What Would Al Ourence (Lawrence of Arabia) Do?
Yesterday, whilst browsing through the internet in search of something, I once again ran into an interesting article about one of my favorite historical figures, T.E. Lawrence, known to his Arab cohorts as ‘Al Ourence’.
Lawrence, as you will recall (hopefully) is the ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ made famous by news correspondent Lowell Thomas in his memoir of the desert campaign of the First World War, titled ‘The Desert Revolt’.
The below backstory concerning Lawrence and Thomas is presented here, courtesy of PBS, because it conveniently summarises the circumstances surrounding Lawrence’s rise to public awareness as much as it describes Thomas’s emergence as one of the modern media age’s towering figures of note. Rather than recapitulate these facts, it’s far more efficacious to read them by virtue of PBS’s excellent summary:
“Lowell Thomas was a man ahead of his time: the first roving newscaster, a film maker through the 1920s, a radio presenter in the 1930s, an adventurer who wrote more than 50 books, he was heralded as the father of 'Cinerama'.
“Born in 1892, Lowell Thomas started out as a reporter for the Chicago Evening Journal. He had a flair for making ordinary stories exciting.
“Inspired by the growing art of documentary film, Thomas dreamed of filming the war in Europe. He raised $50,000 from Chicago businessmen and headed for France accompanied by his wife and a talented cameraman, Harry Chase.
“Depressed by the brutality of the war on the Western Front Thomas and Chase set off for the Middle East. They arrived in time to film General Allenby's historic entry in to Jerusalem. While in Jerusalem they met the man who was to make them famous, a diminutive British officer in a borrowed uniform called Captain Lawrence.
“Lawrence was allegedly introduced to Thomas as the 'Uncrowned King of Arabia'. Thomas and Chase were invited to Feisal's desert camp where they shot moving and still pictures of Lawrence with the Arabs.
“Later both men were to dispute how long the filming had taken, Thomas claiming it was a few weeks, Lawrence said it was only days. Lawrence later claimed he had been "tricked" into being filmed and photographed; Thomas said he had been a willing model.
“Nonetheless, the images of Lawrence in Arabia captivated a public exhausted by the horrors of the 'war to end all wars'.
“The romantic and adventurous tales of this "mysterious blue eyed Arab in the garb of a prince wandering the streets" were an instant hit. Lowell Thomas' screen show showed to packed audiences in New York and then London.
“Thomas' planned London run of two weeks was extended and ran for six months. There was even a Royal Command Performance. Allenby turned up to a standing ovation and Thomas later claimed that even Lawrence had sneaked in for a viewing.
“The show went on to Australia, New Zealand, South-East Asia, India and Canada. Over four million people saw it, making Thomas millions of dollars and turning Lawrence into a movie star. Lawrence at once loved and hated fame and never forgave Thomas for exploiting his image, calling him a 'vulgar man'.
“When asked about Lawrence's aversion to celebrity Lowell Thomas quoted an old Turkish saying, "He had a genius for backing into the limelight".
“Thomas went on to live an adventurous life, making many more films and radio broadcasts. He was also the first man to film the Dalai Lama in Tibet.
“Thomas died in 1981 in New York at the age of 89.”
Lawrence, for his part, was a complex man full of contradictions (as noted in the above commentary), but also a trained archeologist and brilliantly original thinker. A shy, reserved and even retiring person by nature and of short stature, among his many incongruous talents was the ability to endure extreme physical and mental hardships with perfect equanimity. He was also physically somewhat slightly built, certainly not the imposing man of imposing action and commanding personality that one might visualized after reading of his exploits.
He also had the curious ability to persevere in circumstances that would normally be considered daunting for any naturally reticent individual in that he could be what has been described by award-winning writer Scott Anderson (in his 2014 work about Lawrence’s Middle Eastern campaigns, titled ‘Lawrence In Arabia’) as ‘politely belligerent’. That is, he could skillfully deflect and redirect argumentative and contrary individuals’ unreasonable willfulness through the use of his uncanny understandings and persuasive knowledge.
This was Lawrence at his finest, a man who could almost effortlessly align others’ sentiments and behavior to parallel his wishes. Lawrence, with his unusual gift of persuasiveness and his piercing blue eyes, was thus able to understand the outlooks and awarenesses of the Arab tribesmen he circulated among and prompt them to act according to his desires.
