Air Marshal Salmond had dropped what is known in the RAF as a “clanger,” or outside it as a “brick.” Fortunately, he did not pursue the matter, but Bone kept an eye open for the mysterious AC1 Shaw and in time discovered that he was virtually the only person at Drigh Road not already in on the secret that AC1 Shaw was T. E. Lawrence.*

Bone was annoyed not to have been informed that one of his clerks was Lawrence of Arabia, and his natural tendency to take it out on Lawrence may have been increased by the fact that he had read and disliked Robert Graves’s Lawrence and the Arabian Adventure.He sought out Lawrence, and as Lawrence put it in a letter to Trenchard’s private secretary, Wing Commander T. B. Marson, another old friend, he “trod heavily on my harmless, if unattractive face.”

Salmond quickly intervened to put a stop to this, presumably at the request of Trenchard, but the effect was that Bone was further embarrassed, and began to suspect that Lawrence was spying on him. Either because he had been informed by the camp post office, or because he had simply guessed correctly, he asked his adjutant to find out whether Lawrence was communicating with headquarters. The adjutant, who might have proceeded with tact in view of the fact that the inquiry involved private letters between Airman Shaw and Marshal of the Royal Air Force Trenchard, was, in Lawrence’s words, “bull-honest,” and simply demanded to see the letters. Lawrence obediently showed him, among others, his latest letter from Trenchard, and another from Salmond, and so he “was sent for, cursed, and condemned to go up-country as a Bolshevik.” This attack caused Salmond to reappear and read Bone the riot act, but it did not make Bone any happier to have such a well-connected airman on his station. Lawrence had mentioned in his last letter to Trenchard that he had been offered “$100,000 for a seven week lecture in the United States,” and that he had turned down an offer of Ј5,000 for one of the five copies of the Oxford edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom* That Airman Shaw was turning down offers amounting to many times more than a wing commander would make in a whole service career can hardly have sweetened Bone’s feeling about him.

Matters could hardly be expected to go on like this for long—Lawrence’s presence was not only irritating his commanding officer, but also beginning to divide the officers: some thought he should be left alone, and others sided with Bone. This was certainly “contrary to the maintenance of good order and discipline,” though the fault in this instance seems to have been more that of Bone than of Lawrence. Still, Lawrence was certainly an upsetting presence to several of his commanding officers; he was in battle, and he was a master of what we would label passive-aggressive behavior. (It is called “dumb insolence” in the British armed services, and is a chargeable offense.) Lawrence also had vast reserves of connections, patience, and unconcealed mental superiority to draw on in any struggle with authority, as well as the most important quality of all: innocence. There was no rule in King’s Regulationsthat a marshal of the Royal Air Force and chief of the air staff might not write private letters to an airman, nor that the airman should not reply to such letters; still less was there any requirement that the airman should share their contents with his commanding officer. Bone was on shaky ground, but it is always easy for a commanding officer to make trouble for a mere airman. As Lawrence had discovered at Farnborough, strict kit inspections and extra guard duty were the least he could expect.

The friction between the officers at Drigh Road on the subject of Lawrence is illustrated by the adjutant, Squadron Leader W. M. M. Hurley, who had been sent to ask Lawrence whether he was writing letters to headquarters. After getting to know Lawrence, Hurley offered him the use of the typewriter in the orderly room on Thursdays (a day off, in the relaxed working conditions of the British armed services in India), and soon got to know him even better. Hurley did not agree with the commanding officer’s opinion about Lawrence at all. He admired Lawrence’s scrupulously correct attitude toward his officers, and the fact that no matter how upset he was at the many small forms of military persecution he was subjected to, he never raised his voice. Hurley remarked too on Lawrence’s appearance: “his head was everything, a noble feature indeed with a lofty forehead, very soft blue eyes and a strong chin. His body was small and wiry and must have framed a splendid constitution, when we consider the trials and the actual brutality which had been part of his share in the Arabic campaign.”

Now and again the old Lawrence broke through the barriers behind which Airman Shaw had imprisoned him. On one occasion, when the officers were carrying out their annual pistol course on the firing range, Lawrence happened to be range orderly. At the end of the day, when only the adjutant, the NCO in charge of the station’s armory, and Lawrence were left behind, Lawrence “suddenly and quietly … picked up a pistol and put six ‘bulls’ on the target,” shooting far beyond the ability of any of the officers. On another occasion, when air routes from Karachi to Britain were being discussed by a survey party of the RAF, high political officers from the government of India, and the British resident in the Persian Gulf, AC1 Shaw was hurriedly brought into the meeting from the Engine Repair Section, in his overalls, to give his crisp opinion of the trustworthiness, character, and influence of the sheikhs along the route across Iraq and Trans-Jordan. He did so, with a precision and an air of authority that astonished (and silenced) officers and civilian authorities alike.

Lawrence’s fellow airmen were impressed by his willingness to take on guard duties over holidays, when everybody else wanted to go out drinking, and by the vast number of books he collected, including “William Blake, Thomas Malory, Bunyan, Plato, and James Joyce’s Ulysses,” as well as his own copy of the subscribers’ edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom,“which he kept in a small tin box under his bunk.” He happily allowed Leading Aircraftman R. V. Jones, who had the bunk next to his, to borrow his own book; and Jones, who soon became a friend, later recalled that Lawrence, who had a gramophone and frequently received packages of classical records from Britain, also ordered the latest records of Sophie Tucker to appeal to the less highbrow taste of the airmen in his barracks.

By the beginning of 1928 Lawrence’s mother and his brother Bob had left China, unable to continue their missionary work because of the hostility of the Chinese. Lawrence wrote to them, realistically, but without much sympathy: “I think probably there will be not much more missionary work done anywhere in the future. We used to think foreigners were black beetles, and coloured races were heathen: whereas now we respect and admire and study their beliefs and manners. It’s the revenge of the world upon the civilisation of Europe.” India, with its apparently subservient native masses and its small body of British rulers, made him feel this even more strongly. He was far ahead of his time in this, as in many of his other opinions, and once he was back in Britain he would unhesitatingly use his very considerable influence to change things to which he objected, such as the death penalty for cowardice. In the meantime, however, he was stuck in India, though even that did not prevent the London press from running fanciful and sensationalist stories about him. The Daily Express,for example, alleged that “instead of visiting Karachi … he goes when off-duty to the edge of the desert…. There he chats with the villagers, and joins in their profound Eastern meditations.” Lawrence wrote to his friend R. D. Blumenfeld, the editor, ridiculing this kind of thing. He did not speak any of the local languages, he protested, and had never practiced meditation; but these stories found their way back to India and may have made Wing Commander Bone more determined than ever to get rid of Lawrence.