‘The Mint’ and Later Writings About Service Life

In January 1935 T. E. Lawrence visited Augustus John’s studio near Fordingbridge. He brought away a ¾-length drawing of himself in RAF uniform, which he took to London to be reproduced in a half-size facsimile. The 100 copies were to be the frontispiece for a private edition of The Mint, his book about service life in the RAF.

He planned to print this on a press to be installed in the new water-tank building at Clouds Hill. In preparation for the edition he also lightly revised a typed copy of The Mint, one of several that had been made from the manuscript he had given to Edward Garnett in 1928.

In mid-May, when Lawrence died, his printing press had not yet been installed. We know little about his projected edition of The Mint, except that we can guess its format from the size of the untrimmed frontispiece. He cannot have planned to print as many as 100 copies, since he had given several of the frontispiece plates to friends. He would probably have printed the book in Caslon, his preferred typeface.

His younger brother later incorporated the revisions to the text, together with some earlier amendments on another typed copy, in the edition of The Mint published in 1955.

Had Lawrence lived long enough to print The Mint, he would probably have added a new section after the Cranwell chapters in Part III. Eighteen months previously he had told Charlotte Shaw what he had in mind: ‘You know I have been moody or broody for years, wondering what I was at in the R.A.F., but unable to let go – well, last night I suddenly understood that it was to write a book called Confession of Faith, beginning in the cloaca at Covent Garden, and embodying The Mint and much that has happened to me before and since as regards the air. Not the conquest of the air, but our entry into the reserved element, “as lords that are expected, yet with a silent joy in our arrival”. It would include a word on Miranshah and Karachi, and the meaning of speed, on land and water and air. I see the plan of it. It will take long to do. Clouds Hill, I think. In this next and last R.A.F. year I can collect feelings for it. The thread of the book will only come because it spins through my head: there cannot be any objective continuity – but I think I can make it whole enough to do. The Mint, you know, was meant as notes for something (smaller) of the sort. I wonder if it will come off. The purpose of my generation, that’s really it.’

After Lawrence’s death some notes for this project were found among his papers. One reads: ‘Final section “Leaves in the Wind”, snatches of life and letters, misarranged, from 2 lines to pages’. A note titled ‘Confession of Faith’ echoes his remarks to Charlotte Shaw, and must also date from December 1933. David Garnett printed it in Letters of T. E. Lawrence as though it were a kind of poem in blank verse; but in the manuscript it looks more like a disjointed series of jottings, apparently made at different times. The beginning and end are in pencil, while four of the middle lines are in ink. Two of the final lines cross over one another. Perhaps he wrote them in the dark.

There is no sign that Lawrence added to these notes during 1934, perhaps because he was too busy with RAF work. The next note, on the same sheet as ‘Confession of Faith’, refers to a letter of 6 February that confirmed his intention to leave the RAF when his term of enlistment expired. This almost certainly dates from February 1935, when there was some question at the Air Ministry whether he might wish to stay on.

Below this, on the same page, are outline notes about his voyage to India at the end of 1926 in HMT Derbyshire. This voyage presumably would have opened the new section, following on from Cranwell. On a separate sheet there is a more polished account of an incident during the voyage. Other notes describe an incident in India and the crash of an Iris Flying Boat in 1931.

To summarise what we know about Confession of Faith:

• It would begin with The Mint.

• It would be autobiographical, like almost all Lawrence’s writing, and more or less follow the chronology of his service career.

• The approach would be similar to the Cranwell section of The Mint, in that the new material would consist of passages about unrelated incidents, chosen and arranged to bring out particular themes. (Any different approach would have left a marked break where the new material began.)

Lawrence planned to draw at least some of ‘Leaves in the Wind’ from letters. His outline of the voyage to India begins ‘Quote letter to Mrs Shaw . . . and then in PS put “unposted letter”.’ In Part III of The Mint, describing his life at Cranwell, he had incorporated several descriptions he had sent to friends.

In a sense, by 1935 Lawrence was in a position to carry through his original scheme for The Mint. At the outset, he had seen the Uxbridge training as a gruelling prelude to the description of service life that would follow: ‘My determined endeavour is to scrape through with it, into the well-paid peace of my trade as photographer to some squadron. To that I look forward as profession and livelihood for many years.’ That career progression had been broken when he was dismissed from the RAF in 1923. Although he managed to rejoin the Air Force in 1925, he never qualified as an RAF photographer. On the other hand, he had since found another worthwhile service career, working on RAF marine craft. Had he been keeping notes, he would now have had material to extend the narrative through twelve years of service life.

He did not have notes, but there are comments about service life in many of his letters. In fact, one can wonder whether some of the descriptions he sent to Charlotte Shaw were not half-intended as notes for a future book. He knew she kept his letters, and she had copied and sent to him material for the Cranwell section of The Mint. Years before, when preparing his Oxford thesis about mediaeval military architecture, he had drawn on the descriptions of castles in letters to his family.

The number of comments about service life in Lawrence’s letters between 1927 and 1935 led to the idea of adding a fourth section to our edition of The Mint, which we therefore titled ‘The Mint’ and Later Writings About Service Life. We could not create ‘Leaves in the Wind’ as Lawrence would have written it, but we could assemble his contemporary descriptions into a patchwork account. When added to the section on Cranwell, these later writings would provide a much better balance to the grim description of the recruits’ training course at Uxbridge.

Compiling this selection posed a number of problems. First, many of Lawrence’s comments are duplicated, with slight variations, in letters to different recipients. Such repetitions would be tedious, so we had to edit them out. Also, comments about service life were often mixed in with other topics. Our aim, so far as possible, was to isolate the kind of material present in The Mint, leaving out anything not relevant.

We couldn’t tell how Lawrence would have grouped topics, so we opted for a diary format. Also, since we had removed most of the personal content from the extracts, it seemed a needless distraction to include recipients’ names (these are listed at the end of the book). We have given names only when relevant to the content, for example where Lawrence was writing on service matters to someone in the RAF.

The passages chosen were selected from a far larger body of material. In particular, we did not draw heavily on Lawrence’s technical letters about RAF boats. For a general audience, a little technical description goes a long way. For those who are more interested, we will include many technical letters in our edition of Lawrence’s handbook on the 200 Class Seaplane Tender.

I think these writings, read in chronological sequence, clarify aspects of Lawrence’s biography. In 1922 he had seen service life as a safe haven. His attitude of determined submission at Uxbridge reflected a psychological imbalance that ultimately (in 1925) became a life-threatening crisis. The healing began at Cranwell and continued at Karachi and Miranshah, where his work started to involve individual responsibility.

By late 1932, his enlistment had outlived its original purpose. He felt secure enough to leave the RAF early, offering to stay only if he could do work he thought worthwhile. Thereafter, at Felixstowe, his role was largely independent of service-life constraints. He even wore civilian clothes.

Towards the end of his service, Lawrence felt that he had contributed all he could to boat development. In retirement, he would regret the companionship and activity of service life (most people who retire have similar feelings). But he knew his work was finished and made no effort to continue it as a civilian.

Adapted from the Introduction to ‘The Mint’ and Later Writings About Service Life (Castle Hill Press. Two editions are currently in production) Copyright (c) Jeremy Wilson 2009