At home with Lawrence and Hardy

Mark Thornton pays a visit to the homes of two of England’s most celebrated writers.

There are so many reasons for remembering T.E. Lawrence but few greater than his fine intellect and his mastery of words. In his masterpiece Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he wrote as a motto, summarising the book:

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands

and wrote my will across the sky in stars

To gain you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,

that your eyes might be shining for me

When we came.

Very few people write like that, very few people even think like that: with such self-assured imaginative force, conviction and power.

Peter O’Toole looked strikingly similar to Lawrence in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, right down to the slightly mad look in his eyes.

It was an appropriate look, for when Lawrence adopted a cause or made friends, his commitment was fervent.

Despite his demonstrative character, robust physique and commanding presence, Lawrence was only 165cm tall and very conscious of his stature at a time when the average British man’s height was 170cm. In his cottage Clouds Hill in Dorset — itself a small and modest building bequeathed to the National Trust after Lawrence’s death in 1935 — there stands a bust mounted on a wooden column so you can see how short he was. Yet the sculptor has managed to capture the fire in the man’s eyes.

He mixed easily with people from all walks of life, including kings and heads of state such as Winston Churchill, who described him as “one of the greatest beings alive in our time”. But while he was at home in any milieu, he had little respect for authority and shunned publicity.

Churchill again, after Lawrence’s death: “The world looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame.” The company Lawrence craved was that of writers, including George Bernard Shaw, E.M. Forster and Robert Graves. He was particularly impressed with Thomas Hardy, who lived nearby in Dorchester.

When one thinks of Hardy, it is usually as a 19th century writer, but he lived until 1928. Lawrence used to invite him to Clouds'''' Hill, some suggest uncharitably, to impress other learned friends — no matter that he had already made his own name. He knew Graves was a friend of Hardy and his wife Florence, and asked him to arrange a meeting, which took place in 1923.

Lawrence had just published his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, an autobiographical account of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks from 1916-18, when he served as a liaison officer with rebel forces led by Emir Faisal.

But Hardy already knew who he was. The urbane curator of Clouds Hill told me that thanks to Lawrence’s Indiana Jones-like exploits in the Middle East, he had been a household name for several years before he met Hardy.

However, he was not given to self-promotion, and was unknown in his native Britain during World War I.

It was only after American war correspondent Lowell Thomas, who shot dramatic film footage of Lawrence in Arabia, brought his slide and lantern show to London in 1919 that Lawrence became a celebrity. “I’ve been and am absurdly overestimated,” he wrote to a friend. “There are no supermen and I’m quite ordinary.”

There was an almost immediate sense of camaraderie between Hardy and Lawrence, who had many of Hardy’s novels in his Clouds Hill library. After the first meeting, Florence described Lawrence as “a most brilliant, magnetic young man”.

Hardy, 48 years senior to Lawrence, was born in a cottage in Higher Bockhampton, close to Dorchester, which is also a National Trust property. Hardy wrote Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from the Madding Crowd there and to visit the cottage today is to step back in time.

Such is the wonderful understated character of the English and their National Trust that there have been no attempts to commercialise places such as Clouds Hill and Hardy’s Cottage. You approach the latter down an unpaved lane, passing ancient cottages that look as if they’ve emerged organically from the landscape.

Hardy’s cob and thatch cottage stands under the shoulders of the outlying chestnuts and beeches of Thorncombe Wood. When I visited, a neighbour was holding a modest bring-and-buy sale in a garden filled with hollyhocks, delphiniums and rioting rambling roses.

Stooping to enter the house Hardy lived in for the first 34 of his 88 years, I met a youngish man for whom the adjective “bucolic” could have been invented. Wearing dark trousers in need of a wash and an open-necked white shirt with sleeves rolled up to his forearms, he might have stepped directly out of Jude the Obscure. It was his turn that day to welcome guests on behalf of the trust and he did so with a smile so beaming it illuminated the small parlour all by itself.

The house had many interesting facets but its jewel was a small room you had to pass through to reach the exit. There sat the young man surrounded by hundreds of copies of Hardy’s books, all of them well-thumbed. Some were first editions, while others were translations of his works into more than 30 languages. You would expect there to be rules forbidding handling of these rare books. Not so. Our woodlander host picked up several in his huge hands — no soft white gloves — and thumbed through them to show distinctive passages he particularly liked. None was for sale.

When Hardy visited Clouds Hill, often with Shaw, Forster and other literati, their discussions were eclectic, though tended towards politics, literature and the finer points of writing.

The urbane curator at Clouds Hill assured me that while there would have been hearty discussions in the cottage, the behaviour of the gentlemen would have been unaffected by alcohol. Lawrence was a strict vegetarian and he eschewed alcohol and tobacco.

Importantly for Lawrence, they all shared a loved of music, particularly the work of the Romantic composers.

A copy of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, which they listened to on Lawrence’s wind-up gramophone, complete with trumpet speaker, sits there still.

Since my visit, I have discovered the National Trust and Dorset County Council have opened a Hardy’s Birthplace Visitor Centre, complete with an Under the Greenwood Tree Cafe. My brother, who lives nearby, has assured me that this development has been done with decorum and respect for the Hardy estate. Lawrence’s Clouds Hill remains unchanged.

For more information on visiting Clouds Hill and Hardy’s Cottage, see nationaltrust.org.uk.