TE Lawrence is celebrated for his role in the Arab Revolt, but his legend obscures secret agreements and British imperial ambitions that shaped modern West Asia and left enduring consequences
On December 10, 1962, Lawrence of Arabia, one of the 20th century’s cinematic masterpieces, premiered in London. It starred Peter O’Toole as one of the century’s most romantic figures, Thomas Edward (TE) Lawrence (1888-1935), a British Army officer, archaeologist, diplomat, and writer, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. The legend has it that Lawrence rode into the desert, united Arab tribes against the Ottoman Empire, and led them to freedom.
But the real story of the Arab revolt (1916-1918) and the fall of the Ottoman Empire is more about secret treaties and broken promises that continue to haunt the region. A generation grew up with Lawrence’s rosy image and his role in the so-called Arab liberation. He knew about the 1917 British Balfour Declaration, which led to Israel’s creation and Palestinian dispossession, and the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France to partition the Ottoman territories into respective spheres of influence.
The agreement betrayed Arabs who were promised freedom in exchange for revolt against the Ottomans. Lawrence was part of the mess the British created in the region. But Lawrence, barely 5’3, gained a much stronger image thanks to the iconography surrounding the 1962 film: O’Toole’s piercing blue eyes and flowing white robes. Lawrence was once told to stand on tiptoes to meet the height requirement for acceptance into the British forces, which changed during the First World War amid desperation for recruits.
Lawrence of Arabia’s Secret Family Origins
Before he rose to fame, Lawrence grew up as a lonely boy in a scandalous family. Lawrence’s Anglo-Irish father and mother lived under a false identity after his father, whose real name was Sir Thomas Chapman and who was heir to an Irish baronetcy, ran off with his daughter’s governess, Sarah. His wife never divorced him, leaving Lawrence’s family with a secret at its heart and with no backstory.
Chapman pretended to be Lawrence after leaving his estate in County Westmeath, Ireland, where he lived with his devoutly Catholic wife, and their four daughters and the governess. He had an affair with Sarah, and when she got pregnant, Thomas Chapman left with her. He never went back to Lady Chapman, who, as a devout Catholic, refused to give a divorce. Chapman and Sarah could never get married.
An allowance from his family fortune was enough for a comfortable life. But Chapman always worried about being caught and seen by people who might know him. So Sarah and Chapman moved around before settling in Oxford, a relatively quiet city. They lived in a red brick house as Mr and Mrs Lawrence and family. Sarah was herself born out of wedlock and had five sons with somebody else’s husband, and yet came across as being somebody filled with evangelical piety.
Lawrence’s Childhood: Religion and an Imagined World
Religion was part of Sarah’s refuge in an era marked by a moral obsession with respectability, religious duty, self-improvement, and social order. Sarah, described as dour, difficult, and introverted, had five sons. She was a strict mother, particularly with her second son, TE Lawrence, who was different from the others. TE Lawrence is believed to have been the only one of the five who knew something was wrong. In his teens, he told a friend he thought Sarah was his mother, but Chapman was not his father.
TE Lawrence thought Thomas Chapman had stepped in to do the decent thing and make the family whole, and they pretended to be Lawrences. There were no aunties and grandmas. They were completely cut off, living in a bubble. But dad was around, and it was a dysfunctional but loving family. They were very quiet, did not socialize, and were always fearful of social stigma as unmarried with five children.
The invented Lawrence family got woven into TE Lawrence’s psyche. He lived in a fantasy land most of his life. As a kid, he told stories about knights and maidens, courtly love, and storming castles. He spun a world for himself. Lawrence was interested in the Middle Ages. He visited castles and churches. Lawrence was obsessed with brass rubbings and often went far afield with a friend, putting paper on brass reliefs and rubbing charcoal over them for pictures.
