John Buchan - Section 9
9 - John Buchan and Lawrence of Arabia.
The dedication at the beginning of Buchan's biography of Julius Caesar is to "Aircraftsman T. E. Shaw". This is Lt. Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence CB DSO (1888-1935) (Lawrence of Arabia). They were good friends and Buchan held him in high esteem both as a military strategist and also as a person. Buchan was instrumental in arranging the transfer of Lawrence from the Tank Corps to the RAF by talking to the head of the Air Force, Sir hugh Trenchard and also Baldwin the Prime Minister In 1939 Buchan wrote an article about Lawrence in the Canadian Defence Quarterly. Seven pages of Buchan's autobiography Memory Hold-the-Door are given over to Lawrence, most of this came from the article in the C.D.Q. of the previous year. Buchan describes the last time that he saw Lawrence - {I last saw him at the end of March 1935, when on a push-bike he truned up at Elsfield one Sunday morning and spent a long day with us. He was on his way from Bridlington to his Dorsetshire cottage ---- When he left I told my wife that at last I was happy about him and believed that he might become again the great man of action - he might organise, perhaps, our imperfect national defences. She shook her head. "He is looking at the world as God must look at it," she said, "and man can not do that and live." . . . A few weeks later he was dead.}
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