T. E. Lawrence

• 1. Introduction

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  T. E. Lawrence wrote that he once crossed the Sinai Peninsula, from Aqaba to the Suez Canal, in just 49 hours without any sleep. His own notebooks say otherwise. The famous camel ride took more than 70 hours and included two long breaks for sleeping. Lawrence left those breaks out when he wrote his book.

  That small edit hints at a larger puzzle. Under the name Lawrence of Arabia, he became an international celebrity for his part in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. He was a British Army officer, an archaeologist, a diplomat and a writer, and he described his own adventures so vividly that readers around the world believed him.

  How did a studious young man end up advising an Arab army? Who turned an obscure officer into a household name, and what did that fame cost him? And when the storyteller himself left gaps in the record, how much of the legend can be trusted?

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• 2. Roots and Ruins

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  Thomas Edward Lawrence was born on the 16th of August 1888 in Tremadog, Carnarvonshire, in a house called Gorphwysfa, now known as Snowdon Lodge. His father, Thomas Chapman, was an Anglo-Irish landowner who had left his wife Edith. He had then fathered a son with Sarah Junner, the governess to his daughters. Sarah had irregular beginnings of her own. She was born in Sunderland to Elizabeth Junner, a servant of a family named Lawrence. Elizabeth was dismissed four months before the birth and named the father as "John Junner, Shipwright journeyman".

  Sarah and Thomas Chapman never married. They lived together under the pseudonym Lawrence, and they had five sons. The second eldest, Thomas, was called "Ned" by his immediate family. In 1914 his father inherited the Chapman baronetcy, based at Killua Castle, the ancestral home in County Westmeath, Ireland.

  In 1889 the family left Wales for Kirkcudbright in Galloway, in southwestern Scotland, and then kept moving. Next came the Isle of Wight, the New Forest, Dinard in Brittany and Jersey. From 1894 to 1896 they lived at Langley Lodge, set in private woods between the New Forest and Southampton Water. There the young Lawrence found plenty of outdoor activity and trips to the waterfront. The house has since been demolished.

  In the summer of 1896 the family settled at 2 Polstead Road in Oxford, and they stayed until 1921. The wooden shed built in the garden so that Lawrence could study as a schoolboy still stands. From 1896 until 1907 he attended the City of Oxford High School for Boys. One of its four houses was later named Lawrence in his honour, though the school closed in 1966. He and one of his brothers became commissioned officers in the Church Lads' Brigade at St Aldate's Church.

  At 15, Lawrence cycled with his schoolfriend Cyril Beeson around Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. They stopped at almost every village parish church to study its monuments and make rubbings of the brasses. The two boys also watched Oxford building sites and handed whatever they found to the Ashmolean Museum. The museum's Annual Report for 1906 said they "by incessant watchfulness secured everything of antiquarian value which has been found."

  In the summers of 1906 and 1907, Lawrence toured France by bicycle, sometimes with Beeson, gathering photographs, drawings and measurements of medieval castles. In August 1907 he wrote home with some pride about his accent: "the Chaignons and the Lamballe people complimented me on my wonderful French: I have been asked twice since what part of France I came from".

  From 1907 to 1910 Lawrence read history at Jesus College, Oxford, and joined the University Officers' Training Corps with enthusiasm. In July and August 1908 he cycled 2,200 miles alone through France to the Mediterranean and back, studying castles. In the summer of 1909 he set out on a three-month walking tour of crusader castles in Ottoman Syria, covering 1,000 miles on foot. He graduated with First Class Honours after submitting a thesis titled The Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture, to the End of the 12th Century. His brother Arnold later wrote that these "medieval researches" were a "dream way of escape from bourgeois England".

  In 1910 D. G. Hogarth offered Lawrence a place as a practising archaeologist on the British Museum expedition he was setting up at Carchemish. Hogarth arranged a scholarship called a Senior Demyship at Magdalen College, Oxford, worth £100 a year. In December 1910 Lawrence sailed for Beirut and went to Byblos in Lebanon, where he studied Arabic. He then joined the dig at Carchemish, near Jerablus in northern Syria, working under Hogarth, R. Campbell Thompson and Leonard Woolley until 1914. He later said that everything he had achieved he owed to Hogarth.

