Lord Thomson was already irritated by Lawrence’s presumptions to set Air Ministry policy. Britain was in the process of completing two giant “airships” in the summer of 1929. Every major nation was intrigued by the possibilities of these huge dirigibles, which many believed represented the future of long-distance air travel. That this was an illusion was not finally demonstrated until a great German airship, the Hindenburg,burst into flames on mooring at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937. The two British airships were nearly 800 feet long, longer than the Hindenburg,and carried sixty passengers in private staterooms spread over two decks, with a cocktail lounge, a dining salon, a smoking room, and “two promenade lounges with windows down the side of the ship.” In short, such an airship was a flying first-class ocean liner, with a range of 5,000 miles at sixty miles an hour. There were only three problems with the airship—the first was that there was no proof it could ever be made profitable; the second was that the hydrogen gas keeping it aloft, if mixed with air, was highly combustible; and the third was the question of how stable it might be in storms.

The air marshals were doubtful about the value of airships, which from a military point of view were in any case nothing new. The German zeppelins had bombed London in 1917-1918, and were found to be very vulnerable to antiaircraft fire and to determined fighter attack, since they were enormous, slow-moving targets. Still, Britain was naturally interested in any form of transportation that would make travel to the farthest portions of the empire a matter of only a few days; and the British were unwilling to concede the future to the Germans, who were planning scheduled flights to New York and Rio de Janeiro.

Lawrence entered the picture because he was convinced that an airship could overfly and explore the Rub al-Khali of Arabia—the so-called Empty Quarter, which no European or Arab had ever crossed—as part of its test flight to India, thus combining an aviation triumph with a notable geographical discovery. He urged this scheme on Trenchard, who was lukewarm on the subject and passed it on to Lord Thomson; but he also urged Bernard Shaw (who knew Thomson, a fellow Fabian) to make a personal appeal to the air minister. Unfortunately, Shaw was too busy to pay a call on Thomson and wrote to him instead, noting that Lawrence, with his knowledge of Arabia, would be a good person to add to the crew. As was so often the case with Shaw, his belief that any suggestion of his would be taken seriously rebounded, this time on Lawrence. Thomson replied to Shaw with enthusiasm about the idea of the airship as a means of making geographical surveys—he was a true believer on the subject of airships, which would very shortly cost him his life—but rejected Lawrence as a crew member: “As regards including Lawrence, or Private Shaw, as you have yourself described him, I will consider the matter. His passion for obscurity makes him an awkward man to place and would not improve his relations with the less subtle members of the crew.” Lord Thomson’s belief in Fabian socialism apparently did not extend to receiving suggestions from airmen, even when these were passed along to him by Bernard Shaw. Lawrence’s habit of reaching out from the ranks to the great and famous was not likely to endear him to any civilian head of aviation, even though the suggestion that he should join the flight came from Shaw, not himself. In any case, Thomson clearly took it as a challenge to his authority.

On August 23, 1929, Trenchard inspected RAF Mount Batten, and took the opportunity for a private chat with Lawrence, “telling me off as usual,” as Lawrence wrote to T. B. Marson, Trenchard’s faithful private secretary, who had retired from the RAF to take up farming. Given that Trenchard himself would retire at the end of the year, he may have felt it necessary to warn Lawrence to be more careful about Lord Thomson in the future. If so, it was wasted breath.

That Lawrence upstaged Lord Thomson—and almost everybody else—during the Schneider Trophy Cup races was not entirely his fault. The press was more interested in Lawrence than in the pilots, let alone in Lord Thomson, and it did not help matters that Lawrence knew so many of the dignitaries present, or that they stopped to chat with him. Even Trenchard was annoyed to see AC1 Shaw in conversation with Lady Astor, but there was worse to come. Lawrence, leading from the ranks as usual, had organized some airmen to clean the slipway leading to the hangar where the Italian team kept their seaplanes. Marshal Italo Balbo—the famous Italian aviator,* minister of aviation, and at the time heir apparent to Mussolini—was in charge of the Italian team, and he knew Lawrence well. Balbo paused to chat with Lawrence in Italian, and en passantasked if he could get the slipway cleaned up, since the rails were covered with scum. Lawrence proceeded to get that done in his usual efficient way, and was caught in the act by Lord Thomson, who wanted to know why a British airman was taking orders from an Italian air marshal, and passing them on to other British airmen as if he were an officer himself. There followed an animated discussion between Lord Thomson and Lawrence, which was unfortunately caught on film by the press photographers, and appeared in newspapers all over the world, to Thomson’s great embarrassment. To use RAF slang, Thomson was clearly “tearing a strip off” Lawrence and did not forgive him.

The British not only won the race but set a new world speed record, and Lawrence, except for his brush with Thomson, had enjoyed being part of it. He was also delighted by the unexpected gift of the speedboat that he and Clare Smith would spend so much time on. A wealthy friend of Wing Commander Smith’s, Major Collin Cooper, had made his motor yacht available to the RAF for the occasion, and Lawrence spent a good deal of time on board, tinkering with the temperamental engine of the tiny, two-seat Biscayne “Baby” American racing speedboat that it carried as a tender. Cooper was so impressed by Lawrence’s efficiency and hard work that when the race was over he made Lawrence and the Smiths a gift of the speedboat. Clare and Lawrence renamed it Biscuit,no doubt because at rest it sat in the water looking like a low, flat, round object rather than a long, pointed one. The Biscayne “Baby” speedboats were a one-class racing design, built in Florida, powered by a six-cylinder, 100-horsepower Scripps marine engine, and capable of more than forty miles per hour. Designed after the pattern of Gar Wood’s speedboats, the hard-chine hull had a very sharp V-shaped bow flattening out toward the stern, so that at high speed the boat raised its bow and planed over the water, rather than pushing through it. This design, partly thanks to Lawrence, would eventually be used for all the RAF high-speed rescue launches in Britain, and in the United States it was the basis for the famous PT boat, despite determined resistance by the navy in both countries. Major Cooper had the American speedboat delivered to RAF Mount Batten, and Lawrence would spend much of the winter of 1929-1930 painstakingly stripping and rebuilding the engine and refinishing the hull.

In the meantime, his brush with Lord Thomson had consequences. He had applied to Trenchard for permission to accompany a friend on a seaplane tour of Europe as a member of the crew, and Trenchard had tentatively approved, provided Thomson agreed. The sight of yet another extraordinary request from AC1 Shaw to the chief of the air staff apparently infuriated Thomson, who instructed Trenchard to inform Lawrence that henceforth he was to stay in the country, was not to fly on any government aircraft, was to keep a low profile, and was forbidden to visit or even to speak to a distinguished group of people that included Winston Churchill, Lord Birkenhead (the former F. E. Smith, a pugnacious, brilliant, witty, hard-drinking Conservative political figure), Lady Astor, Sir Philip Sassoon (deputy undersecretary of state for air), and Sir Austen Chamberlain, KG (the autocratic former foreign secretary, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and half brother of Neville Chamberlain). Bernard Shaw was outraged at being left off the list. Lawrence was “to stop leading from the ranks, and confine himself to the duties of an aircraftman.”