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St. John's College

• T. E. Lawrence's brothers Bob and Will were undergraduates at St. John's College, and he himself attended tutorials there with Sir Ernest Barker. The college library holds the copy of the subscribers' Seven Pillars that he gave to his mother. In 1919, while Lawrence was at All Souls, he became friends with the poet Robert Graves, then an undergraduate at St. John's. Graves's papers are now in the college library.

• The college website includes a history and an interactive tour.

• This is the fifth time that a T. E. Lawrence Society Symposium has been held at St. John's.

Photo © St. John's College, Oxford
Click on the picture to visit St. John's College website

Provisional programme. The speakers, papers, and order of papers may change. Please check this web page for updates.

Philip Neale: Richard Aldington: Lawrence’s strongest critic 

In 1955, Richard Aldington’s book Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry caused a massive storm of protest. The opposition had developed well before publication, through the co-ordinated actions of a powerful group of people including Basil Liddell-Hart, Robert Graves and A W Lawrence. Aldington’s prolific literary career and health was destroyed, his life drifted into obscurity, and his reputation still suffers today. This paper looks at the controversy surrounding the book and what Aldington was trying to achieve. It also examines his life and presents an appraisal of his literary skills, particularly as a war poet. 

Philip Neale is a pharmacist by profession and works for the Medicines Regulatory Agency in drug safety. He is Treasurer for the TEL Society and his interest in Lawrence developed following the National Portrait Gallery exhibition in 1988. He also has a strong interest in the First World War and Twentieth century art and literature, particularly relating to the Bloomsbury Group. Philip is the author of different journal articles as well as a small book in the Bloomsbury Heritage series. He also presented a paper at the TEL Society symposium in 2008. 

Philip Walker:  The Jeddah diary of Captain T P Goodchild during the Arab Revolt, 1916 

Captain Goodchild was sent to the Hejaz to buy camels for the advance of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force through Sinai and Palestine. His travelling companions on the SS “Lama” included T E Lawrence and Ronald Storrs. Goodchild was attached to the Jeddah Agency under Col. C E Wilson, and began his diary at a crucial time, in October 1916, when the Arab Revolt was stalling and risked failure. Philip Walker’s paper will address the diary’s significance and will attempt to put Goodchild’s words into their military and political context. 

Philip Walker is a retired archaeologist who spent most of his career as an Inspector of Ancient Monuments with English Heritage. He has travelled in Palestine (the West Bank), Libya, Morocco and Central Asia and became interested in Lawrence when he acquired a First World War diary, the subject of this paper, that was written during the Arab Revolt. His particular interests are the relationship between the Arab Revolt and British intelligence, and the procurement of camels for the Palestine campaign. 

Dr Roderick Bailey: T E Lawrence and the Special Operations Executive (SOE)

Drawing on recently declassified files, this paper explores the connections between T E Lawrence and Britain’s Special Operations Executive, the secret organisation set up in the Second World War to encourage resistance and carry out sabotage in enemy-occupied territory. It examines the impact of Lawrence’s ideas on revolt and guerrilla warfare on SOE planning and operations. It also reveals, for the first time, enduring links in terms of personnel: several officers who had served with Lawrence in the desert went on to work for SOE, as did A W Lawrence, T E’s youngest brother.

 
A graduate of Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities and a former Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and Dr. Roderick Bailey is a professional historian and a specialist in the study of Britain’s Special Operations Executive. He is the author of the critically acclaimed The Wildest Province: SOE in the Land of the Eagle, a study of SOE operations in the occupied Balkans, and two Sunday Times top-ten bestsellers: Forgotten Voices of the Secret War, an oral history of SOE, and Forgotten Voices of D-Day  

Dr Eveline Van der Steen: T.E. Lawrence and the tribes

T.E. Lawrence’s claim to fame is intimately related to his actions in the \first World War, and his interaction with the tribal groups. Tribal wartime politics and loyalties are complex, involving a mixture of inter-tribal relationships, personal and tribal interests and perceptions of honour. Lawrence understood this, and used it to involve a number of tribes, particularly the Huwaytat and the Rwala in the battle. However, we learn relatively little about how these tribes saw the war and their own role in it:  Lawrence is silent about the tribes in the other camp. This paper looks at the tribal politics of the time, to provide a background for the events he describes.

