Текст книги "Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia "

Автор книги: Michael Korda

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Текущая страница: 46 (всего у книги 55 страниц)

The Air Ministry consistently underrated both Lawrence’s celebrity and the ingenuity of the press, and this was a good example of both. Wing Commander Sydney Smith, the commanding officer of RAF Cattewater (the nearest RAF station to Plymouth) and former chief staff officer at Cranwell (where he and his wife, Clare, had befriended Lawrence), was sent out on the launch in civilian clothes with instructions to escort him to London with the least possible publicity. But despite all the precautions, every moment of Lawrence’s transfer from the Rajputanato the deck of the naval launch was caught on film, and would appear in newsreels and in newspapers the world over. It was even front-page news in The New York Times.In London, one headline above a front-page photograph summed up the situation from the point of view of the press and public: “GREAT MYSTERY OF COLONEL LAWRENCE: SIMPLE AIRCRAFTMAN—OR WHAT?”

Here was one of the first modern “media feeding frenzies"—a forerunner of those that would later be triggered by every event in the life of Princess Diana. The photographers with their long telephoto lenses bobbed up and down in the swell of the harbor, while Lawrence, in his airman’s uniform, descended slowly on a rope ladder thrown over the side of the Rajputana,then walked across the deck of the launch to its tiny cabin, hands in the pockets of his RAF raincoat in a most unmilitary way, with a faint, sardonic smile on his face. He seemed to be thinking, “All right, you bastards, you got me this time, but nexttime you bloody well won’t!”

AC1 Shaw returns to England, 1929.

The comparison between Lawrence and Princess Diana is by no means far-fetched. They were both magnetically attractive—she was the most often photographed person of her generation, he the most often photographed, drawn, painted, and sculptured person of his; they both had a natural instinct for adopting a flattering pose in the presence of photographers and artists without even seeming to know they were doing it; they both played cat and mouse with the press, while complaining of being victimized by it; they both simultaneously sought and fled celebrity; they both—always a tricky task in Britain—managed to cross class lines whenever they chose to, she by making friends of her servants, he by serving in the ranks of the RAF and the army. Both of them were on the one hand intensely vulnerable, and on the other, exceedingly tough. Of course one recognizes the differences—Lawrence was an internationally acclaimed war hero, a scholar, and a writer of genuine distinction, perhaps even genius; and in the sixty-two years that separated their deaths in road accidents Great Britain changed radically (though not radically enough to save Diana’s marriage or her life). But it will help modern readers to understand Lawrence’s problems if they bear in mind that from 1919 to his death Lawrence was as famous, as sought after, as admired, and as persecuted by the press as Diana was. To this situation he added, by his own efforts to keep out of sight and the bungled efforts of the RAF to hide him, something of the mystery that surrounded Howard Hughes in Hughes’s later, reclusive years. Lawrence, hidden away from the press in India or at RAF stations in England, provoked exactly the same unrelenting press interest as Hughes did when he was locked away in a hotel suite in Las Vegas, and the same kind of intense, almost prurient curiosity and speculation on the part of the public. Lawrence was perhaps the first in the long line of twentieth-century celebrities who became victims of their own fame. A journalistic tradition was born on February 2, 1929, when Lawrence was greeted at sea by the RAF wing commander and the Royal Navy lieutenant commander and taken ashore through a floating gauntlet of what would now be called paparazzi.

Not surprisingly, Wing Commander Smith was no more successful at avoiding press headlines than his successors in the role of “media handler” have been since then. To avoid the Plymouth railway station, which the press was sure to have staked out, Smith rushed Lawrence to Newton Abbott; but they were discovered as soon as they boarded the train to London, and when they reached Paddington Station in London the platform was crowded with an unruly mob of photographers and journalists, jostling and pushing to get close to Lawrence, who had been presented with a letter from Trenchard firmly warning him to say nothing. When Smith and Lawrence got into a taxi, they were followed by lines of cars and taxis full of photographers; meanwhile, their taxi driver, who may have been bribed by journalists, deliberately drove slowly and took them the longest way to the flat of Smith’s sister-in-law on Cromwell Road. The wing commander rushed Lawrence into the flat in such a hurry that Lawrence literally bumped into Clare and almost sent her flying to the floor. The New York Timesreported the car chase on its front page the next day under the headline: “LAWRENCE OF ARABIA HIDES IN LONDON: FLEES REPORTERS ON ARRIVING FROM INDIA.”