  At Carchemish Lawrence met Gertrude Bell. In 1912 he worked briefly with Flinders Petrie at Kafr Ammar in Egypt. Back at Carchemish, a German-led team building the Baghdad Railway nearby was a constant source of tension. There was never open combat, but the two sides regularly clashed over access to land and the treatment of local workers. Lawrence gained experience in Middle Eastern leadership and in settling disputes.

  In January 1914 Woolley and Lawrence were co-opted by the British military to act as an archaeological smokescreen for a survey of the Negev desert. The Palestine Exploration Fund paid for them to search for the area the Bible calls the Wilderness of Zin. The Negev mattered because any Ottoman army attacking Egypt would have to cross it. Their report on archaeological findings was published, but the more important result was an updated map that marked military features such as water sources. Lawrence also visited Shobek, not far from Petra, and the town of Aqaba.

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• 3. Maps and Secret Promises

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  Fighting broke out in August 1914, but Lawrence did not rush to enlist. On the advice of S. F. Newcombe he waited until October, when he was commissioned on the General List as a temporary second lieutenant-interpreter. Before the year ended, his mentor Hogarth, by then a Lieutenant Commander, summoned him to the new Arab Bureau intelligence unit in Cairo. Lawrence arrived there on the 15th of December 1914. The Bureau's chief was Brigadier-General Gilbert Clayton, who answered to the Egyptian High Commissioner, Henry McMahon.

  By 1915 an Arab nationalist movement was growing across the Arabic-speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire, including among Arabs serving in its armed forces. Its members were in touch with Sharif Hussein, the Emir of Mecca, who was bargaining with the British. He offered to lead an uprising against the Ottomans. His price was a British guarantee of an independent Arab state covering the Hejaz, Syria and Mesopotamia.

  An uprising would ease the threat to the Suez Canal, so London had reason to listen. Two other parties objected. French diplomats insisted that Syria's future was as a French colony. The Government of India, nominally part of the British government but acting independently, pictured a British-controlled Mesopotamia as a granary for India. It also wanted to keep its Arabian outpost at Aden.

  At the Arab Bureau, Lawrence supervised the preparation of maps, wrote a daily bulletin for the British generals in the theatre and interviewed prisoners. He argued for a British landing at Alexandretta, now İskenderun in Turkey, which never took place. He also consistently argued for an independent Arab Syria.

  In October 1915 Sharif Hussein demanded an immediate commitment and threatened to back the Ottomans if he did not get one. That could have produced a credible Pan-Islamic message at a bad moment, since Britain was in severe difficulties in the Gallipoli Campaign. McMahon answered with a letter that was broadly agreeable but held back on the Mediterranean coastline and the Holy Land.

  In the spring of 1916 Lawrence was sent to Mesopotamia to help relieve the Siege of Kut. The plan was some combination of starting an Arab uprising and bribing Ottoman officials. The mission produced no useful result. Meanwhile, in London, negotiators were drafting the Sykes-Picot Agreement without the knowledge of British officials in Cairo. It awarded a large share of Syria to France. Under its logic, the Arabs would have to conquer Syria's four great cities themselves if they wanted a state there. Those cities were Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo. It is unclear when Lawrence learned what the treaty contained.

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• 4. War of the Dervishes

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  The Arab Revolt began in June 1916, but it stalled after a few early successes. There was a real danger that Ottoman forces would advance along the Red Sea coast and retake Mecca. On the 16th of October 1916 Lawrence travelled to the Hejaz on an intelligence mission led by Ronald Storrs. He interviewed three sons of Sharif Hussein, Ali, Abdullah and Faisal, and concluded that Faisal was the best man to lead the revolt.

  In November, Newcombe was chosen to head a permanent British liaison to Faisal's staff. He had not yet reached the area and the matter was urgent, so Lawrence went in his place. In late December 1916 Lawrence and Faisal worked out how to reposition the Arab forces. The aim was to threaten the railway from Syria while keeping the Ottoman troops around Medina from menacing Arab positions. Newcombe arrived just as Lawrence was preparing to leave. Faisal urgently asked that Lawrence's posting be made permanent.

  Medina, the second-holiest site in Islam, was a tempting prize. Its Ottoman garrison was weakened by disease and isolation. Faisal and Lawrence decided that leaving it alone was the smarter choice. The Arabs would strike the Hejaz railway south from Damascus without wrecking it for good. That kept the troops at Medina tied down and forced the Ottomans to spend heavily on defending and repairing the line. The wider plan was to extend northward through Maan and Dera'a to Damascus and beyond.