Speaking as someone who lived among and worked with the Saudi Arabs myself in the 80s and 90s, I can testify that for most Westerners this would be a substantially daunting task, if not a wholly impossible challenge. The Arabs, whose erstwhile (and undeserved) reputation as semi-crazed desert primitives and religious fanatics is transmitted to most Americans through a severely distorted Israeli filter, can indeed be frustratingly recalcitrant, behaviorally contradictory and predictably unpredictable. But that was exactly the sort of milieu wherein Lawrence’s immense interpersonal skills and abilities excelled and it wasn’t long before he had established himself as a highly regarded and respected leader of the scattered Arab tribes in their WWI campaign against the Turks of the tottering Ottoman Empire.
All of the foregoing is itself merely backstory for the central topic of this discourse (one prominent aspect of the present state of American motorcycle culture) but before I go any further, let me recommend to you Anderson’s rather brilliant study of the singular, enigmatic T.E. Lawrence, a person whom history, whilst seemingly endlessly fascinated by him, has been repeatedly misinterpreted and ‘reinvented’ largely to suit the biases and prejudices of various biographers.
‘Lawrence in Arabia’ (by Anderson) is truly one of those books that you find difficult to put down and his street-creds as a knowledgeable author are impeccable, given a distinguished career as a veteran war correspondent who has exhaustively covered a huge number of modern conflicts and wars. [In this, he shares a similar regard with another singular war correspondent, Englishman Robert Fisk, whose equally peerless work on the Middle East’s centuries-long ethnic and religious turmoil (‘The Great War for Civilisation’, 2005) belongs in the same category.]
Coincidentally, I am myself interested in all aspects of Middle Eastern (or, as we say in the military establishment, ‘Southwest Asia’) culture and civilization, not least due to my presence over there for several decades and my enduring historical fascination with the unique peoples of that region.
But to return to the chief thematic intent of this installment of my ramblings, I have also been a life-long motorcyclist, having begun my affair with two-wheeled motorized vehicles ever since I purchased my very first such conveyance, a 1962 Honda C-110 ‘SuperCub’ (as in ‘You meet the nicest people on a Honda’, that company’s famed and brilliantly successful advertising slogan of the 60s) in my sophomore year in high school.
At that time (1962) I was, of course, a teenager and most people in the general population were even at that early date all too acutely aware of the post-war (WW2) rogue biker image that had been almost single-handedly established as a fixation in the collective public mind by the Marlon Brando film, ‘The Wild One’. Hot on the heels of that late 1950s film followed a string of sensationalist ‘B-movies’ about drug-crazed and alcohol fueled outlaw bikers, as some of the less artistically inclined producers and directors sought ways to make easy dollars from the public’s superficial fancies. Watching one of these movies today you can already see how the stereotyped image of the leather-clad, ‘Bosch’ helmet wearing, Iron Cross flaunting ‘outlaw biker’ was being cast in stone, both in the public mind and in the minds of those ‘wannabes’ who would emulate the rebel bikers in subsequent decades.
It’s quite interesting to me to see how a certain affect, manner of dressing and behaving took hold of so many marginally bright young people by virtue of these exciting but execrable films, who perceived these causeless misfits to be a sort of glamorous new iteration of the social outlaw-hero that punctuated the history of the American West in the late 1800s. Naturally, accompanying the post-war economic boom was a youthful rejection of the bourgeois American socio-economic standards that so thoroughly characterised the 50s and 60s in America. Nowhere was that rejection embraced more than by a certain selection of restless youths for whom Brando and James Dean served as role-models to be emulated. Perhaps the only really authentic outlaw bikers at that time were the Hells Angels, but it wasn’t long before a great many youths of the 60s and 70s looked to the Angels as an archetype within which to express their rebellious rejection of conventional American society. Suddenly, black leather-clad hoods on motorcycles became ultra-cool!
Almost predictably, the image of American motorcycle culture of that period was overly represented by these two-wheeled social rejects and even today that image strongly persists, despite the fact that Harley-Davidson motorcycles (as a Japanese ‘rice-burner’ fan, I refer to them sneeringly as ‘Hardly-Goodsons’) are now so prohibitively expensive to own and maintain that only up-scale, well-salaried professionals can afford them. Thus, today a disproportionate number of H-D motorcycle owners are found to be physicians, lawyers, hedge fund managers and other top-of-the-economic-food-chain individuals who are about rebellious as a cupcake.
Speaking of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, it’s always a matter of some interest for me to note that if one could make gross oversimplifications about H-D owners, one would likely conclude that…regardless of their true economic status…they nearly always fit into a certain type-description. That is, a preponderance of them are much older men, many with thick gray beards and abdominal paunches that indicate a love of regular eating and consumption of copious amounts of both food and alcohol.
So much is this a seeming characteristic of Harley-Davidson owners that I’d be sorely tempted to say that most H-D owners today appear to be ‘fat old men’ as a group. Whatever the truth, H-D motorcycles are inarguably technological dinosaurs, manufactured in a classic semi-obsolescent mold with little real change in their appearance, operation, performance and aesthetics (noise levels) over the years. As someone who values quietude, peacefulness and unobtrusiveness, H-D motorcycles are to me little more than an aesthetic irritation, a needlessly noisy annoyance and a cacophonic wart on the spiritual façade of modern two-wheeled motor vehicle progress. Throwbacks to an era in which Harley-Davidson machines (with a few similar appearing exceptions) were the only game in town, if you fancied getting around on two wheels.
But since irritating ‘squares’ (to use 1950s parlance) is and has always been part of the social rebel game, that sort of symbolic ‘in your face’ attitude still has great appeal to a wide range of older men who, faced with the inevitability of aging, enthusiastically embrace a last chance to show everyone that they can still figuratively say ‘fu*k’ occasionally by driving down the street and gunning the sonorously distinctive Harley engine excessively. Dylan Thomas’ famed admonition, “…do not go gentle into that good night!” comes immediately to mind: the last, desperately wild cry of late, lost & lamented youth!
As I have remarked on more than a few occasions, and as someone who understands technology from a mechanical engineer’s viewpoint, excessive sound is directly associated by anyone with an understanding of basic physics to be equitable to inefficient operation of a mechanical device. To any engineer, excessive noise in a vehicle bespeaks deficit design and wasted energy. By the same reckoning, a quiet engine is generally a well-designed and highly efficient engine.
This contradicts the intent of immature youths, half-baked persons and what we call ‘arrested juveniles’, since these unfortunates weaponise extreme noise and use it as a means of calling attention to their worthless lack of self-esteem in a conventional social setting where they would otherwise be scorned and totally ignored. QED also, the advent of powerful automobile sound systems up through the 80s that were capable of pumping out hundreds of watts of sound…a circumstance that for many of us simply meant that we all had to unwillingly share someone’s excessively bad taste in music, until law enforcement understandably cracked down on the fad.
Unfortunately, enforcement of rules against socially objectionable public noise in turn prompted clever capitalists (who are, after all, always searching for new, expensive techo-gadgets to sell) came up with today’s ‘mega-bass’ sound system that keeps the volume of music and lyrics down to a manageable level, while exponentially elevating the ‘thumpity-thump’ of the bass beat. Most regrettably, today law enforcement resources are stretched so thin and the popularity of these vibratory nightmares on wheels is so widespread that it has become impossible to enforce any sort of prohibition against this final noisy assault on our urban ears (i.e. another unenforceable law, of which we today have so many).
But I digress. If obsolescent, noisy ‘old technology’ (as characterised by Harley-Davidson motorcycles) is the habitual venue of the ‘bearded, old fat guy’, their opposite number, high-tech Japanese sportsbikes, have become almost the exclusive preserve of the reckless, generally immature and intellectually myopic, youthful rebel. While today’s H-D riders were once yesterday’s reckless, immature and intellectually myopic youths, they have at least survived the rigors of youthful indiscretion sufficiently to afford their noisy mounts today. Their successors, the new youthful rebels, prefer sophisticated Japanese one-off motorcycle racing machines to make their territorial mark on the virtual social fire-hydrants of America today.
In general, these machines resulted from the popularity of world-class international motorcycle racing sports back in the 80s and 90s. It has long been a tradition in both four-wheel and two wheeled powered vehicle racing to ‘homologate’ extremely high-performance racing vehicles by producing a limited number of ‘street legal’ machines that, while still capable of blowing your mind with zero-to-60 accelerations of 2.7 seconds, have been equipped with department of transportation mandated safety equipment (such as lights, safety devices & systems, and ‘normal’ roadworthy automobile gear). This permits a manufacturer to make the exaggerated claim (not without a large hint of humorous mirth, I'm sure) that his racing machines are, after all and to some degree, ‘streetable stock’. Right!
