It is, officially, the first day of spring, but nobody has told the south of
Dorset. Grey clouds are massing over the hills of Purbeck and a keen wind is
blowing up from Bovington Camp. I am in a lay-by on King George V Road, once
called Tank Park Road, staring intently at a tree and the memorial stone at
its base. The inscription records that a famous man was fatally wounded at
this site. This lonely hill hardly seems a fitting place for a hero to die.
I don’t normally seek out celebrity crash sites, but, having spent the past
year writing about Lawrence of Arabia, I felt duty-bound to visit Clouds
Hill, his cottage; and, a quarter of a mile away, this location, where, on
May 13, 1935, the 46-year-old swerved his motorcycle to avoid two boys on
bicycles and hit a tree. (The tree is no longer there: this one was planted
in 1983 as a memorial by Tom Beaumont, who had been a gunner with Lawrence
in the desert).
There is another stone, laid by the TE Lawrence Society, a little way into the
woods. Both say he crashed somewhere “near” the respective memorial. Nothing
in Lawrence’s life, not even the place where he was fatally injured, is
entirely certain.
By this time, the gate to Clouds Hill, which now belongs to the National
Trust, has been unlatched. It is the first day this year that the cottage
has been open to the public, and business is brisk. It seems Lawrence of
Arabia’s star refuses to dim. There is always something (David Lean’s
centenary this year; a forthcoming auction of rare slides of Lawrence on the
NorthWest Frontier) to keep the legend alive.
Lawrence was ambivalent about his celebrity status; he happily used the
influence it gave him when it suited him, but loathed the attention created
by the stirring tale of an Englishman leading the Arab revolt (which, in
fact, he didn’t). Hence his attempts to hide away in the services and at
Clouds Hill.
“Don’t expect a palace,” he warned visitors, and the small worker’s cottage is
far from what one might imagine as a home fit for a hero. When Lawrence
rented it in 1923, for half a crown, he had enrolled in the Tank Corps under
the name Shaw, having failed to conceal himself in the RAF as Ross. The
cottage was his bolt hole while he was in the services; he used it to write
and to recover from the strain of barracks life.
When he first saw it, Clouds Hill was derelict, crushed by rotten thatch and
strangled by rhododendrons. Using money from his translation work - the
early editions of his masterwork, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, were so lavish,
they lost money - he tiled the roof and made the upper floors waterproof.
That is why the cottage is topsy-turvy, with Lawrence’s writing and music room
(the gramophone, with a huge papier-mâché horn, is still in situ) on the
first floor and the bedroom and library on the ground. It has a bathroom,
but no lavatory. A man who had lived among the Bedu for almost two years had
no need for such a modern convenience.
Quite how less robust visitors - including EM Forster and George Bernard Shaw
- coped in these ascetic surroundings is another matter. Still, it was
perfect for a man trying to escape his past. He retired permanently to the
cottage in March 1935, hoping for “a life of Sundays”; two months later, he
was dead.
THAT FIRST breath of spring has finally appeared, dappling the hills with weak
sunshine, so I decide to visit the Lawrence grave at Moreton. This means
driving through the dreary barracks of Bovington Camp - where Lawrence had
ridden to send a telegram on that fateful day, and where he was taken after
the accident (he died six days later) - and parking at the Tank Museum.
Opposite the museum, a two-mile footpath links Bovington with Moreton. This
takes me through deciduous forest, showing the first bluebells, and
gorse-studded heath - the latter a sliver of Thomas Hardy’s “Egdon Heath”, a
description of which opens The Return of the Native. The author and the
military man were great friends during the 1920s, and Lawrence frequently
rode his Brough Superior motorcycle to Max Gate, the Hardys’ home in nearby
Dorchester.
My first sight of the tiny village of Moreton is the elevated St Nicholas’s
church. This is where the funeral was held on May 21, 1935. In the local
tearoom, there is a Lawrence area, which has not only the hand-drawn bier
his coffin was carried on, but pictures of the mourners, including Winston
Churchill, General Wavell, Lady Astor and Siegfried Sassoon. The church
suffered war damage - the Luftwaffe pilot must have been way off course -
and its windows have been replaced not by stained glass, but by engraved
panes, which flood the interior with a pure white light.
Lawrence is not buried at the church, but up the hill in a small, separate
grave. It is a relatively simple affair for such an international figure,
with his name on the headstone, the fact he was a Fellow of All Souls and a
quotation from St John’s Gospel, Chapter 5, chosen by his missionary mother,
a zealous Christian, which Lawrence was certainly not.
Back at the car, I drove off to see the last part of my Lawrence trail - his
effigy, carved by his friend and admirer Eric Kennington. Life-size - it
confirms Lawrence was 5ft 5in, considerably shorter than Peter O’Toole - it
was intended for St Paul’s Cathedral, but ended up at the Anglo-Saxon St
Martin’s church, in Wareham.
In the sculpture, the supine Lawrence is dressed in Arab robes, with his
famous curved dagger clasped in his hand. His pillow is a camel’s saddle;
his sandalled feet rest on a Hittite carving. Although Lawrence spent only a
small fraction of his life in Arabia, and would doubtless have seen his
legacy more in terms of the high-speed RAF rescue launches he helped to
develop, the effigy perfectly captures the populist image of the fighting
scholar and desert warrior.
In the centre of town is the small Wareham museum, which, like so many public
buildings around these parts, has a Lawrence room. In it is a statement from
one of the boys who were on the bicycles, adamant that the accident didn’t
happen as shown in the movie (where they were pedalling towards Lawrence,
rather than him coming up behind them) and that no mysterious black car (as
some claimed) was involved. The fact is, accidents do happen. Even to
heroes.
I finish my Lawrence trail at the Anglebury House restaurant. Next to the
window seat is a small plaque announcing that TE Lawrence “spent many a
pleasant hour drinking coffee in this seat”. As he never touched alcohol, I
feel I can’t really raise a glass to the man, so I do what the uncrowned
king of these parts would do: I order a large pot of coffee and watch the
late-afternoon sunshine warm the streets of Wareham.
Robert Ryan’s novel about Lawrence of Arabia, Empire of Sand (Headline
Review £12.99), is out now. To buy it for £11.69, inc p&p,
call The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
Travel brief
What to see: Clouds Hill (01929 405616, www.nationaltrust.org.uk
), Thu-Sun, noon-5pm; £4, free to NT members. Moreton Tea Rooms (01929
463647), daily except Mon, 10am-5pm. Bovington Tank Museum (01929 405096, www.tankmuseum.org
), daily, 10am-5pm; £10, under16s £7; Lawrence exhibition on display from
September. Wareham Town Museum (01929 553448, www.warehammuseum.fsnet.co.uk
), Mon-Sat, 10am-4pm; free. Anglebury House (01929 552988); closed Sun, Mon
evenings. The slide auction is on Friday, Duke’s Auctioneers, Dorchester
(01305 265080, www.dukes-auctions.com
).
Where to stay: Holmebridge House B&B (01929 550599, www.holmebridgehouse.co.uk
; doubles from £65), just outside Wareham, is run by Anita Saunders, whose
mother’s cousin was one of the boys clipped by Lawrence. The Priory (01929
551666, www.theprioryhotel.co.uk
; doubles from £225, B&B) is on the river near the centre of
Wareham.
Iraq in 2008 : A Country I helped to make and build - Now what a good title to a book TE Lawrence could have easily penned if he had been alive now.
Ian Payne, WALSALL,