The Lawrence
of Arabia Dilemma
By Kent Barker
An extraordinary package arrived in my letter box the other
day. It was from my cousin in
London. Now Adam is a big, jolly
fellow. Well, jolly enough when not
talking about his work. He’s an archive film
researcher for a major TV channel. It’s
an important job. When a reporter needs
some historical footage – say shots of World War 1 campaigns in the Middle East
- then they call on Adam. And his skill
is knowing exactly where, in the massive vaults, the material is and then getting
it into the cutting room in no time flat.
The trouble is that corporatization
left Adam and his fellow picture librarians with less and less scope for
individual flair. And so whenever he comes
down to the country to visit, he moans about how awful and soulless the new
structure is.
Each year he’d turn up for the little
festival we hold in my field and I’d offer him a bed in the house, but he always
preferred to sleep in his car. We’d rendezvous
round the bar and talk about our cousins and the family history he was
compiling.
Which brings us back to the
mysterious package. Now, I knew that my
maternal grandfather had been an architect and had worked with Edward Lutyens
on designs for the Midland Bank. But I
was eleven when he died so didn’t know much more about him. In fact my main memory was of one Christmas
when I’d been given a Hornby train set and “Pop” as we called him got all
teary-eyed over the model steam locomotive. “They don’t make them like that any
more,” I remember him saying over and over again as he held it up to the
light. Later I overheard my parents discussing
how drunk he’d been. And I thought he
was just admiring my new present!
Anyway back in 1916 “Pop” aka Laurence Mussel Gotch, had joined
the Royal Engineers and been posted to Cairo, where he was seconded to the Intelligence
Corps in the map room of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. There he recalls coming
across “a little man, sitting behind the map office door … squatting in an Arab
dress, silent for 15 or 20 minutes.”
This, as you may possibly have guessed, was T.E. Lawrence.
Jump forward to 1920. Capt.
Gotch has been demobbed and is looking for employment. An American writer and former war
correspondent, Lowell Thomas, has been packing theatres and arenas with his extraordinarily
popular lecture “With Allenby in Palestine” which is credited with brining
international fame to ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.
Ah, thinks Capt. Gotch, if Thomas can do it so can I. After all I served with T.E.L., while the
Lowell fellow only interviewed him.
So grandfather gets up his own lecture, complete with lantern
slides, and tours the country, apparently to some acclaim. Not for him, sadly, the Royal Opera House or
Madison Square Garden, but the Victoria Hall, Kettering was reportedly packed
on the evening of March 2nd.
In the family we vaguely knew that Pop had corresponded with T.E.
Lawrence while he was preparing his talks, but cousin Adam has tracked down the
letters themselves along with other archive material. Copies were in the package
which he sent round to members of the family.
On 1st June 1920 T.E.L. wrote: Dear Gotch … if you are lecturing for your
own living then I’ll help you … if you can make some money for yourself out of
it in these unbuttoned times … the more you make, the merrier for you.” Later he sent a letter with a hand-drawn map
detailing his famous attack on Akaba - the
Turkish-held port in Jordan, which threatened British forces in Palestine.
Apart from the half dozen letters, the archive also contains
30 pages of closely typed manuscript. It
appears that grandfather copied these from papers Lawrence loaned him which seem
to have been from the first draft of a book he was writing entitled ‘Revolt in
the Desert’. But Lawrence destroyed the
manuscript and then later rewrote and, in 1926, published the memoirs as ‘The
Seven Pillars of Wisdom’.
Now this may not be of much matter to you and me. But to Lawrence experts, historians and museums
the copies of Lawrence’s first draft and the letters would be fascinating. And possibly valuable, especially in the US
where there could be a ready market.
So part of Adam’s package contained a note to we fellow
cousins who own them, asking if we should put them up for sale or,
alternatively, give them to the Bodleian in Oxford. My immediate instinct was to donate them. Now I’m not so sure.
After all Lawrence’s himself said: “If you can make some money for yourself … the more you make, the
merrier for you”!
ends.
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