TE Lawrence

SERIES OF ARTICLES ABOUT DIFFERENT SIDES OF TE
This will be the first part of a series of articles about different sides of TE. (*1) In my opinion TE has become a fictitious personage for every friend, acquaintance or writer to project himself, his fantasies and interpretations on. TE was partly to blame for this, as his brother Arnold remarked to Jim Ede,   “I think you are not alone in finding it difficult to isolate the essential TE from the mind he merged in your own. I mean he tended to call things out of people rather than give them himself when he talked, and the result is that many think of him as rather like themsel­ves, but more so.”(*2)            He was an extraordinary adapter of behaviour, tending to take on the characteristics of the person he met, being able to see through the other’s eyes. He did not seem to have a clearcut, one-dimensional identity (this is who I am), but only a fragmented one, almost like a multiple personality (I am many). He did not seem to choose between these different sides, saying different things all the time, contra-dicting himself, which ultimately makes him into      an enigma, and a fascinating source of endless speculation.

                                                                                                                                                         BOYISHNESS
“When men remain boyish well into middle age, continuing to love pranks and practical jokes, to enjoy making animal noises with children and to seek attention by singing falsetto songs in public, it seems reasonable to interpret this immaturity as symp­tomatic – in part at least – of a reluctance to grow up.” (*3) This is a remark made by the biographer of a contemporary of TE, Lord Baden Powell (1857-1941). It seems to fit TE, since we find a reluctance in him of growing up,    of becoming and having the responsibility of an adult. It is best described by Ralph Isham (1890-1955) an American businessman who befriended TE after the war. “He resented his body’s permanent immaturity. He did not, I think, realize that his personality also would not quite grow up. His hatred for his body was a boy’s hatred; his fear of women was a boy’s fear; his terror of being noticed was     a boy’s terror. He liked pranks and stories as a boy does. His perception and reactions (….) were essentially those of a sensiti­ve child, immediate, int­uitive, emotional; that is why he was comforta­ble only with people of sim­plicity, and that is why it was such   a bitter shock to him to discover the worlds wicked­ness and selfishness when the tides drew him forth.” (*4)

This attitude of TE fits in the Victorian tradi­tion of what the writer Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) calls “Pe­rennial Boyish­ness”. It is the theory that child­hood experi­ences were so intense for many men that it came to domi­nate their lives and to arrest their devel­opment. Its symbol was Peter Pan, the boy who would not grow up (“puer aeternu­s”), and it implies a longing for a perpetual childhood. Children were regarded as sexless, cherubic, inno­cent, and pure, and becom­ing an adult felt like, “A fall from grace which is not compensated for by any doc­trine of future redemption; we enter the world, trail­ing clouds of glory, childhood and boyhood follow and we are damned. Certainly growing up seems a hurdle which most of us are unable to take.” (*5) Manifestations of “Perennial Boyish­ness” were an identificati­on with, and a sentimen-tal love of boys (*6), and a prolonged adolescen­ce, in which passionate emotional attach­ments to other men were the most significant of men’s lives. (*7)          

                                                                                                                                                         BOYISH LOOKS AND BEHAVIOUR
TE is often described as looking like a boy, even when he was over thirty. It ranges from “a strange boy” at 24,          to a “very beau­­­ti­ful (eternal) youth” when he was 45. (*8) This impression seems not only to be caused by his smallness of stature, being only 1,65m long, but also by his behaviour. His impish­ness and sense of mischief is often mentioned. Even in Paris during the Peace Conference of 1919, he had his share of “schoolboy fun”,       for example, when he showered toilet paper on Prime Minister Lloyd George (1863-1945) and Foreign Secretary James Balfour (1848-1930).(*9) “You are such a magician at leg-pulling, that one is unaware that one’s leg is off till you return that member with a non-committal air, as though you had just picked it up off the floor.” (*10)

                                                                                                                                           