Originally the market for such land-bound, two-wheeled fighter jets was rather limited, but as soon as youths with high levels of discretionary income (equipped with E-Z loans from the Acme Finance Company) became aware of them, the motorcycle industry responded (predictably, sensing obscene new corporate profits) by turning these high-performance (and expensive) motorcycles out in the millions. It wasn’t long before high-revving ‘sportsbikes’ became the number one choice of any hormonally super-charged youth you could care to name. Since hanging one’s ass out over the razor’s edge is a time-honored resort of the half-baked adolescent mind, this promised kicks unequalled in today’s stodgy social-economy (thanks heaps, Steve McQueen!).
Thus, Japanese sportsbikes quickly became the other major market-share for two-wheeled vehicles and it is fair to say you won’t find many over the age of 40 or so driving one, since their hair-trigger performance can kill you is less time that it takes to say ‘suicide’. My own Kawasaki Ninja will propel me from a standstill to over 60 mph is less than 2.7 seconds! GAAK!
So, is there an age/generational chasm dividing the more recent and the older generations? You bet your sweet Kawasaki Ninja there is! H-D riders, as much older individuals, have substantially lower reaction times than your average, edgy, high-energy adolescent, as age continues to destroy physical agility and degrade mental acuity. Sportsbikes, with their almost obscene performance capabilities, therefore are generally completely unsuited for older, more sedate motorcyclists (I suppose I, now well into my 70s, am a screaming exception to the norm, if also perhaps a not-so-bright one). Conversely, lumbering Harley-Davidsons, now solidly redolent with the ‘old, bearded fat guy’ image, are realistically absolute anathema to anyone under the age of 50 (or thereabouts).
This well-defined polarity has therefore come to define the prevalent social norm (almost) in today’s modern American motorcycle world, and that is a real shame, since it redacts an already rather severely formularized and two-dimensional milieu (motorcycle sports and recreation) still further.
In America, ‘motorcycle sport bikes’ have become the sole venue of what I characterise as the ‘typical’ heavily stereotyped masculine norm, in which intelligent, perhaps even ‘sensitive’ reflectivity has given way to an operative ethos of super-charged, action-packed, testosterone-inbued two-wheeled machismo. This is in extreme contrast to the sort of traditional English regard for technology, especially as characterised by individuals like T.E. Lawrence, who had a long-lasting affinity for high-powered motorcycles and yet who was a true intellectual.
Lawrence's affinity for fast, two-wheeled transportation began while he was serving as an intelligence officer in the British Army, operating out of Cairo in 1915. Motorcycles provided an excellent and expedient means of getting about in those distant days, despite the fact that they were then still a bit primitive. The British Army used Triumph motorcycles for communications dispatch duty and Lawrence was able to commandeer one occasionally (for both military and personal uses). Later, in the desert campaign, they would prove equally useful for his need for speedy transportation.
Much later and well after his WW1 service, Lawrence acquired a series of George Brough’s exceptionally engineered and (for their time) quite advanced (technologically speaking) machines. In 1936, after having withdrawn almost completely from English circles and highly reluctant to acknowledge his part in the desert adventures of the ‘Great War’, Lawrence derived immense personal pleasure and a feeling of release from riding his latest Brough machine, an SS100 model that for its time was one of the most formidable motorcycles of its period (the 30s).
The Brough Superior SS100, built in successive iterations from 1924 through 1940 had a well-deserved following among those who knew and savored state-of-the-art, powerful two-wheeled vehicles and was easily capable of speeds in excess of 100 mph at a time when even automobiles rarely exceeded half that speed in everyday use.
Lawrence, so it has been written, found great solace in careening along the English countryside on his Brough, and riding it enabled him to put his past temporarily behind him, relishing the pure temporal delights of zipping along in draughts of fresh North Sea breezes, among the English countryside hedgerows.
George Bernard Shaw, the great Irish writer, was a good friend of Lawrence and through his financial help Lawrence, despite having the income only of a common enlisted Royal Air Force aircraft maintenance man (a deliberately self-chosen low-status job that enabled him to maintain some anonymity and a sought-after low public profile), was able to afford a series of Brough’s machines, which at that time were actually quite expensive (and well beyond the means of the average person).
