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Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to Sydney Cockerell
Ozone Hotel,
Bridlington,
Yorks.
Nov. 15th, 1934
No, I cannot week-end anywhere for the rest of this year. I sit in Bridlington day-long in a great garage, tending eleven R.A.F. boats in their annual overhaul. My motor-bike-and-means- of-mobility rusts (I pray not, yet fear so) in Dorsetshire, in the garage behind my cottage.
March next, all this ends. The R.A.F. leaves me behind in its march towards the future. I retire to cottage, aforesaid, and do nothing ever after.
No, Miss Stark is post-1922, which was the date I changed lives last; so I have not seen her books or heard of her.1 It must be nearly 30 years since I wandered up the then inaccessible valleys of the Ismailiyeh hills in Syria, and looked for the vestiges of where the (Syria) Old Man of the Mountain had lived. Two remote and lovely sites he had chosen, for his fortresses, and I was their first Frank visitor, probably, since the Crusades. Not nice, being such a back-number and antiquity.
I should like to visit Cambridge once more, and shall perhaps venture, after the Great Change: and then I shall search the FitzW. for you, and console myself with your collected pictures, if you are away.
Which reminds me that we must conspire some day to get rid of that John head of myself which was or is amongst the richer loot. If you are still there, we will settle its hash.
Yours ever
T. E. Shaw
| Source: | SCC 371 |
| Checked: | jw/ |
| Last revised: | 1 January 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