Revealed: the secret marriage of Lawrence of Arabia, the lonely romantic | UK news

Revealed: the secret marriage of Lawrence of Arabia, the lonely romantic

For years he has been one of Britain's most romantic heroes - a real-life incarnation of schoolboy dreams of adventure. But Lawrence of Arabia was more romantic than many have thought. It now appears that he was actually married.

The news will shock many and surprise Lawrence scholars. The ascetic soldier and writer has often been described as a homosexual. He is thought to have shunned close human relationships and was not the sort of man to have had a whirlwind romance. But Tariq Ali, the leftwing novelist, has spoken to friends of Lawrence's brother-in-law who gave him details of how he had married a young Muslim girl while stationed in what was north-west India in 1928. Lawrence, whose fame was confirmed by David Lean's 1962 film starring Peter O'Toole, would then have been 40.

The marriage was shortlived but, says Ali, who is a specialist on south-Asian affairs, it 'definitely happened'.

Ali was told of the marriage by a former senior civil servant from the Himalayan mountain state of Kashmir which was part of the British raj until independence in 1947. The civil servant said he was told by Benji Nedous, the brother of the bride. 'It was kept fairly secret,' Ali said last week. 'While Lawrence was stationed in India he used to go to the city of Lahore like many other officers, to relax. It was known as the Paris of the East and the Nedous family had a hotel there that was popular with soldiers wanting to rest and drink and so on, and that is where he met her.'

Ali said that he was told that the woman, called Akbar Jehan, was from a good family and was a Shia Muslim. 'It was the Shia practice to have short-term marriages that are very quick to arrange and dissolve. The exact details are a mystery and very few people knew about it, but I am completely convinced that Lawrence married the girl.'

Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in Wales in 1888; he died in a motorbike accident in 1935. He is best known for his exploits during the First World War when he was sent on a mission into the Arabian deserts to rally tribesmen against their Turkish overlords who were fighting alongside the Germans. His successful guerrilla raids captured the popular imagination and set new tactical standards. Those battles, along with Lawrence's well-known and public disgust at what he felt was the betrayal of the Arabs, who had been promised their own homeland after the war, established him as a hero.

But the question of marriage is controversial. Lawrence experts rejected the idea this weekend. 'The story of a wife is complete trash,' said Jeremy Wilson, a biographer of Lawrence. 'It is absolutely impossible from A to Z.'

Wilson said that Lawrence, who had joined the the RAF under a false name (Aircraftsman Shaw) to escape the pressures of his fame, was stationed from 1928 to early 1929 in the remote town of Miran Shah on what is now Pakistan's north-west frontier. From there he had written weekly letters describing his movements. They show that he hardly left his station in Miran Shah and went to Lahore only briefly on his way home to Britain.

Lawrence's reputation attracted a number of women admirers and they often claimed that he had married them. But his sexual preferences are unclear. 'It was never clear whether he was homosexual or not,' Wilson said. 'He appears never to have had any relationship with anyone. He developed a flagellation disorder in later life, possibly as a result of male rape.'

There is also controversy over Lawrence's exact role in India. The official line, put out by the India Office and the Foreign and Colonial Office, and backed up by their records, is that he spent his time translating Homer's Odyssey . But Ali, in the London Review of Books , says that the truth is very different.

'Lawrence was deployed in a secret role in Afghanistan to destabilise the regime of the then king. It was a highly secret operation and very sensitive. Lawrence was highly regarded in Afghanistan because he spoke Arabic which tribesmen see as the divine language,' Ali told The Observer last week.

The Afghan king, Aman ullah Khan, was a radical moderniser who was leaning towards the Soviets. That Lawrence was employed in a black propaganda operation as part of a classic Great Game gambit to preserve British influence is plausible.

'I am completely convinced that is what he was doing. You don't have a man of his ability stationed where he was completely by chance,' Ali said.

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