Eveline van der Steen is an archaeologist and anthropologist specializing in the Near East. She did her PhD at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, on the Bronze and Iron Ages of the Jordan Valley. These days one of her special interests is the politics of tribal societies in the Near East (particularly Levant and Arabia) in the 19th and early 20th century. She has written numerous articles on the subject, developing a model for tribal societies that can be used in the archaeology of the region. Presently she is preparing a monograph on the subject.

Eveline is based in Liverpool, as honorary research fellow of the University of Liverpool.

Alan Payne: The Journeys of T E Lawrence

The starting point for this presentation is the thesis that whilst T.E.Lawrence eschewed all involvement with competitive sport, he did throughout his life undertake long journeys; on foot, on bicycles, on camels and on Brough Superior motorcycles. In many cases, these journeys and particular his wartime camel rides were born out of necessity. Many other journeys and particularly his motorcycle journeys were undertaken for the shear joy of the journey itself.

The common theme for most of the journeys is that he looked on them as a challenge and a test of his own abilities and powers of endurance. They were a test for himself,

but there is ample evidence that he delighted in telling others of his achievements. This presentation will explore the nature of these journeys which were taken in the earlier years of the 20th Century; particularly with the cycling, walking and motorcycle journeys, comparisons will be made with modern times.   

Alan Payne gave a lecture to the 2008 Symposium on “T.E.Lawrence and Brough Superior motorcycles”. Much of this presentation was based on a lifetime’s experience with Brough Superior motorcycles. Beyond his extensive knowledge of Brough Superior motorcycles he is a keen long distance cyclist and in the last few years has cycled in France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and Denmark and has now travelled as far as Sweden on the North Sea Cycle Route. During the 1990’s he made 5 trips to the Nepal Himalaya including the full trek to Everest. He has also walked and climbed extensively in the Pyrenees, the Alps and many parts of Britain, particularly in North Wales. He is a member of two mountaineering clubs. He now lives in the Dartmoor National Park and works part time as a Planning Consultant and is Chairman of a Building Preservation Trust 

Dr. Polly Mohs:  Military Intelligence and the Arab Revolt

Lawrence’s insights on insurgency and guerrilla warfare have gained
renewed attention owing to the recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but
Lawrence’s achievements with intelligence are perhaps even more relevant.
Not only did Lawrence promote the integration of Humint, Sigint and Imint
as tactical force-multipliers for the Arab fighters in the field, but his
famous reassessment of the Hejaz war as a classic insurgency, to be
expanded as an intelligence-led irregular campaign, drew entirely on
political and military intelligence – and depended on intelligence to
succeed. This session will discuss Lawrence’s innovations with
intelligence and its influence on policy for the Revolt.
 
Polly Mohs began studying T. E. Lawrence in the historic Reading Room of
the former British Library during summer breaks from college. She obtained
her B.A. (Northwestern University) and M.A. (Columbia University) in
English Literature before earning a doctorate in History at the University
of Cambridge under the supervision of Chris Andrew. Polly published her
dissertation research as a monograph in 2008 with Routledge/Taylor &
Francis for their Series in Intelligence: Military Intelligence and the
Arab Revolt: the first modern intelligence war. She is honoured to be
able to participate during the special occasion of this 25th anniversary
Symposium.

