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Lot 66

LAWRENCE (T.E.)

10 November 2009, 11:00 GMT
London, New Bond Street

Sold for £5,760 inc. premium

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LAWRENCE (T.E.)

Collection of photographs and other ephemera belonging to Corporal J.W. Easton, wireless operator at Miranshah Fort while T.E. Lawrence was serving there, comprising photographs taken during at Miranshah and on the North West Frontier and other times in Easton's RAF career, with two vintage prints of photographs showing Lawrence, one being the well-known view of him standing on the aerodrome of Miranshah, nursing his right wrist (inscribed by Easton on the reverse "T.E. Shaw. Miranshah/ December 1928" and later "Photo given to me by him"), the other of him standing with Corporal Stone, Private Haytor and Easton; and five other photographs exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery centenary exhibition of 1988, including three views of the fort, one of the RAF Depot, Drigh Road, Karachi, one of Sir Philip Sassoon's visit to Miranshah, and an aerial view; plus many vintage prints of photographs not exhibited, in four albums, a file and a folder of loose photographs

Footnotes

Lawrence arrived at Miranshah, an outpost in Waziristan near the Afghan border in May 1928. Although it was its remoteness that appealed to him, it was this very remoteness that forced his return the following January: for warfare had broken out in neighbouring Afghanistan and as soon as the British press discovered his whereabouts they jumped to the conclusion that he was on a spying mission; that he was indeed, as the Daily Herald put it in breaking the story, "The arch spy of the world" (see Malcolm Brown's summary of this period in The Letters of T.E. Lawrence, 1988, pp.310-312). But, far from spying, he in fact spent most his days in the wireless operator's hut, working on his translation of the Odyssey. Fortunately, he got on well with the operator, Jack Easton, whose archive this is. He described the room they shared in a letter to Charlotte Shaw as being "a fifteen foot square white-washed cube, with cement floor. In the centre is the fan: against the far wall my table, covered with white American cloth, and carrying the typewriter, which I've taught to produce pages of Homer, as well as Daily Routine Orders! In the corner is a brick arch, leading to a flu: and there we will burn logs all day, if I am lucky, and stay here indefinitely" (25 June 1928, quoted in the NPG catalogue).

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