Lawrence’s origins revealed by biographer

Anthony Sattin travelled far in his search for Lawrence of Arabia. He journeyed to dangerous corners of the world and braved rough terrain to follow in the footsteps of the heroic leader of the Arab revolt, regarded as one of the most charismatic characters of the Great War.

Sattin climbed up to Crusader castles perched on rocks in Syria and had extended stays in Cairo, Damascus, Beirut and Turkey.

No effort was spared in his effort to bring to life the early life of T E Lawrence, painstakingly set out in his book Young Lawrence: A Portrait of the Legend as a Young Man (John Murray £25).

“I have been collecting stories about Lawrence and the places in the book for more than two decades and I have had more conversations, recommendations, advice and warnings about him and the impact he had on the region than I can list, “ he says.

But there was to be one big disappointment, one door that did not open as he pursued the young archaeologist, hero worshipped as Lawrence of Arabia after leading the successful Arab revolt against the occupying Turks.

And that was in Oxford, where T E Lawrence was brought up, and educated at the City of Oxford High School, then on the corner of George Street and New Inn Hall Street, and later at Jesus College.

Sattin had been desperate to visit 2 Polstead Road, the solid red-brick Lawrence family home in North Oxford, where he had lived with his parents and four brothers.

Apart from one term in college, Lawrence had continued to live at home, where a small, two-roomed building was built at the end of the long back garden so he could do his university work.

The bungalow had a small bedroom, electricity and a direct telephone line to the main house. It was Lawrence’s retreat, where he studied, read and dreamed of making his mark in the Middle East, with the walls hung with fine green cotton to encourage calm.

It is still there, but as the author sadly revealed to an audience at the Oxford Martin School where he spoke during the recent Oxford Literary Festival, he did not get to see it.

“Much to my frustration, I couldn’t get into the house to look at the bungalow. The elderly gentleman who owned it felt he had shown it off to enough people,” explained the well-travelled journalist whose travel books include The Gates of Africa and A Winter on the Nile.

But he learned that the house was now up for sale, with a campaign under way to protect Lawrence of Arabia’s childhood home in North Oxford.

The T E Lawrence Society wants to register 2 Polstead Road, home to the Lawrence family from 1898 to 1921, as a listed building to give it added protection under planning laws. The effort has been backed by Oxford City Council member for St Margaret’s, Elizabeth Wade.

She said: “Lawrence is not a person who should be forgotten. But my concern is that if we don’t protect it now, the site could be left open to future development.”

An application to English Heritage is being made, and Mrs Wade said she dearly wished that the building could be purchased.

She said: “We would need about £2m to buy it and are looking into possibilities of how it could be run.”

More than 100 North Oxford residents have so far backed plans to protect Lawrence of Arabia’s childhood home. And in Anthony Sattin, the campaign has an impressive new recruit.

He wasted no time in appealing to his festival audience for support.

“Something needs to be done to protect this house. And I would urge everyone to get behind this campaign. And it needs to happen now before someone takes this house on.

“Ideally, if anyone here has a couple of million pounds it could be bought,” he said, before adding with a grin, “And I would promise to give a talk there every year.”

The significance of that little bungalow at the end of the garden is made clear by the fact that it figures in the first page of his book. We are introduced to the 26-year-old Lawrence crouching there beside the fireplace in August 1914. He is, in fact, burning the only copy of a book he has written about his experiences over five years travelling and living in the Middle East.

“The only reason he gave for destroying the manuscript was that it was immature. But that doesn’t quite ring true,” Sattin observes.

“He had written other works – a description of Crusader castles in Syria, for instance, and the diary of a journey he made across the Euphrates River in 1911. Both of these unpublished manuscripts were immature, and both were in the bungalow. So why burn the book of his adventures?”

Sattin believes that the key is the coming war.

“He was certain that he had a role to play in this conflict. In fact, he had already dreamed of the glorious challenge: he would start a new crusade by raising a wave of fighters out of Arabia to crash against the walls of Damascus. In so doing, he believed, they would free the Arab lands from Ottoman control. He had already laid his plans. He knew the terrain, the combatants and the tactics that would win the prize of freedom.”

And with a serious risk of him not returning home, Lawrence may simply have decided the book contained something that he did not want his parents and the world to know about.

In the absence of this destroyed book, Sattin sets about describing the years Lawrence spent in the Middle East before he became famous, walking vast distances as an Oxford student researching castles and later as an archaeologist, when he developed a close relationship with the young Arab Dahoum, who became his assistant and protege.

Sattin doubts the much repeated view that they were lovers, pointing out that when Dahoum was asked why he loved Lawrence, he simply replied: “He is our brother, our friend and leader. He is one of us.”

Young Lawrence also throws light on Lawrence’s tortuous relationship with his dominant mother.

At an early age, it seems he picked up clues about the fact that he and his brothers were illegitimate: his father, Sir Thomas Chapman, took the name Lawrence, having got the governess of his four daughters from his marriage pregnant. But there is no suggestion that Lawrence and his brothers had unhappy childhoods.

“Oxford was a happy place to live for someone with a passion for the past,” says Sattin, who tells how Lawrence would go around Oxford talking to workmen involved in demolition work in the city centre. He persuaded them to keep old pottery and glass uncovered and would then reassemble shards and fragments at Polstead Road. The curators at the Ashmolean Museum were delighted to receive the fruits of all this effort and before long Lawrence was helping to rearrange the museum’s medieval displays.

We must hope, along with Anthony Sattin, that equal care will now be put into ensuring T E Lawrence’s old home is properly preserved in its present form.