Seventeen years ago, in the Imperial War Museum on Lambeth Road in London, I stood mesmerised in front of a motorcycle with the number plate GW 2275, enclosed in a glass case. It was a beautiful, brooding machine, low and long, finished in deep black with just enough nickel and chrome to catch the museum lights: twin fishtail exhausts sweeping back in a graceful curve, the big JAP V-twin sitting exposed and unapologetic between the frame rails, cylinders splayed wide, cooling fins stacked like the pages of a book. Thin copper oil lines ran externally along the frame, feeding the total-loss lubrication system of the era, a solution that looked almost primitive next to a modern engine yet was efficient enough to survive being wrung out past 100mph on 1930s public roads.
A flamboyant form, every component left exposed, hinting at George Brough’s intention to let you see exactly what you were paying for. This was, in its day, the pinnacle of what was once the finest motorcycle industry in the world, the British motorcycle industry. Standing there, it was easy to understand why a certain kind of Englishman, restless, brilliant, and a little broken, would have fallen entirely in love with a machine like this.
It took me straight back to being a teenager watching Lawrence of Arabia for the first time. The film famously opens with this motorcycle: the frantic braking, the fatal swerve to avoid two boys on bicycles, before flashing back to how a restless desk officer became a legendary guerrilla leader in the Arab Revolt, and how that legend curdled into cynicism once Britain betrayed the cause he’d fought for. This was the actual Brough Superior SS100 that TE Lawrence was ripping home on from Bovington on May 13, 1935, when he went over the handlebars, struck his head, and died six days later without regaining consciousness.
I have always felt a pull towards places where history happened, where the past has left something tangible behind, and this anniversary issue gave me the excuse I needed to follow Lawrence’s last ride. For this quest, I got behind the wheel of the new Mini Countryman John Cooper Works. A slightly contradictory choice of car for a story about a restless man who spent his last years trying to shrink his own reputation by changing his name twice to get away from the legend he’d unwillingly become. Because the new Countryman is going through much the same thing but in reverse.
By the very virtue of its name, the Mini has a reputation of being a compact and cheeky car that seems to occupy hardly any road at all, but this Mini is large and an SUV, accentuated by beefy curves with all-wheel drive as standard and sporty vivid red disc calipers. Under the bonnet sits a potent 2.0-litre turbo four-cylinder engine with 300 horsepower of shove and 400Nm of tug.
The irony was not lost on me: I was driving a car that had outgrown its own name, setting off to chase a man who’d spent his final years trying to shrink his. I pointed the car west out of London on the M3, then the A303, pulling over near Stonehenge for a quick photograph before pressing on toward another English icon further down the road.
The road to Clouds Hill
Beyond Stonehenge, the Countryman ate the tarmac in complete comfort, cabin hushed, adaptive cruise doing most of the thinking. The road eventually dropped south onto narrower country lanes for the final approach into Dorset, and it was here, as the hedgerows closed in, that the JCW visibly changed character. All-wheel drive dug in through the bends, the exhaust note sharpened, and for a few minutes on the approach to Clouds Hill, this bulked-up, grown-up Mini showed me that the nimbleness of its ancestors still lived somewhere in its genes.
Clouds Hill itself is almost comically modest for a man who became one of the most famous people in England. It’s a four-room labourer’s cottage with no electricity, which Lawrence first rented in 1923 while stationed at nearby Bovington, then painstakingly rebuilt with his own hands before buying it outright in 1929. Inside, the leather-topped daybed, bookshelves crammed with correspondence and photographs, and framed portraits of Bedouin faces and RAF colleagues remain much as he left them, preserved by the National Trust.
What hints at the pull of Lawrence’s personality is who came all the way here to visit him. George Bernard Shaw, EM Forster, Thomas Hardy and Robert Graves all found their way to this tiny, electricity-less retreat, which was slightly ironic, because Lawrence was doing his best to disappear. The world knew him as Lawrence of Arabia, the flamboyant soldier in Arab robes who’d become one of the most recognisable figures of the First World War, and he wanted none of the celebrity that came with it.
He’d already tried once: in 1922, he joined the RAF under the name John Hume Ross, but the press uncovered him within months. The following year, he joined the Tank Corps as TE Shaw, a name he kept for the rest of his life. Clouds Hill became his refuge, a place to read, write, listen to music, work on his boats and motorcycles, and retreat from a world determined to keep finding him.
