T. E. Lawrence

Biography

Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in Tremadog, Wales, in 1888 and grew up in Oxford, where he attended the City of Oxford High School and read history at Jesus College from 1907 to 1910. From 1910 to 1914 he worked as an archaeologist for the British Museum, mainly at the excavations at Carchemish in Ottoman Syria under D. G. Hogarth and Leonard Woolley.

At the start of the First World War he joined the Arab Bureau, a British military intelligence unit in Cairo. In 1916 he went on intelligence missions to Mesopotamia and Arabia and became liaison officer to Emir Faisal in the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule, taking part in its campaigns up to the capture of Damascus in October 1918.

After the war he worked for the Foreign Office, attending the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as a member of Faisal's delegation, and was then an adviser to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office, taking part in the 1921 Cairo Conference. In 1922 he withdrew from public life and served under assumed names as an enlisted man in the RAF and the army. His account of the revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, appeared in 1926. He died in 1935 after a motorcycle crash in Dorset.