T. E. Lawrence(1888–1935)

Thomas Edward Lawrence was born at Tremadog in north Wales on 16 August 1888 and grew up chiefly in Oxford, where his family settled and where he was educated at the city's high school and then at Jesus College. He was a small, restless, brilliant young man fascinated by the medieval world; he wrote his undergraduate thesis on Crusader castles, walking alone across Syria and Palestine to study them at first hand, and then joined the British Museum's archaeological excavations at Carchemish on the Euphrates, where he spent several years before the war learning Arabic and the country and peoples of the Near East as few Europeans of his generation did.

When the First World War spread to the Ottoman Empire, that rare local knowledge made him invaluable. Posted to the intelligence staff in Cairo and then attached to the Arab forces who had risen in revolt against Ottoman rule, Lawrence became the liaison officer, adviser and field leader who helped turn a scattered tribal rising into a coherent campaign. He understood that the Arabs should fight the war that suited them, a war of mobility, raiding and the cutting of the Hejaz railway, rather than be thrown against entrenched modern troops, and he largely shaped the strategy that tied down tens of thousands of Ottoman soldiers across a vast desert front.

His most famous stroke came in July 1917. The fortified Red Sea port of Aqaba was strongly defended against any attack from the sea, its guns facing the water. Lawrence led an Arab force on a long, audacious march inland through the waterless desert to come at the town from the landward side, where it was open, and took it in a single charge from the direction no one had thought possible. The capture of Aqaba opened a supply line, secured the right flank of the British advance toward Palestine, and made his name. He went on with the Arab forces through the campaigns of 1917 and 1918 to the entry into Damascus.

After the war he set down the whole experience in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a vast, intricate, unsparing book that is at once a war memoir, a meditation and a work of literature, widely held to be one of the finest accounts of war ever written in English. Uncomfortable with the fame that the journalist Lowell Thomas had built around the figure of Lawrence of Arabia, he twice withdrew from public life into the ranks of the air force and the army under assumed names, seeking the anonymity and the plain mechanical soldiering he found he preferred to celebrity.

He died on 19 May 1935 from injuries received in a motorcycle accident near his cottage in Dorset, at forty-six. The Lawrence name carries his memory as the Oxford scholar who learned the desert before the war and then led the Arab Revolt across it, took Aqaba by the road no one expected, and turned his war into one of the great books of the age.