He did make forays out. Winston Churchill was a genuine friend, and Lawrence would occasionally turn up unannounced at Chartwell, Churchill’s home about 130 miles away. He liked to boast that his long-distance visits to friends like Churchill and Lady Astor were made in “record time” thanks to the Brough’s speed, calling the machine “the silkiest thing I have ever ridden.”
Churchill’s daughter Mary remembered him arriving as “a short, nondescript, sandy-haired airman riding a motorcycle,” only to reappear at dinner transformed, “presenting himself in the flowing robes of a Prince of Arabia.” She also recalled the “pin-drop silence” that fell over the room whenever Lawrence spoke, a silence that apparently included her father, who himself considered Seven Pillars of Wisdom “unsurpassable” as a war narrative. It was an odd, quietly moving thing to stand in a room with no electricity and realise the man who once sat there could hold some of the loudest reputations in England spellbound.
The road that killed him
From Clouds Hill, the road towards Bovington Camp is the one Lawrence rode almost daily, and it’s easy to see why he loved it: well cambered, with quick, confident curves that seem made for two wheels rather than four. The road has changed considerably since 1935, widened, realigned and smoothed out, the dips Lawrence knew long gone, but the bends remain, and the JCW flowed through them on silky modern tarmac with barely a shudder.
Lawrence was known to push his Brough to 100mph on roads like this despite the rougher surfaces and primitive brakes of the time. It takes a particular sort of nerve to do that. Sadly, this is also the road on which he died. A small, weathered stone marker stands by the roadside near the crash site, its inscription barely legible: Near this spot Lawrence of Arabia crashed on his motorcycle and was fatally injured, 13th May 1935.
Below it, a plaque records that the tree beside the marker was planted in 1983 by Tom Beaumont, who had served as Lawrence’s Vickers machine gunner in Arabia, one old comrade returning nearly half a century later to mark where another had died. It’s a small, unshowy memorial for a man who became the subject of an Oscar-winning film. Bovington Camp is also the start and finish point of the circular 10.8km Lawrence of Arabia Trail, which strings together the cottage, the crash site, and the church at Moreton in one walkable loop.
A short drive away in Wareham is one more stop worth making: the Saxon church of St Martin’s, home to a life-size effigy of Lawrence carved by his friend Eric Kennington, originally intended for St Paul’s Cathedral before being rejected there and finding its way to this small parish church instead.
Moreton and the memory of him
Moreton itself is a proper Dorset postcard, a signpost outside St Nicholas’ Church pointing the way to “Walled Garden” beside directions to Wool and Weymouth, as if history and horticulture share equal billing. Lawrence’s small and very private funeral and burial were held here on May 21, 1935, and the mourners included Churchill, Lady Astor, General Wavell (who flew in by autogiro), and author Henry Williamson.
His grave sits a short walk from the church, simple white stone, flowers laid fresh by visitors, the inscription noting he was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and making no mention at all of Arabia.
The coast, and letting the car breathe
I couldn’t leave Dorset without giving the JCW a proper stretch, so I pushed south to the Jurassic Coast, Durdle Door and Lulworth Cove, a slight detour from Lawrence’s own story, but too good to leave out of a day like this. Every mile of the drive validated it being classed as an SUV. The properly deep boot held picnic mats, beach gear, including chairs and an umbrella, without the need of the rear seats being dropped.
The cabin felt roomy, and the ride height shrugged off potholed coastal car parks without a second thought. There’s real engine grunt for those urgent overtakes on narrow country lanes when stuck behind agonizingly slow motorhomes that make you feel like tearing your hair out.
The all-wheel-drive system quietly sorts out grip on the tighter, greasier lanes, especially with the left wheels on a shoulder slick with wet grass. Flick it into its sportiest mode, and the exhaust note gets a synthesised boost through the speakers. It may be all theatre, but it certainly made me grin, and that’s a win because sound plays such a large part in defining how a car makes me feel.
By the time I rolled back into London, it was quite clear to me that at the wheel of a Mini Countryman, what you get is a car that is actually larger and roomier than the Jeep Compass. It has the space, the grunt and the ground clearance, and from the smooth roads of Dorset to the Jeep-only trails of Zanskar, this Mini is genuinely man enough for whatever the country throws at it.