The reporters could get nothing out of Lawrence, who was only quoted as denying that he was Lawrence, and saying, “No, my name is Mr. Smith.” This didn’t do him a lot of good. Whatever the expertise of the Air Ministry was in other areas, its ability to keep Lawrence’s arrival a secret was zero, much to Trenchard’s embarrassment. Lawrence grew increasingly concerned, for he was afraid that all this publicity would get him thrown out of the RAF. Nightfall finally enabled the Smiths to get Lawrence out of the flat by the back door and to the comparative safety of his old attic hideaway above Sir Herbert Baker’s office. He then spent the weekend in the seclusion of the Trenchards’ home, the last place the press would have looked for him.

He was right to be concerned about his future in the RAF. Trenchard was more amused than irritated by all these goings-on, but by this time questions about Lawrence were beginning to be asked in the House of Commons, and these posed a more serious problem for him. The accusations that Lawrence had stirred the tribes of eastern Afghanistan to rise against their king did not interest Labour members so much as why Lieutenant-Colonel Lawrence had ever been allowed to enlist in the RAF as an airman under a false name. Secretary of State for Air Sir Samuel Hoare replied to these questions reluctantly and with exceedingly bad grace, as was hardly surprising, since he had consistently been opposed to Lawrence’s enlistment. Now, just as he had predicted, he was under attack for something he had resisted from the first. Hoare decided that Lawrence was now a nuisance and an embarrassment to the government.

Despite a weekend with the Trenchards, during which Lawrence must have received a lot of good advice, he elected instead to behave as if he were dealing with an insurgent tribal leader, walking alone and unarmed into the leader’s tent. No sooner had Trenchard driven him back to London than Lawrence went to the House of Commons and asked to see Ernest Thurtle, the Labour member who had been the first to ask why Lawrence had been allowed to enlist under a false name. Thurtle had not been satisfied by Hoare’s reply to his question in the House, and had given notice that he and his colleague James Maxton intended to pursue the matter further. Thurtle was, in his own way, as dedicated a man as Lawrence—an ex-serviceman with a particular interest in improving the life of servicemen in the ranks and making discipline more humane and sensible. He and Maxton must have been surprised when the object of their questions appeared in the lobby of the House of Commons, dressed in an airman’s uniform, asking to see them. To do Thurtle credit, he was willing to listen to Lawrence’s side of the story, and indeed sympathetic, once Lawrence made it clear that he was not an officer and a secret agent, but merely an airman burdened by more publicity, and more inaccurate newspaper reporting, than he could handle. Lawrence explained that any inquiry into his enlistment might have the unintended effect of deeply embarrassing his mother and his surviving brothers. He described to Thurtle “the marriage tangles of [his] father.” Thurtle was not only mollified but convinced, and he and Lawrence thereafter became close friends, thus demonstrating the good sense of Lawrence’s suggestion to Trenchard about how to deal with the murderous and obstinate Feisal el Dueish at Ur. Lawrence and Thurtle worked closely together on many of Lawrence’s pet reform schemes for the armed services.

The famous Lawrence of Arabia appearing at the House of Commons in an airman’s uniform did not go unnoticed; on the contrary, he caused a sensation, and Sir Samuel Hoare complained strongly to Trenchard, who called Lawrence into the Air Ministry and warned him sternly against any further appearances in Westminster. Lawrence apologized gracefully, though he asked if Trenchard could not find some way to shut up The Daily News,and Trenchard, patiently, asked him with gruff amusement, “Why must you be more of a damned nuisance than you need be?”

Lawrence walking around London in uniform was a constant target for journalists—as he wrote to E. M. Forster, “I am being hunted, and do not like it.” Trenchard, who was anxious to get him away, moved quickly to have him posted to RAF Cattewater, near Plymouth, where Wing Commander Smith was the commanding officer. In the meantime, Lawrence received an unexpected and welcome present from Bernard and Charlotte Shaw: a new Brough “Superior” SS-100 motorcycle.* He arrived on this motorcycle at RAF Cattewater, where his friend Clare saw him pull up at the camp gates. “On it,” she wrote, “was a small blue-clad figure, very neat and smart, with peaked cap, goggles, gauntlet gloves and a small dispatch-case slung on his back.” Lawrence was back in the RAF again, on a working station, serving under a commanding officer whom he admired and liked, and whose family made him one of their own. When Clare Smith wrote her description of Lawrence’s years at RAF Cattewater, she called the book The Golden Reign,for Lawrence was the sovereign, casting over all their lives a glow of glamour, excitement, and adventure. It was as if he had been adopted by the Smiths and their children rather than merely posted to a new RAF station. This was perhaps as close to domestic bliss as Lawrence had ever been, and he loved every moment of it.