Naturally enough, I shouldn’t have to recapitulate the fact that Lawrence was a well-respected, widely acknowledged member of British society's upper echelons, especially after his exploits became legendary both at home and around the world. And yet he found nothing demeaning about getting greasy or dirty when on or around his wonderful machines. Lawrence was, in that specific context, a unique exemplar of a way of life now largely gone and vanished forever (the gentleman adventurer), especially in the United States, where intellectualism and cultural aesthetics seems almost incompatible with the macho preoccupations of masculine sports and recreational activities.
And there’s the real pity, for today most people think of ‘motorcyclistas’ in terms of either one of the two popular sub-sets of the US motorcycle scene: bearded old fat-guys on Harleys or reckless punks driving sportsbikes dangerously fast, with reckless disregard for anything other than their subjective, narcissistic kicks.
I’ve experienced that misplaced bias by others at various times in my own life, riding my motorcycles while working professionally with snobby individuals who are accustomed to regarding anyone wearing a leather jacket and boots as some kind of cultural anomaly to be disdained. My own family (what’s left of it on the maternal side) probably regard me not just as a black sheep and ‘family bohemian’, but as a ‘déclassé’ unfortunate who is betraying his White Anglo-Saxon, Presbyterian class origins by clinging on to what amounts to a suicidal proclivity, in the face of its inherently dire hazards.
And, of course, I look down on both the pimply-faced youths who know no other way of amusing themselves than riding well beyond the legal limits of both health and prudent safety (by so doing, almost always placing others around them in very real jeopardy) and the bearded, fat old men who also look down on sportsbikes with the same ill-placed condescension as ‘those fuc*ing punk kids’. Why? Because I well understand that if one is truly well-educated, well-versed in the possibilities of the uncertain life we are all forced to live, and broadly aware of the greater concerns of existence, there are no categorical disynchronicities, no irresolvable quandaries to reconcile with regard to one’s chosen lifestyle. Live and let die becomes the operative MO!
I need look no further than to Robert Persig’s ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ for any necessary justification of the polar contrasts and contradictions implicit in embracing what many might regard as categorically incompatible beliefs, doctrines and/or outlooks on what is or is not important in life. Lawrence maintained a similar complexity in his personal world-view and I can have nothing but respect for that nuance of his life. So many of his peers were truly renaissance men; today’s ‘average’ guy is a barely reflective, professional-sports-obsessed prole incapable of much thought deeper than might be found in the oil sump of his car’s engine.
One very interesting side-story bearing on ‘Al Ourence’ (Lawrence’s name in the Saudi Arab dialect) concerns the famous motorcycle accident that ended his life in 1936. He was taking a ride in the countryside near his modest cottage and came over a rise in the roadway to find two young bicyclists in the road, directly ahead of him. While there was little evidence that he was speeding unduly, there was apparently no room to maneuver and in trying to avoid them he swerved and careened off the road, ending up being flipped over the handlebars of his Brough Superior SS100 (that he had named ‘Boanerges’ or ‘Boa’ for short). Upon landing, he seems to have struck his head against a hard object (rock) and sustained severe cranial injuries that, days later in hospital, claimed his life.
Back then, no one wore a protective helmet, least of all motorcyclists and/or bicyclists. Some aviators occasionally wore a thickly padded leather helmet that, while better than no helmet at all, provided little real impact protection in any sort of serious flying accident.
Lawrence’s dire situation, while being treated in hospital for his major head trauma, caught the attention of a young physician named Hugh Cairns. Cairns’ examination of Lawrence, who remained unconscious and never came out of his coma, revealed severe lacerations and what he characterised as ‘damage to the brain’. It is likely that even if he had recovered and survived, he would have probably been blind and unable to speak, so severe was the impact.
Lawrence’s death made a considerable impact on Cairns, who had been advocating for years before WW2 that some sort of protective ‘crash helmet’ be mandated for all cycle riders. This was revealed in his personal diaries somewhat later, but after Lawrence’s death his first mention of this safety need was made public.
Cairns, as a consumate academician, began gathering solid evidence to support his contention that some sort of protective helmet would both greatly reduce injuries and save the lives of crash victims, but gathering statistical proof remained difficult due to the fact that it was nearly impossible to compare the fatality stats with those relative to riders who actually wore some sort of protective safety helmet (so few wore them!).
Eventually, he succeeded in compiling what evidence he could find and it clearly demonstrated the veracity of his arguments. Interestingly, at that time the British Army was losing roughly two motorcycle dispatch riders a week to crash injuries (mostly to the head) and Cairns’ helmet advocacy caught the attention of the British Ministry of Defense (MoD), who not long after (in 1941, some 5 years after Lawrence’s death) required all Army dispatch riders to wear a suitable safety helmet.
