IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF...T.E. LAWRENCE

In late 1916, a little-known archaeologist arrived in the Red Sea port of Jeddah. What started as a trouble-shooting mission would transform the Middle East

- JAMES BARR

On 16 October 1916, midway through WWI, a small British ship carrying two British officials arrived off Jeddah. The port was the gateway to the Hejaz, the mountainous region that was home to the two most important cities in Islam: Mecca and Medina. “When at last we anchored in the outer harbour, off the white town hung between the blazing sky and its reflection on the mirage, then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless,” wrote one of them. His name was TE Lawrence.

The British encouraged the Arab inhabitants of the Hejaz to revolt against the Turks, but by October 1916 the uprising seemed on the brink of failure. As the British started blaming one another, Lawrence was sent to assess the situation. It was supposed to be brief, and Lawrence’s conclusions had already been decided. All that he needed was some first-hand experience to make his argument unanswerable. However, on the voyage down, he had been practising his pistol shooting. It was a telling sign of Lawrence’s ambitions.

1 YEAR VISITED: 1908

AIGUES-MORTES

At the end of his first year as a student at Oxford University, in the summer of 1908, Lawrence, then nearly 20 years old, embarked on a 3,800km cycle ride across France. He had decided to write a thesis on medieval castle architecture, but the fieldwork also provided a reason not to spend the summer holiday with his domineering mother, with whom his relationship was increasingly strained.