He was also about to enter on a period of his life when he found, at the same time, contentment of another sort. RAF Cattewater was a seaplane base, so boats, launches, and speedboats were a necessary part of its equipment, although the actual seaplane squadron had not yet arrived. It was here that Lawrence began a new career as a largely self-taught expert in the building and running of the RAF’s high-speed rescue launches. During a six-year period Lawrence would make an extraordinary contribution to the revolutionary design of the boats that would be used to “fish” out of the water RAF pilots shot down over the Channel in the summer of 1940. Many of these men would owe their lives to the unconventional ideas, and the awesome ability to reach friends in high places in the Air Ministry and the government, of 338171 AC1 Shaw, T. E.

He described his new home in a letter to a friend: “Cattewater proves to be about 100 airmen, pressed pretty tightly on a rock, half-awash in the Sound: a peninsula really, like a fossil lizard swimming from Mount Batten golf links across the harbour towards Plymouth town. The sea is 30 yards from our hut one way, and 70 yards the other. The Camp officers are peaceful, it seems, and the airmen reasonably happy.”

Safely out of London, Lawrence still kept up his connections to the great world, turning down Eddie Marsh’s invitation to present the Haw-thornden Prize to his friend Siegfried Sassoon, and writing in detail to Ernest Thurtle about his objection to the death penalty for cowardice—"A man who can run away is a potential V.C.,” he noted, from experience.

He continued to write in detail to Trenchard about RAF reforms, objecting to spurs for the officers and bayonets for the men. To another friend, an airman from Farnborough, he wrote with resignation, “I’m very weary of being stared at and discussed and praised. What can one do to be forgotten? After I’m dead, they’ll rattle my bones about, in their curiosity.”

The cold of England ate into his bones—he “wished England could be towed some thousand miles to the South,” and at times he complained that he was “so tired, and want so much to lie down and sleep or die.” But he soon began to cheer up as his work became more interesting. No doubt he was also pleased to be serving as Wing Commander Smith’s clerk for the moment; he found himself instantly transformed into a kind of junior partner in running the station, even suggesting that the camp’s name should be changed to RAF Mount Batten and drafting a letter to the Air Ministry requesting the change. Smith signed the letter, and the request was quickly granted.

Despite the absence of the seaplane squadron for the time being, Smith was busy. Apart from running the camp, he was also the RAF’s representative for the organization of the next Schneider Trophy competition, scheduled for the first week of September 1929, at Calshot, near Southampton. Named after a wealthy French industrialist—the trophy’s official name was La Coupe d’Aviation Maritime Jacques Schneider—this was a speed event flown by seaplanes over a course of 150 miles. It was first flown in 1912, and by the 1920s it had become one of the most glamorous and expensive contests in the world of aviation, and a test of the major industrial nations’ technology and aircraft design. The race had begun as an annual event, but in 1928 the Aйro-Club de France decided to change it to once every two years, in view of the increasing complexity and sophistication of the designs, and the growing world economic crisis. If any nation should win the trophy three times in a row, it would go to that nation in perpetuity. By 1929, the major contestants were Britain, the United States, and Italy—Germany did not enter, because the German government had no wish to draw attention to its fast-growing aircraft industry. The fastest aircraft were often those designed by Reginald J. Mitchell, of the Vickers-Supermarine Aviation Works. Mitchell would go on to design the “Spitfire,” which was based in part on his Schneider Trophy aircraft and would become perhaps the most successful (and most beautiful) fighter aircraft of World War II.

The contest involved a huge amount of preparation on the part of the host nation, and Lawrence quickly took on much of the correspondence to and from Wing Commander Smith, as well as accompanying him to meetings, to take notes and look after the files. Since the British entries were largely government-financed (like those of the Italians and the Americans) and were run by the RAF, Smith was in charge of the British team. Thus Lawrence was involved in numerous meetings at the Treasury and the Air Ministry, during which he was occasionally recognized as the celebrated Lawrence of Arabia.

