“The cottage is alone in a dip in the moor — very quiet, very lonely, very bare, a mile from the camp. Furnished with a bed, a bicycle, three chairs, a hundred books, a gramophone and a table. Many windows, oak trees, rhododendron, laurels, heather: Dorsetshire to look at. I don’t sleep here but come out 4.30 p.m. till 9.00 p.m. nearly every evening and dream or write or read by the fire.”

-T.E. Lawrence on Clouds Hill, 1924

T.E. Lawrence’s golden dagger, made for him in Mecca in 1917. He sold it to Lionel Curtis in October 1923 for £125. The money was put towards repairing the roof of Clouds Hill (his cottage) and purchasing furniture. The dagger is now on display in the Imperial War Museum in London, England.

T.E. Lawrence in camp with Oxford University Officers Training Corps, 1910.

In the actual work he was curiously erratic. It all depended on how far he was interested, and not everything in field archaeology did interest him or appeal to his sense of values. He could take very full and careful notes, not always in a form easy for others to follow, but giving all the gist of the matter, and at other times he would takes no notes at all. Once I asked him to write a detailed description of a row of sculptured slabs and he duly handed in a notebook which he said contained all that was wanted; long afterwards when I came to look at it I found that each slab was dismissed with a sentence or two which merely made fun of it. Probably he thought that a description was a waste of time  — he would himself have much preferred a good photograph; anyhow it could just as well be written later, and the instruction to do a distasteful job gave an opening for the impish humour that was so prominent in him. His impatience of the written record might have been due in part to his prodigious memory. He would look at a small fragment of a Hittite inscription which had just come to light and remark that it fitted on to an equally small piece found twelves months before, and although there were many hundreds of such in our store-room he was always right; or he would quote from memory a particular potsherd that had been found in a former season and could describe its stratum and associations, although I and not he had excavated the piece and written the notes about it. His mind was indeed entirely set on the work he was doing, but he did it in his own way. He would make a brilliant suggestion but would seldom argue in support of them; they were based on sound enough arguments, but he expected you to see those for yourself, and if you did not agree he would relapse into silence and smile.

-Sir. C. Leonard Woolley on T.E. Lawrence

The photo shows Lawrence and Woolley at their dig site in Carchmeish, around 1912-1913.

T.E. Lawrence’s cottage, Clouds Hill which is located in Dorset, England.

Clouds Hill is really the name of the high ground rising to its highest peak about 180 yards S.S.W. of Lawrence’s cottage at a height of about 260 feet above mean sea level. The origin of the name is similar to The Cloud near Buglawton in Cheshire where it refers to a hill as far back as 1199 AD. Either the hill was shaped like a cloud or it rose to meet the clouds. Another possibility o its etymology is in the possessive ‘s’ of Cloud’s Hill — the majority of place names ending in ‘s’ imply a personal possession; Petersfield means the field of St Peter or St Peter’s field and so on. Pat Knowles believed that in medieval times a recluse, a French monk named Claude or Clowood, lived by the spring just to the north of Knowles’ bungalow. Hence he thought it came to be known as the hill of Clowood or Cloud’s Hill. The former explanation is the most likely.

I like Pat Knowles’ theory better…

Source: The Last Days of T.E. Lawrence: A Leaf in the Wind by Paul Marriott and Yvonne Argent

The book room at T.E. Lawrence’s cottage, Clouds Hill, taken in late 1935, several months after his death.

The larger ground floor room was left bare and in June 1924 was full of stored firewood and lumber. The walls were whitewashed in August 1924 and Bill Knowles [T.E. Lawrence’s friend and neighbor] converted the ground floor into a kitchen in March 1927, “Knowles…is now engaged in converting Clouds Hill to a Christian way of living, with a view to letting it.”

In late 1929 Lawrence decided to transfer his growing book library from the large upper room to the lower one. Shelving was erected and by February 1930 he asked Arthur Knowles to find a carpenter “to run shelves like at the present, but in oak, the full depth and height of the chimney-breast, on each side. That will hold 500 books. Years yet.”

