A bumptious ass and his ‘cracked’ comrades . . .

HISTORY BEHIND THE LAWRENCE LEGEND by Philip Walker (OUP £25) JOHN PRESTON

A British Army Colonel called Cyril Wilson met a junior officer who had just been seconded to the British Consulate in Jeddah in October 1916.

the meeting did not go at all well. the junior officer, Wilson later reported, was a ‘bumptious young ass’. Not only that, he seemed to have an extraordinary ability to put people’s backs up.

Wilson’s colleagues heartily agreed with him. Another described the new arrival simply as ‘weird’. the man, a 5ft 5in, 28year-old former archaeologist, was called t. E. Lawrence. Within four years, he would be better known as Lawrence of Arabia.

As far as Philip Walker is concerned, Lawrence is the best known of an unjustly forgotten, equally brave — and often equally odd — bunch. Without his fellow officers, he contends, there would never have been a Lawrence of Arabia.

Even before Lawrence turned up, the British Consulate in Jeddah was a pretty strange place. One of the officers there kept a tame gazelle called Georgie, which would happily eat the wastepaper he dropped on the floor when he was doing his ciphering work. Georgie’s favourite food, however, was boiled rice and curry, followed by a dessert of tea leaves and marmalade mixed with cigarette ends. rather unsurprisingly, he soon expired.

Jeddah itself was a nest of spies, and flies. the British were there to help sherif hussein of Mecca gain independence from the turks.

When they weren’t spying or bombing, the officers would pass time playing golf, eating jam roly-poly and avoiding the local camels, especially during the mating season when they would become ‘mad with lust’ — one unfortunate man had his head bitten off by an enraged camel.

Most of the people who were stationed in Jeddah couldn’t wait to get out. But for Lawrence, who had always had a keen appetite for self-denial, it was as if he’d just stepped into Paradise. A fluent Arab speaker, he was remarkably good at his job and displayed an unquenchable zeal for blowing things up — especially railways.

in theory, the British were meant to pass themselves off as Arabs when engaged in undercover work. in practice, a lot of them found the idea abhorrent. When sherif hussein sent Cyril Wilson a ‘Bedouin rope thing’ to wear over his helmet, Wilson indignantly refused to put it on: ‘if i’m scuppered, i propose to be scuppered in my own uniform.’

Lawrence, of course, liked nothing better than to dress up in Arab gear, which only increased his colleagues’ suspiciousness. But even the biggest doubters had to admit he possessed an almost uncanny sixth sense into what their Arab allies were thinking and feeling.

it wasn’t long, though, before the pressures began to mount on him — just as they’d piled up on everyone else. Almost the whole staff of the British Consulate seems to have been teetering on the verge