Dr. David Murphy: Colonel P.C. Joyce and the Arab Revolt
 
This paper will explore the career of this Galway-born officer who served with Lawrence during the Arab Revolt. A serving officer in the Connaught Rangers, Joyce had served in South Africa during the 2nd Anglo-Boer War and was based in Cairo from 1907. From 1916 he served in Arabia and was commanding officer of Operation Hedgehog - the British mission to the Arab Northern Army. Drawing on Joyce's own papers, this lecture will examine his wartime career and his relationship with T.E. Lawrence and also other leading figures in the revolt such as Prince Feisal and Jafar Pasha. Joyce's later career in Iraq will also be referred to and it will be shown that he played a crucial role in the making of modern Arabia.

David Murphy is a graduate of University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin. He was a major contributor to the Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of Irish Biography and currently lectures in military history and strategic studies at NUI Maynooth. In this capacity, he also teaches at the Irish Military College. His publications include Ireland and the Crimean War (Dublin, 2002) and The Arab Revolt: Lawrence sets Arabia Ablaze (Osprey, 2008). He is currently working on a short biography of Lawrence for the Osprey Command series.
 

Dr. Eugene Rogan: The Druze and Karaka Revolts of 1910: Prelude to the Arab Revolt.  

In 1910, the Ottomans faced major revolts in both the Druze Mountain to the Southeast of Damascus, and in the town of Karaka, now in southern Jordan.  For two weeks, the Ottomans struggled to contain a major insurgency they feared might spread throughout the Syrian Desert as far as the Hejaz and Yemen beyond.  Fear swept Jerusalem and Damascus, of a tribal insurgency that would overwhelm Ottoman defenders and expose the townspeople to tribal violence.  In the aftermath of these events, Arab deputies in the Ottoman parliament began to petition for clemency for the Druze and Karaka rebels as part of a growing Arabism political sentiment.  In the process, the urban nationalists of Damascus came to appreciate the potential of united tribal action to undermine Ottoman rule in the Arab provinces.  The events of 1910, and the clemency campaign of 1912-13, played a key role in promoting the idea of a wartime alliance between urban nationalists and Arab tribesmen that resulted in the 1916 Arab Revolt of T.E. Lawrence fame.

Dr Eugene Rogan is Director of the Middle East Centre at St Anthony’s College, Oxford, and has taught the Modern History of the Middle East at Oxford since 1991. He took his BA in Economics from Columbia, and his MA and Ph.D in Middle Eastern History from Harvard. He is the author of the Arabs: A History.

Andrew Williams: Humour in the Mint?

Andrew’s talk will focus on Lawrence’s writing of his daybook of the RAF, The Mint. Something that is often overlooked in the scholarship surrounding Lawrence is his sense of humour.  Lawrence’s sense of mischievousness comes through in The Mint, and in his letters surrounding the text.  Often, this sense of fun masks a darker side to Lawrence.  Through a look at selected passages from his letters and The Mint, he will add to the appreciation of this remarkable character.

Andrew Williams has taught in the English Departments of Université Sainte Anne, the Université de Quebec a Trois Rivières, Bishop’s University and Dawson College.  He was first drawn to the figure of T.E. Lawrence through David Lean’s film and soon became fascinated by the differences between the "film" Lawrence and the “real” Lawrence.  He is currently at work on a book examining Lawrence’s influence on Modernism. 

Dr. Vino Roy: The Search for Identity in the Writings of T.E. Lawrence and Sayyid Qutb

The terrorist attacks in New York in 2001, and the U.S. led war in Afghanistan and Iraq have renewed interest in the “clash of civilisations" theory that views cultural and religious differences as the main source of international conflict. Vino Roy’s presentation will attempt to provide a better understanding of the identity-conflicts of today, through a comparative study of the lives and writings of T. E. Lawrence and Sayyid Qutb. The writings of both men expose the misrepresentations and earnest desire for mutual and self understanding that has often characterized both Western and Arab representations of the “other.”

Vino Roy manages the distance learning program for the Leader Development and Education for Sustained Peace program which educates US military and civilian leaders on US objectives, regional geopolitical and cultural frameworks in Iraq, Afghanistan and other regions

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Booking information (to be added)

Previous symposium, Oxford, 2008