From late 1929 the storing of books was confined to the bookroom. Most of his collection had been kept in friends’ houses in London, mainly at V.W. Richards’ home at 3 Loudoun Road, St. Johns Wood, London, NW8, but by May 1933, most of the books were transferred to the cottage. K.W. Marshall, an unemployed bookseller, was staying at the cottage and helped to unpack the books and arrange them on the shelves. There is some confusion to the number of books Lawrence had accumulated. It had grown to 2,000 by 9 November 1932 although on 15 September 1933 he stated that there were 1,000 and 200-300 to be replaced. After his death the library was catalogued.

Source: The Last Days of T.E. Lawrence: A Leaf in the Wind by Paul Marriott and Yvonne Argent

At school the Lawrences first began to impress my awakening consciousness by the regularity with which new members of the family appeared, in seemingly inexhaustible supply: each in a dark blue-and-white striped jersey that became almost a uniform, the softness of the wool matching a certain gentleness of speech and fairness of face. Out of this prolonged family Lawrence II gradually became distinct by a spareness of body and pithy energy of speech. Our paths did not much overlap, I think, till we reached the fifth form: there, with some glee, he encouraged me to work all his algebra for him, in return flattering any attempts of mine to write English. He was then best known, almost to notoriety, for his archaeological rummagings (with C.F.C. Beeson) in and about Oxford. Every excavation and rebuilding in the city was penetrated, and fragments of glass and stoneware zealously recovered: a cellar in the old wall bounding the school was identified as a one-time place of confinement for ‘hussies’ and we became familiar with medieval names of Oxford streets, Fish Street, Canditch, Horsemonger Street, one of which the soldiers burnt down through over-roasting a pig. The country churches round were ransacked for brasses, and his school-fellows learnt the virtues of heel-ball. In one such ransacking I took part. In Waterperry Church there were brasses inaccessible behind some pews. Lawrence, already ruthless, made short work of the obstruction, and I still hear the splintering woodwork and his short laugh, almost sinister to my timorous ears.

T.W. Chaundy on T.E. Lawrence

The photo shows the Lawrence brothers photographed in Oxford around 1898. T.E. is on the left, followed by Frank, Bob, and Will. The youngest Lawrence, Arnold, was not born until 1900.

From the time he was quite a small boy he was very interested in brass rubbing, and went to all the churches in and around Oxford; and when he got older made long journeys on his cycle to every place in England which had famous brasses of knights; he covered the walls of his bedroom with them, and they made a wonderful show, especially by firelight. Some of them were over life size. He took the greatest pains over everything he did, and was always full of enthusiasm about all he wad doing in work or play, and was always so good and kind to everyone.

Sarah Lawrence on her son, T.E. Lawrence

The photo is a personal one from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford - taken in 2002. The brass rubbing is of William Viscount of Beaumont who died in 1507. The tomb can be found in Wivenhoe, Essex.  The rubbing was taken by T.E. Lawrence in 1905.

It is very difficult for me to adequately express my feelings in regard to a man I admired above all others. His enthusiastic playfulness in the sport of motor cycling could easily have cloaked the genius of the man behind the boyish smile. I built him eight motor bicycles during the period of our friendship; he called them George I, George II, George III, George IV, George V, George VI, George VII - George VIII was never delivered, and in remembrance of the man for whom it was built, this machine is now ridden by me.

I have never met a more unassuming man, he would talk motor cycling to the biggest tyro at the game, and from his conversation, a stranger would probably form the opinion that T.E.L. himself was also a tyro. As a matter of fact, not only  was T.E.L. extremely clever in anything  technical concerning a motor cycle, but he was one of the finest riders I have ever met. In the several runs I took with him, I am able to state with conviction that T.E.L. was most considerate to every other road user. I never saw him take a single risk nor put any other rider or driver to the slightest inconvenience— but when the road was clear ahead, it required a very good and experienced rider to keep anywhere near T.E.L.

- George Brough (designer, manufacturer, and rider of the Brough Superior motorcycle), on T.E. Lawrence - both shown in the photo above