A 36-year-old Thomas Edward Lawrence sits on a Brough Superior SS100 Motorcycle in this photo, produced in the October of 1925.
Possibly at the Brough Hayden Road Works manufacturing plant in Nottingham, England – where he is known to have once tested a SS100. He had left with the motorcycle on Friday and returned on Monday with the machine caked in mud and with the rear tyre worn down to the canvas. He had tested it over 1000 miles of country road.
Lawrence of Arabia.
Born on the 16th of August in 1888 at the village of Tremadoc in the county of Caernarfonshire in Wales, Thomas Edward Lawrence was the illegitimate son of Thomas Chapman and Sarah Junner who lived together under the pseudonym, Lawrence.
From 1907 and 1910 he studied history at the Jesus college in the university of Oxford and later graduated with First Class Honours with a thesis on the medieval age. The thesis he wrote was titled, the Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture.
In 1914, he enlisted with the British army as an interpreter with the rank of a second Lieutenant, and in the same year was assigned to the British army’s Arab Bureau in Egypt.
From Egypt he was sent to Hejaz on an intelligence gathering mission and in the November of 1914 he was attached as a British liaison officer with the staff of Prince Faisal I bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, later crowned as the king of Iraq on the 21st of August in 1932.
Here in the vast and arid landscape of the Middle East he embarked on the historic journey which had turned him into the legend, famously known as Lawrence of Arabia.
In 1916 when the Arabs had revolted against the Ottomans, he played an instrumental role in uniting feuding Arab tribes to jointly work with British forces to oust the Ottomans, during what was the Sinai Palestine conflict of World War 1.
In this military conflict that was waged between the Ottoman Empire and Britain and their allies, he did not just help Prince Faisal and the Arab tribes with battle strategies and collaboration with British forces but also participated in military engagements. The most notable being the battle of Yarmuk, the siege of Aqaba, the assault on abridge at Damascus and the battle of Talifah.
At Yarmuk he was serious wounded in an explosion and ensuing combat. In 1918 he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. His efforts eventually helped the Arabs win their freedom, in spite of the later political hurdles and imperial ambitions of both Great Britain and France.
The Brough SS 100 Motorcycle.
A state of the art race bike of its time and considered by some to be the world’s first super bike, the Brough SS 100 was hand manufactured by motorcycle racer and second-generation entrepreneur George Brough in November 1924.
Born on the 21st of April in 1890, George Brough was the son of English pioneer and motorcycle manufacturer, William Brough, and was a friend of Lawrence. The SS in the Brough SS 100 motorcycle was an abbreviation for Super Sports.
Between 1924 and 1940, George had not only produced and fine-tuned 383 of these hand made machines from the experience he had gained from testing bikes on roads and in competitions, but for a while had also held the unofficial record of clocking the fastest speed attained by a solo motorcyclist in the world.
As a super racing motorcycle of the early nineteenth century, the SS 100 was a heavy machine built for grueling cross country adventure and had a top speed of 160 km/h.
The motorcycle was equipped with a 1000 cc overhead valve V twin engine and was entirely custom made. Each version was pre-tested over 100 miles before delivery and publicized by British media, as the Rolls Royce of motorcycles.
The first set of motorcycles to be manufactured was introduced to the public, priced at 170 Sterling Pounds.
Lawrence’s fascination for the Brough SS 100 motorcycle.
Lawrence, an enthusiastic admirer of Brough’s creations and a motorcycle adventurer himself was among the first to purchase the expensive SS 100. The motorcycle he purchased was one out of 69 motorbikes that was produced in 1925 – and quite possibly with the money he had made from the sale of his books and publications, during his service at the Royal Airforce Base at Cranwell in Lincolnshire.
He had enlisted with the Royal Airforce at Cranwell under a fictional name to work in anonymity as a mechanic of the lowest rank – after resigning from his former role of a military intelligence officer with the rank of a colonel and as an advisor to Winston Churchill.
Churchill was at the time a colonial secretary overseeing British interests in the Middle East.
Lawrence had nicknamed the SS 100 as George V – presumably, after the reigning king of England, George Fedrick Ernest Albert.
The Brough SS 100 was one of the seven motorcycles he owned till his road accident on the 13th of May and death six days later on the 19th of May in 1935.
On a narrow road in Dorset, he had sharply swerved to avoid colliding with two boys on bicycles and crashed into a thicket. His death was due to the injuries he sustained. That motorcycle, however, was not the same as the one in the photo.
A motorcycle Lawrence had purchased to celebrate.
Harold Orlans, author of the biographical work, T.E. Lawrence – Biography of a Broken Hero, reveals Lawrence had purchased the Brough SS 100 with the number plate RK 4907 to celebrate his enlistment with the Royal Airforce. Harold sourced this information from the Mint, and in which Lawrence himself mentions buying the Brough SS 100 with the number plate RK 4907 to celebrate his enlistment with the Royal Air Force.
The Mint is a book authored by Lawrence and which was published posthumously after his death in 1955.
In his off time, he had jetted down on this Brough SS 100 to the parish of Abbey St. Lawrence in Hertfordshire, his cottage on Cloud Hills in Dorset, and even to London, some 134 miles away from Cranwell. He had returned back from his escapades with fresh eggs and bacon for his tent mates or cakes and tea from a canteen nearby.
Though not quite the hero of cinematic charisma, Colonel T.E., Lawrence, however, was indeed the real-life poster boy for air force men speeding on motorcycles – way before the world of cinema made it famous with movies like Top Gun, an Officer and a Gentleman and dozens more.
The Photo.
This photo was produced by an uncredited photographer in the month of October in 1925, possibly at the Brough Hayden Road Works manufacturing plant in Nottingham, England. It may have been produced when Lawrence had just purchased the motorcycle and was about to take off.
I F I This is an Independent Story produced to unravel the history behind this featured Vintage Photo of T.E. Lawrence astride a Brough SS 100 motorbike from 1925. The story also sheds light on the role Colonel T.E. Lawrence played in helping the Arabs win their freedom during the Arabs revolt against the Ottomans and which was a part of the larger Sinai Palestine and how this conflict got him his nickname of Lawrence of Arabia. The story also delves into the history of the Brough SS 100 motorcycle. It has been created from facts curated from literary and historical sources. I
