CHAPTER FOUR

Oxford, 1907–1910

Noon strikes on England, noon on Oxford town…. Proud and godly kings hath built her, long ago, With her towers and tombs and statues all arow,With her fair and floral air and the love that lingers there, And the streets where the great men go.—James Elroy Flecker, “The Dying Patriot”

I was a modest, good-humoured boy.It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.—Sir Max Beerbohm, “Going Back to School” In Britain one “goes up” to Oxford or to Cambridge; conversely, if dismissed or expelled, one is “sent down.” Lawrence, of course, did not so much “go up” as go sideways—his home in Oxford was only a few minutes from Jesus College by bicycle. For most of his fellow undergraduates, Oxford was the first great adventure of their young lives, away from home and boarding school at last, in a place where they were treated as adults, and expected to behave like adults—with a certain allowance always made, of course, for the follies of young men of the upper classes letting off steam. For Lawrence it was slightly less of anadventure—he had already run away from home and experienced life in barracks with scores of older recruits in an age when each metal cot was exactly two feet away from the next. Still, it was a huge change in status.

Oxford University was and remains a nebulous institution, more of a gas than a solid, as T. E. Lawrence would later describe the Arab Revolt, and guerrilla warfare in general. In order to join it young men (and now of course young women) apply to the colleges of their choice, take an examination, and undergo a firm and probing interview. If accepted, they will spend three academic years at their college, during which the university into which they have been matriculated will seldom touch their lives, except in the form of the “proctor” and his bowler-hatted “bulldogs,” enforcers of the university regulations while undergraduates are outside their own college in the streets of Oxford. The university’s buildings are spread through the town—among them are such architectural landmarks as the Bodleian Library, the Sheldonian Theatre, and the Ashmolean Museum—but the life of the university and much of its teaching take place within the thirty-odd walled-in colleges. When asked where they “went to university” Oxonians are more likely to give the name of their old college than that of Oxford: Magdalen, Christ Church, Jesus, Balliol, etc., each college being, effectively, a world in itself. For both the undergraduates and the fellows (known as “dons"—a hangover from the days when the older colleges were still Catholic ecclesiastical institutions), their college is their home, the center of their world, as the regiment is for officers and senior NCOs in the British army. They eat there; they study there (for the most part); the undergraduates live there for the first two of their three years, as do bachelor dons; and the undergraduates’ academic career is centered on their once-a-week meeting with their tutor, often a fellow of their college, who usually sets them an essay to write, and listens to it at the next tutorial, giving his opinions afterward and setting a direction for further reading, sometimes over a glass of sherry. Much of the benefit of an Oxford education is derived from the undergraduate’s relationship with the tutor—if the personalities dovetail, if there is a bond of mutual sympathy and interest, muchcan be attained. In the absence of these things, disenchantment can quickly set in.*

Lawrence, as so often in his life, was a special case. Unlike his classmates, he did not live at his college. They had assigned “rooms,” usually a sitting room-study and a bedroom; there were several rooms to a staircase, with “a scout"—a combination of valet, butler, and housemaid—to look after the residents. Rooms ranged from medieval discomfort to palatial grandeur, according to the students’ ability to pay, and according to an indecipherable social code in the office of the bursar, who made the assignments. In Lawrence’s day, it was quite common for undergraduates to be served breakfast, lunch, or tea in their rooms, and for those who could afford it, full dinner parties, with a special menu and wines chosen from the college’s cellar. The entrance to each set of rooms (usually two to a landing) was through a pair of doors, and when the outer one was closed (this was called “sporting one’s oak”) it was a sign that one did not wish to be disturbed. Thus the undergraduates had a degree of privacy that few of them could have enjoyed at boarding school or, for the most part, at home.

Lawrence’s principal tutor, Reginald Lane Poole, was actually at his older brother’s college, St. John’s, rather than at Jesus. Poole was not perhaps the ideal tutor for such a rara avis as Lawrence—he was keeper of the archives and lecturer of diplomacy at Oxford, the author of 151 scholarly works, a forbiddingly conventional historian who preferred solidly based research to brilliant insight, and who was described by one of Lawrence’s friends at Oxford as looking “as if he descended from a long line of maiden aunts.” In fact, Lawrence seems to have found two much more interesting and (perhaps interested) unofficial tutors: his crammer, L. C. Jane, whom he continued to visit, often at odd hours of the night; and David Hogarth, the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, who, untilhis death in 1927, remained one of the most powerful influences in Lawrence’s life.

Except for one term in 1908, Lawrence continued to live at home throughout his years at Jesus, and since he seldom ate dinner “at Hall"—indeed, he seldom participated in any conventional meal, except that he had a fondness for tea (among his few self-indulgences was a sweet tooth)—his contact with his fellow undergraduates was minimal. He did not take part in team sports or frequent the Junior Common Room or join any of the undergraduate clubs and societies that are deemed to be an essential part of the Oxford experience. In short, he managed to attend Oxford on his own terms. The only exception was his service in the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps. Lawrence was one of the first to volunteer, no doubt in part because as a schoolboy he had been in a similar organization, the St. Aldate’s Church Lads’ Brigade, and perhaps because he thought he might as well put to some use his brief service in the army. In addition, he was made a signaler, a position that in those days involved cycling, his passion. Besides, his enthusiasm for military matters was genuine, and not necessarily confined to reading books on strategy and tactics.

Lawrence was never friendless, despite his Cheshire cat-like invisibility at Jesus. “Scroggs” Beeson was up, though not at the same college, and Lawrence made friends with several undergraduates at Jesus, including an American Rhodes Scholar from Kansas, W. O. Ault; and Vyvyan W. Richards, a “Welsh-American,” with whom Lawrence had a more intimate friendship than with any other contemporary. Ault’s tutor was also Reginald Lane Poole, and as Ault was also studying medieval history he saw quite a lot of Lawrence, who introduced him to the art of taking brass rubbings. Lawrence seems to have been the only person at Jesus who did not treat Ault as an outsider because he was American.

Vyvyan Richards was rather more of a soul mate than Scroggs or Ault, a sensitive young man who shared Lawrence’s medieval interests and, like Lawrence, was a passionate devotee of William Morris, the Victorian aesthete and founder of a school of arts and crafts. Much of Morris’s work was in the Gothic revival mode—indeed, the curious roof design of Lawrence’s cottage in the garden at 2 Polstead Road looks very much as if it had been inspired by the cupolas of the famous “Red House” Morris had designed and built for himself and his wife Jane.* Lawrence and Richards shared Morris’s passionate commitment to designing and printing beautiful books, when possible by hand, with hand-set type, eschewing altogether the modern linotype and the machine press, in favor of medieval printing methods and hand-painted illumination.