Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (94 page)

The famous Lawrence of Arabia appearing at the House of Commons in an airman’s uniform did not go unnoticed; on the contrary, he caused a sensation, and Sir Samuel Hoare complained strongly to Trenchard, who called Lawrence into the Air Ministry and warned him sternly against any further appearances in Westminster. Lawrence apologized gracefully, though he asked if Trenchard could not find some way to shut up
The Daily News,
and Trenchard, patiently, asked him with gruff amusement, “Why must you be more of a damned nuisance than you need be?”

Lawrence walking around London in uniform was a constant target for journalists—as he wrote to E. M. Forster, “I am being hunted, and do not like it.” Trenchard, who was anxious to get him away, moved quickly to have him posted to RAF Cattewater, near Plymouth, where Wing Commander Smith was the commanding officer. In the meantime, Lawrence received an unexpected and welcome present from Bernard and Charlotte Shaw: a new Brough “Superior” SS-100 motorcycle.
*
He arrived on this motorcycle at RAF Cattewater, where his friend Clare saw him pull up at the camp gates. “On it,” she wrote, “was a small blue-clad figure, very neat and smart, with peaked cap, goggles, gauntlet gloves and a small dispatch-case slung on his back.” Lawrence was back in the RAF again, on a working station, serving under a commanding officer whom he admired and liked, and whose family made him one of their own. When Clare Smith wrote her description of Lawrence’s years at RAF Cattewater, she called the book
The Golden Reign,
for Lawrence was the sovereign, casting over all their lives a glow of glamour, excitement, and adventure. It was as if he had been adopted by the Smiths and their children rather than merely posted to a new RAF station. This was perhaps as close to domestic bliss as Lawrence had ever been, and he loved every moment of it.

He was also about to enter on a period of his life when he found, at the same time, contentment of another sort. RAF Cattewater was a seaplane base, so boats, launches, and speedboats were a necessary part of its equipment, although the actual seaplane squadron had not yet arrived. It was here that Lawrence began a new career as a largely self-taught expert in the building and running of the RAF’s high-speed rescue launches. During a six-year period Lawrence would make an extraordinary contribution to the revolutionary design of the boats that would be used to “fish” out of the water RAF pilots shot down over the Channel in the summer of 1940. Many of these men would owe their lives to the unconventional ideas, and the awesome ability to reach friends in high places in the Air Ministry and the government, of 338171 AC1 Shaw, T. E.

He described his new home in a letter to a friend: “Cattewater proves to be about 100 airmen, pressed pretty tightly on a rock, half-awash in the Sound: a peninsula really, like a fossil lizard swimming from Mount Batten golf links across the harbour towards Plymouth town. The sea is 30 yards from our hut one way, and 70 yards the other. The Camp officers are peaceful, it seems, and the airmen reasonably happy.”

Safely out of London, Lawrence still kept up his connections to the great world, turning down Eddie Marsh’s invitation to present the Haw-thornden Prize to his friend Siegfried Sassoon, and writing in detail to Ernest Thurtle about his objection to the death penalty for cowardice—"A man who can run away is a potential V.C.,” he noted, from experience.

He continued to write in detail to Trenchard about RAF reforms, objecting to spurs for the officers and bayonets for the men. To another friend, an airman from Farnborough, he wrote with resignation, “I’m very weary of being stared at and discussed and praised. What can one do to be forgotten? After I’m dead, they’ll rattle my bones about, in their curiosity.”

The cold of England ate into his bones—he “wished England could be towed some thousand miles to the South,” and at times he complained that he was “so tired, and want so much to lie down and sleep or die.” But he soon began to cheer up as his work became more interesting. No doubt he was also pleased to be serving as Wing Commander Smith’s clerk for the moment; he found himself instantly transformed into a kind of junior partner in running the station, even suggesting that the camp’s name should be changed to RAF Mount Batten and drafting a letter to the Air Ministry requesting the change. Smith signed the letter, and the request was quickly granted.