The Helmet He Never Wore
Lawrence’s fatal crash had one consequence far beyond Dorset. Among the doctors treating him at Bovington Camp Military Hospital was a young Australian neurosurgeon named Hugh Cairns, who had himself served in the Middle East during the First World War. Watching Lawrence die of head injuries that a helmet might have prevented left a deep impression on him, and he began studying motorcycle head trauma as a direct consequence.
Crash helmets already existed, invented back in 1914 for racing at Brooklands, but nobody wore them on the road. It took the Second World War, and Cairns’s appointment as a head injuries adviser to the Ministry of Health, for that to change. Researching fatalities among military despatch riders, he found that head injuries were the single biggest killer among motorcyclists and that, of the few riders wearing helmets when they crashed, not one had died.
His 1941 paper was damning enough that helmets became compulsory for all military motorcyclists within a month, and a 1946 follow-up showed the death rate had fallen sharply as a result. Cairns argued the same logic should extend to every civilian rider. It took another 27 years, and Cairns didn’t live to see it, for that to become UK law in 1973. But the chain runs in a straight, almost eerie line from one Dorset lane to millions of ordinary commutes: the man who died avoiding two boys on bicycles ended up, through the doctor who treated him, saving countless lives on two wheels after his own.
“The Rolls-Royce of Motorcycles”
Every Brough Superior was hand-built at George Brough’s works on Haydn Road, Nottingham, and Brough himself was as singular as his machines. Rarely seen without his trademark tailored flat cap, he carried himself more like landed gentry than a factory owner, and his standards bordered on obsessive. Born to motorcycle pioneer William Edward Brough, George forged his own path in 1919 after a rift with his father over how grand and expensive motorcycles ought to be.
A friend suggested adding “Superior” to the name, which Brough senior took as a personal insult. That pursuit of excellence defined the marque: each machine was assembled once to fit every component together, then stripped down for painting and plating, then reassembled for delivery. Brough tested every SS100 himself on public roads past 100mph, and each one left the factory with George Brough’s personal approval and a written certificate guaranteeing it had been timed at the ton over a flying quarter mile.
‘SS’ stood for Super Sports, ‘100’ for that guaranteed top speed of a 100mph, and Brough pushed the idea further still in 1928, setting a 130.6mph record at Arpajon in France. The “Rolls-Royce of Motorcycles” nickname was coined by journalist HD Teague of The Motor Cycle, and Brough liked it enough to use it in his own advertising, reportedly with the real Rolls-Royce’s blessing.
War ended civilian production in 1940, when the factory turned to munitions and aircraft parts, and the specialised J.A. Prestwich (JAP) 998cc, air-cooled, 50-degree OHV V-twin engines Brough relied on were never commercially viable again. Around 3,100 machines were made across 19 models in the marque’s 21-year run, and roughly a third survive today, making every survivor a priceless piece of automotive art.
Lawrence’s relationship with the marque ran deeper than most customers’. Writing to Brough in 1926, he said he’d ridden five Broughs and covered 1,00,000 miles in four years, calling them the greatest delight of his life, two of them possessing “a speed and reliability that reminded me of an express train.” Between 1922 and 1935, he owned eight. The first, bought in 1922, was nicknamed “Boa,” short for Boanerges, meaning “son of thunder.”
The seven that followed were named George I through George VII, with a ninth, George VIII, still being built when he died. At around £200 apiece, enough to buy a modest cottage, this was extraordinary indulgence for a man on an RAF aircraftman’s pay, though royalties from Seven Pillars of Wisdom helped fund it. The Brough he crashed on May 13, 1935, registration GW 2275, was George VII, his last completed machine.
The photographs here are of George Brough and Lawrence on the Brough nicknamed George VI. They were taken during one of Lawrence’s frequent, unassuming visits to the Haydn Road factory by Jack Hallsworth, a Nottingham Journal photographer who knew George Brough and had been tipped off to bring his camera one afternoon.
It’s a rare glimpse of a man famously camera-shy and almost never photographed candidly, hinting at the genuine warmth behind the machines: two very different Englishmen, one a self-effacing war hero trying to vanish into rural obscurity, the other a flamboyant engineer-showman happy to let Rolls-Royce’s name do some of his advertising for him, bound by a friendship that outlasted their differences.