Lawrence was at the same time working hard to finish his translation of the Odyssey,and trying to decide whether it should be published under his name (given Trenchard’s warning to keep Lawrence’s name out of the press), or indeed whether he could ever finish it at all, given the scope and variety of his duties with the RAF. In addition to being the commanding officer’s secretary-clerk, Lawrence was now a machine and workshop clerk and part of the motorboat crew. Bruce Rogers, the American book designer who had commissioned the Odysseyproject, displayed a saintly patience with the delay; he sensibly decided to wait, writing Lawrence soothing letters, rather than trying to set deadlines that Lawrence couldn’t meet.

There were occasional stories about Lawrence in the newspapers: the trashy scandal tabloid John Bullmade his life more difficult by suggesting that he spent all his time at Mount Batten tinkering with his expensive motorcycle and translating Homer—exactly the kind of story Trenchard wanted to avoid. Still, Lawrence managed to get up to London on his motorcycle from time to time, and also managed to cut the journey to just over four and a half hours. This meant riding the big Brough over “the ton” (100 miles per hour) wherever he could.* Lawrence heard Bernard Shaw read The Apple Cartaloud at the London house of Lord and Lady Astor, with a guest list of exactly the kind of people Trenchard wanted him to avoid. He soon found a soul mate in his hostess, Nancy Astor, Britain’s first woman member of Parliament, and perhaps the most energetic, flamboyant, and outspoken woman in the country. She was originally Nancy Langhorne, from Danville, Virginia; and she and her sister reached fame as the original “Gibson Girls.” After an unsuccessful marriage to Robert Gould Shaw II, she came to England and quickly married the immensely wealthy Waldorf Astor, Viscount Astor. Soon Nancy Astor became something of a national institution, known for her wit, her willingness to break social barriers and traditions, and her blunt outspokenness to opponents, including Winston Churchill. Her seat as a member of Parliament was Plymouth, virtually on Lawrence’s new doorstep. When she spied Lawrence in the streets of Plymouth, he reported to a friend, “A pea-hen voice screamed ‘Aircraftman’ from a car.” Lawrence tried to escape, but she called Wing Commander Smith and “invited herself” to RAF Mount Batten, where she not only tracked Lawrence down but persuaded him to give her a ride on his motorcycle. They immediately became friends, much to the surprise of other people, for she was rich, reactionary, a militant Christian Scientist, and a dreadful bully. He described her to Charlotte Shaw as “one of the most naturally impulsive and impulsively natural people. Like G.B.S. [Charlotte’s husband], more a cocktail than a welcome diet.” (This was perhaps not the most flattering thing to say about Bernard Shaw to his wife.) Lady Astor became another of Lawrence’s impassioned correspondents, arousing both disapproval and heartache in Charlotte. “I do not know when, or with whom, I have ever maintained for so long so hot a correspondence,” Lawrence wrote Nancy Astor. “Clearly we are soul-mates.”

For a man who gave the impression of being a confirmed misogynist, Lawrence had a surprising number of female soul mates: Charlotte Shaw,Nancy Astor, and Clare Smith. Clare had certain advantages—she was young, beautiful, always elegantly dressed, adventurous, and nearby. Extremely photogenic and gay, with a taste for saucy hats, she had the plucked, finely penciled eyebrows of the period, as well as the high cheekbones and vividly painted lips. In photographs she looks like a character in a Nancy Mitford novel. Lawrence spent a lot of time with her, at the Smiths’ home—the RAF had saved money by converting a famous old Plymouth pub into the commanding officer’s house—where he was encouraged to drop in whenever he liked. They also squeezed together in the tight seat of a tiny speedboat they had been given by a wealthy yacht owner; or they sunned themselves on the Smiths’ porch. Clare loved warmth as much as Lawrence did. She called him “Tes,” after his new initials, T.E.S., and he called her Clare and her daughter “Squeak.” Clare noticed, among other things, how much he disliked shaking hands with anyone and how hard he tried to avoid it, holding his hands behind his back, and bowing slightly instead like a Japanese. However, he did not mind stroking dogs and cats—the Smiths’ dogs, Leo and Banner, were devoted to him. Clare noted also that he never smoked, drank alcohol, or swore. The two shared a love of music, and he gave the Smiths his expensive electric gramophone, so that he and Clare could listen to classical records in the evenings, and taught her how to sing lieder in German. He especially enjoyed hearing Clare sing Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben,but his favorite lied was Wolf’s “Ver-schweigene Liebe.” When Clare went shopping in Plymouth, she often brought him back a cake of Golden Glory soap, a transparent glycerin soap that he especially liked because it smelled sweet and didn’t “make a mess of any bath.” This curious domesticity between an airman and the commanding officer’s wife was something that Clare seems to have accepted intuitively: “he lived a monastic life within the world of ordinary beings,” she wrote. “Thus he was able to have a deep friendship for a woman—myself—based on the closest ties of sympathy and understanding, but containing none of the elements normally associated with love.” He seemed, she thought, to have completely separated himself from the physical side of life, and indeed to be hardly even aware of it.

