T. E. Lawrence

T. E. Lawrence was a young Oxford archaeologist who became a British liaison officer with the Arab forces fighting the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, and afterwards, through a showman's lectures and his own memoir, the legendary "Lawrence of Arabia". Much of what the public came to believe about him rests on his own account, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and historians have long worked to separate that account from what other records confirm.

Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in Tremadog, north Wales, on 16 August 1888, the second of five sons of an Anglo-Irish landowner, Thomas Chapman, and Sarah Junner, a former governess; the couple never married and lived under the name Lawrence. The family settled in Oxford in 1896. While reading history at Jesus College he walked alone through Ottoman Syria in 1909 to study crusader castles. He graduated with first-class honours in 1910. From then until 1914 he worked on the British Museum's excavation at Carchemish in northern Syria under D. G. Hogarth and Leonard Woolley, learning Arabic.

Commissioned in October 1914, Lawrence joined the new Arab Bureau, a military intelligence unit in Cairo, drawing maps and questioning prisoners. Britain was then negotiating with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who offered to lead an Arab rising in return for a promise of independence. At the same time Britain and France were secretly agreeing the Sykes–Picot Agreement, which divided much of the region between them; when Lawrence learned of it is uncertain.

The Arab Revolt began in June 1916 but soon stalled. Sent to the Hejaz that October, Lawrence judged Hussein's son Faisal the best leader and became his liaison officer. With Faisal he favoured a strategy of leaving the Ottoman garrison at Medina isolated while raiding the Hejaz railway and pushing north towards Syria. He took part in many raids on the railway and in battles such as Tafilah in January 1918, for which he received the Distinguished Service Order. In July 1917 an Arab force led by Sharif Nasir and the tribal leader Auda Abu Tayi, with Lawrence accompanying it, took the port of Aqaba from the landward side, after which the British commander Edmund Allenby backed the campaign. Damascus surrendered to the 10th Light Horse, a cavalry regiment of Allenby's army, on 1 October 1918; Lawrence arrived some hours later and helped set up an Arab administration under Faisal.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom, first printed privately in 1926, is the main source for Lawrence's inner story, and some of it cannot be checked. He wrote that in November 1917 he was captured in disguise at Dera'a and beaten and sexually assaulted; there is no independent testimony, and while several biographers accept the account, others think he exaggerated it or that it did not happen. His own notebooks show that a famous camel crossing of Sinai took over 70 hours with rest stops, not the 49 sleepless hours of the book. He also claimed to have served briefly as a boy soldier, of which army records show no trace. Near Tafas in 1918, after Ottoman troops massacred villagers, Arab fighters killed their prisoners with his encouragement.

Lawrence attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 with Faisal, whose kingdom in Damascus the French ended in 1920. The American journalist Lowell Thomas's lecture shows made him a celebrity, which he later regretted. He then advised Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office for about a year. In 1922 he enlisted in the RAF as an ordinary airman under a false name; exposed, he served in the Tank Corps as T. E. Shaw, returned to the RAF in 1925 and helped develop fast rescue boats. Two months after leaving the service, he crashed his motorcycle near his cottage in Dorset on 13 May 1935 and died on 19 May. The inquest was hurried, but his death is generally accepted as an accident.

Our 1914 map shows the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the revolt, and the 1920 map shows the new mandates drawn up during the partition of the Ottoman Empire.