Trenchard called Lawrence down to the Air Ministry and read him, as gently as possible, the riot act, warning him that any infraction of Thomson’s rules would get him thrown out of the air force. Lawrence, it must be said, took all this calmly, no doubt counting on the fact that most people in the government and the House of Commons would not regard friendship with Lady Astor and Winston Churchill as grounds for a court-martial, but he did not want to embarrass Trenchard or create further difficulties for him. In the event, he was busy enough over the winter with Biscuitand Homer to stay out of trouble.

With the coming of better weather, Lawrence began to put the little boat to the test, and both he and Smith realized how far superior it was in design to the existing RAF rescue launches. Lawrence had painted it silver, and Clare Smith had the seats covered in navy blue cloth, with the initial S embroidered on both seat backs, so that they would serve for “Smith”and “Shaw.” Lawrence taught Clare how to drive the little boat, and despite her initial fear, the two of them were soon covering long distances at high speeds. They took the boat upriver to have lunch with Lord and Lady Mount Edgcumbe—more friends of Lawrence’s of whom Lord Thomson would surely have disapproved—and while being shown the famous twelfth-century manor house, Lawrence pointed out a priceless, museum-quality rug on which a hip bath had been standing. His expertise in Oriental rugs, begun at the Altounyan house in Aleppo before the war, had apparently not diminished over the years.

In the area of boat design at least, Lawrence’s influence could be channeled through Smith to the Air Ministry, and very soon it began to affect the design of the next generation of RAF rescue launches. So long as Lawrence’s contributions were indirect and did not make the front pages of the newspapers, he did not offend Lord Thomson. In any event, on October 5, 1930, Thomson died—a martyr to his belief in airships—when the R101, which Lawrence had hoped would explore the Arabian Desert on its way to India, crashed on a hillside in France, killing forty-eight men, including Lord Thomson, who had insisted on continuing the flight despite bad weather. For a time, this crash ended British interest in airships.

Lawrence’s next brush with publicity was another tragedy, this time the crash of a seaplane—the RAF “Iris” III—in Plymouth Sound. Lawrence had been taking his morning coffee break with Clare Smith, in a sunny spot they liked for their “elevenses,” when he saw a large seaplane descend toward the water as if to land; but instead of flattening out, it dived straight into the sea and disappeared. Before the seaplane crashed, Lawrence had realized that it was in trouble, and he ran to get the rescue boat moving. He not only organized the rescue, but dived into the sea himself to attempt to rescue any survivors. of the twelve men on board, six were saved, though both pilots were among the dead. Lawrence knew at once what had happened: the senior officer on board was not qualified to fly such a large, complex seaplane—everybody at Mount Batten knew it—but once he was airborne his seniority gave him the right to insist on taking control of the aircraft, and he had done so, with disastrous consequences. Lawrence, working through Lady Astor this time, made sure the facts were known at the Air Ministry, and as a result it became RAF policy that once an aircraft was airborne the pilot had command of it—even if he was a sergeant and the senior officer on board was a wing commander or a group captain. Henceforth, the pilot was in complete command of the aircraft, like the captain of a ship. Nobody on board, no matter how high his rank, could overrule the pilot and take control. The accident also demonstrated the importance of faster rescue launches, in situations where minutes might save lives; this was one of Lawrence’s major interests and areas of expertise.

Lawrence was obliged to testify at the RAF inquiry, which posed no problems for him, but also at a public inquest, where the press would be present. Even without Thomson, Lawrence was concerned that he would make headlines again, particularly if he was called on to criticize the officer who had taken over the controls. He was equally concerned that Wing Commander Smith might be blamed for letting an officer go up even though his incompetence as a pilot was widely known. Always the gleeful trumpeter of doom, and eager to get Lawrence out of uniform (where he did not think Lawrence belonged), Bernard Shaw wrote, “You are a simple aircraftman: nothing but an eye-witness’s police report can be extorted from you. However, as you will probably insist on conducting the enquiry, and as you will want to save your ambitious commander from being sacrificed, the future, to my vision, is on the knees of the gods. Pray heaven they sack you.”

In the end, Lady Astor did her part splendidly—her friends the press lords played down Lawrence’s role (any other airman might have been awarded a medal for his courageous effort to save lives), Smith was not blamed for the incompetence of the pilot, and the need for faster rescue launches was widely acknowledged. Shaw’s gleefully dire prediction did not come true. Writing to thank Lady Astor for her tactful and effective intervention, Lawrence invited her upriver on Biscuitfor a picnic. By this time—March 1931—Lawrence himself was beginning to feel that his best years in the RAF were coming to an end: Trenchard had left, and would shortly go on to a peerage and his next big job, as metropolitan commissioner of police; the Smiths, by now Lawrence’s surrogate family, would move on to RAF Manston, where the wing commander, promoted to group captain, would take over as commanding officer.

As for Lawrence, he moved temporarily to Hythe, near Southampton, where he lodged in a cottage on Myrtle Road while working at the British Power Boats factory, to test and improve the prototype of the RAF 200 Class Seaplane Tender. He had made himself something of “a marine expert” (in his own words), and found in the person of Flight Lieutenant W. E. G. Beauforte-Greenwood, head of the Marine Equipment Branch of the Air Ministry, another sympathetic and appreciative commander, who knew how to make the most of Lawrence’s growing (and self-acquired) skill at designing, handling, and servicing fast boats. Indeed, Lawrence knew so much about boats by now that Beauforte-Greenwood invited him to write the official handbook on the ST 200. Lawrence undertook this project with his customary zeal, and the handbook remains today perhaps the most concise and most instructive technical manual ever published. That discriminating judge of literature Edward Garnett described it as “a masterpiece of technology,” perhaps the beginning of a new genre; and Lawrence himself boasted that “every sentence in it is understandable, to a fitter,” and to a crewman as well, for he included instructions on how to handle the boat in the wind, or in high seas, and how to effect a rescue as quickly as possible. The handbook remained in use until the ST 200 Class boats were retired, well after World War II.

After the Odyssey,Lawrence put in good order a compilation of poems he had liked over the years: Minorities,consisting, with his typical taste for paradox, of minor works by major poets, or major works by minor poets. He had kept this in the form of a manuscript over the years, and gave it for a time to Charlotte Shaw. Some of the poems and poets in Minoritiesare not really minor, in fact. Lawrence included Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth,” a poem that Winston Churchill would quote to great effect in a speech on April 27, 1941, at one of the most difficult moments for Britain of World War II. Interestingly, Lawrence remarks that he had “read it at Umtaiye, when the Deraa expedition was panicking and in misery: and it closely fitted my trust in Allenby, out of sight beyond the hills.” These were not so much “minor poems,” in fact, as poems that had meant a lot to Lawrence at difficult points of his life.