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Bernard and Charlotte Shaw Some past postings from Programme Updates Page
contents When the Lawrence-Shaw set is complete we will order some slipcases from The Fine Bindery that will take the four volumes. These will be available to order, but we shall not know the size or the cost until all four volumes have been bound. There's nothing exciting to say on Lawrence-Shaw 1928: the nitty-gritty of research and checking goes on. At this stage one often wonders when it will end; but gradually we whittle down the long-list of queries until there are only a few left. We know we will not resolve them all; though occasionally, long afterwards, an answer comes along. For instance, someone researching the life of Manning Pike recently told us his date of birth. As for Lawrence's letters, from Miranshah he often wrote to Charlotte on thin foolscap sheets of absorbent brown paper. The ink soaked through, but that didn't seem to bother him. He usually wrote on both sides, and the resulting mess is easy to mis-read. However, we do our best. It will be a relief to get back to the post-India letters, when he wrote (usually) on proper notepaper!
Lawrence
wrote... A couple of thought-provoking Lawrence quotes from the 1928 volume: In February, he wrote: "Doctors (and now psychoanalysts) find comfort in giving illnesses (and now moods) long names. Whereas my bristles rise over the same process." In April: "What a queer man [Butler] must have been: to devote quite 1/4 of a very interesting volume to a consideration whether the Odyssey was written by an unknown man or an unknown woman! My instinct says 'Man', because I don't believe any woman would have drawn so nincompoopy a son as Telemachus, or so equivocal a woman as Penelope. But I'd be ashamed if I thought of it for more than five minutes. The one or other of two unknowns is not worth the turn of a coin: and their sex is even less important. Authors matter when you can document their lives, and find echoes of their stresses in their writing." Indeed.... The volume will include two photographs of Lawrence by F/Lt Smetham that Lawrence sent to Charlotte, and his comments on them. There are also two aerial photographs of the Miranshah camp and its surroundings, which Lawrence sent with explanatory comments. We would like to reproduce these interesting photographs large enough to show the fine detail. They will probably have to be some kind of fold-out plates. As with the two portrait photographs in the 1927 volume, these illustrations will be printed duotone or tritone, to achieve a depth close to the original photographic prints. Comments in these letters show that Lawrence used the station dark-room for private photographic work and also for processing RAF photographs, which he helped with from time to time. That makes it likely that the 1928 menu card for Christmas dinner at Miranshah was partly or even entirely his work. Note: Publication of this volume has been held up because of illness.
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