Lawrence of Arabia began as a teenage brass-rubber scouring Oxford building sites
Years before the Arab Revolt made him famous, T. E. Lawrence was a schoolboy cycling from parish church to parish church, rubbing monumental brasses and rescuing finds from Oxford building sites for the Ashmolean Museum. Archaeology took him to Ottoman Syria, and war turned that knowledge into intelligence work and legend.
Lawrence was born on 16 August 1888 in Tremadog, in north Wales. His father, the Anglo-Irish landowner Thomas Chapman, had left his wife for Sarah Junner, his daughters' governess; the couple never married and lived under the name Lawrence. Called Ned at home, he was the second of five sons. The family moved restlessly, through Scotland, the Isle of Wight, Brittany and Jersey, before settling in 1896 at 2 Polstead Road in Oxford, where the garden shed built for his studies still stands.
At 15 he and his friend Cyril Beeson toured the churches of three counties recording monuments, and the museum's 1906 report praised the pair's watchfulness on local building sites. He cycled through France in 1906 and 1907 measuring medieval castles, and boasted that locals mistook him for a native speaker. After reading history at Jesus College from 1907 to 1910, he spent four years excavating for the British Museum, mostly at Carchemish in Ottoman Syria. His later claim to have run away and served briefly as a boy soldier finds no support in army records.
When war came in 1914 he joined the Arab Bureau, an intelligence unit in Egypt. Missions in 1916 drew him into the Arab uprising against Ottoman rule, and he became British liaison to Emir Faisal, one of its leaders, taking part in fighting that ended with the capture of Damascus in October 1918. The American journalist Lowell Thomas's sensational reporting did much to create the Lawrence of Arabia image.
After working with Faisal at the Foreign Office, he withdrew from public life in 1922 and served as an ordinary enlisted man in the Army and the RAF until 1935, helping develop rescue motorboats. His account of the revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, came out in 1926, and The Mint described RAF life. He died at 46 on 19 May 1935 after a motorcycle crash in Dorset. A 1962 film took his famous title.
Source: T. E. Lawrence
