All about Lawrence of Arabia's home Clouds Hill in Dorset

If it is solitude you are looking for, Clouds Hill near Wareham is the place to be.

Thought to be named after a medieval French hermit called Claud, it is a secluded two-up-two-down cottage, slightly set back from the main road and with around four acres of rhododendron-clad heathland to its name.

The atmosphere is one of aloneness rather than loneliness and it was this, perhaps, that drew its most famous resident to its door.

In 1923 a man calling himself Private TE Shaw - standing just five ft five ins tall and recently enlisted in the Royal Tank Corps at Bovington - came across the cottage and had his interest piqued.

"He drove past it and saw the custodians, the Knowles, Arthur and Henrietta, working on it, so he stopped," explains Clouds Hill's current custodian, Peter Preen.

"They were going to do it up so their children could come and live with them when they grew up, but this Private Shaw told them that children move away and that they should let him move in. He paid them 10 shillings a month. He was a very persuasive man."

Clouds Hill

'Private Shaw' was in fact Thomas Edward Lawrence, alias 'Lawrence of Arabia'. In his tragically brief life, he would prove himself to be a warrior and a scholar, arguably - along with Gertrude Bell - one of the founders of Iraq.

He was a loner yet one of the most sought-after men of his time, equally comfortable with princes and army privates, at home on the rolling heaths of Dorset as in the harsh landscapes of the deserts of the Middle East.

Born in North Wales on the wrong side of the blanket, Lawrence was the second eldest son of the Seventh Baronet of Westmeath and the love of his life, his daughters' governess Sarah Junner.

The family moved to Oxford and after a distinguished academic career (including a First from Jesus College for his degree thesis on The influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture - to the end of the 12th century) Lawrence worked in the Middle East as an archaeologist.

The primitive interior of Clouds Hill

With the outbreak of the First World War he was co-opted by the British military and used as an archaeological smokescreen for a British military survey of the strategically vital Negev Desert.

Because of his knowledge of the area and affiliation with the Arabs, he was soon being used by the intelligence services to liaise with the local tribes in the fight against the Turks. With Lawrence to encourage and guide them, the Arabs rose up against the Turkish Empire and what resulted was one of the most glittering campaigns of the conflict.

It was immortalised in David Lean's film Lawrence of Arabia, which also gave rise to the misapprehension that Lawrence was a giant among men, thanks to his portrayal by the six ft 2in Peter O'Toole.

Back in 1918 however, it was a film by journalist Lowell Thomas that made Lawrence's name. Although the Government was aware of his war work, the public was not - until Thomas and his cameraman Harry Chase made the documentary about his time with the Arabs, and toured it round the world to great acclaim.

"Lawrence did not want to be famous," said Peter Preen, who was in 2007 a National Trust custodian at Clouds Hill, which was bequeathed to the nation in 1935.

"He thought that all the glory that was heaped upon him was based upon a lie and that he had failed the Arabs who he hoped would be granted independence after the war.

"He felt they deserved their independence, but of course the powers that be knew there was oil on their lands and had done a deal. He only agreed to pose for publicity shots in the belief that they would help the Arab cause at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. He felt very betrayed when that did not happen.

"He was invited to Buckingham Palace to become a Knight Commander of the British Empire but refused. He said he had made the Arabs a promise and hadn't been able to keep it so couldn't accept the award. He was a brave and honourable man - if somewhat naive."

Inside Clouds Hill

In 1922, sick and tired of diplomacy and publicity, Lawrence tried to join the Royal Air Force using the name John Hume Ross. He failed and the following year became part of the Royal Tank Corps and was stationed at Bovington.

This was when he saw and fell in love with Clouds Hill, to the extent that when he eventually succeeded in joining the RAF in 1925 and was posted to India, he bought the house and for the next three years let and loaned it to family and friends.

When he first acquired the property it lay derelict, empty for years apart from the occasional passing tramp, so he set about redecorating it in his own inimitable, if frugal style.

