At the beginning of 1922, with his work at the Colonial Office finished, Lawrence suddenly decided to seek ‘obscurity’ within the ranks of the RAF (under the assumed name of John Hume Ross), which was easily achieved with the connivance of the Air Ministry – Lawrence knew all the ministers well of course – and a recruiting officer by the name W.E. Johns, the creator of ‘Biggles’, who was ordered to ask no questions of the applicant.

The reason always given for Lawrence’s sudden decision to become a ranker in the RAF was that he was suffering from acute depression and needed the monk like seclusion of the ranks; which is the last place you’re going to find it of course. Then, in February 1922 ( not long after joining) Lawrence decided to take three months leave – something the average ranker would have found impossible to do. But then Lawrence was not an ordinary ranker. He was still a full and highly decorated colonel in the army (and a man with many friends in very high places, one of whom, Churchill, was already building up a dossier on the effectiveness of the RAF in any future war), and a serving intelligence officer with the SIS who, more than likely, was working under-cover as a counter-intelligence agent (within the RAF) at a time when many new aircraft were under development. Had Lawrence really wanted obscurity he could have found himself a cottage in Welsh mountains.

But take leave he did and over those three months prepared Seven Pillars of Wisdom for printing, with the finished result (set in typical newspaper double columns) something of an inky, mistake infested mess. The text was printed in random order, with Lawrence adding chapter, and page numbers later. Only eight copies were ever printed, with Lawrence distributing them to friends such as George Bernard Shaw and E. M. Forster. Lawrence had to borrow heavily to pay the printing bills, and it’s rather ironic to note that a copy of that Oxford Times edition sold a few years at auction for just short of $1million!

In 1923 Lawrence left the RAF and joined the Tank Corp (under the assumed name of Thomas Edward Shaw) at Bovington Camp in Dorset. That he was able to so with such ease is again an obvious sign that he either used his friends in high places to find his desired anonymity and peace (no chance), or more likely, be close to where secretive new tanks were being developed and tested. The chances are his SIS bosses had placed him there to counter a threat of spying from a foreign country.

But Lawrence’s all too public attempts to supposedly find anonymity were covered widely in the press (and he never kept his whereabouts a secret) but the stories, at least to start with, always used the reason that he was a man suffering from severe depression (even madness, as Rattigan has suggested) due to his harrowing wartime experiences, and that he could only find the seclusion and peace he needed within the ranks. Codswollop of course, but an excellent form of cover: a kind of double bluff.

During the summer of 1923 Lawrence rented the small cottage ‘Clouds Hill’, just a mile or so from Bovington Camp, where he regularly met together with his old recruiter and boss, Dr David Hogarth (who had run the Arab Bureau in Cairo during WWI), Guy Dawney ( a member of General Allenby’s staff in Cairo and probably Lawrence’s controller), and Lionel Curtis ( an academic who wrote widely on the effect and nature of the British Empire, and who, in all probability, was also an intelligence officer) to ostensibly discuss the feasibility of publishing a subscription only edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom that would sell for 30gns a time (£1,200 in todays money) in a limited edition of 100 copies. Although this edition was published in 1926, with each copy bound in a different coloured leather, numbered and signed by Lawrence, the real reason for the meetings was the sharing, and assimilation, of secret intelligence information.

To Be Continued…