  Faisal had wanted to launch regular attacks, and Lawrence talked him out of it. His reasoning appears in what he wrote about the Bedouin. "The value of the tribes is defensive only and their real sphere is guerilla warfare. They are intelligent, and very lively, almost reckless, but too individualistic to endure commands, or fight in line, or to help each other." He described the Hejaz war as one of dervishes against regular forces, with the Arabs on the side of the dervishes. In his words, "Our text-books do not apply to its conditions at all."

  The push north also fit the language of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. That text spoke of an independent Arab entity in Syria, to be granted only if the Arabs liberated the territory themselves. The French, and some of their British liaison officers, were uneasy about the northward movement because it weakened French colonial claims.

  In 1917 Lawrence proposed an attack on Aqaba, a lightly defended town on the Red Sea. A strike from the sea was possible, but the narrow passes leading inland through the mountains were strongly held. Storming them would have been very difficult. So he proposed a joint action by Arab irregulars and forces including Auda Abu Tayi, who had earlier worked for the Ottomans. The expedition was led by Sharif Nasir of Medina. Lawrence kept the details of the inland attack from his British superiors, fearing they would block it as contrary to French interests.

  The column left Wejh on the 9th of May. Aqaba fell to the Arab forces on the 6th of July, after a surprise overland attack hit the Turkish defences from behind. General Sir Edmund Allenby, the new commander-in-chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, then agreed to Lawrence's strategy for the revolt. After the war Allenby recalled: "I gave him a free hand. His cooperation was marked by the utmost loyalty, and I never had anything but praise for his work, which, indeed, was invaluable throughout the campaign. He was the mainspring of the Arab movement and knew their language, their manners and their mentality." Lawrence now held a powerful position, as an adviser to Faisal and as a man Allenby trusted.

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• 5. Raids, Wounds and Damascus

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  Between January 1917 and September 1918, Lawrence took part in a string of operations, though his main contributions lay in strategy and liaison with British forces. He joined attacks on the railways at Aba el Naam and Mudawara, and he helped destroy a railway engine. He also went after the bridges at Ras Baalbek and at Yarmuk, where an explosion and the fighting that followed left him with several wounds. Other targets included the bridge connecting Amman and Dera'a, garrisons in the Hejaz and the garrison at Tell Shahm, where British armoured cars were used.

  At the village of Tafas, Ottoman forces massacred the villagers while retreating alongside German troops. The Arabs retaliated by killing their prisoners, and Lawrence encouraged it.

  In June 1917 he made a 300-mile journey north, visiting Ras Baalbek, the outskirts of Damascus and Azraq in Jordan. He urged Arab nationalists to hold off revolting until Faisal's forces arrived. He also attacked a bridge to give the impression of guerrilla activity. The British valued his findings so highly that they seriously considered awarding him a Victoria Cross. In the end he was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath and promoted to major.

  The Battle of Tafilah, in January 1918, took place in a region southeast of the Dead Sea. Arab regulars fought there under Jafar Pasha al-Askari. It began as a defensive action and turned into an offensive rout, which the official history of the war called a "brilliant feat of arms". Lawrence received the Distinguished Service Order and a promotion to lieutenant colonel. By early 1918, however, Lieutenant Colonel Pierce Charles Joyce had replaced him as Faisal's chief British liaison, and Lawrence devoted himself mainly to raiding and gathering intelligence.

  On the 20th of November 1917, Lawrence was scouting Dera'a in disguise when Ottoman soldiers captured him. In his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he says the local bey and his guardsmen beat him and sexually assaulted him, though he never spells out what the sexual contact involved. No independent witness exists. Some scholars say he exaggerated his injuries, and others say the episode never happened. Biographers Malcolm Brown, John E. Mack and Jeremy Wilson find the account believable, because several reports agree and there is no sign that he invented it outright. They argue that it left deep psychological marks that may explain some of his unconventional behaviour in later life. He closed the episode with the line: "In Dera'a that night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost."

  The son of the Governor then living in Dera'a argued that the story must be false, because Lawrence describes the bey's hair while his father was bald. Yet in the 1922 text Lawrence describes the bey's head as shaven, with stubble standing up. It is also uncertain who the man he calls "the Bey" really was.