Partial view of the Book Room at Clouds Hill, showing the reading chair and fireplace

The house remains much as it was when he left it. Of the two rooms downstairs, one is a cork-tiled bathroom without a toilet and the other is Lawrence's reading room and library. It is lined with books, photographs, drawings and sketches of and by its owner. In one corner is his armchair with wings wide enough to hold a cup of tea and in the centre of the room, under the mullioned window thought to come from Binden Abbey, is a wide, leather-topped reading couch or bed with a folded blanket embroidered with the word 'meum'.

Upstairs in the aluminium foil-lined bunk room, the guest bed has a similar blanket embroidered with 'tuum' - mine and yours.

"There is no toilet as you can see," says Peter, "Lawrence used to give his guests a shovel and instruct them to use the grounds. The only rule was that they went somewhere where they couldn't be seen through the windows!"

The approach to Clouds Hill

The second, and main, first floor room is the music room. Here, you can still see the elegant Grafonola gramophone where he would play his beloved Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Elgar, his Royal typewriter on which he wrote The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and two paintings.

Fireplace at Clouds Hill

One, above the mantelpiece, is by Henry Scott Tuke and may be a likeness of Lawrence himself on the beach near St Mawes in Cornwall, where he once fled as an adolescent. The other painting, by Gilbert Spencer, sits above a window and is the view from the crest of Clouds Hill.

He also replaced the heather thatch with tiles and built a skylight into the roof to let more light into his music room - although that too had to be replaced after a rather incendiary incident.

Lawrence of Arabia

"At one point there was a branch overhanging the roof which Lawrence wanted to get rid off," explains Peter Preen. "Only of course being Lawrence, he didn't saw it down, he leant out of the window and attached TNT to the branch - and blew the skylight out in the process."

Although Lawrence died on May 19, 1935, the house still feels alive with his presence, as though he has just popped out to buy a packet of tea or some cheese for a casual supper among friends.

Gramophone at Clouds Hill

Once refurbished and furnished as he liked, Lawrence set about using Clouds Hill as a gentleman's pied a terre, complete with a thatched garage where he stabled the Brough Superior motorcycle he called Boanerges after the Aramaic name 'sons of thunder', which Jesus bestowed upon the disciples James and John.

It was on this Brough that he met his death in 1935, aged 46, just down the road from Clouds Hill. His funeral, which took place in Morton Church, was attended by Winston Churchill.

But even though he sought solace and the companionship of friends at the cottage, Lawrence shied away from making it too cumbersomely permanent, living by the ancient text telling us that 'the world is a bridge. Pass over it but build no house upon it'.

Instead, he used the house as a bolt hole, feeding visitors from tins and not bothering to sit down for meals - the height of the mantelpiece in the music room was adjusted so that Lawrence could lean on it while he ate.

And what a mixture of friends one could find there - ordinary soldiers rubbing shoulders with the likes of authors Thomas Hardy and his wife Florence, EM Forster and George Bernard Shaw, who inscribed a copy of his play St Joan 'to Private Shaw from public Shaw'.

Clouds Hill was bequeathed to the National Trust by Lawrence's brother Arnold. Such is the draw of the warrior and scholar that people flock to the property from all over the world, Australian bikers and American academics alike.

"He was a polymath," says Peter Preen. "He was self-deprecating but whatever he turned his hand to, be it engineering, architecture, war, drawing, photography, he excelled at.

"Yet for his retirement, he planned to spend the time simply cycling round Dorset because that is what he loved doing. He loved cycling, you see. When his father ran off with the governess, they didn't have a lot of money so cycling was their main way of getting about the place."

Typewriter at Clouds Hill belonging to TE Lawrence

While the public can enjoy a slice of his life and bask in a brush with the Lawrence legend through visiting Clouds Hill, the man himself remains as much an enigma as ever.

"The more you learn about Lawrence, the more you need to know," says Peter. "But maybe he didn't want to be known.

"He used Charlotte Shaw, the wife of George Bernard Shaw as a mother confessor and wrote to her without her husband's knowledge. In one letter he wrote 'I can't explain things to my mother because she would want to understand me - and I'm not certain I am ready to be understood."

For more information on Clouds Hill near Bovington Camp, Wareham, including opening times, see www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/dorset/clouds-hill