Dick Benson-Gyles - The Boy In The Mask: The Hidden World of Lawrence of Arabia

THE BOY IN THE MASK:THE HIDDEN WORLD OF LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

Dick Benson-Gyles

Foreword by Malcolm Brown

the lilliput press

dublin

Dedication

To the Dear Memory of my Father and Mother,

always loving, always giving

Contents

T.E. Lawrence A Chronology

Abbreviations

Foreword

1. A Meeting

2. Irish Initiations

3. A Lost Heritage

4. A Territorial Root in the Proper Place

5. A Huge Grant of County Meath

6. Ancestral Voices

7. Fashionable Marriage

8. The Abandoned Sisters

9. A Double Life

10. A Standing Civil War

11. A Child of Sin

12. My Native Land

13. Crazed with the Spell of Far Arabia

14. The Last and Lingering Troubadour

15. Id Rather Morris Than the World

16. The Well at the Worlds End

17. Body and Soul

18. The Citadel of My Integrity

19. An Imaginary Person of Neutral Sex

20. Candidates and Advocates

21. The Dark Lady

Appendix I: The Chapman Coat of Arms

Appendix 2: Farida Al Akle

Appendix 3: Chapman of Killua

Appendix 4: Lawrence Junner

Appendix 5: Ms of Dedicatory Poem to Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Appendix 6: Map of the Middle East in 1915

Appendix 7: Lawrence and Chapman at Rest

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Illustrations

Copyright

Epigraph

There was a sort of dual personality there was the boy and there was also I think he called it a mask. Thats rather crude but it is the boy in the mask. We all liked him but he began to be quite different.

Canon Edgar Hall (Omnibus. BBC 2, 18 April 1986)

My self-distrusting shyness held a mask, often a mask of indifference or flippancy, before my face, and puzzled me. My thoughts clawed at this apparent peace, wondering what was underneath, knowing that it was only a mask.

T.E. Lawrence (Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 2004, p. 679)

T.E. Lawrence A Chronology

16 August 1888. Born North Wales, second of five Lawrence brothers.

1896. Family settles in Oxford.

September 1896 July 1907. Attends Oxford High School.

Summers 1906 and 1907. Studies castles in northern France.

October, 1907 June 1910. Attends Jesus College, Oxford.

Summers 1908 and 1909. Studies castles in France and in Syria for degree thesis.

Winter 1909-1910, Writes Crusader Castles. Awarded First Class Honours in History.

Summer 1910. Studies medieval pottery in France.

Winter 1910 1911. Studies Arabic at Jebail, Syria.

March July 1911. Excavating at Carchemish (Jerablus) with British Museum Expedition under D.G. Hogarth and R. Campbell Thompson.

Summer 1911. Walks through northern Syria.

Early 1912. Excavating in Egypt under Flinders Petrie.

Spring 1912 spring 1914. Excavating at Carchemish under C.L Woolley.

Summer 1913. Home in Oxford.

January February 1914, Survey of Sinai.

Summer 1914. Completes Wilderness of Zin (report on Sinai work) in Oxford and London, then in War Office, London.

December, 1914 May 1916. In Egypt with Intelligence Department.

March May 1916. Journey to Iraq.

October 1916 October 1918. With Arab forces during Arab Revolt, Syria (rising in rank from Lieutenant to Colonel).

October December 1918. In London and Oxford.

January October 1919. In Paris for Peace Conference.

May 1919. By air to Egypt.

October 1919 1921. At All Souls College, Oxford, and in London.

1921 1922. Adviser to Colonial Office.

August-December 1921. Missions to Aden, Jeddah and Transjordan.

Second half 1922 January 1923. Aircraftman Ross, Royal Air Force (RAF).

Discharged on discovery of identity.

March, 1923 August, 1925. Private Shaw, Royal Tank Corps, Bovington, Dorset.

Acquires cottage, Clouds Hill, near Bovington. Transfers to RAF.

August 1926. Aircraftman Shaw RAF at Cranwell.

1926. Seven Pillars of Wisdom (SPoW) published.

January, 1927 1928. India, RAF, Karachi and North-West frontier.