PREFERRING PEOPLE OF SIMPLICITY
TE was very good with children, and wrote and spoke to them as if they were his own age. He wished kids didn’t have to grow up, since they     “are so beauti­ful, unfinished.” (*11) He felt more comfortable with “people         of simplicity”, usually less educated and younger than himself, like the Arabs at the archaeological diggings in Carchemish (1911-1914), his Arab body-guard during the Arab Revolt (1916-1918), and his fellows in the RAF and the Tank Corps (1922-1935). TE was very good with children, and wrote and spoke to them as if they were his own age. He wished kids didn’t have to grow up, since they “are so beauti­ful, unfinished.” (*11)        At Carchemish he said, “Our people are very curious and very simple, and yet there is a fund of directness and child-humour about them that is very fine.” (*12) It was during this period that he met Dahum (1896-1918), an Arab boy with whom he developed an intimate friendship. His body-guard during the Arab Revolt, consisted mainly of outsiders and boys, two of whom, Daud & Farraj, he idealized in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. “Their sins were elvish gaiety,      the thoughtles­sness of unba­lanced youth, the being happy when we were not (…)        two sunlit beings, on whom the shadow of the world had not yet fallen – the most gallant, the most enviable, I knew.” (*13) His life in the Military Services was     in a sense a boy’s life, since “he had gone back to his boyhood class and was at home.” (*14) Often he referred to his fellows as “the children” (or “the family”), while his house, Clouds Hill, became “an infant palace”. (*15) He enjoyed        his role as a loving, older and wiser friend, being particularly sensitive         to young men who were outsiders or in need, and he went to great lengths in his help and assistance to them. (*16)

                                                                                                                                                                   JUDGEMENTAL INTERPRETATION
At first sight this interpretation of TE’s boyishness seems to be very simple and straightforward.        The problem with it, however, is the judgment which speaks from it. Not growing up and still being  a boy implies living a child’s life and not an adult one, and not taking responsibility which is expected of an adult. And this is in my opinion certainly not the case with TE. He took responsibility for who he was and tried to manage his different sides as best as he could. He showed responsibility and commitment in his work (historian, archaeologist, map maker, leader of the Arab Revolt, politician, soldier, mechanic, writer) and all the things he did (being a friend, music lover, motor-rider, reader). Many consider it strange and childish that TE behaved in the fashion he did, putting “high value on      the child-quality in grown-ups” and sometimes even enjoying “arrested develop­ment in his adult friends.” (*17) But in my opinion it may be a good thing for a person’s mental health when he is able to give different sides of himself, including a boyish one, a place in his life, and to create a good balance between them.

PLAYFULNESS
What happens if we look at TE’s behaviour from a different perspective? But this time with an open mind, without judgment, and accept his behaviour for what it may have been for him? His boyishness may then be regarded as playfulness. Playfulness is looking at the world, in wonderment and amazement, as if everything is new. Imaginative, spontaneous, honest and free. To investigate, explore and discover by trial and error, without fear of failure. In play there is no failure, it can’t be wrong, since there are no rules. It can be what you want it to be, and therefore there are no judgements in it, and there is no strange or weird, childish or irresponsible. Playfulness is the opposite of the things you should be doing, of doing the right thing in the right way, and therefore it is the opposite of the critical mind. The famous artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) spoke of the importance of keeping this playful and creative part of ourselves alive, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, and a lifetime to paint like a child. (…) Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”  

IDEAL STANDARD
Playfulness was something TE had missed as a child, because he was never really allowed to be one. (*18) According to his younger brother Arnold, “A child­hood like his would create an unbalance in anyone’s mind. It brought about a very severe knack, even worse than the war.” (*19) This is a poignant statement, particularly the last part, because during the war TE experienced horrific warfare, and was tortured and raped by the Turks. He was forced to be an adult too early in      his life by the perfectionism of his mother, who wanted him to be     an immaculate child, and expected him to do something special with his life. She enforced this ideal standard with strict discipline and punishment. Mother’s perfectionism was eventually replaced by         a strong inner perfectionist (*20) and inner critic (*21), which led      TE to be very depreciative of his own achievements, and eventually to depression. TE suffered from too much responsibility during his childhood and during the Arab Revolt and its political aftermath, and therefore creating a special place for a playful part of himself in his life, may be considered as a rejection of the responsibility to be perfect.

