"During the period of our friendship I never saw him eat a single solid meal .. . a few biscuits, a piece of chocolate, an apple or a handful of raisins." And on such rations he would go off regularly somewhere on long rides of 50 or 100 miles on his racing bicycle. This was while the subject was a student at Oxford, and what his friends saw in him was above all "a most lovable, unique and refreshing personality, who, had he been born in the Middle Ages, would not only have been a great scholar, but also perhaps an ecclesiastical statesman or even a saint.
This from an article in the Harvest number of The Country- man magazine. It came to hand when a book Crusader Castles had just reappeared from among an untidy library. The title refers to the heart of the book itself, of course, but included are letters to his mother by the author, who wrote sometimes every day as he covered English and Welsh territory, then that of France, and later parts of the Middle East. On an August day of 1908 he reaches Aigues-Mortes on the Mediterranean ".. . a lovely little place, an old, old town huddled along its old streets, with hardly a house outside its old walls, still absolutely unbroken .. . from it St Louis started for his Crusades .. . today it is deserted by the world an is decaying fast. I bathed today in the sea, the great sea, the greatest in the world .. . I felt that I had reached the way to the South and all the glorious East; Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Tyre, Syria, Italy, Spain, Sicily, Crete . . . I fancy I know now better than Keats what Cortes felt like, silent upon a peak in Darien."
His exhaustive study of the many, many fortresses on the ground, with detailed drawings and measurements ensured a firstclass degree for the student at Jesus College, Oxford. He was, of course, T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. Certain Irish associations, some felt, might be useful to this country during the war of Independence or later. For his father was a baronet or heir to a baronetcy who left his wife on the family home in Meath an decamped with the governess to England, where the pair had five sons, T.E. or Ned being the second.
But in a letter to E.M. Forster he declared that his family was part of the Elizabethan plantation "without a drop of Irish blood in us ever," and he wrote to John Buchan that they got the land by favour of a cousin - Walter Raleigh. He was a friend of Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte and wrote to the latter that he would like to do a short book about Casement and make England ashamed of itself. Y