Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (95 page)

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 passant
asked 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.”

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
Biscuit
and 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
Biscuit
for 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
Minorities
are 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.