming from Mount Batten golf links across the harbour towards Plymouth town. The sea is 30 yards from our hut one way, and 70 yards the other. The Camp officers are peaceful, it seems, and the airmen reasonably happy.”

  Safely out of London, Lawrence still kept up his connections to the great world, turning down Eddie Marsh’s invitation to present the Haw-thornden Prize to his friend Siegfried Sassoon, and writing in detail to Ernest Thurtle about his objection to the death penalty for cowardice—"A man who can run away is a potential V.C.,” he noted, from experience.

  He continued to write in detail to Trenchard abou
t RAF reforms, objecting to spurs for the officers and bayonets for the men. To another friend, an airman from Farnborough, he wrote with resignation, “I’m very weary of being stared at and discussed and praised. What can one do to be forgotten? After I’m dead, they’ll rattle my bones about, in their curiosity.”

  The cold of England ate into his bones—he “wished England could be towed some thousand miles to the South,” and at times he complained that he was “so tired, and want so much to lie down and sleep or die.” But he soon began to cheer up as his work became more interesting. No doubt he was also pleased to be serving as Wing Commander Smith’s clerk for the moment; he found himself instantly transformed into a kind of junior partner in running the station, even suggesting that the camp’s name should be changed to RAF Mount Batten and drafting a letter to the Air Ministry requesting the change. Smith signed the letter, and the request was quickly granted.

  Despite the absence of the seaplane squadron for the time being, Smith was busy. Apart from running the camp, he was also the RAF’s representative for the organization of the next Schneider Trophy competition, scheduled for the first week of September 1929, at Calshot, near Southampton. Named after a wealthy French industrialist—the trophy’s official name was La Coupe d’Aviation Maritime Jacques Schneider—this was a speed event flown by seaplanes over a course of 150 miles. It was first flown in 1912, and by the 1920s it had become one of the most glamorous and expensive contests in the world of aviation, and a test of the major industrial nations’ technology and aircraft design. The race had begun as an annual event, but in 1928 the Aéro-Club de France decided to change it to once every two years, in view of the increasing complexity and sophistication of the designs, and the growing world economic crisis. If any nation should win the trophy three times in a row, it would go to that nation in perpetuity. By 1929, the major contestants were Britain, the United States, and Italy—Germany did not enter, because the German government had no wish to draw attention to its fast-growing aircraft industry. The fastest aircraft were often those designed by Reginald J. Mitchell, of the Vickers-Supermarine Aviation Works. Mitchell would go on to design the “Spitfire,” which was based in part on his Schneider Trophy aircraft and would become perhaps the most successful (and most beautiful) fighter aircraft of World War II.