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 Ernest Thurtle

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Cattewater
Plymouth

26.IV.29

Dear Thurtle,

I hope you successfully pass the test next month, and go back again for seven years. If your people win, do try and carry them with you about the death penalty. I feel it a blot and reflection upon your fellow-humans who have been brought to enlist in the Services.

Yesterday I met Lady Astor, who said nice things about you. She's sickening, too, with election fever. I hope she gets in. A rare creature: very swift and yet kind.

I will call, if I can: but I'll promise not to keep on calling! My feet are happy when they tramp up down London: and to go into a house breaks the rhythm, and is a deprivation. A little of it is good, as variety: but if I did all I should, there would be no street-time left.

I've been in London (for a night) twice, since March 7. Not bad. Last run took 4 hrs 44 minutes to do - and about two days to recover from!

If the public would let me choose the next House of Commons, it would be a decent and friendly little gathering. One despairs rather, though, over this electing business. Hot blood isn't a good counsellor.

I must put in a last word about my abnormality. Anyone who had gone up so fast as I went (remember that I was almost entirely self-made: my father had five sons, and only £300 a year) and had seen so much of the inside of the top of the world might well lose his aspirations, and get weary of the ordinary motives of action, which had moved him till he reached the top. I wasn't a King or Prime Minister, but I made 'em, or played with them, and after that there wasn't much more, in that direction, for me to do. So abnormal an experience ought to have queered me for good - unless my skin was as thick as a door-mat. What feels abnormal is my retirement from active life at 35 - instead of 75. So much the luckier, surely.

Here's a good little poem of F.L. Lucas, a Cambridge don and very subtle fellow, to cap my not very imaginative explanations.

Yours

T.E. Shaw

Notes:

Ernest Thurtle and Nancy Astor were standing for Parliament at a forthcoming General Election.

Two stanzas omitted, beginning 'They laid Protesilaus to his sleep', from a poem by F.L. Lucas published in Time and Memory (London, Hogarth Press, 1929)

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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