                                                                                                                                                                  A SAFE PLACE
It was TE’s cottage Clouds Hill which became a refuge from the stan­dards of his mother and her English world of respectability and responsibility. It was         a place where there were no obligations, no expecta-tions, no rules. You were invited to live accor­ding to your own nature, to be your­self and to do the things you had always wanted to do, without bother­ing about what others would think. Over the door hang the sign Ou Phrontis, which sym­bo­li­zed that             “We weren’t to care, as soon as we were inside; we were to feel easy, and not worry about the world and its standards.” The phrase came from a story by the Greek historian Herodotus (484-425 BC): “A young man was going to marry a king’s daughter, but unfortunate­ly during the dinner party he got drunk, stood on his head on the table and began dancing with his legs in the air. The king was shocked at such conduct in a prospective son-in-law, and said to him severely: “You have danced away your bride.” But the young man didn’t care. He replied, “Ou Phrontis, “I don’t care”! And con­tinued to wave his legs in the air.”(*22)

TE’s cottage became the place where his male friends (*23) were welcome to spent time with him, not by appointment, but when the route and spirit would move them. His possessions, like his books and records, were theirs and he liked it when vi­si­tors left little evi­dences of their presence. The men who came, listened to music, talked, read books, drank water or tea, and ate out of tins, when and wher­ever they felt like it. TE was able to integrate differ­ent parts of his life, mixing classes and bringing together artists, writers, tank corpsmen, and airmen to enjoy each other’s common humanity. (*24) Clouds Hill became a safe place for TE, where he finally found some rest from his tumultuous life.

“It’s streaming with rain against the western window, and the trees are tossing: – not as if they were playing, but wearily, as though this fourth day of the wintry weather was too much against their longing to turn green: and inside it is calm as ever. We went out in the drift and looked under the rhododendron for dry stakes: and have got enough to make a red fire, in whose heat the damp fir-logs burn away freely: and Palmer is sitting in front of it with his hands folded waiting for the Rosenkavalier waltz to end. After it he wants a little bit of Mozart as played by the Lener. Palmer gets drunk on music: – likes the sort which makes him most drunk. Russell is reading the Dream: and shocking Palmer out of his peace by elbow digs now and then, when he comes on an extra-juicy paragraph. Meanwhile I’m out over by the very wet window (but on its dry side) writing to you. There’ll be tea when I’ve finished the letter and more and more animal contentment after that: till we wind up, when the dark comes, with a movement out of a Bach thing for two violins. We always finish with that, if the time is dark enough.” (*25)

 

NOTES
*1 Other sides which will be dealt with are: the inner critic, the perfectionist, the pusher, the adapter, the puritan and the beast.

*2 Letter Arnold Lawrence to Jim Ede 9-9-35, in: Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge).

*3 Tim Jeal – Baden-Powell (Hutchinson, London 1989),p.87

*4 A.W. Lawrence – T.E. Lawrence by his Friends (Jonathan Cape, London 1937),p.296/7. Leonard Woolley (1880-1960), who was with TE in Carchemish, speaks of “his essential immaturity” (T.E.Lawrence by his Friends,p.91) and George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), the famous writer says “… at forty he still had the grinning laugh and artless speech of a schoolboy; and powerful and capable as his mind was, I am not sure that it ever reached full maturity.” (T.E. Lawrence by his Friends,p.247) According to TE’s second cousin Lord Vansit­tart (1881-1957), he was “an ageless schoolboy, who did not grow up but grew ol­der.” (The Mist Pro-cession: The Autobiography of Lord Vansittart – Hutchinson, London 1958,p.261)

*5 Cyril Connolly – Enemies of Promise (Deutsch, London 1973),p.254

*6 This sentimental (Uranian) love of boys was usually chaste, since sexuality would desecrate         the innocence and purity of the beloved.

*7 Examples of these attachments are: Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) & Arthur Hallam (1811-1833), Robert Louis Ste­venson (1850-1894) & William Ernest Henley (1849-1903), Rudyard Kipling (1863-1936) & Wolcott Balestier (1861-1891). And more fictitious: Sherlock Holmes & Dr Watson and Robinson Crusoe & Friday.

