A Robe, a Hovercraft, and Lawrence of Arabia: The Curious Connections between Alec Guinness, Sydney Cockerell, and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

By Tobi Lopez Taylor

This post is part of the ongoing Crabbet Chronicles series, which also includes Lady Anne Blunt’s Stradivarius and the Crabbet-bred mare owned by Eve Balfour. 

Wilfrid Blunt knew, was related to, had affairs with, and/or wrote about everybody who was anybody in England from the mid-1800s to the 1920s. His “Secret Diaries,” which were sealed for fifty years after his death in 1922, “mixed up scandalous gossip with serious commentary,” according to his biographer Elizabeth Longford. Blunt’s observations have provided many a historian with a useful perspective. Peter de Mendelssohn, Winston Churchill’s biographer, called Blunt “a shrewd observer of men and a faithful and reliable recorder of their opinions.”

Blunt and one of his Arabian horses. Etching by Tristram Ellis, 1883. 

National Portrait Gallery. NPG D1079

Blunt, who wrote verse prodigiously, believed that he would be known to posterity as a poet. However, the first word about him in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is “Hedonist,” followed by “poet,” then “breeder of Arabian horses.” (His wife’s grandfather, Lord Byron, was the real poet in the family.) As Oscar Wilde wrote about minor poets, like Blunt, “they are never quoted.”  Blunt’s poems didn’t even make it into the Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets—whose compiler had excluded him only due to the “magnitude” of his output. During his lifetime, Blunt’s work did have its admirers, including Yeats, who remarked (incorrectly) that “certain sonnets, lyrics, stanzas of his were permanent in our literature,” and Pound, who praised Blunt’s double sonnet “For Esther” (a pseudonym for Catherine Walters, known as Skittles, considered “one of the last great courtesans of Victorian London,” linked not only to Blunt but also to King Edward VII and Napoleon III).

Just as Blunt would be disappointed about posterity’s view of his poetry, it’s likely that Academy Award–winning actor Sir Alec Guinness would be less than thrilled to learn that he is now best remembered by people under forty for originating the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars franchise—whose dialogue he dismissed as “rubbish.”

Although Guinness never met Blunt, who died when Alec was a mere seven years old, they do share a curious connection through a robe belonging to Sir Sydney Cockerell, as discussed in Guinness’s memoir, Blessings in Disguise.

This robe was not, however, Guinness’s most famous robe, the one that his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi required him to wear (copies of which are worn by millions of kids annually on Halloween). After shooting ended on Star Wars, that robe, and other costumes from the film, went into storage at Angels and Bermans, a costume company in London. “The [robe] was thrown in with hundreds of monks’ robes and later rented out to customers, also being worn by an extra in the 1999 film The Mummy…Company boss Tim Angel said the [robe]was only discovered during a routine stock check.”    In 2007, the robe was sold for 54,000 pounds (about $71,000).

Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Seventeen years before the release of Star Wars, Guinness had the opportunity to wear yet another robe when he portrayed T. E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia—on the London stage in Terence Rattigan’s Ross. As blogger Groggy Dundee notes, “Ross began as a film project for the Rank Organization. In 1955, producer Anatole de Grunwald commissioned Rattigan to pen a screenplay based on Basil Liddell Hart’s T. E. Lawrence in Arabia and After (1934). The movie was to be shot in Iraq, ruled by the descendants of Lawrence’s ally Emir Feisal, with Anthony Asquith directing and Dirk Bogarde as Lawrence. However, in July 1958 Iraqi army officers overthrew Iraq’s King Feisal II and the project was scrapped.” (I can’t help but note here that Asquith’s mother, the former Margot Tennant, had been one of Blunt’s many lovers.) Rattigan then reworked the screenplay into a play. The following year, the playwright was asked to turn it back into a screenplay, but by then, David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia was already in production, with Guinness–again wearing a robe—playing Prince Faisal opposite Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence.

Alec Guinness as T. E. Lawrence.

In the film, which a contemporary reviewer gave an “A” for entertainment and a “C-“ for historical accuracy, Lieutenant T. E. Lawrence, a former archaeologist, is sent by the British army to Arabia to find Prince Faisal. Lawrence’s goal in Arabia, like Byron’s in Greece, was to help free the locals from their oppressors—in this case, the Turks. Over the years, historians’ perspectives have shifted on Lawrence’s legacy; he is known variously as a hero, a poseur, a cultural appropriator, and even a traitor.

Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal.

For example, here is Isabella Hammad, writing earlier this year in the Paris Review:

I am familiar with the legend of T. E. Lawrence—fluent Arabist, British hero of the Arab Revolt of 1916, troubled lover of the Arab peoples—as well as with the ways the Jordanian tourism industry has capitalized on this legend. Nevertheless, I am still surprised when I hear someone mention him with admiration. The image of Lawrence as an adventuring Orientalist, galloping through the desert in flowing robes at the head of a Bedouin army, has endured in the imaginations of the British and American publics at the expense, arguably, of an accurate understanding of Lawrence’s role in the events of the First World War and its aftermath. Despite the fact that, to date, Lawrence has been the subject of nearly fifty biographies and scores of critical works, it is the image of Lawrence in the film Lawrence of Arabia, starring Peter O’Toole and a heavily made-up Alec Guinness as the Arab Prince Faisal, that has stuck.

