Five Thousand Kilometres Through France

In the trail of the Young Lawrence of Arabia

More about the Young TE Lawrence

Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in north Wales in 1888, the second of five sons. As a boy his family lived in several places, in Scotland, northern France and the New Forest, but by 1896 they had settled in Oxford. He was a keen collector of pottery (as a young man he became an archaeologist) and brass rubbings - catching the words and images of brass memorial plates and stone graves with tracing paper - which he would hang on his bedroom wall. In our age of electronic games, this seems an odd pursuit for a teenage boy, but it was a popular activity at the time and the young Lawrence was captivated by the chivalric age.

Known to his family as Ned, the young Lawrence was an individualist to the core. He was not an easy child and he had a complicated relationship with authority: as a boy at school and later with the establishment. He would develop a keen interest in exercise and endurance, but he disliked team sports at school. Spurred by his developing sense of adventure, he would set off alone or with a friend on bicycle rides out in the country around Oxford. In other ways, despite his individuality, he found that he was drawn to the establishment. As a boy he claimed to have run away from home to join the army (something that was later denied by his mother). In later life, he would be deeply disappointed by the British foreign policy that prevented Arab autonomy after the 1916 uprising, and yet he continued to serve in the RAF, notably in the ranks rather than as an officer.

As a result of his study of churches and castles, the young Lawrence built up a huge knowledge and an expert eye for ecclesiastical and military architecture. He settled on History as his subject and in 1907 he was awarded a scholarship to study the subject at Jesus College at Oxford, for which he was awarded a First Class degree. On graduation in 1910, he was offered a position by Magdalen College, enabling him to start a career in archaeology. This took him back to the Middle East, where he was the junior member of a two-man team managing a major dig at Carchemish.

At 5’ 5”, TE Lawrence was a small man, but his physical endurance, something he developed as a youth and a young man, was freakish. He loved to push himself on his cycle journeys, talking of feeling good after riding hard on very little food. As a university student he enjoyed testing himself in other ways: there are stories of him intentionally going without food and sleep. One college friend remembered Lawrence with a manic glint in his eye firing a blank pistol out of the window of his college rooms after staying awake for more than 40 hours. Lawrence’s 2500-mile cycle journey around France in 1908 was exceptional, and his 1910 walk through the Middle East, 1000 miles in 40 degree heat on extremely rough roads, was an extraordinary physical achievement. Again he was contrary and individualistic. Where most students spend most of their time in the library, these journeys were in pursuit of practical research for his undergraduate thesis into medieval castles.

A key fact in understanding the young Lawrence is that his parents never married. His father, Thomas Chapman, an aristocrat from Ireland, was already married with a family when he fell in love with Lawrence’s mother, the family governess Sarah Lawrence (who interestingly had been born illegitimate herself - her mother was called Elizabeth Junner and the name Lawrence apparently derives from her likely father). Chapman’s wife refused to divorce him or to move from the family estate, and so he and Sarah Lawrence moved away. They were never able to marry, but they called themselves Mr and Mrs Lawrence.

It is hard to appreciate nowadays how much difference this illegitimacy made to the Lawrence family as their five sons grew up. Had the truth been known, they would have been socially outcast. So the family kept a low profile and kept moving: to Wales, Scotland, to Wales, to Dinard in France and to the New Forest. Eventually, when it became necessary to educate their five sons, they moved to Oxford. The family were provided with a small living by Thomas Chapman’s estate in Ireland.

TE Lawrence’s mother was an extremely strong influence in his early life, one he found over-bearing, even though it is clear from his letters that he cared about her. She was religious (she twice accompanied one of her other sons as a missionary to China), but her desire for control affected Ned particularly – in response to her inquisitiveness he developed a habit of dissimulation that continued throughout his life. He was never keen on the idea that anyone should know his inner thoughts. At the start of David Lean’s 1962 film, Lawrence of Arabia, a character says: “…though I never really knew him…” 

Lawrence was closer to his father, who passed on several of his interests to the young Ned – cycling and photography being the most relevant to this project. The knowledge of his father’s heavy drinking may also have led to TE Lawrence being a teetotaller.

In short, TE Lawrence was an extremely clever but complex young man. He enjoyed a bit of gossip and liked to be provocative; he could be empathetic when it suited him, and he could be charismatic and inspirational, as he later showed in the Arab Revolt (where, while part of the military, he was largely outside the immediate control of the British establishment). And of course the exceptional physical endurance he built up as a young man enabled him to earn the respect of the Arabs he called to rebel against the Ottoman Empire.