Lawrence From Oxford to the Ottoman Empire
In the summer of 1909, Lawrence decided to walk across Ottoman Syria, taking an obsession with castles and churches to a new level. He cycled to France the summer after his first year at Oxford University. Lawrence stopped at churches for a thesis on medieval church architecture. Lawrence, a vegetarian then, drank two pints of milk and a baguette for breakfast, riding about 50 miles daily on a push bike. He stopped at churches, examined floor plans, made sketches and took pictures all through the heat of July and August.
That was the prelude to the next adventure to Syria at the end of his second year at Oxford. David George Hogarth, an archaeologist who had made extraordinary journeys in that region before becoming keeper of antiquities at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, inspired Lawrence. Lawrence looked up to Hogarth as his mentor. Hogarth told Lawrence that Englishmen do not walk in that part of the world and asked him to get a horse or a camel and a servant. He warned him against going in the summer because it is blisteringly hot.
When Lawrence insisted on going on his own, walking and doing it in the summer, Hogarth put him in touch with Charles Doughty, the author of Travels in Arabia Deserta. Doughty, an English poet, writer, and traveller who travelled in West Asia and lived with the Bedouins during the 1870s, was the man to go to for anything about Arabia.
Lawrence in Syria and Bond with Dahoum
Doughty told Lawrence he could not walk in summer and warned him: ‘You are going to die.’ But Lawrence ignored the warning and arrived in Beirut in July, two months after his 21st birthday, in Ottoman Syria, what is now modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and Hatay (Turkey). He walked up to a thousand miles amid unrest in Ottoman provinces. Lawrence, who carried a revolver, a pistol, a change of clothes, and a camera in his bag, looked for Crusader castles, the origins of the Gothic arch, and influences on medieval architecture. The thesis of Lawrence, who was inspired by the Crusades, which were a theologically justified attempt to erase Islam and the Islamic civilization, earned him a first-class degree at Oxford.
In Syria, Lawrence did not have to explain who he was or hide who he was not. These were the happiest years of his life. In 1911, he went out to dig at Carchemish, a major ancient city on the west bank of the Euphrates River, straddling the modern border between Turkey and Syria. Lawrence loved the local people, who looked after him. He felt a great affinity with them. Lawrence found locals incredibly cooperative as he looked after a workforce of a couple of hundred people for the British Museum-commissioned digging. The diggers hoped to find the Rosetta Stone of the language of the Hittites, an ancient Anatolian Indo-European civilization centered in modern Boğazköy in Turkey from roughly 1650 to 1190 BCE, and something that would allow them to crack its code. The digging goes on today.
Lawrence first went to Lebanon to study Arabic, which put him ahead of the other archaeologists. He mastered colloquial Arabic and showed affinity with his underlings, including Selim Ahmed, nicknamed Dahoum, the emotional heart of Lawrence’s life, unlike other Europeans. Around 200 people worked on this British museum project, and Dahoum, a water carrier, was the youngest; probably about 13-14 when Lawrence first met him. Dahoum had a donkey. He brought water to the workers.
Lawrence, First World War, Ambition and Loss
When Lawrence asked Dahoum what he would do with the money he was getting, he replied that he would go to Aleppo for education. Self-taught, Dahoum could write Arabic. Lawrence thought he could help and nurture Dahoum. His book Seven Pillars of Wisdom is dedicated to Dahoum, to whom he is believed to have had a sexual attraction. They were together until Dahoum was 16-17.
Lawrence took Dahoum to Aleppo’s British consulate to learn English. Within a year and a half, Dahoum became one of the headmen of the dig workforce. In the summer of 1914, Lawrence left Dahoum behind as the First World War erupted. Lawrence, who studied Levantine history and Arabic as an undergraduate at Oxford University, was recruited in the British Army for his knowledge of terrain, Arab culture, and language.
Lawrence worked at the Cairo Military Intelligence Department. In 1916, he was reassigned to liaise with the Hashemites in the Hejaz (western Saudi Arabia) and would soon be on the front lines of the war. The same year Dahoum died of typhoid. But Lawrence did not get to know about Dahoum’s death until just before he was with the Arabs, moving towards Damascus after its fall at the end of the First World War.