The savings in terms of lives and personnel loss due to head injuries was substantial, thereby vindicating Cairns’ tireless efforts to get cyclists to protect their heads.
Cairns’ greatest contribution was, although others had frequently opined that safety helmets were a useful and logical safety device of potentially great value, that he had actually submitted substantiated factual statistical data demonstrating the irrefutable validity of this argument.
Cairns continued to investigate statistics relative to motorcycle riders of both the military and civilian kind in subsequent years, clearly further documenting that due to use of protective helmets, deaths had dropped dramatically from nearly 200 just before the MoD mandated dispatch rider helmets, to less than 50 after that date, and by mid-war was actively petitioning authorities to enact some sort of statutory regulation requiring all cyclists (particularly civilian) to wear head protection. However, despite Cairns’ unceasing advocacy for protective headgear use by civilians, it wasn’t until 1973 that the British house of Commons finally passed such a statute.
While many riders willingly embraced the new protective helmet law, a stubborn few continued to resist it…a situation not dissimilar to what we still find today in many reactive motorcycle riders who claim that mandatory helmet use infringes upon their freedom of choice. One particularly strong protest against the new law was issued by an English individual named Enoch Powell who stated “…The maintenance of the principles of individual freedom and responsibility is more important than the avoidance of the loss of lives through the personal decision of those individuals.”
Of course that rebuke to common sense and the collective social good flies in the face of hard, cold statistics that show that the actual ‘cost’ of such deaths is borne inordinately by others (as well as third-party medical and insurance institutions), often costing taxpayers large sums of money annually when unprotected riders are severely injured or even killed due to their irresponsible abnegation of personal protective gear use. In other words, use or non-use of a protective helmet quickly becomes a collective socio-economic concern and not JUST a personal decision.
In the United States, this contention is still argued almost on a daily basis, pitting riders who cite the precedence of ‘personal freedom’ over state-imposed safety sanctions. This comes mainly from older riders of the same huge, technologically obsolescent Harley-Davidson ‘Hogs’ I despise, rather than from younger sportsbike riders (who seem, at least to some small extent, have a glimmer of how easily their super-charged two-wheeled stallions can kill them in a heartbeat). This never-ending argument remains another substantial schism that divides adherents of modern, technologically advanced and high-performance ‘sports motorcycles’ from those proto-Luddite H-D riders who insist their ‘freedoms’ are being egregiously infringed by mandatory helmet laws.
Fortunately, although change never occurs quickly, no matter what the issue or what the topic pertinent, in most eventualities public safety considerations usually gain ultimate ascendance, and systems like automobile seat-restraints, air-bags (and helmets) gain ground against the self-centered dissenters.
It is always amusing to me to note that among the Harley-Davidson crowd, despite California’s mandatory helmet law requiring adult motorcyclists to wear a helmet, this begrudging, passive-aggressive compliance often takes the form of wearing what are called ‘beanie’ helmets, or thin-shelled plastic bowls that serve merely a cosmetic purpose rather than an actual safety function. Other, even more refractory helmet dissenters go so far as to drape such a ‘beanie’ over the sissy bars on their Hog when they ride, since the helmet law doesn’t state explicitly that a helmet must be worn ‘on the head’, rather than ‘on the bike’.
All of this contentiousness occurred long after ‘Al Ourence’ departed from life prematurely, back in 1936, but even if Britain had had a helmet law at that time, Lawrence was such a life-long eccentric and ‘free spirit’ accustomed to living by his own dictates, it is doubtful if he would have taken the pains to lessen to any extent the pure joy he must have experienced of hearing the wind flying past him as he sped though the countryside, near his cottage on beautiful Boanerges. One can only speculate!
As a footnote, Lawrence’s superb and powerful Brough (properly pronounced as one would say the word ‘cough’) Superior SS100 was salvaged after his death, restored, and is, by the way, today on display in a museum, where it appears just as alluringly black and wickedly purposeful as it was when Lawrence of Arabia charged out into the English countryside one last time, those many decades ago...
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I'll leave you with a famous quote by Lawrence that perfectly sums up his attitude about motorcycles:
"A skittish motorbike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals of earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties and the hint, the provocation, to excess, conferred by its honeyed, untiring smoothness."
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