T.E. Lawrence and his fondness for pranks and practical jokes
Many people who knew Lawrence, noticed his unique sense of humor and fondness of jokes and the subtle, spontaneous and individual nature of his pranks.
While at Carchemish he decorated Hogarth’s normally simple mud-walled room with pink satin curtains trimmed with lace and adorned with big pink bows. A pink cushion, hairpins, cheap scents and other reminders of domestic life were distributed about the room to make Hogarth feel “at home.” Hogarth not unexpectedly flew into something of a rage when he discovered the joke, but Lawrence, according to Woolley, grinned over the jest for days. Yet (also according to Woolley) Lawrence was himself unusually sensitive to ridicule and could not tolerate jokes made at his own expense.
T.E. also decorated the lintel of the main doorway into the house at Carchemish (it was a sun disk, with crescent moon, and wings carved with a screw-driver and a knife) to imitate Hittite design. His delight with this joke would be renewed each time a visitor to the excavations paused to admire the forged Hittite relic.
In Seven Pillars of Wisdom T.E. described how he parodied the style of Auda's storytelling to the amusement of everyone present, including Auda himself:
"Everyone had heard that sunrise twenty times, in its immense bathos; an agony piled up of linked phrases, repeated and repeated with breathless excitement by Auda to carry over for hours the thrill of a raiding story in which nothing happened; and the trivial rest of it was exaggerated the degree which made it like one of Auda's tales; and yet, also, the history of the walk to market at Wejh which many of us had taken. The tribe was in waves of laughter on the ground. Auda laughed the loudest and longest, for he loved a jest upon himself; and the fatuousness of my epic had shown him his own sure mastery of descriptive action."
Meinertzhagen claimed that during the time of Paris Peace Conference he and Lawrence hid themselves at the top of the stairs of the Astoria Hotel, unfurled rolls of toilet paper, and dropped them down in long strips on the heads of Lloyd George, Balfour, and Lord Hardinge, who were standing in the lobby, prompting Hardinge to remark: “There is nothing funny about toilet paper.”
According to Graves, Lawrence once climbed a tower at All Souls to hang the Hejaz flag from its peak, kidnapped a deer from the Magdalen College deer park, and rang the station bell he had captured from Tell Shahm from his window at night. He was at the time a thirty-one-year-old retired officer.
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