Her husband, far from disapproving of their relationship, which raised many an eyebrow in Plymouth, seems to have felt the same kind of affection for this strange and lonely man. When a well-intentioned friend told him that there was “a good deal of talk going on about your wife spending so much time with Mr. Shaw,” Smith simply “roared with laughter.” So did Lawrence, when the Smiths told him about it. The other airmen, and even the NCOs, seem to have had no problem with the close relationship that developed between Lawrence and the Smiths—RAF Mount Batten was small enough so that it was apparent to everybody that Lawrence never sought favors for himself, and that he was in some way a special figure, irrespective of rank—at once a problem solver and a natural leader to whom everybody came for advice. There was no secret about him at Mount Batten—the men knew he was Lawrence of Arabia and were proud to have him there, a celebrity and a person who seemed to live by his own rules. In a curious way, Lawrence had at last found happiness, perhaps for the first time since his life with Dahoum at Carchemish, or at least as much happiness as he was capable of enjoying, for he remained fiercely self-critical and ascetic.

As always, outside the gates of Mount Batten, the presence of Lawrence in the RAF continued to present problems. The Conservative government had been replaced by Labour and the new secretary of state for air, Lord Thomson, was no more disposed than his predecessor to have Lawrence in the ranks of the RAF. This was unfortunate, for the Schneider Trophy Race was bound to make Lawrence more visible, however much he tried to stay out of the limelight, and a full complement of the world’s press would be covering it.

Lord Thomson was already irritated by Lawrence’s presumptions to set Air Ministry policy. Britain was in the process of completing two giant “airships” in the summer of 1929. Every major nation was intrigued by the possibilities of these huge dirigibles, which many believed represented the future of long-distance air travel. That this was an illusion was not finally demonstrated until a great German airship, the Hindenburg,burst into flames on mooring at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937. The two British airships were nearly 800 feet long, longer than the Hindenburg,and carried sixty passengers in private staterooms spread over two decks, with a cocktail lounge, a dining salon, a smoking room, and “two promenade lounges with windows down the side of the ship.” In short, such an airship was a flying first-class ocean liner, with a range of 5,000 miles at sixty miles an hour. There were only three problems with the airship—the first was that there was no proof it could ever be made profitable; the second was that the hydrogen gas keeping it aloft, if mixed with air, was highly combustible; and the third was the question of how stable it might be in storms.

The air marshals were doubtful about the value of airships, which from a military point of view were in any case nothing new. The German zeppelins had bombed London in 1917-1918, and were found to be very vulnerable to antiaircraft fire and to determined fighter attack, since they were enormous, slow-moving targets. Still, Britain was naturally interested in any form of transportation that would make travel to the farthest portions of the empire a matter of only a few days; and the British were unwilling to concede the future to the Germans, who were planning scheduled flights to New York and Rio de Janeiro.