After his experiences in Arabia, Lawrence greatly wanted to meet Blunt, who, many years earlier, had traveled widely with his wife Lady Anne (and on her dime) in the Middle East. He was a fierce anti-Colonialist, sympathetic to Irish, Indian, and Egyptian nationalism. In 1888, Blunt’s support of Irish Home Rule landed him in Galway and Kilmainham  prisons for two months. (After Blunt published a book of poems about his prison experience, his acquaintance Oscar Wilde, years away from his own stint in jail owing to his relationship with Blunt’s cousin Lord Alfred Douglas, wrote, “prison has had an admirable effect on Mr. Wilfrid Blunt as a poet.”) Blunt also had some political influence over both Randolph Churchill and his son Winston. As A. Warren Dockter writes in “The Influence of a Poet: Wilfrid S. Blunt and the Churchills,” “Where Lord Randolph took Blunt’s anti-imperialism with a grain of salt, Winston accepted him as a more serious figure.”

It was the younger Churchill who facilitated Lawrence’s pilgrimage to Blunt’s Sussex home; Lawrence later proclaimed the elderly Blunt a prophet. Blunt was equally taken with Lawrence, writing in his diary that Lawrence had embarked on “an adventure of the heroic kind [in the Middle East], carrying out very exactly the old one I had dreamed of attempting myself in 1880.”

A couple of decades before he met Lawrence, Blunt hired a secretary, Sydney Cockerell—later the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University—who had previously been employed by designer William Morris (with whose wife, Janey, Blunt had an affair). Cockerell and Lawrence later became friends and correspondents, in part because of their mutual interest in the Middle East. The Fitzwilliam Museum’s website notes that:

Blunt and Lady Anne, both self-taught Arabists, nurtured Cockerell's interest in the history, literature and arts of the East. They offered him a first-hand experience of the Orient. During his visits to their house [Sheykh Obeyd] near Cairo he explored the region's rich culture, travelling to Karnak, Thebes, Memphis, Beirut, Baalbeck, and Damascus, camping with Bedouins in the desert, and surviving a shipwreck on the way to Mount Sinai in 1900. Cockerell swore to keep his beard for the rest of his life. He kept his Arab robes too and wore them at a Fancy Dress Ball at the Cambridge Guildhall in 1919.

Sir Sydney Cockerell and friend.

 Blunt and Lawrence were both dead by the time Guinness met Cockerell on a “hot Sunday in March 1939 [that] was heavy with the unmistakeably dusty, peppery and aromatic smell of Egypt and the Near East which can make even drab places seem glamorous.”  Despite a large disparity in their ages, they instantly took a liking to one another. Indeed, many years later, when Guinness was studying for the role of Lawrence in Ross, he visited Cockerell to, as he put it, “pick at Sydney’s memories.” According to Guinness, Cockerell remembered Lawrence as a “terrible fibber,” but Sydney’s companion, Miss Dorothy Hawksley, painted a more comprehensive picture:

I came in here one day and saw a small man, dressed as an airman looking out of the window. His back was turned to me. I wondered why Sydney should be talking to such a very undistinguished little man. Then, just as if he could read my thoughts, the little man turned round and stared at me. I was stupefied; I don’t think I have ever encountered such a strong personality. I didn’t know who he was, of course, until introduced. He rather gave me the creeps. 

Cockerell’s young son Christopher, who later became an inventor, had an opportunity to meet many famous men of letters who came to see his father. However, “Sydney was very disappointed when Christopher showed very little interest in literature, public affairs and other aesthetic pursuits of such visitors. It was only when T. E. Lawrence stayed at their home that he showed an interest—this was in Lawrence’s 1000 cc Brough Superior motorcycle.” Lawrence owned eight of these motorcycles, one of which he crashed when he swerved to avoid two bicyclists. He died from his injuries six days after the accident, in May 1935.

T. E. Lawrence on one of his Brough Superior motorcycles.

It was through Cockerell that Guinness acquired the robe that connected him to Blunt. Guinness recalled, “Sydney gave me a coarse, striped robe which he had bought from a Bedouin when he and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt had been wrecked off the coast of Sinai in 1900. He used it as a dressing-grown later in life; lent it to Lawrence who in turn handed it on to [George Bernard Shaw]. Eventually it found its way back to Sydney, and shortly after it came into my possession I handed it over to Clouds Hill, T. E.’s hideaway cottage in Dorset, as a memento.”

Today, Clouds Hill is a British heritage site. Among Lawrence’s effects there, in addition to the “coarse, striped robe,” is a copy of Blunt’s In Vinculis — a volume containing the Irish prison poems that Wilde admired.

And as for Sydney Cockerell’s concern about his son’s lack of culture, Christopher Cockerell turned out just fine. Almost two decades before the landspeeder in Star Wars enchanted young moviegoers, Christopher, who was more taken with Lawrence’s motorcycle than with Lawrence himself, invented the Hovercraft, which employs a cushion of air to stay aloft above water or ground. Hovercrafts are “now used throughout the world as specialised transports in disaster relief, coastguard, military and survey and applications, as well as for sport or passenger service.” As writer Amy Cowen noted, “Remember Luke’s landspeeder in the original Star Wars trilogy? Remember the way it skimmed across Tatooine’s surface of sand as he went in search of R2-D2 and found Obi-Wan? While not necessarily a textbook example of hovercraft technology, the story set in a “galaxy far, far away” did a memorable job in 1977 of showing the potential—and alluring ‘glide’—of an air-cushion vehicle.”

Like his father, Christopher Cockerell received a knighthood, though the son’s was “for services to engineering,” something the elder Cockerell likely never expected of the son he once derided for being “no better than a garage hand.”