*8 James Elroy Flecker calls him “a strange boy” after their first meeting. (Letter to Frank Savery           10-1-1912, in: James E. Flecker “The Letters of J.E. Flecker to Frank Savery” – Beaumont Press, London 1926 – quoted by Phil O’Brien, TEL Whittier List 24-3-1999). Colonel Richard Meinertz­hagen speaks    of “a pleasure boy” when he first laid eyes on him in 1917. (Colonel R. Meinertzhagen – Middle East Diary 1917-1956 – Cresset Press, London 1959,p.28) Colonel Eduard Bremond calls him “a Catholic choir boy”, when he saw TE in 1918 wearing white Arab robes in Boulogne (John E. Mack – A Prince of our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence - Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London 1977,p.259) Eric Kenning­ton says he was “a small, grinning hatless kid”. (T.E. Lawrence by his Friends,p.262) E.M. Forster, when he first meets TE in 1921, remembers him as “a small fair-haired boy”.(T.E. Lawrence by his Friends,282).            And Flight-Lieutenant Sims describes TE in his thirties as “a very small boy, angeli­cally fair, from whom another boy has just pinched an apple” (T.E. Lawrence by his Friends,p.550), and when TE was about 45 as a “very beau­­­ti­ful (eternal) youth”. (T.E. Lawrence by his Friends,p.552). John Buchan is the only one who describes TE as looking “like a pretty girl”, and mentions “his girlish face”. (Buchan, speech 1939 – quoted in: Andrew Lownie – The Friendship of Lawrence & Buchan, in: Journal of the TEL Society 1 (1995),p.57 and 64).

*9 Lawrence James – The Golden Warrior: the Life & Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London 1990),p.311 

*10 Letter from H.M. Tomlinson 5-12-1928, in: A.W. Lawrence (ed.) – Letters to T.E. Lawrence (Jonathan Cape, London 1962),p.189

*11 Letter to Lord Lloyd 22-1-1929, in: Malcolm Brown (ed.) – The Letters of T.E. Lawrence (J.M. Dent & Sons, London 1988),p.399

*12 Letter to his parents and brothers 18-6-1911, in: John E. Mack – A Prince of our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London 1977),p.91

*13 T.E. Lawrence – Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Jonathan Cape, London 1935),p.311. In reali­ty their names were Ali and Othman (J.M. Wilson – Lawrence of Arabia: the Authorised Biography of T.E. Lawrence – Heinemann, London 1989,p.492/3)

*14 “To friends who wondered aloud how he could endure the company of the barrack-room and its bareness          TE might retort, almost fiercely, that he had gone back to his boyhood class and was at home.” (Comments     and corrections by TE on Liddell Hart’s typescript for his biography on TE, June/July 1933, in:       T.E. Lawrence to his Biographer Liddell Hart – Doubleday, New York 1963,p.79)

*15 “What can I do for you, child?” (Paul Tunbridge – With Lawrence in the Royal Air Force -Buckland Publications, Kemsing 2000,p.39). “One of the children might come, too.” “The family is sitting still and reading, in expectation of a large tea shortly.” (Letter to Charlotte Shaw 6-4-1924, in: Jeremy & Nicole Wilson (eds.) – T.E. Lawrence Correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw 1922-1926 – Castle Hill Press 2000,p.72-73). “It will be an infant palace …” (Letter to Charlotte Shaw 3-10-1933, in: Jeremy & Nicole Wilson (eds.) – T.E. Lawrence Correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw 1929-1935 – Castle Hill Press 2009,p.203).

*16 “The Air Force fellows are like Oxford undergraduates in their second term … buds just opening after the restraint of school and home. Their first questioning, their first doubt of an established convention or law or practice, opens a flood-gate in their minds for if one thing is doubtful all things are doubtful: the world to them has been       a con­crete, founded, polished thing: and the first crack is porten­tous. So the Farnborough fellows used to come to me there, after “lights out” and sit on the box by my bed, and ask questions about every rule of conduct and experience, and about mind and soul and body: and I, since I was lying on my back, could answer suc­cinctly and with illumination.” (Letter to Charlotte Shaw 31-8-1924, in: Malcolm Brown (ed.) – The Letters of T.E. Lawrence – J.M. Dent & Sons, London 1988, p.273). When Baden Powell served as an officer in the army       he always made friends with young men, which was rather an exception because of the snobbery invol­ved. He would talk to them about their homes, their morals, their feelings, and their pros­pects, and sometimes he would give them money, but mostly advice.  (Tim Jeal – Baden-Powell – Hutchinson, London 1989, p.99-100)                                                                                

*17 Eric Kennington, in: T.E. Lawrence by his Friends,p.276-277

*18 Notes on a conversation between Jim Ede and Arnold Lawrence 1937, in: Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge). More about TE’s childhood in the next article on this blog.