Despite the absence of the seaplane squadron for the time being, Smith was busy. Apart from running the camp, he was also the RAF’s representative for the organization of the next Schneider Trophy competition, scheduled for the first week of September 1929, at Calshot, near Southampton. Named after a wealthy French industrialist—the trophy’s official name was
La Coupe d’Aviation Maritime Jacques Schneider
—this was a speed event flown by seaplanes over a course of 150 miles. It was first flown in 1912, and by the 1920s it had become one of the most glamorous and expensive contests in the world of aviation, and a test of the major industrial nations’ technology and aircraft design. The race had begun as an annual event, but in 1928 the Aéro-Club de France decided to change it to once every two years, in view of the increasing complexity and sophistication of the designs, and the growing world economic crisis. If any nation should win the trophy three times in a row, it would go to that nation in perpetuity. By 1929, the major contestants were Britain, the United States, and Italy—Germany did not enter, because the German government had no wish to draw attention to its fast-growing aircraft industry. The fastest aircraft were often those designed by Reginald J. Mitchell, of the Vickers-Supermarine Aviation Works. Mitchell would go on to design the “Spitfire,” which was based in part on his Schneider Trophy aircraft and would become perhaps the most successful (and most beautiful) fighter aircraft of World War II.

The contest involved a huge amount of preparation on the part of the host nation, and Lawrence quickly took on much of the correspondence to and from Wing Commander Smith, as well as accompanying him to meetings, to take notes and look after the files. Since the British entries were largely government-financed (like those of the Italians and the Americans) and were run by the RAF, Smith was in charge of the British team. Thus Lawrence was involved in numerous meetings at the Treasury and the Air Ministry, during which he was occasionally recognized as the celebrated Lawrence of Arabia.

Lawrence was at the same time working hard to finish his translation of the
Odyssey,
and trying to decide whether it should be published under his name (given Trenchard’s warning to keep Lawrence’s name out of the press), or indeed whether he could ever finish it at all, given the scope and variety of his duties with the RAF. In addition to being the commanding officer’s secretary-clerk, Lawrence was now a machine and workshop clerk and part of the motorboat crew. Bruce Rogers, the American book designer who had commissioned the
Odyssey
project, displayed a saintly patience with the delay; he sensibly decided to wait, writing Lawrence soothing letters, rather than trying to set deadlines that Lawrence couldn’t meet.

There were occasional stories about Lawrence in the newspapers: the trashy scandal tabloid
John Bull
made his life more difficult by suggesting that he spent all his time at Mount Batten tinkering with his expensive motorcycle and translating Homer—exactly the kind of story Trenchard wanted to avoid. Still, Lawrence managed to get up to London on his motorcycle from time to time, and also managed to cut the journey to just over four and a half hours. This meant riding the big Brough over “the ton” (100 miles per hour) wherever he could.
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Lawrence heard Bernard Shaw read
The Apple Cart
aloud at the London house of Lord and Lady Astor, with a guest list of exactly the kind of people Trenchard wanted him to avoid. He soon found a soul mate in his hostess, Nancy Astor, Britain’s first woman member of Parliament, and perhaps the most energetic, flamboyant, and outspoken woman in the country. She was originally Nancy Langhorne, from Danville, Virginia; and she and her sister reached fame as the original “Gibson Girls.” After an unsuccessful marriage to Robert Gould Shaw II, she came to England and quickly married the immensely wealthy Waldorf Astor, Viscount Astor. Soon Nancy Astor became something of a national institution, known for her wit, her willingness to break social barriers and traditions, and her blunt outspokenness to opponents, including Winston Churchill. Her seat as a member of Parliament was Plymouth, virtually on Lawrence’s new doorstep. When she spied Lawrence in the streets of Plymouth, he reported to a friend, “A pea-hen voice screamed ‘Aircraftman’ from a car.” Lawrence tried to escape, but she called Wing Commander Smith and “invited herself” to RAF Mount Batten, where she not only tracked Lawrence down but persuaded him to give her a ride on his motorcycle. They immediately became friends, much to the surprise of other people, for she was rich, reactionary, a militant Christian Scientist, and a dreadful bully. He described her to Charlotte Shaw as “one of the most naturally impulsive and impulsively natural people. Like G.B.S. [Charlotte’s husband], more a cocktail than a welcome diet.” (This was perhaps not the most flattering thing to say about Bernard Shaw to his wife.) Lady Astor became another of Lawrence’s impassioned correspondents, arousing both disapproval and heartache in Charlotte. “I do not know when, or with whom, I have ever maintained for so long so hot a correspondence,” Lawrence wrote Nancy Astor. “Clearly we are soul-mates.”

