In place of spiritual certainty, Lawrence used intuition – the rational ability to compute how events have come about and where they are heading. It was a quality which gave him an air of prescience, and which Clare Sydney Smith would romanticize as ‘the power of foretelling’. Lawrence certainly did not have some magical fortune-telling ability, as Smith envisaged it, for though his intuitions could be staggeringly accurate, they were occasionally dreadfully wrong. Lawrence was adept at selecting and navigating possible paths through the universe, and, as George Lloyd would comment, he had a ‘genius for thinking ahead of nine people out of ten’.⁹ It was a correct intuition which had told him, long before his latest trip to France, that Crusader castles in Syria would be the inevitable culmination of his planned thesis. It was Charles Bell of the Ashmolean, though, who guided him towards the topic of the pointed arch and vault. It had long been contested as to whether this structure had been adopted from Oriental sources by the Crusaders, or whether the Crusaders themselves had introduced it as an innovation in the East. Lawrence’s knowledge of medieval castles in Britain and France qualified him perfectly for such a study: Bell suggested that he should visit Syria and settle the issue once and for all.¹⁰

Lawrence was now back in his bedroom at Polstead Road, lamenting the loss of his rooms in college and craving a sense of physical separation from the family. He needed ‘quietness’ for his studies, and he persuaded his parents to build him a small cottage at the bottom of the garden, containing a bedroom and a study, piped water, a fireplace and even a telephone to the house. To insulate it doubly against outside noise, Lawrence hung its walls with Bolton sheeting. Vyvyan Richards would often find him there, lying on the hearthrug by a crackling fire, reading his way through a pile of books, or carefully drawing his own foot. Once, Richards startled him in the act of striding up and down along an odd-looking board with nails banged into it. Lawrence explained that he was practising the art of pacing out distances covertly, which would be essential for his next trip if he wished to avoid being arrested as a spy. There are other intimations that he was readying himself for an expedition to the East during the winter of 1908. In October he had begun reading Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, the classic work on Arabia and the Bedu, written by the most distinguished desert explorer of the era – a book which Lawrence would later praise as ‘a bible of its kind’. Its combination of Chaucerian prose and Elizabethan construction appealed to him enormously, since he recognized that Doughty had deliberately set out to purify the English language in the same way that William Morris had done. For Lawrence, stirring adventures and dramatic experiences were of little use unless they were presented in perfect prose, and for this reason he did not admire Richard Burton – possibly the most interesting Orientalist and explorer of the nineteenth century. He condemned the highly-strung, irascible, formidably talented Burton as ‘vulgar’ and dismissed his books as being ‘written in so difficult an English style as to be unreadable’.¹¹ Like Morris’s novels, Arabia Deserta would remain close to his heart for the rest of his life.

In winter 1908, Lawrence joined the newly formed Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps as a cadet – an act which astonished his peers. The avowed non-conformist, who refused to play organized games ‘because they were organized, because they had rules’, was now voluntarily putting on army uniform, bowing to military discipline and meekly taking orders. The truth may be that the OTC appealed to his masochistic fantasy about military life – not quite as satisfying as being a humble Gunner in the Royal Garrison Artillery, perhaps, but a uniform just the same. The Jesus College contingent was a bicycle-mounted signals unit, which gave him opportunities for cycling, and he considered some of the training to be of real value. He later wrote that he had learned to fire a Vickers machine-gun in the OTC, which was of use to him during the Arab Revolt, though he would tell Liddell Hart that his OTC experience was ‘negligible’ in the sense of teaching him strategy.¹² He did practise pistol-shooting assiduously, however, and in December found an opportunity to test his compass-work when he and Scroggs Beeson marched on a bearing from the top of Cumnor Hurst in a snowstorm, wading freezing streams and breasting snowdrifts until they almost fell into the Isis at Folly Bridge.

This was, in fact, the last day he and Beeson spent in each other’s company, for they had outgrown their friendship. Beeson had forsaken archaeology for zoology, his first interest, leaving Lawrence to archaeologize alone. He became even more deeply involved with the Ash-molean in late 1908, and one day, while visiting the medieval collection, he ran into Edward Leeds, a shy young man eight years his senior, who until recently had been serving in the Colonial Service in Malaya. Leeds had just replaced Leonard Woolley as junior Assistant Keeper of the Ashmolean, and he and Lawrence found much in common – not least their shyness. The following January Leeds introduced Lawrence to the museum’s new Keeper, David Hogarth – a man who was to exert a profound influence on his life. Hogarth was then forty-five years old, an Orientalist and antiquarian of the classical school, who had tramped Syria, Turkey and Palestine alone with a revolver for company, and who stood no nonsense from the natives. He had written a notable book about his adventures: A Wandering Scholar in the Levant, and was an archaeologist of repute who had once run the British School of Archaeology in Athens, and had excavated in Cyprus and in Egypt under the celebrated Flinders Petrie. He spoke French, German, Italian, Greek and Turkish, sat on the committee of the Royal Geographical Society, and had even worked as Times correspondent in Crete during the 1897 revolution. Hogarth was the archetypal Edwardian gentleman-Imperialist: chauvinistic, conservative, autocratic, almost congenitally hostile to democracy – an aristocrat of the intellect. Patrician in style, cool in temperament, superbly educated at Winchester and Magdalen, he was the eternal dilettante amateur, whose qualities Lawrence would later sum up with the single epithet ‘civilized’. Others, less impressed with his combination of physical repugnance and unstymied erudition, thought him a ‘highly educated baboon’.¹³ Despite his ability, Hogarth never achieved greatness in any one sphere: his talents were too diffuse, and like Lawrence himself, he was too restless to be labelled, always oscillating between the academic and the adventurous, and ultimately leaving his most distinguished legacy in his recognition of remarkable talent in the person of T. E. Lawrence. To Lawrence he was to become a kind of father-figure, a parent-surrogate who ‘was like a reserve, always there behind me; if I got flustered or puzzled’.¹⁴ Moreover, Hogarth was well connected. Unlike Thomas Lawrence, who had necessarily broken ties with everyone of influence and could no longer call on the Old School to assist him, Hogarth knew almost everyone. Edwardian society was no meritocracy, and despite his intellectual and academic gifts, Lawrence realized he required some kind of sponsor in order to ‘get on’. He later admitted that he owed Hogarth every good job he had ever had. He was, Lawrence concluded, ‘a very wonderful man … first of all human, then charitable, then alive … the parent I could trust, without qualification, to understand what bothered me’¹⁵ (my italics). From the beginning, Lawrence recognized what a man like Hogarth could do for him, and set out to win him over.