Lawrence had met Bruce in London in 1922, while still working for the Colonial Office, at the Mayfair flat of a man called Edward Murray, who was considering the eighteen-year-old Scotsman for a job. On their second meeting, Lawrence told Bruce who he was, and informed him that he was looking for someone who was young, strong and alert, who could be trusted with highly confidential personal matters. Bruce thought him a crank, and protested that he was not qualified, but he was desperately in need of a job, and Lawrence offered him a generous salary of Ј3 a month as a retainer. On subsequent meetings Lawrence swore Bruce to the utmost confidence, and began to unfold a long and complicated fantasy, claiming to be in the power of a relative he referred to as the ‘Old Man’. The story went that he was in debt and, under pressure from his bank, had decided to write a book, hoping that it would make enough money to allow him to pay off his debt and retire to the country. He had applied to a merchant bank for the money to live on while the book was being written, and the bank had asked for the copyright of the book, and requested a guarantor. He said that when his father had died in 1919, the Old Man had inherited his money, and Lawrence had asked him to act as his guarantor. At first he had agreed, but when he discovered that Lawrence had quit his job with the Colonial Office, he had changed his mind, called Lawrence a ‘bastard’ and accused him of a plethora of sins, including insulting King George at Buckingham Palace, ruining the career of Lord Curzon, turning his back on God, and dragging the family name through the gutter. The Old Man, said Lawrence, had agreed to take over his financial affairs and handle his debts, but only on the understanding that all ‘disciplinary matters’ were to be placed in his hands: if he did not agree the Old Man would expose the circumstances of his birth. His life was to be strictly curtailed: he was to enlist in the army or the RAF as a private, and spend his time either writing or soldiering. The only friends he was to be allowed in the ‘upper bracket’ were people connected with his writing. Lawrence told Bruce that he had sworn on the Bible to respect the Old Man’s every wish, and mentioned that corporal punishment might be involved.²⁰ Bruce was suspicious, not because he disbelieved the story, but because he and Lawrence were poles apart socially and he wondered why Lawrence had chosen him for this particular job. Lawrence explained that most of his ‘friends’ couldn’t be trusted, and the few who could were ‘too big’. They would be willing to help only for personal gain: ‘you don’t know what is to be gained,’ Lawrence told him, ‘and wouldn’t be disappointed if you gained nothing.’²¹ He sent Bruce back to Aberdeen, telling him that he would be called for when needed.

While Lawrence was at Uxbridge and Farnborough, he corresponded with Bruce occasionally, telling him how much he loathed the RAF, but hinting that the Old Man thought the life too soft: he had no right to be there at all, he wrote, since the Old Man had arranged for him to join the army. In November Lawrence asked Bruce to come to Farnborough, and when they met informed him that ‘a birch had arrived’ and that the Old Man wanted him to ‘take a few over the buttocks’ as a penalty for having ‘cheated him’ in joining the RAF instead of the army. Before the ‘punishment’ could be carried out, however, Lawrence was exposed by the press in his guise of ‘Ross’ and obliged to leave. He told Bruce that the Old Man had paid an officer at Farnborough Ј30 to give the story to the Express. Bruce temporarily lost touch with him, but in January 1923 he moved to London and managed to get a job as a bouncer in a Paddington nightclub, leaving a message for Lawrence at his borrowed Barton Street flat. A few days later Lawrence came to see him, looking dirty, ragged, sick and exhausted, telling him he had been sleeping rough for several nights (in fact he had been sleeping in the sidecar of the motorcycle he had acquired while in the RAF). Lawrence told Bruce that the Old Man was now forcing him to join the Royal Tank Corps. According to Bruce, he then volunteered to join the army with Lawrence.

*

It seems likely that someone in the military authorities knew of the association between Lawrence and Bruce, for Bruce recounted that his recruitment in Aberdeen had been pre-arranged. Lawrence told him that his offer had pleased the Old Man, who would be writing to him directly once they had enlisted. At Bovington they were given consecutive serial numbers, and adjoining beds in the same hut. They were issued with ill-fitting uniforms, and assigned to a squad of twenty-two recruits, for the duration of their sixteen weeks’ training: ‘we had everyone in the hut sized up,’ Bruce wrote. ‘It was the bad ones I had to keep my eyes on, especially the drinkers, who were continually touching Lawrence for money … I came into the hut and heard a fellow giving Lawrence a mouthful of filth because he refused to give him a pound. I jumped him there and then and one hell of a fight took place …²² Shortly afterwards, Lawrence rented Clouds Hill, a cottage which stood close to the camp, as a refuge from the almost intolerable life of the barrack-room, and it was here, in 1923, that Bruce gave Lawrence a birching for the first time. The beating was arranged with the precision of a ritual. First, Lawrence told Bruce that the Old Man had decided he must be punished, and had sentenced him to twelve strokes of the birch. He then handed Bruce a typed letter, purporting to be from the Old Man, which informed him that he was to pick up a birch from the local railway-station and administer the punishment, afterwards reporting to him in writing that he had done so, and describing how Lawrence had conducted himself throughout the beating. At first, Bruce declared that he would have nothing to do with it, but Lawrence insisted that it had to be done. Since Lawrence seemed to be willing, Bruce finally agreed, and carried out the ‘sentence’ the same afternoon. However, since Lawrence kept his trousers on during the birching – which consisted of twelve strokes to the buttocks – the Old Man was not appeased, and the thrashing had to be repeated later, on Lawrence’s bare behind: ‘After I had given him the twelve, he said: “Give me another one for luck,”‘ Bruce remembered. ‘It is nasty. The prongs go into the skin and break the blood vessels and it bleeds. He just lay there and gritted his teeth. He never moved.’²³ Whether this was the first such birching Lawrence had ever received is open to question. Curiously, Bruce stated that he saw ‘no other scars’, though W. E. Johns claimed to have seen ‘a mass of recent scars’ on Lawrence’s back at the recruiting office less than a year earlier. Bruce also said that he was not the only man to have beaten Lawrence in this manner – indeed, some time later he discovered birch-marks on Lawrence’s legs while they were working out in a gymnasium in Bournemouth, and Lawrence told him they had been inflicted by ‘an employee of the Old Man’.²⁴ Between 1923 and 1935, Bruce birched Lawrence on nine occasions, at Clouds Hill, at Barton Street, at his home in Aberdeen and at other places in Scotland, and on at least one occasion another witness was present. Moreover, Philip Knightley and Colin Simpson, the Sunday Times reporters to whom Bruce told his story, revealed in their 1968 article that they knew of two other men who had been employed to thrash Lawrence, though whether before, after, or concurrently with Bruce is unknown. If Johns did see ‘recent’ scars on Lawrence’s back in 1922, then it may be that Lawrence’s flagellation disorder had begun before he met Bruce earlier that year. However, it is likely that Johns’s statement was spurious: Bruce’s beatings were always administered to the buttocks rather than the back, suggesting a sexual element which some biographers have tried to suppress, and which was confirmed by Bruce’s admission that Lawrence sometimes experienced orgasm as a result of the floggings. The attempt of some biographers to ‘sanctify’ Lawrence’s masochism by suggesting that he tried to emulate the practices of medieval saints also falls down on this point – for medieval flagellants were invariably whipped on the back rather than the buttocks.