LAWRENCE | Autograph letter signed, to Leeson, reflecting on the Arab Revolt, 4 February 1923

Property of a Distinguished Collector

LAWRENCE, T.E.

Autograph letter signed ("J.H. Ross"), to B.E. Leeson

REFLECTING ON HIS "ARAB ADVENTURE", FAME, AND POST-WAR LIFE, admitting that he enlisted in the RAF to escape his past and explaining his abrupt departure ("...When the Press let itself go in that hideous fashion the Air Ministry said 'Quite impossible to permit an A.C.2 to have such publicity.' I was meek & said I didn't really want it: they might have it if they could get it. In reply they slung me out...") but expressing his determination to find another such role ("....I'm fed up with being called a Colonel in this ridiculous year 1923: and am determined not any more to be respectable. Besides I like being an A.C.2 and would like to be something of the sort in future..."), revealing to Leeson the existence of the Oxford text of Seven Pillars ("...I printed a few copies of it nearly three years ago, & there is rests. I wrote my heart out, & so it's rather intimate and indiscreet. It contains only my adventures, so that a certain car adventure up W. Hamdh didn't figure..."), and with news of fellow "Hejaz oiks", 2 pages, 4to, 14 Barton Street, Westminster, 4 February 1923

"...After you left us the Arab Adventure got rather too black & heavy & the gaiety died out: while the end of it left a nasty taste in my mouth. Hence partly my disgust for my war personality! So please pardon a change of name..." 

AN EXCEPTIONALLY REVEALING LETTER TO A FELLOW VETERAN OF THE ARAB REVOLT. This letter was written during the brief period between Lawrence' dismissal from the RAF in January 1923 after his identity was discovered by the press, and his entry into the Tank Corps in March of the same year. He enlisted in the Tank Corps under the name T.E. Shaw, so letters signed as "J.H. Ross", which he had adopted in August 1922, are comparatively rare.

B.E. Leeson was a veteran of the Arab Revolt. He had joined 14 Squadron of the RFC in January 1917 as an Observer with the rank of Lieutenant. The squadron was then providing aerial support to Arab and British forces from Rabigh, north of Mecca in the Hejaz, and later from Wejh. Leeson's personal connection with Lawrence came in late April, when the two men had been part of a small group who spent a week exploring a remote valley, Wadi Hamdh, to recover a crashed B.E.2c biplane. This was the "certain car adventure" mentioned in this letter. The temperature was 118° in the shade, the country was waterless, and their car constantly had to be cut free of thick dry brushwood ("How we stuck!", as Lawrence recalls). Leeson was subsequently invalided out of Arabia.

LITERATURE:

Garnett, The Letters of T.E. Lawrence, 397-99

PROVENANCE:

Phillips, 14 March 1996, lot 393