T. E. Lawrence

Contents lists

1888-1910

1911

1912

1913

1914

1915-16

1917-18

1919-20

1921

1922

1923

1924

1925

1926

1927

1928

1929

1930

1931

1932

1933

1934

1935

Updated June 2012

T. E. Lawrence to his family

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Military Intelligence Office
Cairo

21 September 1915

I'm not going to write much now, as I have a trifle of malaria, and a lot of people are jabbering away a few yards off. The weather is now changing very fast. At Midday it is warm, like an ordinary summer day in England, and at night it gets cold. That I think is probably why the fever caught me. However, I haven't had any for a year now, so there is not very much harm in it.  I hear from your letters (a bunch of about 3 weeks supply came yesterday) that you are all well again, and that Armie is going back to school. That will seem odd to him, but he will be comforted by the expectation of a new disease to interrupt him once more. It's hardly worth trying to go on, is it? I find I have a balance at Cox's, of some £60 or £70 so far as I can reckon it out. Would it be any use to you? I cannot well draw on it here, as you lose a lot in exchange, so I have a local account on which I live: therefore the other one isn't really any use to me.

Mr. Hogarth is in Athens just now. He worked in the office here for 6 weeks or so. I expect he'll be back some time or other. The Gallipoli business is dragging, and will go on dragging, till somebody who knows his mind interferes It's been very badly done so far.

No news of Syria: I'm afraid a lot of men from our neighbourhood have gone to Gallipoli lately.

N.

T. E. Lawrence chronology

1888 16 August: born at Tremadoc, Wales

1896-1907: City of Oxford High School for Boys

1907-9: Jesus College, Oxford, B.A., 1st Class Hons, 1909

1910-14: Magdalen College, Oxford (Senior Demy), while working at the British Museum's excavations at Carchemish

1915-16: Military Intelligence Dept, Cairo

1916-18: Liaison Officer with the Arab Revolt

1919: Attended the Paris Peace Conference

1919-22: wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom

1921-2: Adviser on Arab Affairs to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office

1922 August: Enlisted in the Ranks of the RAF

1923 January: discharged from the RAF

1923 March: enlisted in the Tank Corps

1923: translated a French novel, The Forest Giant

1924-6: prepared the subscribers' abridgement of Seven Pillars of Wisdom

1927-8: stationed at Karachi, then Miranshah

1927 March: Revolt in the Desert, an abridgement of Seven Pillars, published

1928: completed The Mint, began translating Homer's Odyssey

1929-33: stationed at Plymouth

1931: started working on RAF boats

1932: his translation of the Odyssey published

1933-5: attached to MAEE, Felixstowe

1935 February: retired from the RAF

1935 19 May: died from injuries received in a motor-cycle crash on 13 May

1935 21 May: buried at Moreton, Dorset