Anguish of TE Lawrence

The agony of TE Lawrence, who felt so trapped by his fame that he took a low-rank posting in the RAF, is revealed today in a letter released by the Public Record Office.

Despite the collusion of the government in safeguarding his secret, Lawrence - who, Greta Garbo-like, said "I want to be alone" - suffered the fate of many a modern celebrity and was exposed by a newspaper.

After helping to lead the Arabs in their uprising against the Turks during the First World War, adventures which he helped mythologise in his book The Seven Pillars Of Wisdom, Colonel Lawrence sought to escape his notoriety by enlisting in the RAF as a humble Aircraftman under the names John Hume Ross and Thomas Edward Shaw.

In the letter from January 1923, Lawrence writes from the Fresham Pond Hotel near Farnham of his desire to be accepted as a normal serviceman.

"The further I get from the RAF the more I regret its loss . . .The CAS (Chief of Air Staff) said the other day that I was an unusual person and inevitably embarrassing to a CO (Commanding Officer) - but I don't agree.

"I've had a lurid past which has now twice pulled me down and of which I'm beginning to despair, but if my CO was a decent (illegible) he'd treat me as an average and I'd be an average," he writes, asking his superior officers for a posting.

Lawrence was, of course, far from "average". For two years he had rallied the morale of the Arab tribes fighting a guerrilla force against the Turks. Arab forces under his command entered Damascus on 1 October, 1918 and he was later awarded a DSO and made a Prince of Mecca by his friend King Hussein.

Lawrence subsequently served as an adviser on Middle East affairs but, disillusioned with the treatment of the Arabs in the post-war settlement imposed by the victorious allies, he withdrew from politics.

Once enlisted into the RAF, the military establishment colluded in his search for anonymity. On return from a posting to Karachi in 1929 he was warned the press would be meeting him at the dock and told a plain clothes officer would escort him from the boat.

That year a note from the RAF's press section warned that "any publicity given to this airman should be watched carefully-please" after stories about Lawrence began to appear.

In 1933 Lawrence was posted to the Marine Craft Section at Felixstowe and a letter from Air Vice Marshall RH Clark in April 1933 instructed his new commanding officer that "to avoid any publicity, Shaw should wear plain clothes when he is attached to contractors works".

But on 11 May 1934 his cover was broken by a front-page story in the News Chronicle. Reporter JM Pughe had tracked Lawrence down to the British Power Boat Works at Hythe and in a long interview with "Aircraftman Shaw" sought his views on the political situation in Arabia.

But the hero of the desert exploded: "I am not interested in Arabia. I do not know anything about the situation in Arabia. I am 15 years behind the times."

In the interview Lawrence - described by Pughe as the most bitter man he has ever met - bemoans the fact he has become a pariah because of his past exploits.

He says: "No country will have me. France, Germany, Turkey, all of them refuse me a passport visa. I have been deported from India and sacked from the Air Force because of my fame - no call it infamy or notoriety.

"I am banned from every country in the world because I am supposed to be a secret service agent. I am nothing of the kind, and I never have been."

Lawrence of Arabia was killed in 1935 in a motorcycle crash near Bovington camp.