2. Dominus Illuminatio Measss

Schooldays 1896–1905

Though Oxford had been changing slowly for half a century before the Lawrences arrived in 1896, it remained a city which moved at the pace of the horse-drawn era. The man who was shortly to transform it into a centre of the motor industry, Lord Nuffield, was then plain Mr William Henry Morris – a cycle-maker with dreams, and a shop in the High – and the city remained, as Jan Morris has put it, ‘a kind of elfin workshop, full of respectable craftsmen tapping away in back-alleys … and weavers’ looms … clack[ing] in Magdalen Grove’.¹ A few colleges already had their own motor cars, but the most ponderous vehicles commonly to be found in Oxford streets were the drays of Hall’s or Morrell’s Breweries. Horse-drawn trams – there were nineteen of them by 1910 – were required to keep to a sedate eight miles per hour, and their drivers were given instructions to ‘slow down for a herd of cattie, and to stop completely at the approach of a flock of sheep’. It was a dignified, unhurried Oxford – a place of gas-lit houses, of college barges, private fire-brigades, hansom cabs and coaches-and-four: a town where milkmen still carried their churns in handcarts from St Aldate’s dairy, where the University Clerks still weighed butter in the covered market opposite Jesus College, where boys wore plus-fours and winged shirt-collars, where girls rode bicycles in pinafore-dresses like Tenniel’s Alice in Wonderland, and where demure young women in ankle-length skirts and straw bonnets played a round of stately tennis on the University parks.

I travelled to Oxford to see if I could recapture something of the atmosphere in which T. E. Lawrence grew up, and to taste the vision of Britain he was to carry with him to the deserts of the East. Though the drays are gone, and the horse-drawn trams have long since been replaced by diesel-powered double-deckers, I found that much of turn-of-the century Oxford remains. I stood outside No. 2 Polstead Road – now a slightly seedy building with overflowing rubbish bins and rusty Morris Minors parked in a concrete yard – straining over the decades to hear the voices of the four eldest Lawrence boys, Bob, Ned, Will and Frank, as they set off to school each morning in that long, bright Indian summer of Old England before the Great War changed the world for ever. I walked down Woodstock Road towards the city centre, holding in my mind a vivid image of the boys riding their bicycles, in single file, in strict order of seniority, wearing the blue and white striped Breton jerseys which were almost a family uniform. There were massed may trees in bloom in the gardens, and horse chestnuts budding cream and pink, the hedgerows scented with hawthorn and alder. I passed the same massive stone villas with granite steps and ornate porticoes they would have seen, the same mansions of yellow limestone in stands of spruce and pine, and the same churches spanning a thousand years of history, from G. E. Street’s High Victorian Gothic prayer-hall of St Philip and St James in Walton Manor, to the crusty Anglo-Saxon bulwark of St Michael’s in the Cornmarket. I passed the same corner shops and terraced cottages, the same pubs with double-barrelled names like the Horse and Jockey and the Eagle and Child, the same austere Elizabethan faзades of Balliol and St John’s. I turned right before the Saxon Tower and walked west along George Street, towards the Boys’ High School on the corner of New Inn Hall street. The building was still there, but it was no longer a school, neither did it face St George’s church as it had done in Lawrence’s day: the church was gone, replaced by the less elegant ABC cinema. It was an impressively solid Victorian edifice, however, with its arches and ecclesiastical window, flanked by sculpted Latin mottoes: Dominus Illuminatio Mea and Fortis East Veritas.

Lawrence spent ten years at this school, and while a student there dreamed of freeing the Arabs from the shackles of the Ottoman Turks: ‘I fancied to sum up in my own life,’ he wrote, ‘that new Asia which inexorable time was slowly bringing upon us. The Arabs made a chivalrous appeal to my young instinct and while still at the High School in Oxford, already I thought to make them into a nation.’² This might seem an extraordinary premonition for a schoolboy who had never set foot in the East, yet Lawrence was acquainted with the geography, history and ethnology of the Arab lands long before he arrived there. Daily study of the Bible had made the deserts and mountains of Midian, Moab, Edom, Judah and other places almost as familiar to him as the streets of Oxford, and a remarkable little volume entitled Helps to the Study of the Bible provided him with up-to-date details. Between its modest covers he found surveys of the Holy Land, lists of topographical features connected with the Gospels, indices of biblical plants, flowers, mammals, reptiles, birds and fishes in their English, Latin, Hebrew and occasionally their Arabic names. As a youth he chose as school prizes two books on the history of Egypt, and later he obtained Henry Layard’s works on the excavation of ancient Nineveh. These were no stilted academic reports, but thrilling adventures which epitomized the Victorian view of the East as a place of mystery and exoticism, where fabulous cities lay buried under desert sands prowled by wandering Bedu tribes. In Layard, Lawrence discovered all the elements the East should possess: the bizarre, the sensuous, the alluring. It was an irresistible picture, and throughout his youth he was aware of the East as a parallel world, a dimension to which, in future, he might find the chance to escape.

