Kennington

It was in 1920 that Lawrence first met the artist Eric Kennington, who was eventually to spend some five years overseeing the printing of the illustrations in the subscribers' edition. Robert Graves, who had himself only met Lawrence early that year in Oxford at an All Souls College guest night, claims to have brought about the introduction, but Kennington's version of their meeting is that he contacted Lawrence himself after Lawrence had bought two of his pictures, and then visited him in Oxford. Lawrence told him 'I've written a book . . . a poor thing without illustrations to help it through. Do you know any artist who could make portraits from photographs?'; but Kennington's response was that 'they would be no good. The artist must see the person.' (1) Thus at this very first meeting Lawrence decided that Kennington was the artist to draw his Arabs as he wanted them to be drawn, and made plans to take him out to Arabia.

Churchill, meanwhile, persuaded Lawrence to join the newly formed Middle East Department of the Colonial Office, and from December 1920 to the early summer of 1922, Lawrence undertook the post of Churchill's adviser on Arab affairs. So it was that Colonial Office business intervened - Lawrence was called to a conference in Cairo, and Kennington went out to Arabia alone, meeting up with Lawrence from time to time. He returned with a remarkable collection of work, which was exhibited at the Leicester Galleries, London, during October 1921, and Charles Whittingham & Griggs, the London printing firm, began preparing collotype plates of the first few of Kennington's portraits, in readiness for a book which its author still demurred to print. However, Lawrence's money soon ran out, and this and his continuing doubts about publishing brought the expensive colour printing work to a temporary halt.

1	Friends, p 262

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