  Lawrence helped prepare the capture of Damascus in the last weeks of the war, but he missed the formal surrender. He rode in around 9 am on the 1st of October 1918, several hours after the city had fallen. The first to arrive was the 10th Light Horse Regiment, led by Major A. C. N. "Harry" Olden, who accepted the surrender from the acting Governor, Emir Said. Lawrence then played a key part in setting up a provisional Arab government under Faisal in the newly liberated city, which he had pictured as the capital of an Arab state.

  On the 30th of October 1918, King George V offered Lawrence a knighthood at a private audience in Buckingham Palace. Lawrence declined, because he believed British policy had betrayed the Arab cause. He had tried throughout the closing years of the war to convince his superiors that Arab independence served British interests, with mixed success. The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and Britain contradicted the promises of independence he had made to the Arabs.

  His dream ended in 1920. After the battle of Maysaloun, French forces under General Henri Gouraud entered Damascus, commanded there by General Mariano Goybet. Faisal's rule as king came to an abrupt end.

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• 6. Making Lawrence of Arabia

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  Lawrence came home from the war as a full colonel and went straight to work for the Foreign Office. He attended the Paris Peace Conference between January and May 1919 as a member of Faisal's delegation. On the 17th of May 1919, a Handley Page Type O/400 carrying him to Egypt crashed at the airport of Roma-Centocelle. The pilot and co-pilot were killed. Lawrence survived with a broken shoulder blade and two broken ribs, and King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy visited him in hospital.

  In 1918 the American journalist Lowell Thomas went to Jerusalem and met Lawrence. In the words of author Rex Hall, Lawrence's "enigmatic figure in Arab uniform fired his imagination". Thomas and his cameraman Harry Chase shot a great deal of film and many photographs. Thomas turned them into a stage show called With Allenby in Palestine, with a lecture, dancing and music. It presented the Middle East as exotic, mysterious, sensuous and violent. The show premiered in New York in March 1919.

  Thomas agreed to bring it to England only if the King invited him personally and he could use either Drury Lane or Covent Garden. He opened at Covent Garden on the 14th of August 1919 and went on to give hundreds of lectures, "attended by the highest in the land". At first Lawrence played only a supporting role, because the show centred on Allenby's campaigns. Then Thomas noticed that the photographs of Lawrence in Bedouin dress had captured the public's imagination. He had Lawrence photographed again in London in Arab dress. In early 1920 he relaunched the show as With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia, and it proved extremely popular.

  The new title lifted Lawrence from supporting player to co-star. Lawrence helped create the presentation, answering Thomas's questions and posing for photographs. Once the success arrived, he regretted having been part of it. Thomas' films and lectures were seen by over 3 million people in the early 1920s, and they turned a previously obscure officer into a household name.

  In February 1920 Lawrence became an adviser to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office, a post he held for just over a year. He hated bureaucratic work. On the 21st of May 1921 he wrote to Robert Graves: "I wish I hadn't gone out there: the Arabs are like a page I have turned over; and sequels are rotten things. I'm locked up here: office every day and much of it". He still travelled to the Middle East several times, and at one point held the title of "chief political officer for Trans-Jordania". He also campaigned for his and Churchill's vision of the region in newspapers including The Times, The Observer, The Daily Mail and The Daily Express.

  In France, Lawrence had a sinister reputation during his lifetime, and it has lasted. Many there saw him as an implacable "enemy of France" who kept stirring up the Syrians against French rule through the 1920s. French historian Maurice Larès argued that the real problem was simpler. The Syrians did not want to be ruled by France, and the French needed a scapegoat. Larès wrote that Lawrence, usually pictured as a Francophobe, was really a Francophile.

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• 7. Pillars and Doubts

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  Lawrence often sent several letters in a single day, and a number of collections of his correspondence have been published. His correspondents included George Bernard Shaw, Edward Elgar, Winston Churchill, Robert Graves, Noël Coward, E. M. Forster, Siegfried Sassoon, John Buchan, Augustus John and Henry Williamson. He met Joseph Conrad and commented perceptively on his works. Many of his letters went to Shaw's wife, Charlotte.