Lawrence entered the picture because he was convinced that an airship could overfly and explore the Rub al-Khali of Arabia—the so-called Empty Quarter, which no European or Arab had ever crossed—as part of its test flight to India, thus combining an aviation triumph with a notable geographical discovery. He urged this scheme on Trenchard, who was lukewarm on the subject and passed it on to Lord Thomson; but he also urged Bernard Shaw (who knew Thomson, a fellow Fabian) to make a personal appeal to the air minister. Unfortunately, Shaw was too busy to pay a call on Thomson and wrote to him instead, noting that Lawrence, with his knowledge of Arabia, would be a good person to add to the crew. As was so often the case with Shaw, his belief that any suggestion of his would be taken seriously rebounded, this time on Lawrence. Thomson replied to Shaw with enthusiasm about the idea of the airship as a means of making geographical surveys—he was a true believer on the subject of airships, which would very shortly cost him his life—but rejected Lawrence as a crew member: “As regards including Lawrence, or Private Shaw, as you have yourself described him, I will consider the matter. His passion for obscurity makes him an awkward man to place and would not improve his relations with the less subtle members of the crew.” Lord Thomson’s belief in Fabian socialism apparently did not extend to receiving suggestions from airmen, even when these were passed along to him by Bernard Shaw. Lawrence’s habit of reaching out from the ranks to the great and famous was not likely to endear him to any civilian head of aviation, even though the suggestion that he should join the flight came from Shaw, not himself. In any case, Thomson clearly took it as a challenge to his authority.

On August 23, 1929, Trenchard inspected RAF Mount Batten, and took the opportunity for a private chat with Lawrence, “telling me off as usual,” as Lawrence wrote to T. B. Marson, Trenchard’s faithful private secretary, who had retired from the RAF to take up farming. Given that Trenchard himself would retire at the end of the year, he may have felt it necessary to warn Lawrence to be more careful about Lord Thomson in the future. If so, it was wasted breath.

That Lawrence upstaged Lord Thomson—and almost everybody else—during the Schneider Trophy Cup races was not entirely his fault. The press was more interested in Lawrence than in the pilots, let alone in Lord Thomson, and it did not help matters that Lawrence knew so many of the dignitaries present, or that they stopped to chat with him. Even Trenchard was annoyed to see AC1 Shaw in conversation with Lady Astor, but there was worse to come. Lawrence, leading from the ranks as usual, had organized some airmen to clean the slipway leading to the hangar where the Italian team kept their seaplanes. Marshal Italo Balbo—the famous Italian aviator,* minister of aviation, and at the time heir apparent to Mussolini—was in charge of the Italian team, and he knew Lawrence well. Balbo paused to chat with Lawrence in Italian, and en passantasked if he could get the slipway cleaned up, since the rails were covered with scum. Lawrence proceeded to get that done in his usual efficient way, and was caught in the act by Lord Thomson, who wanted to know why a British airman was taking orders from an Italian air marshal, and passing them on to other British airmen as if he were an officer himself. There followed an animated discussion between Lord Thomson and Lawrence, which was unfortunately caught on film by the press photographers, and appeared in newspapers all over the world, to Thomson’s great embarrassment. To use RAF slang, Thomson was clearly “tearing a strip off” Lawrence and did not forgive him.

The British not only won the race but set a new world speed record, and Lawrence, except for his brush with Thomson, had enjoyed being part of it. He was also delighted by the unexpected gift of the speedboat that he and Clare Smith would spend so much time on. A wealthy friend of Wing Commander Smith’s, Major Collin Cooper, had made his motor yacht available to the RAF for the occasion, and Lawrence spent a good deal of time on board, tinkering with the temperamental engine of the tiny, two-seat Biscayne “Baby” American racing speedboat that it carried as a tender. Cooper was so impressed by Lawrence’s efficiency and hard work that when the race was over he made Lawrence and the Smiths a gift of the speedboat. Clare and Lawrence renamed it Biscuit,no doubt because at rest it sat in the water looking like a low, flat, round object rather than a long, pointed one. The Biscayne “Baby” speedboats were a one-class racing design, built in Florida, powered by a six-cylinder, 100-horsepower Scripps marine engine, and capable of more than forty miles per hour. Designed after the pattern of Gar Wood’s speedboats, the hard-chine hull had a very sharp V-shaped bow flattening out toward the stern, so that at high speed the boat raised its bow and planed over the water, rather than pushing through it. This design, partly thanks to Lawrence, would eventually be used for all the RAF high-speed rescue launches in Britain, and in the United States it was the basis for the famous PT boat, despite determined resistance by the navy in both countries. Major Cooper had the American speedboat delivered to RAF Mount Batten, and Lawrence would spend much of the winter of 1929-1930 painstakingly stripping and rebuilding the engine and refinishing the hull.