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Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to John Buchan
Cranwell
Lincs
27.VIII.25
Dear Buchan,
Do not distress yourself to answer this. It's a letter of realised thanks, for the great difficulty is over. I feel like a person home at last - to find everyone else grown up, or changed, and the house open to all manner of other people beside myself. A new camp is always such a plunge into unknown.
This is a very comfortable, peaceful, cleanly camp, and will be glorious when I have settled into it. Indeed it is then I should have written to you, and not now, the first day of work, when I am tired. But you aren't in need of beautiful letters!
My thanks pile higher and higher.
Yours sincerely,
T E Shaw
| Source: | DG 483 |
| Checked: | mv/ |
| Last revised: | 12 February 2006 |
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