“I assumed he was probably a poet”: Four mysterious tapes from the Wilson archive

Whilst sorting out some of the previously digitised material from the Wilson Archive, we found a box full of microfilm reels sent from various archives and libraries around the world, as well as a number of floppy disks holding files in various defunct formats (a frequent problem with the Wilson digital collection!). However amongst this there were four tapes that looked like they might contain unique material!

At this late stage, it was exciting to find some new material and we quickly arranged for the tapes to be sent away for digitisation. This ended up taking some time as the Verbatim tape on the top left of the picture was in an extremely difficult-to-read format. However, early this year, we received back the digital files and with some trepidation, I pressed play on the files to see what they contained.

The difficult to read tape labelled “Jock Chambers – A.W.L.” turned out to contain images rather than audio – and the images showed letters that we already had elsewhere in the Wilson collection! I had been hoping to hear a recording of a conversation between Chambers and A.W. Lawrence – in fact Chambers does refer rather mysteriously to a potential recording in one of his letters to Jeremy Wilson. In this long letter after relating several anecdotes on Lawrence including his opinions of Lenin and the future Edward VIII, Chambers suggests Wilson make a recording on his next visit “as after all I’m two years in excess of the allotted span” but if this tape exists, we unfortunately don’t have it.

The long reel in the picture labelled “Interview in Australia” contained a fuller version of a radio interview with Arabella Rivington, a Lawrence researcher who travelled to Australia in 1970 to search for Australians who had met Lawrence during the Arab Revolt. We already had this item in the collection but at least it finally confirmed that the strange short story by Arabella featuring a man sailing a boat to a mysterious island who meets a female artist with a pet monkey (!), was in fact a draft of a fan-fiction novel by Arabella about Lawrence and her other hero, the artist Emily Carr. This section of the interview can be heard in the following three clips:

 

Here are some excerpts from Arabella’s rather unusual story which match the description in the clips…

Another reel that I found was labelled “Tape of TEL on TV” – would it contain an audio recording of another television programme like our earlier discovery of the audio from the TV drama “Ross” starring Sir Ian McKellen?

The tape began with a reading of Will Lawrence’s poem “To T.E.L.” written after he had visited his brother at Carchemish before the First World War. Interesting, I thought, what else is on here? Listening further, I was rather baffled to hear most of a German language lesson! With renewed interest, I turned to the other side (by which I mean I clicked on the next digital file) – finally sonorous voices! This must be something! However, it transpired that this was a recording of audio of “Murder in the Cathedral” by T.S. Eliot, perhaps recorded from television or radio, so again irrelevant to the collection.

 

However, the last tape was far more interesting. Just before I found the tapes, I heard from Jonathan Mandelbaum, friend of Jeremy Wilson, about a tape of an interview he had conducted in 1968 with a teacher from his high school who had met T.E. Lawrence. He believed the tape should be with the Wilson collection, and did I know what had happened to it? Amazingly, only a few days after this conversation I discovered the tape! This proved to be the most interesting item in the little cache of tapes. It’s an interview with Nina Ellis, formerly governess to Denys Dawnay (1921-1983). Denys was the son of Alan Dawnay (1888-1938), a contemporary of Lawrence who was part of the Arab Bureau during the First World War, and also a Magdalen alumnus.

 

The first clip introduces the interview, although Nina Ellis appears to be confused about the date of the meeting which could not have taken place in summer 1935 for obvious reasons! The date is instead likely to have been sometime between 1929 and 1932 during a period when Lawrence was based at Calshot, which is mentioned on the tape. 

 

 

Having not recognised Lawrence, Nina then goes on to describe his rather unusual appearance and her assumptions about his profession:

 

The confusion deepens further when Lawrence’s motorcycle Boanerges is mentioned:

 

During tea and still none-the-wiser, Nina receives a personal message from Lawrence:

 

It was only after Lawrence had left that Nina was finally told who the visitor was, and even then she takes some convincing!

 

After meeting “T.E.” a few more times during picnics with the Dawnay children, the family are joined by an unexpected guest on a trip to the Isle of Wight:

 

The full version of this tape is now held in our digital archives, where we also hold more audio and video material on T.E. Lawrence from the 1960s till the present day. Material recently added to the catalogue from Wilson’s digital files includes a copy of a 1962 documentary “Adventures: Desert Adventure” where two presenters explore the remains of the Hejaz railway, and a talk by the cricketer Dennis Silk, the long time friend of Siegfried Sassoon, recorded in 2007.

Feel free to contact us if you are interested in any of our audio and visual holdings on Lawrence, at archives@magd.ox.ac.uk.