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 Robert Graves

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14, Barton St.
20.3.23

Dear R.G.
I’ve been some while wanting to write, and your note (which came to hand yesterday) is the last straw to weigh down my mind.
Sorry to have missed you in London: but my movings have been eccentric of late. The R.A.F. threw me out, eventually. Crime of too great publicity. Stainless character. I took the latter to the W.0. and persuaded them to let me enlist with them. So I’m now a recruit in the Tank Corps. Conditions rough too. However, there is a certainty and a contentment in bed-rock.
I wanted to ask you . . . we are near Dorchester and I run about Dorset on wheels (when they take their eyes off us) . . . do you think old Hardy would let me look at him? He’s a proper poet and a fair novelist, in my judgment, and it would give me a feeling of another milestone passed if I might meet him. Yet to blow in upon him in khaki would not be an introduction. You know the old thing, don’t you? What are my hopes?

youuuuuuuurs

 

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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