  Lawrence spoke French and Arabic well and could read Latin and Ancient Greek. Only three major texts appeared in his lifetime. The most significant was Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The other two were translations, Homer's Odyssey and a French novel called The Forest Giant that was otherwise forgotten. For the novel he took a flat fee. For the Odyssey he negotiated a generous fee plus royalties.

  In 1919 Lawrence was elected to a seven-year research fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, which supported him while he worked on Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He rewrote the book three times, once "blind" after losing the manuscript. Parts of it read as essays on military strategy, Arabian culture and geography. In the preface he thanked Shaw for help with editing.

  The first edition appeared in 1926 as a high-priced private subscription edition, printed in London by Herbert John Hodgson and Roy Manning Pike. Its illustrators were Eric Kennington, Augustus John, Paul Nash, Blair Hughes-Stanton and Hughes-Stanton's wife, Gertrude Hermes. Lawrence feared the public would assume he was getting rich from the book, so he vowed to take no money from it. He kept that vow. The sale price was one third of the production costs, and he was left in substantial debt.

  A "deleted chapter" of the book resurfaced in 2022 and shows what weighed on him. Lawrence wrote: "The cabinet raised the Arabs to fight for us by definite promises of self-government afterwards." The Arabs, he explained, trusted persons rather than institutions and saw him as a free agent of the British government. "So I had to join the conspiracy", he wrote, and he assured the men of their reward. He summed up his feelings in a single line: "I was continually and bitterly ashamed."

  In March 1927 came Revolt in the Desert, an abridged Seven Pillars that he had begun in 1926, in both limited and trade editions. He disliked the publicity it required, but it became a best-seller. Again he refused any fees, partly to appease the subscribers who had paid so dearly for the full edition. At the end of 1926 he had set up the Seven Pillars Trust, with his friend Hogarth as a trustee, and made over the copyright and surplus income. He told Hogarth he had "made the Trust final, to save myself the temptation of reviewing it, if Revolt turned out a best seller."

  By the fourth reprint in 1927 the trust had cleared the debt from Seven Pillars. Lawrence then invoked a clause in his publishing contract to halt the abridgement in the United Kingdom. He still allowed American editions and translations, which brought in substantial income. The trust paid that money into an educational fund for the children of RAF officers killed or invalided by service, and more substantially into the RAF Benevolent Fund.

  Fred Halliday, a specialist in the Middle East, called Seven Pillars a "fine work of prose" but judged its relevance to the study of Arab history and society "almost worthless." Stanford historian Priya Satia sees a broadly positive but "Orientalist" picture of the region. She argues that Lawrence's romanticised, vivid depictions made him a sought-after symbol of British leadership and goodwill while Britain's global influence was waning after the First World War. In her view his books offered a "reassurance of continuity" with Britain's triumphant history.

  In 1955 Richard Aldington published Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry, a sustained attack on Lawrence's character, writing and honesty. He called Seven Pillars "rather a work of quasi-fiction than history". He said Lawrence seldom reported an episode involving himself without embellishing it. He also argued that Lawrence's strategy of containing but not capturing Medina was wrong and that French rule in Syria had benefited the country. Aldington pointed to inflated claims in the biographies by Robert Graves and B. H. Liddell Hart. These said Lawrence had read 50,000 books in the Oxford Union library, blown up 79 bridges, carried a price of £50,000 on his head and suffered 60 or more injuries. Aldington showed that Lawrence had edited those books, supplied some key texts, and then asked the authors to hide that fact.

  News of the book reached London's literary community before it appeared. From 1954 a group that Aldington called "The Lawrence Bureau", led by Liddell Hart, tried energetically to have it suppressed. When that failed, Liddell Hart distributed hundreds of copies of a seven-page, single-spaced rebuttal. It worked. Aldington's book drew many hostile and even abusive reviews, and there is strong evidence that some reviewers had read the rebuttal but not the book.

  Fred D. Crawford later noted that much of what shocked readers in 1955 is now standard knowledge. Lawrence was illegitimate and troubled by it, took liberties with the truth in his official reports and Seven Pillars, and contributed to his own myth. Even so, most biographers since Aldington, Crawford among them, still express strong admiration for his military, political and writing achievements. Aldington himself conceded that Lawrence was an "extraordinary man".