*19 “The demon of the absolute” as André Malraux (1901-1976) called it. “One of the sorest things in life is     to come to realise that one is just not good enough. Bet­ter perhaps than some, than many, almost – but I do not care for rela­tives, for mat­ching my­self against my kind. There is an ideal stand­ard some­where and only that matters; and I cannot find it. Hence this aim­lessness.” (Letter to Eric Kennington 6-8-1934, in: David Garnett (ed.) – The Letters of T.E. Lawrence – Jonathan Cape, London 1938,p.813-4)

*21 “My detached self always eyeing the performance through the wings in criti­cism.” (T.E. Lawrence -                 Seven Pillars of Wisdom – Jonathan Cape, London 1935,p.562) “I have a censorious devil within me …”  (Letter to Robin Buxton 11-5-1923, in: Harold Orlans – T.E. Lawrence: Biography of a Broken Hero – McFarland, Jefferson 2002,p.192)

*22 E.M. Forster – Clouds Hill, in: Two Cheers for Democracy (Edward Arnold, London 1951),p.352.     The story is from Herodotus’ The Persian Wars (book 6, chapter 129). The dancer is Hippo­cleides,          the Prin­cess, who lost a husband, Agarista, and the king Cleisthenes.

*23 “I don’t like women in my place, anyhow; but am too perfect the little gent to refuse them.” (Letter to Jock Chambers 26-1-1935, in: David Garnett (ed.) – The Letters of T.E. Lawrence – Jonathan Cape, London 1938,p.841

*24 “Two or three other men – some­times more – of widely different types were among the regular visitors to Clouds Hill in those days. TE was an expert at “mixed grills” where men were con­cer­ned. He presided over the com­pany, settling argu­ments, patiently answering all manner of questions, feeding the gramophone, making tea, stoking the fire, and by some magic of his own, managing to keep everyone in good humour.” (Alec Dixon, in: T.E. Lawrence by his Friends,p.375)

*25 Letter to Charlotte Shaw 30-4-1924, in: Jeremy & Nicole Wilson (eds.) – T.E. Lawrence Correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw 1922-1926 (Castle Hill Press 2000),p.73/4. TE had met both “Posh” Palmer (1902-1983) and Arthur Russell (1904-1991) in the Tank Corps. They were “joyous to look at together: but they break all the furniture where they go”, as TE says in the same letter.

A FAMILY STORY
A British/Dutch family recently contacted me to make sense of an important chapter of their family history. It raises an interesting question: was the motorcycle accident which led to TE’s death the consequence of a blackout?

Imagine yourself in Lincolnshire (England) in 1929. Fifteen year old Joyce is walking home from work. While coming down Cross O’ Cliff Hill, she sees a large motorcycle on its kickstand at the side of the road with the engine still running. After looking around, she spots a man lying in a ditch. He is in quite a bad way, shaking, sweating and delirious, speaking a load of nonsense. She turns the motor-cycle off and struggles to take the man to her home, which is a few miles away in the city of Lincoln. Her mother imme-diately tends to him, while her older brother goes off to fetch his bike. The man, who is well looked after for a few days, bears the name Shaw and serves in the RAF. (*1)

           You can follow this story on the map.
Point A: Place where Shaw was lying at the side of the road.
Point B: Joyce’s home, where Shaw was looked after.
Point 2: RAF Cranwell, where Shaw was based in 1925 and 1926.

For me the most interesting part of this story is the fact that TE         (who called himself Shaw at that time) became unwell, and had       to park his motorcycle at the side of the road to come to his senses. This is especially interesting because the combination of riding          a motorcycle and having fits might have played an instrumental role in the accident which caused his death.

