Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (99 page)

Lady Astor’s suggestion that he would soon be offered the job of reorganizing Britain’s defenses should be taken with a grain of salt. As a member of Parliament and the wife of the immensely wealthy owner of
The Observer
she was in the habit of assuming that all her suggestions would be taken seriously. Except for Winston Churchill, there was nobody whose advice on matters of defense Stanley Baldwin was less likely to take seriously than Nancy Astor; nor did defense and foreign policy hold much interest for Baldwin to begin with—he was reported to sleep soundly through cabinet meetings whenever either of these subjects was discussed. His motto might have been peace at any price: not just peace in Europe, but also peace from Lady Astor’s importuning him. Nor is it even remotely likely that Baldwin would have given Lawrence a place in reorganizing the national defenses, first of all because his policy was to let sleeping dogs lie, and second because Lawrence, like Churchill, represented exactly the kind of enthusiastic and publicity-attracting amateur strategist whom Baldwin most distrusted.
*
Baldwin’s ambition was to rely as much as possible on solid Tory party figures and professional civil servants—the more cautious, the better—and until very late in the day he continued to believe that Hitler could be bought off by territorial concessions or would come to his senses like a reasonable man, as did Lady Astor, for that matter.

On May 12, 1935, Lawrence wrote what was almost certainly his last letter, to K. T. Parker, “keeper” of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, to express his pleasure that Augustus John’s portrait of Hogarth would be hung in the Ashmolean—where, as a child, Lawrence had left pottery shards he had dug up, for Hogarth’s scrutiny. “At present I am sitting in my cottage and getting used to an empty life,” he wrote, but without any trace of self-pity or depression. Indeed, he ended the letter on a hopeful note.

He had, in the meantime, received a letter from Henry Williamson, an acquaintance who was the author of
Tarka the Otter,
a book Lawrence had greatly admired. Williamson was a member of the British Union of Fascists, but the purpose of his letter was not to convert Lawrence to Sir Oswald Mosley’s cause, but to get advice about a manuscript that had been entrusted to Williamson by V. M. Yeates, the author of
Winged Victory,
before his death. Yeates was also an author Lawrence admired—
Winged Victory,
a harrowing semiautobiographical account of a fighter pilot’s experience of air combat during the war, was regarded as a classic by most readers at the time—so it is hardly surprising that Lawrence invited Williamson to have lunch with him at Clouds Hill. If there was anybody who knew everything there was to know about editing and publishing an account of war, it was Lawrence. There is no reason to believe that Lawrence was becoming more interested in Fascism, or that Williamson was coming to recruit him.

On the morning of Monday, May 13, Lawrence rode to the nearest post office, at Wool, the village just outside Bovington Camp, with a parcel of books he wanted to send to a friend. He also sent Williamson a telegram: “LUNCH TUESDAY WET FINE. COTTAGE ONE MILE NORTH BOVINGTON CAMPSHAW.”

In keeping with the mysteries that surround Lawrence’s life, much has been made of this seemingly innocuous telegram, suggesting some urgency on Lawrence’s part. But since Williamson had concluded his letter to Lawrence with, “I’ll call in anyway on Tuesday unless rainy day,” Lawrence’s “WET FINE” had no such connotation. He was simply saying, in effect, “Come for lunch Tuesday, never mind the weather,” a very sensible reply in England. The cryptic quality that some scholars find there is merely a reflection of the way people compressed telegram messages to the bare minimum of words and punctuation. Lawrence was not wealthy, and every word had to be paid for. Having completed his errands he got back on his motorcycle and set out for home, a trip of about a mile and a half.

