First edition. Harry Broughton and his wife Gwen – who had both served as the Mayor of Wareham – founded the ‘Wareham Pictorial Museum’ in their home in 1960. Since Wareham was less than ten miles from Bovington Camp (where Lawrence had been stationed from 1923 to 1925) and Clouds Hill, the Pictorial Museum contained numerous images depicting and related to Lawrence, and Broughton wrote the present work to correct ‘the mixture of facts and fiction that comprises most people’s knowledge of Lawrence’ (p. [2]). A second edition of Lawrence of Arabia: The Facts without the Fiction was published in 1972 and the text was also reprinted in Broughton’s Lawrence of Arabia: The Simple Facts in the 1980s, with illustrations taken from Broughton’s earlier publication, Lawrence of Arabia and Dorset (1965). In 1974 the Broughtons closed the Pictorial Museum and the collections were acquired by Wareham Town Council and housed in the newly established Wareham Town Museum.

The privately published Lawrence of Arabia: The Facts without the Fiction is a scarce work, and Library Hub Discover only records copies at the National Library of Scotland; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Jesus College, Oxford; and Trinity College, Dublin.

This copy of Lawrence of Arabia: The Facts without the Fiction is from the T.E. Lawrence collection of Roy Turner, whose interest in Lawrence began while he was serving in Palestine with the Royal Engineers in circa 1945-1948 and continued into the late 1990s.

O’Brien E322.