For a man who gave the impression of being a confirmed misogynist, Lawrence had a surprising number of female soul mates: Charlotte Shaw,Nancy Astor, and Clare Smith. Clare had certain advantages—she was young, beautiful, always elegantly dressed, adventurous, and nearby. Extremely photogenic and gay, with a taste for saucy hats, she had the plucked, finely penciled eyebrows of the period, as well as the high cheekbones and vividly painted lips. In photographs she looks like a character in a Nancy Mitford novel. Lawrence spent a lot of time with her, at the Smiths’ home—the RAF had saved money by converting a famous old Plymouth pub into the commanding officer’s house—where he was encouraged to drop in whenever he liked. They also squeezed together in the tight seat of a tiny speedboat they had been given by a wealthy yacht owner; or they sunned themselves on the Smiths’ porch. Clare loved warmth as much as Lawrence did. She called him “Tes,” after his new initials, T.E.S., and he called her Clare and her daughter “Squeak.” Clare noticed, among other things, how much he disliked shaking hands with anyone and how hard he tried to avoid it, holding his hands behind his back, and bowing slightly instead like a Japanese. However, he did not mind stroking dogs and cats—the Smiths’ dogs, Leo and Banner, were devoted to him. Clare noted also that he never smoked, drank alcohol, or swore. The two shared a love of music, and he gave the Smiths his expensive electric gramophone, so that he and Clare could listen to classical records in the evenings, and taught her how to sing lieder in German. He especially enjoyed hearing Clare sing Schumann’s
Frauenliebe und Leben,
but his favorite lied was Wolf’s “Ver-schweigene Liebe.” When Clare went shopping in Plymouth, she often brought him back a cake of Golden Glory soap, a transparent glycerin soap that he especially liked because it smelled sweet and didn’t “make a mess of any bath.” This curious domesticity between an airman and the commanding officer’s wife was something that Clare seems to have accepted intuitively: “he lived a monastic life within the world of ordinary beings,” she wrote. “Thus he was able to have a deep friendship for a woman—myself—based on the closest ties of sympathy and understanding, but containing none of the elements normally associated with love.” He seemed, she thought, to have completely separated himself from the physical side of life, and indeed to be hardly even aware of it.

Her husband, far from disapproving of their relationship, which raised many an eyebrow in Plymouth, seems to have felt the same kind of affection for this strange and lonely man. When a well-intentioned friend told him that there was “a good deal of talk going on about your wife spending so much time with Mr. Shaw,” Smith simply “roared with laughter.” So did Lawrence, when the Smiths told him about it. The other airmen, and even the NCOs, seem to have had no problem with the close relationship that developed between Lawrence and the Smiths—RAF Mount Batten was small enough so that it was apparent to everybody that Lawrence never sought favors for himself, and that he was in some way a special figure, irrespective of rank—at once a problem solver and a natural leader to whom everybody came for advice. There was no secret about him at Mount Batten—the men knew he was Lawrence of Arabia and were proud to have him there, a celebrity and a person who seemed to live by his own rules. In a curious way, Lawrence had at last found happiness, perhaps for the first time since his life with Dahoum at Carchemish, or at least as much happiness as he was capable of enjoying, for he remained fiercely self-critical and ascetic.

As always, outside the gates of Mount Batten, the presence of Lawrence in the RAF continued to present problems. The Conservative government had been replaced by Labour and the new secretary of state for air, Lord Thomson, was no more disposed than his predecessor to have Lawrence in the ranks of the RAF. This was unfortunate, for the Schneider Trophy Race was bound to make Lawrence more visible, however much he tried to stay out of the limelight, and a full complement of the world’s press would be covering it.

Lord Thomson was already irritated by Lawrence’s presumptions to set Air Ministry policy. Britain was in the process of completing two giant “airships” in the summer of 1929. Every major nation was intrigued by the possibilities of these huge dirigibles, which many believed represented the future of long-distance air travel. That this was an illusion was not finally demonstrated until a great German airship, the
Hindenburg,
burst into flames on mooring at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937. The two British airships were nearly 800 feet long, longer than the
Hindenburg,
and carried sixty passengers in private staterooms spread over two decks, with a cocktail lounge, a dining salon, a smoking room, and “two promenade lounges with windows down the side of the ship.” In short, such an airship was a flying first-class ocean liner, with a range of 5,000 miles at sixty miles an hour. There were only three problems with the airship—the first was that there was no proof it could ever be made profitable; the second was that the hydrogen gas keeping it aloft, if mixed with air, was highly combustible; and the third was the question of how stable it might be in storms.