Meanwhile, though, there was the more prosaic business of school to be attended to. Lawrence looked back on his schooldays as a time of misery, yet he proved to be a remarkably quick learner, outpacing Bob, from whose lessons he had picked up reading and writing early, as many young siblings do. He had a precocious ability with language, and knew colloquial French from his time in Brittany, as well as some Latin, which the boys had been taught by a private tutor in preparation for school. He had a retentive memory and became an unusually fast reader, able, according to his own testimony, to assimilate the core of any book within half an hour. He won two prizes during the years 1896 and 1903, and in 1904 took the Vth Form prize for Divinity, despite claiming to have left the paper unfinished so that Bob, who was still in the Vth Form, might gain first place. In the same year, he was listed eightieth in the Junior Section of the Oxford Locals examinations. Yet despite his apparent success, school did not interest him, for it did not teach him the kind of thing he wanted to know: he later wrote that it had been ‘an irrelevant and time-wasting nuisance, which I hated and contemned’.³

One reason for this may have been that at school Lawrence felt himself a misfit among his peers. From his schooldays onwards he developed a sense of oddity which he never quite lost:’…the oddness must be bone deep,’ he wrote years later. ‘At Oxford I was odd … In officers’ messes, too, I’ve lived about as merrily as the last-hooked fish choking out its life in a boat-load of trippers.’⁴ As a youth Lawrence often saw himself as a giant trapped in a dwarf’s body, and his smallness and unimpressive appearance would colour his self-concept throughout his life. In later years ‘big’ would become his favourite accolade to those he admired, and even to works of art and literature he appreciated. Although he claimed to despise organized games simply because they had rules and results, it was actually a sense of physical inadequacy which led him to reject them. ‘Never compete in anything’ became his personal motto, so impressing his youngest brother that Arnie admitted years later to having been embarrassed when Ned asked him how he had done in a race.⁵ Though his brothers paid lip-service to his non-competitive whim out of deference, their physical qualities overshadowed his. Will – only sixteen months younger and often compared with him – was tall, athletic, and a paragon of classical excellence. The athletic ability which later brought Will a half-blue at St John’s College was surpassed by that of his younger brother Frank, who won the Challenge Cup for Athletics while at the High School, and was three times school gymnastics champion as well as captain of football and vice-captain of cricket. Lawrence, who would later mutter darkly about the ‘sinful misery’ of games, was affronted at this apparent break in ‘family tradition’. Actually the motto ‘never compete’ was an aspect of Lawrence’s paradoxical mask which hid a nature so extremely competitive that he could not even bear to hear someone else praised without feeling diminished. Yet so low was his self-esteem that if he was directly praised he would dismiss it as undeserved. His rejection of the norms of middle-class society was an aspect of his reverse exhibitionism, and his refusal to take part in organized sport was his most overt expression of that rejection. It is perhaps difficult to conceive now that in the late Victorian-Edwardian era sporting prowess was close to Godliness, and the qualities sport was supposed to engender – ‘true grit’, ‘fair play’, ‘good form’, ‘team spirit’ and ‘decency’ – were closely tied up with the mythology of Empire. It was seriously believed in many quarters that Britain actually owed her Empire to her sport, and that the battles which had made her great had first been won ‘on the playing-fields of Eton’. The purity campaign of the late nineteenth century had led to a shift in the concept of manliness, away from moral strength to physical strength, and away from moral integrity to sexual abstention. One authority of the time defined masculinity as ‘the duty of patriotism; the moral and physical beauty of athleticism; the salutary effects of Spartan habits and discipline; the cultivation of all that is masculine and the expulsion of all that is effeminate, un-English and excessively intellectual’.⁶