Dahoum’s Death and the Beginnings of Lawrence’s Espionage
The fall of Damascus was a great victory of the Arab revolt. Everybody was celebrating. For Lawrence, it was a great day for everybody except him. He asked to be relieved so he could go home. It was over for him after Dahoum’s death. Everything was over. It was a platonic love, and Lawrence carved out Dahoum’s naked sculpture, causing a scandal.
Before the war, Lawrence helped secretly map a desert route to the Suez Canal. Lord Kitchener, British Agent and Consul-General in Egypt, anticipated the war and had the desert mapped under the guise of exploring traces of Moses and the children of Israel, and the Exodus. That was the beginning of Lawrence’s spying. In 1909, he went to Tiberias and the Galilee Sea as the Zionist project was beginning. Farms were springing up across Ottoman Palestine, and large areas were being sold.
The whole of the Jezreel Valley was being bought up, and Arabs were being expelled from their land. New Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland were taking and farming it, increasing its yields. Lawrence saw Jewish farms flourishing 10 years into the Rothschild project and the funding of farms in Palestine. Lawrence wrote, the sooner the Jews farm it, the better. He called their colonies bright spots in a desert, perhaps revealing his sympathies lay with Zionists rather than Arabs.
Palestinians used simple and underfunded farming techniques. They were not producing a surplus. The new Jewish arrivals were funded and equipped with new equipment and technology. Their land was in the valley, which was more fertile. The Palestinian land was in the hills, better for grazing and growing olive trees than crops.
The Arab Revolt and Britain’s Conflicting Promises
Lawrence came across Zionist kibbutzim and agricultural colonies in Palestine as he mapped the Zin Desert, which is mentioned in the Bible as one of the places through which the Israelites wandered during their Exodus. The war would soon break out in August 1914 with the Germans in alliance with the Turks. Winston Churchill, future British Prime Minister and political head of the British Royal Navy, ordered the seizure of two Ottoman battleships, giving the Ottomans another reason to rally around the Germans.
The British, meanwhile, made three contradictory promises about Arab lands, creating the fissures that scar the region to this day. In 1915, Sir Henry McMahon promised the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, independence, except for a few districts around Damascus and Aleppo and part of Lebanon. The Arab world was supposed to be independent if the Arabs rose and fought the Turks. But the British signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement with the French to divide the region among themselves. In 1917, the Balfour Declaration pledged British support for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
A year before the declaration, 62-year-old Hussein bin Ali opened a window of the Hashemite Palace in Mecca, pointed a rifle at the Ottoman barracks across the way, and fired a shot, signaling the beginning of the Arab revolt (1916-18). The Sharif, guardian of Islam’s holiest city and the Prophet’s direct descendant, declared war on the Muslim Empire that he served all his life at the behest of a British civil servant in Cairo on June 10, 1916.
Lawrence Between Arab Independence and British Imperial Ambitions
Lawrence heard the news of the revolt at his desk in a room at the Seavoy Hotel, 600 miles away in Cairo. He would soon participate in the revolt, which weakened the Ottoman Empire from within, and initially thought of a confederation of Arab kingdoms or states under British control. Lawrence, who dressed like Bedouins, played a leading role in coordinating British support of the revolt, pitting Arabs against the Ottomans. He served as the Arabic translator for Emir Faisal, one of Sharif Hussein’s sons, as he advocated for an independent Arab Kingdom and a unified Greater Syria under the Hejaz monarchs at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919-20.
Lawrence mediated between the Hejaz monarchy and the British. He coordinated victories for the Allied war effort. Lawrence, who bolstered colonization of Syria and worked for the Colonial Office and served the British Raj, advocated for Arab liberation. But Lawrence also knew the British did not intend to follow through on their wartime promise of Arab self-determination and planned to take former Ottoman lands for themselves and the Allied powers France and Russia. But when he had to choose between the commitment to the British Empire and the Arabs, he chose the former.
The essay draws on insights from travel writer and historian Anthony Sattin’s Young Lawrence: A Portrait of the Legend as a Young Man