The road between Bovington and Lawrence’s cottage should have presented no special problems. It was and remains a narrow country road with several bends, but no sharp curves. The sides of the road are either steep or heavily wooded. There are three dips, deep enough so that any one of them might conceal an oncoming vehicle momentarily; and in 1935 the surface was still tar, on top of which loose gravel had been sprinkled. For obvious reasons this is not an ideal surface for a motorcycle—loose gravel always presents a danger—but Lawrence knew the road well, and was an experienced rider. What appears to have happened was that he approached one of the dips in the road at about thirty-eight miles per hour or less (the motorcycle was found still in second gear after the accident), and did not realize that two local boys on bicycles were in front of him, since they were concealed in the dip. Instead of riding one behind the other, they were riding side by side, going in the same direction as he was, so when Lawrence suddenly saw them, he had no easy way to get around them. He must have swerved sharply to avoid hitting them and braked hard at the same time, but he hit the rear wheel of one of the bicycles, at which point he lost control of his motorcycle; the brakes may have jammed, the bike may have skidded, and he was thrown forward over the handlebars. The bike fell away to the right, spinning in the loose gravel and gouging a mark in the road, while Lawrence landed on his head, then slid off the road, coming to a stop as his head hit a tree trunk. The first impact was hard enough to kill him, though it did not. He was unconscious, however, and bleeding heavily.

Probably no vehicle accident up until Princess Diana’s has received more detailed scrutiny than Lawrence’s. His death has been variously ascribed to a foreign or domestic assassination, or to some combination of death wish and speed, or suicide. True, Lawrence had written “In speed we hurl ourselves beyond the body,” and he loved riding at high speeds, but it was subsequently established that he was going less than forty miles an hour when he was killed, so he was neither a victim of high-speed driving nor a successful suicide. As for the assassination theory, there seems no very good reason why either the British or the German intelligence service would have wanted Lawrence dead. Although
The Daily Express
would claim that he carried “the plans for the defence of England in his head,” that too seems a typical Fleet Street exaggeration. Certainly Lawrence had
ideas
on the subject, but he was not privy to any secrets.

Though nobody said so at the inquest, his death was yet another proof that a motorcycle accident at
any
speed is dangerous. The helmets of the day were not scientifically designed to prevent head injury, and in any case Lawrence never wore a proper helmet—in extremely bad weather he sometimes wore a leather flying helmet, which would have offered no protection from impact. If he had landed on his side he might have suffered nothing worse than a few broken bones, but he was thrown forward and instead landed on his head, fracturing the skull.

The subsequent inquest and many further investigations by private individuals do not provide much more than this in the way of fact. A soldier, Corporal Catchpole, who heard the crash and ran to the site of the accident claimed to have seen a black car speeding away from the scene; the boys denied that they were riding side by side, no doubt warned by their parents not to admit that they had been breaking the law, though they were notorious for larking about on the road; and some people have speculated that the front brake cable in Lawrence’s Brough may have snapped, although this seems unlikely: Lawrence was always conscientious to the point of fussiness about maintaining his bikes.

Catchpole flagged down a passing army lorry, and ordered the driver to take Lawrence and one of the boys, who had sustained minor injuries, to the Bovington camp hospital, the nearest medical facility, where Lawrence was quickly identified. After that the army took control, although Lawrence was a civilian and the accident had taken place on a civilian road. All ranks were warned that they were not to talk to newspapermen, and reminded that they were subject to the Official Secrets Act; newspaper editors were informed that bulletins about Lawrence’s health would be issued by the War Office. As anyone could have predicted, this had the effect of increasing interest in Lawrence’s crash, adding a note of mystery to what was simply a tragic road accident. Even without that, however, it was a major news story throughout the world. Arnold Lawrence was informed of the accident by the Cambridge police, and arrived the next day at Clouds Hill with his wife.

Lawrence lay unconscious in the hospital at the army camp he had disliked so much when he was exiled from his beloved RAF. Distinguished specialists in brain injuries were sent for; the king dispatched two of his own physicians, including the future Lord Dawson of Penn, and telephoned himself, asking to be kept informed. The Home Office, not wanting affairs left entirely in the hands of the military, sent two plainclothes officers from Scotland Yard, one to sit in Lawrence’s room, while his relief slept on a cot outside in the corridor. To be fair, this was probably less from any fear of foreign agents or security issues than to prevent an enterprising newspaper photographer from finding a way in to take a picture of Lawrence on his deathbed.

