System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Thomas E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia
August 16, 1888 - May 19, 1935
Thomas Edward Lawrence, known to his family as Ned, was born in Wales, on August 16, 1888. He was the second of five illegitimate sons of Sir Thomas Chapman, an Anglo-Irish baronet, and Sarah Junner, who had previously been employed in the Chapman household as governess to Thomas's four legitimate daughters. Having eloped together, Thomas and Sarah adopted the name 'Lawrence.'
By 1896 they had settled in Oxford, where they lived together as husband and wife. Their sons attended the City of Oxford High School for Boys. Lawrence had been fascinated by archaeology since childhood. After graduating with honors from Oxford in 1910, he served as an assistant at a British Museum excavation in Iraq (then known as Mesopotamia).
When war broke out with Germany in 1914, Lawrence spent a brief period in the Geographical Section of the General Staff in London, and was then posted to the Military Intelligence Department in Cairo. In 1916 the Arabs rebelled against the Turkish empire. Lawrence was sent to Mecca on a fact-finding mission, ultimately becoming the British liaison officer to the Arabs. His account of the revolt is chronicled in his classic books, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom, A Triumph" and "Revolt in the Desert."
After the war Lawrence served in the British Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, where he promoted the cause of Arab independence. Despite his efforts Syria, Palestine and Iraq were mandated to France and Britain. Lawrence returned to England exhausted and disappointed. By the end of 1920, British attempts to impose a colonial rule in Iraq had provoked an open rebellion. Winston Churchill was appointed by the British Colonial Office to find a solution, and persuaded Lawrence to join him as adviser. By the summer of 1922 Churchill, with considerable aid from Lawrence, had achieved a settlement of the situation.
In 1922 Lawrence resigned his position with the Colonial Office and enlisted in the RAF under an assumed name. After four months he was discovered by the press and discharged. With the help of a highly-placed friends he re-enlisted in the Tank Corps as 'Thomas Edward Shaw'. Between 1922 and early 1927 Lawrence revising "Seven Pillars" for publication and edited an abridgement of the book called "Revolt in the Desert." Half way through this work he succeeded in transferring back to the RAF.
Encouraged by this literary success, during 1927 and 1928 Lawrence wrote another book, The Mint, based on notes he had made during his first RAF enlistment. It is an unsparing yet brilliantly observed portrait of the initial training given to Air Force recruits. In chapter after chapter, he distilled into a few words mundane events that he had witnessed again and again. Like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, it belongs to the genre of books written by intellectuals who find themselves, for one reason or another, in prison. The Mint passed such harsh judgement on the RAF regime that publication would have damaged the reputation of the service Lawrence had come to love. He therefore stipulated that it should not be appear before 1950.
After finishing The Mint, he accepted a commission to translate Homer's Odyssey. He did not complete it until 1932. Before then, at the end of 1928, he had been forced to return to England by fictitious press rumours about espionage activities in India.
He was posted to a flying-boat unit at Plymouth, where he was to become passionately committed to a new cause. At the beginning of 1931 he witnessed a flying-boat crash, quite close to the shore. The old-fashioned rescue launch was so slow to reach the scene that lives were lost needlessly. As it happened, he had recently refurbished an American motor-launch built to a much faster planing-hull design. From then on he and his Commanding Officer (a long-standing personal friend) campaigned for the adoption by the RAF of planing-hull launches. Lawrence became deeply involved in the development of these craft, spending his last Air Force years working in boatyards in civilian clothes. As a direct consequence of these efforts, by the outbreak of World War II in 1939 the RAF was equipped with a fleet of high-speed launches.
In March 1935 his twelve-year term of enlistment came to an end. He retired to Clouds Hill (the name of his cottage) in Dorset, England, planning to start a private press and produce a small edition of The Mint. In May, while riding his motor-cycle on a local errand, he swerved to avoid two cyclists and was thrown from his machine. He suffered severe head injuries and died some days later, having never regained consciousness.