MOTORCYCLING
TE had a serious passion for motorcycling, and rode the best model going: the famous Brough Superior. Riding it helped him through difficult times. Because of his war and rape trauma, he suffered from depression, and sometimes he was on the verge of madness.            To chase off “the broody feeling” (*2) and the restlessness, “movement fast in the night” helped him to temporarily cure his mind. (*3) “When my mood gets too hot and I find myself wande­ring beyond control I pull out my motor-bike and hurl it top-speed through these unfit roads for hour after hour. My nerves are jaded and gone near dead, so that nothing less than hours of voluntary danger will prick them into life; and the ‘life’ they reach then is a melancholy joy at risking something worth exactly 2/9 a day.” (*4)

Sometimes he drove like a madman, with speeds up to 108 miles an hour (173,5 km). (*5) Consequently he also had accidents. For example in May 1926 he got caught with his wheel in a tramline, which left him bleeding from the head and unconscious for a short while. (*6) Later that year he cracked his knee in another accident, ruining his bike. (*7)

BLACKOUTS
In this story, we find TE lying in a ditch, suffering from what appears to be a traumatic black-out.      The first time I heard of TE’s blackouts was in an exchange of letters between his two friends, Celandine Kennington (*8) and Jim Ede (*9), where they speak about witnessing TE having “epileptic fits”. (*10) It did not make sense to me at that time, because I had never heard any mention of it before. But during my research on trauma, I found that there were more soldiers and officers from the First World War who suffered from fits.

These fits were anxiety reactions, caused by dissociated traumatic memories, which would suddenly and unexpectedly take over. And making the victim act as if he were again experi­encing the traumatic situ­ation, leading to violent fright and panic, just as in the orig­inal events or even worse. Psycho-somatic symptoms like shaking and shivering all over and loosing consciousness, are the nervous system’s attempt to contain the intense survival energies that remain in body and mind as the result of unresolved trauma. Reliving these traumatic memories would occur in nightmares or even night terrors during sleep, and in flash­backs and dissociative episodes during the day.

TE had them all. Horrible dreams made him afraid         of going to sleep, leading to insomnia and to an intensification of his symptoms because of exhaustion. The flashbacks and episodes during the day led people to wonder if TE was practising meditation or yoga, because he could suddenly “go dead”, sitting in the same position for hours, without moving and with the same expres-sion on his face. Others considered him to be moody and introspective, because he could suddenly shut himself off in the middle of a conversation and seem to be miles away.

The blackouts are usually triggered by cues that remind the victim in some way of the traumatic situation, or by new situations which cause feelings of powerlessness and fear. TE’s writing about his experiences, though helpful for integration in the long run, possibly made   his situation worse. Particularly because of his ambitions surrounding it, to fulfil his wish to become a cre­ative artist, and write one of the great books of his time, like Tol­stoy’s War and Peace or Mel­ville’s Moby Dick.               His consciousness became dominated by remembering, and by again being awash with the emotions and sensations involved, which may have been traumatizing in itself.

After a blackout the victim does not remember a thing: he has blacked out. If anything, he only knows that time has been lost inexplic­a­bly. Losing control over his own body and mind must have horrified TE, since self-control was essential to him. Therefore it must have come as a great shock to learn that it was not his rea­son, but the “traitors from with­in” (*11) which ruled him. His will proved to be unable to neutralize the traumatic images which caused emotional out­bursts. If his will was not able to con­trol his inner self, who or what would? To make it even worse, reli­ving traumatic experiences and emotions sometimes bring about an extreme consci­ous­ness of repres­sed and negated fee­lings. Thus old fears and possibly old traumas, which had been successfully suppres­sed, also came to the surface again. As TE says, “there is the school-fear over me”. (*12)

It should be clear by this point, that it is very easy to underestimate the importance and influence of these blackouts on TE’s life after the war. Having sudden and continuous re-experiences of his rape and war trauma, in the form of blackouts and nightmares, and bringing with it a return of old fears from his childhood, meant an enor­mous attack on his mental and physical stamina, and brought TE on the verge of mad­ness. Fear and anxiety dominated his life: “Fear again; fear everywhere.” (*13) Fear of peop­le, fear of a repeat of the events, fear of a loss of con­trol. He felt himself to be excessive­ly vulner­a­ble, power­less and hel­pless. To deal with his fears and to protect himself from his own frightening reactions, he chose an ordered life for himself, in the armed forces as an ordinary private. While he also started to study the psychol­ogy of fear. (*14)

