LAWRENCE’S “TERRIFIC SOCK”

Evening Star, Issue 22938, 21 April 1938, Page 13

LAWRENCE’S “TERRIFIC SOCK”

FOR PRESS PHOTOGRAPHER In correspondence about Press intrusion a ‘ Times ’ correspondent recently mentioned the drastic action taken by “ Lawrence of Arabia,” when a pack of Press photographers besieged his cottage retreat at Clouds Hill. The subject crops up in ‘T. E. Lawrence, By His Friends,’ edited by A. W. Lawrence, his brother, and published in 1937. Hero is the full story as told therein by Ralph H. Isham:— “On March 15, 1935, I received a telegram from Lawrence saying that the Press had cleared off and he had returned to Clouds Hill, where he would remain (Lawrence had previously fled from Press attentions); and wondered if I could go down to see him there. On the 17th I motored from London to Clouds Hill. As we neared the cottage I noticed a group of perhaps, four men, talking earnestly together. They carried Targe cameras. They seemed very curious at my arrival. BANGING ON DOOR, SHOUTING. “ I knocked, and then shouted for T. E., but there was no response. On the few feet of the lawn that separated the cottage from the surrounding rhododendrons I saw fragments of thick old. tiles. One could see where they had been broken out of the roof. Then a local roan came up and said: ‘He’s gone!’ I asked what had happened. He said that a number of Press representatives had arrived, wanting to interview and photograph Lawrence; he had refused, but they would not go away, and kept banging on his door and shouting at him, and at last he had given one man a terriffio sock in the eye and driven them off. “ Lawrence had then taken his pushbike through a covered-over path in the rhododendrons, and had ridden away on it, only shouting to the man, ‘ I’ll be back when you see me.’ The photographers, not having witnessed his departure, had placed some of their number in the bushes facing the door, and others had gone to the brow of the steep hill rising immediately behind the cottage, and from there had hurled stones on to the roof, hoping to drive him out into the ambushed cameras of those below. “ I left a letter for him, and,drove hack to London, sick at heart that the peace and enjoyment of bis little home, to which he had so looked forward on his retirement, had been ruthlessly invaded. Five days later Lawrence came to see me in London. . . He said he was sorry to have missed me at Clouds Hill, but the photographers had driven him out. I said I knew full well, as I had seen them and the damage they did to his roof. He said: ‘ Did one of them have a black eye?’ grinning. ‘ I gave one of them a beauty, but it rather put my thumb

out,’ and he rubbed the back of hjs hand reflectively.”