In February 1921, Churchill took over as Colonial Secretary and decided that the situation must be redressed. He gathered around him a team of experts, including Lawrence, who agreed, less reluctantly than many had expected, to become his adviser on Arab Affairs. Though Churchill came from a far more privileged background, he and Lawrence were made of similar stuff. Both were intuitive, both romantic, both had suffered childhood traumas (Churchill had been emotionally neglected by his promiscuous mother), neither was physically impressive, but both had overcome physical limitations by tremendous willpower and courage, both were rhetoricians, master propagandists and master wordsmiths. Their admiration was mutual. It was Churchill’s intention to hold a conference in Cairo calling together all the parties concerned with policy in the Near East and hammer out a settlement once and for all. The conference met at the Mena House hotel in Cairo, under the shadow of the pyramids, in March 1921 and included almost every British soldier and administrator concerned in the Middle East question. The decision, which had been made previously in consultation with Feisal in London, was to revoke the British Mandate in Iraq and hand the administration over to an Arab government, with the recommendation that Feisal should be king subject to a general plebiscite. Britain would then enter an alliance with Feisal, and withdraw British troops in favour of Lord Trenchard’s RAF bombers. In April Lawrence and Churchill travelled to Jerusalem to confer with Sharif Abdallah, who the previous year had arrived at Ma’an with a force of tribesmen ready to attack the French in Syria. ‘Abdallah proposed that he should govern a single state consisting of Trans-Jordan and Palestine, but this plan was rejected due to Britain’s promises to the Jews. Instead, ‘Abdallah was confirmed as provisional governor of Trans-Jordan, and Lawrence remained in the country as British representative until December, when he returned to Britain, satisfied that he had done his best to fulfil his wartime pledges to the Hashemites: ‘[Churchill] made straight all the tangle,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘finding solutions fulfilling (I think) our promises in letter and spirit (where humanly possible) without sacrificing any interest of our Empire or any interest of the people concerned. So we were quit of our war-time Eastern adventure, with clean hands, but three years too late to earn the gratitude which peoples, if not states, can pay.’²⁴

It was, said Arab historian George Antonius, a statement ‘so palpably untenable as to cast serious doubts on Lawrence’s understanding of the issues involved’.²⁵ In fact, the Cairo Conference heralded a period of unrest in the Middle East which had scarcely been surpassed even under Ottoman rule. Iraq failed to enjoy a single year of peace until the end of the Second World War, and remains in dire straits today. The same can obviously be said for Palestine. In Syria, the French met with severe opposition until they finally accepted an Arab administration in 1936. Only in Trans-Jordan, a relatively poor country, mostly desert, was some semblance of balance maintained by the Arab Legion under the gifted administrator John Bagot Glubb. King Hussain, the fox who had conspired from his youth to create an independent Hejaz, was driven from his own country in 1924 by ‘Abdal Azziz ibn Sa’ud, the desert puritan who was the real victor of the Arab Revolt. The ‘war-time Eastern adventure’ is still with us, and we are not quit of it with clean hands yet.

Lawrence was never to return to Arabia, however. He had done what he could for the Arabs, had, rightly or wrongly, emerged as the greatest hero of history’s most devastating war, and was obliged to carry the fantastic ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ with him for the rest of his life. He might have named his job – it was even rumoured (by Lawrence himself) that Churchill had offered him the post of High Commissioner in Egypt, in the footsteps of Kitchener, McMahon and Allenby. But Lawrence had no taste for high office. The reward he chose for his wartime service was the most curious one imaginable: he chose to join the armed services as a private soldier, thus bringing to full circle the ambition he had nurtured when, at the age of seventeen, he had run away from home.

21. In Speed We Hurl Ourselves Beyond the Body

The RAF, RTC and death 1922 – 35

On 30 August 1922, a small, ragged-looking man named John Hume Ross hovered shakily outside the RAF recruiting-office in Henrietta Street, central London, wondering whether or not to enter. Finally, after rushing to a public lavatory to ease the ‘melting of his bowels’ from fright, he resolved to walk in. He was confronted by a stern-looking Warrant Officer, Sergeant-Major McGee, who thought him suspicious-looking, and called his officer, Captain W. E. Johns, an aspiring author who would later entertain the boys of the world with his ‘Biggies’ books. McGee made a signal to Johns, indicating that Ross might be a crook, for he had no identity-papers or references with him. Johns sent Ross away to get references and his birth certificate, and while he was gone contacted the registry of births at Somerset House, ascertaining that there was no John Hume Ross’ born on the date the man had given. When ‘Ross’ returned with references which were obviously forged, the Sergeant-Major showed him out.

To Johns’s astonishment, however, the little man was back within the hour, in the company of an official messenger from the Air Ministry who carried a message signed by the Chief of Air Staff, Lord Trenchard, that Ross was to be enlisted as an Aircraftman Second Class. However, there was still the medical examination to contend with, and the two RAF doctors found that Ross not only bore signs of voluntarily inflicted beating,¹ but was also severely malnourished. The doctors rejected him as unfit. Johns took the case to his Commanding Officer, who telephoned the Air Ministry. When he had finished, he put the phone down and said: ‘Watch your step. This man is Lawrence of Arabia. Get him in, or you’ll get your bowler hat!’² Johns returned to the doctors with this sensational news, but they adamantly refused to sign. Johns was obliged to bring in a civilian doctor to get Lawrence of Arabia enlisted as a private in the RAF.

It is not given to every man to realize his life’s fantasy, but then the fantasies of many men revolve around dreams of grandeur, wealth and success. Lawrence’s curious psychology – the ‘reverse exhibitionism’ which was the social expression of his masochism – made sure that his fantasies always extended in the opposite direction – towards degradation, poverty, self-denial and enslavement. Short of being an actual slave or a prisoner in jail, the situation which best allowed Lawrence to experience such degradation was in the ranks of the armed forces. He later said that it had been his wartime experience with army and RAF personnel which had encouraged him to join the ranks: ‘These friendly outings with the armoured car and Air Force fellows were what persuaded me that my best future, if I survived the war, was to enlist,’ he wrote.³ In January 1922, though, while still working for the Colonial Office, he had written to Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff – whom he had met at the Cairo Conference in 1921 – that he would like to join the RAF ‘in the ranks, of course’. He told Trenchard that his reason for enlisting was to obtain material for a book about the Royal Air Force ‘from the ground’. When Trenchard – with Churchill’s agreement – finally issued the order that John Hume Ross’ should be admitted to the RAF as ‘AC 2’ (Aircraftman 2nd Class) No. 352087 on 16 August, he wrote, ‘He is taking this step to learn what is the life of an airman.’⁴ He later wrote to an acquaintance that he had joined up because he had found himself destitute, and enlisting in the ranks was a quick and easy way of staying alive.