Lawrence of Arabia letters fetch £10,000 at auction

A bundle of letters the infamous T.E. Lawrence wrote to an RAF Flight Sergeant in 1932 and ’33 have been sold at auction for a staggering £10,000, showing that the cult figure remains as popular and intriguing as ever.

T.E. Lawrence (or ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ as he is more commonly known) was famous for his passion for motorcycles. He had a particular soft spot for his beloved Brough Superior SS100 and owned a string of Broughs in the 1920’s and ’30’s.

The scholar nick-named all of his Broughs ‘Boa’, short for the Aramaic ‘Boanerges’, meaning the sons of thunder. In “The Road”, Lawrence wrote: “A skittish motorbike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocations, to excess conferred by its honeyed untiring smoothness. Because Boa loves me, he gives me five more miles of speed than a stranger would get from him.”

Earlier this year Peter Henshaw took a Moto Guzzi Le Mans in search of some of Lawrence of Arabia’s best loved roads. Check out the pages below for his account and more on the life of Lawrence: