Probably no vehicle accident up until Princess Diana’s has received more detailed scrutiny than Lawrence’s. His death has been variously ascribed to a foreign or domestic assassination, or to some combination of death wish and speed, or suicide. True, Lawrence had written “In speed we hurl ourselves beyond the body,” and he loved riding at high speeds, but it was subsequently established that he was going less than forty miles an hour when he was killed, so he was neither a victim of high-speed driving nor a successful suicide. As for the assassination theory, there seems no very good reason why either the British or the German intelligence service would have wanted Lawrence dead. Although The Daily Expresswould claim that he carried “the plans for the defence of England in his head,” that too seems a typical Fleet Street exaggeration. Certainly Lawrence had ideason the subject, but he was not privy to any secrets.

Though nobody said so at the inquest, his death was yet another proof that a motorcycle accident at anyspeed is dangerous. The helmets of the day were not scientifically designed to prevent head injury, and in any case Lawrence never wore a proper helmet—in extremely bad weather he sometimes wore a leather flying helmet, which would have offered no protection from impact. If he had landed on his side he might have suffered nothing worse than a few broken bones, but he was thrown forward and instead landed on his head, fracturing the skull.

The subsequent inquest and many further investigations by private individuals do not provide much more than this in the way of fact. A soldier, Corporal Catchpole, who heard the crash and ran to the site of the accident claimed to have seen a black car speeding away from the scene; the boys denied that they were riding side by side, no doubt warned by their parents not to admit that they had been breaking the law, though they were notorious for larking about on the road; and some people have speculated that the front brake cable in Lawrence’s Brough may have snapped, although this seems unlikely: Lawrence was always conscientious to the point of fussiness about maintaining his bikes.

Catchpole flagged down a passing army lorry, and ordered the driver to take Lawrence and one of the boys, who had sustained minor injuries, to the Bovington camp hospital, the nearest medical facility, where Lawrence was quickly identified. After that the army took control, although Lawrence was a civilian and the accident had taken place on a civilian road. All ranks were warned that they were not to talk to newspapermen, and reminded that they were subject to the Official Secrets Act; newspaper editors were informed that bulletins about Lawrence’s health would be issued by the War Office. As anyone could have predicted, this had the effect of increasing interest in Lawrence’s crash, adding a note of mystery to what was simply a tragic road accident. Even without that, however, it was a major news story throughout the world. Arnold Lawrence was informed of the accident by the Cambridge police, and arrived the next day at Clouds Hill with his wife.

Lawrence lay unconscious in the hospital at the army camp he had disliked so much when he was exiled from his beloved RAF. Distinguished specialists in brain injuries were sent for; the king dispatched two of his own physicians, including the future Lord Dawson of Penn, and telephoned himself, asking to be kept informed. The Home Office, not wanting affairs left entirely in the hands of the military, sent two plainclothes officers from Scotland Yard, one to sit in Lawrence’s room, while his relief slept on a cot outside in the corridor. To be fair, this was probably less from any fear of foreign agents or security issues than to prevent an enterprising newspaper photographer from finding a way in to take a picture of Lawrence on his deathbed.

Everything that could be done was done, given the limited facilities of the Bovington camp hospital; but as the doctors had concluded after examining Lawrence, the case was hopeless.

Lawrence lingered six days, never regaining consciousness, with his lungs becoming increasingly congested, and died just after eight in the morning on Sunday, May 19.

He was forty-six years old.

Postmortem examination revealed that Lawrence would have lost his memory and would have been paralyzed had he survived.

He was buried in the nearby churchyard of Moreton. His old friend Ronald Storrs (now Sir Ronald, and governor of Cyprus) was the chief pallbearer. The others were the artist Eric Kennington; Colonel Stewart Newcombe, who had known Lawrence since the Sinai survey before the war; a neighbor; and two service friends of Lawrence’s, one from the army and the other from the RAF.

The small ceremony was quiet, despite a mob of photographers and reporters, and many of Lawrence’s friends were present: Winston Churchill and his wife, Lady Astor, Mrs. Thomas Hardy, Allenby, Siegfried Sassoon, Lionel Curtis, Augustus John, Wavell, Alan Dawnay. As the coffin was lowered into the ground the soldier and the airman, on opposite sides of the grave, shook hands over it; and at the last moment a neighbor’s little girl ran forward and threw a bunch of violets on the top of it.

Nancy Astor, in tears, ran to put her arms around Churchill, who was also in tears, and cried, “Oh, Winnie, Winnie, we’ve lost him.”

The king’s message to Arnold Lawrence would appear the next day in the Times:

The King has heard with sincere regret of the death of your brother, and deeply sympathizes with you and your family in this sad loss.Your brother’s name will live in history, and the King gratefully recognizes his distinguished services to his country and feels that it is tragic that the end should have come in this manner to a life still so full of promise. Perhaps fortunately, because of his gifts of description, Ronald Storrs—who had taken the young Lawrence with him on his journey to Jidda in 1916, and had watched him wave good-bye from the shore at Rabegh, the day before his ride up-country to the meeting with Feisal and, in Storrs’s words, to “write his page, brilliant as a Persian miniature, in the History of England"—was the last to see him before his burial.

I stood beside him lying swathed in fleecy wool; stayed until the plain oak coffin was screwed down. There was nothing else in the mortuary chamber but a little altar behind his head with some lilies of the valley and red roses. I had come prepared to be greatly shocked by what I saw, but his injuries had been at the back of his head, and beyond some scarring and discolouration over the left eye, his countenance was not marred. His nose was sharper and delicately curved, and his chin less square. Seen thus, his face was the face of Dante with perhaps the more relentless mouth of Savonarola; incredibly calm, with the faintest flicker of disdain…. Nothing of his hair, nor of his hands was showing; only a powerful cowled mask, dark-stained ivory against the dead chemical sterility of the wrappings. It was somehow unreal to be watching beside him in these cerements, so strangely resembling the aba,the kuffiyaand the agalof an Arab Chief, as he lay in his last littlest room, very grave and strong and noble. His plain, modest headstone merely describes him as “T. E. Lawrence, Fellow of All Souls College,” as if even in death he was still resisting the rank of colonel and all his decorations. Below are inscribed the words:

The hour is coming & now isWhen the dead shall hearThe Voice of theSON OF GODAnd they that hear shall live. They were placed there, we may be sure, to please his mother, rather than from any wish of Lawrence’s, who was at best a nominal Christian. At the foot of the grave is a smaller stone, in the shape of an open book, bearing the words ”dominus illuminatio mea,” which may be translated “The Lord is my light,” but which can also mean “May God enlighten me.”