DEATH
The family story told here, indicates that it is very likely that TE had more incidents caused by black-outs, both with and without his motorcycle. Therefore I would like to suggest a relation with his fatal accident on May 13, 1935. While riding his motorcycle that day, he suddenly came upon two boys on bicycles in a dip of the road. He swerved to avoid them, which caused him to be thrown from his machine. A strange accident, because TE knew the road extremely well, having lived nearby since 1923. Therefore he would have experienced incoming traffic regularly on that particular stretch of the road. Besides, he was only doing 40 miles an hour, which for an experienced rider like TE was nothing special, and would have given him enough time to react if something unusual would occur. A sudden blackout would explain this otherwise inexplicable accident, which left TE unconscious. After six days in a coma, he died in hospital on May 19, 1935 from severe brain damage. (*15)

NOTES

*1 Shaw, as TE called himself officially in those days, was at that time based at RAF Cattewater, in Plymouth (Devon), after his sudden return from India in February 1929. From August 1925 until November 1926, he had served near Lincoln, at RAF Cranwell, which is merely 13½ miles from the place where this story starts. Therefore he might have been visiting old friends at Cranwell. Another reason for being in Lincoln at that time could have been a visit to the motorcycle factory of George Brough in Nottingham (32 miles from Lincoln), for a check up to his brand new motorcycle. 

*2 Letter from TE to Charlotte Shaw 26-12-1925, in: Jeremy & Nicole Wilson (eds.) – T.E. Lawrence Correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw 1922-1926 (Castle Hill Press 2000),p.158

*3 T.E. Lawrence – Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Jonathan Cape, London 1935),p.518

*4 Letter from TE to Lionel Curtis 14-5-1923, in: Malcolm Brown (ed.) – The Letters of T.E. Lawrence (J.M. Dent & Sons, London 1988),p.237

*5 Letter from TE to John Buchan 5-7-1925, in: David Garnett (ed.) – The Letters of T.E. Lawrence (Jonathan Cape, London 1938),p.478

*6 Heanor & District Local History Society Newsletter 234 (1999), quoted on T.E. Lawrence Studies List 23-11-1999.

*7 Letter to Pat Knowles 30-11-1926, T.E. Lawrence Studies List 19-6-1998.

*8 Celandine Kennington (1886-1975), usually known as Mrs Kennington, was the wife of Eric Kennington (1880-1960) the artist who worked with TE on Seven Pillars of Wisdom. TE became friends with both Eric and his wife.        She was suffering from manic depression, and felt a special connection         with both TE, who comforted her on a few occasions, and his mother.

*9 Harold Stanley Ede (1895-1990), better known as Jim Ede, was assistant curator at the Tate Gallery from 1921 to 1936. It became his vision that art should be shared in a relaxed environment and not in a museum, and he brought this open house principle to practice by opening up the wonderful art collection in his house Kettle’s Yard (in Cambridge) to the public. He left it to the University, and I would definitely advise you to visit it, if you have the chance.                                          Ede was a very sensitive man, and suffered an emotional disturbance in the latter part of 1929. While he tended to blame the war for his difficulties, TE tried to help him obtain a more balanced perspective. He wrote that TE “by his kindly sanity on his various visits helped me considerably at this period.” After his death in 1935, Ede started working on a biography about TE, but became depressed studying his life, and never finished it.

*10 Correspondence in Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge.

*11 T.E. Lawrence – Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Jonathan Cape, London 1935),p.468

*12 T.E. Lawrence – The Mint (Jonathan Cape, London 1973),p.154

*13 Letter to Charlotte Shaw 28-9-1925, in: Malcolm Brown (ed.) – The Letters of T.E. Lawrence          (J.M. Dent & Sons, London 1988),p.290. Chapter 4 of his memories of his life in the Tank Corps and the RAF, The Mint, is titled “The Fear”. “The root-trouble is fear: fear of fai­ling, fear of brea­king down.”        (The Mint,p.154). “For a moment my bedfellow was perfect fe­ar.” (The Mint, p.24)  

*14 Arnold Lawrence in: A.W. Lawrence – T.E. Lawrence by his Friends (Jonathan Cape, London 1937),p.590

*15 The film fragment of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) showing TE’s accident, was not filmed at the original location in Dorset, but on a minor road outside Chobham in Surrey. It must be noted too, that in reality the boys on the bicycles were not cycling towards TE, but were riding in the same direction, probably on the wrong side of the road.