T.E. Lawrence

Thomas Edward Lawrence CB DSO was a British archaeologist, military officer, and diplomat. He was renowned for his liaison role during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign and the Arab Revolt against Ottoman Turkish rule of 1916–18.

Better known as Lawrence of Arabia he was a colorful figure with loyalties to both the British empire and the Kingdom of Hejaz (Mamlakat al-Ḥijāz) which was a state in the Hejaz region ruled by the Hashemite family.

The First World War, with its horribly bloody trench warfare, produced few heroes. But after the war, the British were told that a short, blue-eyed, Irish-English officer named T.E. Lawrence had donned Arab robes and led an audacious and dashing Arab revolt against Britain’s enemies in the Middle East.

They were told this tale most compellingly by a young American journalist, Lowell Thomas, whose multimedia show — part of which was titled “Lawrence in Arabia” — played in front of three million people from 1919 to 1924 in New York, London and across much of the English speaking world, and more than 4 million people in all. Lawrence had been a low-ranking officer, removed from the central battles of the war. Yet the British and much of the English-speaking world had their hero.

And the fascination with T.E. Lawrence has remained remarkably strong. “Along with Winston Churchill, he remains perhaps the best-known Englishman in the world,”

During the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, Prince Feisal, the third son of Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, and Lawrence agreed on a desert attack plan on Akaba. On May 9, 1917, a small band of 50 Arabs left Feisal’s headquarters in Wejh on the Arabian Peninsula. They were led by Auda abu Tayi of the Howeitat tribe, by the Sherif Nasir of Syria and by Lawrence, who was wearing Arab robes, riding a camel.

This Arab army dashed from well to well across some extraordinarily inhospitable territory, stopping occasionally to blow up Turkish railroad tracks or create diversions to confuse the Turks about their ultimate objective. The plan was successful.

In 1919, during the Paris Peace negotiations, one of the more unusual sights at the peace conference called to redraw the map of the world after the First World War was the member of the British delegation walking around Versailles in Arab robes. It was at the Paris Peace Conference from January to June 1919 that T.E. Lawrence would push forward his campaign for Hashemite Kingdoms.

T.E. Lawrence was in Cairo in March 1921, working for Winston Churchill, the British Colonial Secretary, who had arranged the conference. Churchill and Lawrence had worked out this plan for Iraq and Transjordan in advance of the conference. And their plan was based on two ideas for which Lawrence had been crusading during and after the war. First, the Arabs must be given control of their own lands (as Lawrence had implied they would when the Arabs were fighting alongside him against the Ottoman Empire and for Britain). And, second, the proper Arabs upon whom to bestow this power were the members of the Hashemite family: King Hussein and his sons, including Feisal and Abdullah.

Thirty-nine British men and one British woman, Gertrude Bell, attended the conference in Cairo, but none — probably including Churchill — had more influence upon its outcome than T.E. Lawrence.Winston Churchill, Auda abu Tayi, Gertrude Bell, T.E.Lawrence.