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• 8. Aircraftman Shaw

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  In August 1922, Lawrence, who had seen air power used effectively in the war, enlisted in the Royal Air Force as an aircraftman under the name John Hume Ross. At the recruiting centre in Covent Garden he was interviewed by Flying Officer W. E. Johns, later the author of the Biggles novels. Johns suspected that "Ross" was a false name and rejected the application. Lawrence admitted it was false and that he had supplied false documents, then left. He returned some time later with an RAF messenger carrying a written order that Johns must accept him.

  In February 1923 his identity was exposed and the RAF forced him out. He took the name T. E. Shaw, apparently because of his friendship with George Bernard Shaw and Charlotte Shaw, and joined the Royal Tank Corps. He was unhappy there and repeatedly petitioned to rejoin the RAF, which finally readmitted him in August 1925. A fresh burst of publicity after Revolt in the Desert led to postings at Karachi and Miramshah in British India, now Pakistan, from late 1926. At the end of 1928 he had to return to Britain after rumours spread that he was involved in espionage.

  At Chingford he bought several small plots of land, built a hut and a swimming pool, and visited often. The hut was removed in 1930 when Chingford Urban District Council acquired the land. The City of London Corporation re-erected it in the grounds of The Warren, Loughton. A plaque on the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, sighting obelisk on Pole Hill now marks his tenure.

  His later RAF bases included RAF Mount Batten near Plymouth, RAF Calshot near Southampton and RAF Bridlington in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Lawrence had once watched a seaplane crew drown because the tender sent to rescue them was too slow. He helped push the RAF's Marine Craft Section toward faster rescue launches. With Hubert Scott-Paine, founder of the British Power Boat Company, he introduced the 37.5 ft ST 200 Seaplane Tender Mk1. It could cruise at 24 knots over a range of 140 miles and reach a top speed of 29 knots.

  From a notebook he kept while enlisted, Lawrence wrote The Mint, a memoir of ordinary airmen's days and of his wish to belong to something larger than himself. Its sparse prose differs sharply from the complicated syntax of Seven Pillars. He left it unpublished, and his brother Arnold edited it after his death. Lawrence left the service in March 1935 with considerable regret. In a tribute the following year, Churchill wrote: "He saw as clearly as anyone the vision of airpower and all that it would mean in traffic and war."

  Lawrence owned eight Brough Superior motorcycles over the years. In 1934 he rode one more than 200 miles from Manchester to Winchester to meet Eugène Vinaver, editor of the Winchester Manuscript of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. Lawrence admired that book and had carried it on his campaigns. On the 13th of May 1935, two months after leaving military service, he crashed his SS100 in Dorset, close to his cottage, Clouds Hill, near Bovington Camp. A dip in the road hid two boys on bicycles from his view. He swerved to avoid them, lost control and was thrown over the handlebars. He died six days later, on the 19th of May 1935, at the age of 46.

  One of the doctors who treated him was the neurosurgeon Hugh Cairns. The case led Cairns to a long study of deaths from head injuries among motorcycle dispatch riders. His research led to crash helmets being adopted by both military and civilian motorcyclists.

  Lawrence's mother arranged with the Framptons for his burial in their family plot, in the separate burial ground of St Nicholas' Church, Moreton. He had bought Clouds Hill from his cousins, the Frampton family, and had long visited their home at Oakers Wood House. The coffin travelled on the Frampton estate's bier. Mourners included Winston Churchill, E. M. Forster, Lady Astor and Lawrence's youngest brother, Arnold. Churchill said: "Lawrence was one of those beings whose pace of life was faster and more intense than what is normal."

  The inquest was conducted hurriedly, and the testimony conflicted. Witnesses disagreed about a "black car" that may or may not have been at the scene, and about what the bicycling boys did. Some people speculated that Lawrence was assassinated, but without supporting evidence it is generally accepted that his death was an accident.

  In January 1936 a bronze bust of Lawrence by Eric Kennington was installed in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, London, alongside the tombs of Britain's greatest military leaders. Kennington also made the stone effigy placed in St Martin's Church, Wareham, in 1939. When Arnold divided the estate in 1936, Clouds Hill went to the National Trust. In December 1962 David Lean's film Lawrence of Arabia was released, with Peter O'Toole in the title role, and O'Toole earned an Academy Award nomination for best actor. In 2018 the Royal Mint put Lawrence on a £5 coin, part of a six-coin set marking the centenary of the First World War.

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