Revolt in the Desert (abridgement of SPoW) published and withdrawn in British Empire. Completes The Mint (account of time in RAF as Aircraftman Ross).

1930 1935, RAF Mountbatten, with work around Britain on marine air-sea rescue craft.

February 1935. RAF Bridlington, discharged. Returns to civilian life, Clouds Hill.

19 May 1935. Dies after motorcycling accident near Clouds Hill, Dorset, aged forty-six.

Abbreviations

AB: Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorised Biography of T.E. Lawrence (William Heinemann Ltd: London 1989).

BHF: A.W. Lawrence (ed.), T.E. Lawrence By His Friends (Jonathan Cape: London 1937).

BL: The British Library, Euston Road, London.

BLAM: British Library Additional Manuscript.

BOL: Bodleian Library, Oxford.

DG: David Garnett (ed.), The Letters of T.E. Lawrence of Arabia (Jonathan Cape: London 1938).

HL: M.R. Lawrence (ed.), The Home Letters of T.E. Lawrence and his Brothers (Basil Blackwell: Oxford 1954).

HR: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA. T.E. Lawrence Collection,

IWM: Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, London.

IWM-ST: Imperial War Museum, Research material for The Sunday Times book, The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia. Phillip Knightley & Colin Simpson (Nelson: London 1969).

JM: John E. Mack, A Prince of our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence (Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London 1976).

JTELS: Journal of the T.E. Lawrence Society.

MB: Malcolm Brown (ed.), The Letters of T.E. Lawrence (J.M. Dent & Sons: London 1988).

NA: The National Archives, Kew, London.

SPW: T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Jonathan Cape: London 1935).

SPWO: T.E.Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: The Complete 1922 Oxford Text (J. and N. Wilson: Fordingbridge, Hampshire 2004. Single vol.).

S-S 192226: J. and N. Wilson (eds), T.E. Lawrence: Correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw, 19221926 Vol. 1 (Castle Hill Press 2000).

S-S 1927: Vol. 2 (2003).

S-S 1928: Vol. 3 (2008).

S-S 192935: Vol. 4 (2009).

THBRG & THBLH: Robert Graves & Liddell Hart, T.E. Lawrence: Letters to his Biographers (Cassell: London 1963).

TEL: T.E. Lawrence.

Foreword

malcolm brown

My initial response when asked to write a foreword to, or a review of, yet another book on one of Britains most enduring heroes is usually No. Ive been involved in the T.E. Lawrence world for many years and am very suspicious of ninety plus per cent of any new authors coming out of the blue with the claim: Look, Ive got the Holy Grail.

But this book is different. Its an amazing story, powerful, moving and a genuinely fresh perspective on Lawrences life. It is, in fact, an original, both in the material its offering and its exceptional, indeed unique approach. Its a book that has been lived as much as written by its author, who was captivated through the David Lean film and has ever since turned Lawrence into an aid and a companion, almost a doppelgnger. So, rightly, he calls the book a personal quest and has had the energy, insight and ability to translate his extraordinary story into an absorbing written account. It is brilliantly lucid and compulsive for pages on end and the author, a practised journalist as well as a gifted writer, has imposed order and clarity on complex argument and analysis while retaining the romance and evocative lyricism of an enthralling narrative.

Whats new in this book? This will undoubtedly be the question immediately asked. Well, for me, in the first part he has illuminated an area long dark about the Anglo-Irish background from which Lawrence emerged. We all knew his father was an Eton-educated aristocrat who left a socially prominent family of a wife and four daughters in Ireland to run off with their Anglo-Scottish governess and found a family of five illegitimate sons under an assumed name, the second of whom was to become the legendary Lawrence of Arabia; but Dick Benson-Gyles has put reality and detail into the story, so that we now know this was not just, as it were, any old Rochester running off with a Jane Eyre, but in social terms a cataclysmic fall from grace within a highly reputable and well connected social circle which left seriously hurt people all over the place and put a far bigger wound into Lawrences psyche than we had ever thought. He has also placed the story powerfully in the context of Irish history and of that fading clan of Anglo-Irish whose decline almost parallels that of the British in India. This is Jewel in the Crown stuff Irish style.