Everything that could be done was done, given the limited facilities of the Bovington camp hospital; but as the doctors had concluded after examining Lawrence, the case was hopeless.

Lawrence lingered six days, never regaining consciousness, with his lungs becoming increasingly congested, and died just after eight in the morning on Sunday, May 19.

He was forty-six years old.

Postmortem examination revealed that Lawrence would have lost his memory and would have been paralyzed had he survived.

He was buried in the nearby churchyard of Moreton. His old friend Ronald Storrs (now Sir Ronald, and governor of Cyprus) was the chief pallbearer. The others were the artist Eric Kennington; Colonel Stewart Newcombe, who had known Lawrence since the Sinai survey before the war; a neighbor; and two service friends of Lawrence’s, one from the army and the other from the RAF.

The small ceremony was quiet, despite a mob of photographers and reporters, and many of Lawrence’s friends were present: Winston Churchill and his wife, Lady Astor, Mrs. Thomas Hardy, Allenby, Siegfried Sassoon, Lionel Curtis, Augustus John, Wavell, Alan Dawnay. As the coffin was lowered into the ground the soldier and the airman, on opposite sides of the grave, shook hands over it; and at the last moment a neighbor’s little girl ran forward and threw a bunch of violets on the top of it.

Nancy Astor, in tears, ran to put her arms around Churchill, who was also in tears, and cried, “Oh, Winnie, Winnie, we’ve lost him.”

The king’s message to Arnold Lawrence would appear the next day in the
Times:

The King has heard with sincere regret of the death of your brother, and deeply sympathizes with you and your family in this sad loss.

Your brother’s name will live in history, and the King gratefully recognizes his distinguished services to his country and feels that it is tragic that the end should have come in this manner to a life still so full of promise.

Perhaps fortunately, because of his gifts of description, Ronald Storrs—who had taken the young Lawrence with him on his journey to Jidda in 1916, and had watched him wave good-bye from the shore at Rabegh, the day before his ride up-country to the meeting with Feisal and, in Storrs’s words, to “write his page, brilliant as a Persian miniature, in the History of England"—was the last to see him before his burial.

I stood beside him lying swathed in fleecy wool; stayed until the plain oak coffin was screwed down. There was nothing else in the mortuary chamber but a little altar behind his head with some lilies of the valley and red roses. I had come prepared to be greatly shocked by what I saw, but his injuries had been at the back of his head, and beyond some scarring and discolouration over the left eye, his countenance was not marred. His nose was sharper and delicately curved, and his chin less square. Seen thus, his face was the face of Dante with perhaps the more relentless mouth of Savonarola; incredibly calm, with the faintest flicker of disdain…. Nothing of his hair, nor of his hands was showing; only a powerful cowled mask, dark-stained ivory against the dead chemical sterility of the wrappings. It was somehow unreal to be watching beside him in these cerements, so strangely resembling the
aba,
the
kuffiya
and the
agal
of an Arab Chief, as he lay in his last littlest room, very grave and strong and noble.

His plain, modest headstone merely describes him as “T. E. Lawrence, Fellow of All Souls College,” as if even in death he was still resisting the rank of colonel and all his decorations. Below are inscribed the words:

The hour is coming & now is

When the dead shall hear

The Voice of the

SON OF GOD

And they that hear shall live.

They were placed there, we may be sure, to please his mother, rather than from any wish of Lawrence’s, who was at best a nominal Christian. At the foot of the grave is a smaller stone, in the shape of an open book, bearing the words ”dominus illuminatio mea,” which may be translated “The Lord is my light,” but which can also mean “May God enlighten me.”

The open book and the Latin phrase form part of the heraldic coat of arms of Oxford University, and it is perhaps the most fitting memorial to Lawrence, who grew up among the ancient walls and towers of Oxford, and whose character was formed by it more than by any other single element, perhaps the most extreme example of the scholar turned hero in the eleven centuries of its existence.