A former colonel rides his motorbike through a dip in the road

Lawrence of Arabia. Utter the name and suddenly visions arise of Peter O’Toole in David Lean’s classic Oscar-winning film, ice-blue eyes heroically scanning the horizon as he rides a camel through the desert. A swashbuckling hero with a devil-may-care attitude, Lawrence had reserves of courage that would shame most other mortals. If even half the stories about him are true, he was a man who lived an extraordinary life, the effects of which are still felt today. That his death should also have made its mark should not, therefore, be a surprise. That it was an entirely unwitting legacy Lawrence was to pass on to future generations, and one that he would doubtless have poured scorn on himself, is one of those odd quirks of fate that make the world such an appealingly unpredictable place in which to live.

He was born Thomas Edward Lawrence in Tremadog, Wales, on 16 August 1888. His mother was Sarah Junner, a Scottish governess, and his father was Sir Thomas Chapman, an Anglo-Irish nobleman who had abandoned his first family in Ireland to live with Junner. The surname Lawrence was entirely fictitious – the couple had assumed it to cover the fact that they were not married and then, quite naturally, had passed it on to their son in order to keep up the pretence. It was an unconventional start to an unconventional life.

Lawrence gained a place at Oxford University to read history and headed off to the Middle East in 1910 as an archaeologist, digging mainly in areas that are today part of Syria. It was World War I that was to make his name as well as his nickname. Using his brilliant leadership and language skills and, just as importantly, his knowledge and respect for the Arab people and their culture, he led a guerrilla force composed of Arab fighters against the might of the Ottoman Empire, eventually helping to capture Damascus. He ended the war a colonel.

A short while later he returned to Oxford to begin a fellowship at All Souls College and the writing of his best-selling war memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He also served as a diplomat but found the widespread acclaim for his rôle in the Great War difficult to live with; in 1922 he deliberately attempted to disappear from public view. He spent the remaining 13 years of his life striving – largely in vain – to achieve obscurity. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force as a lowly aircraftman under the name John Hume Ross and served a short time as a private in the army as T. E. Shaw before returning to the RAF.

While he may have endeavoured to avoid the unwanted trappings of his fame, the daredevil streak in him did not go away. He was a collector of Brough motorcycles and a lover of the high speeds (in excess of 100mph) they could attain, writing once that, ‘A skittish motor-bike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth.’

It is not known whether Lawrence was travelling at any undue velocity on his Brough Superior 1100 on the morning of Monday 13 May 1935. What we do know is that it was raining very hard and that a dip in the road near his Dorset home restricted the view of what lay up ahead of him. It meant that he did not see two boys on bicycles until it was too late. He swerved to avoid them but lost control of his machine and was thrown over the handlebars. The damage he sustained to his head when it hit the road was severe, and despite the best efforts of hospital doctors, he died six days later. He was 46. Like most motorcyclists of his time, Lawrence was not wearing a crash helmet.

One of the doctors who had fought to save his life was a man named Hugh Cairns. The young neurosurgeon – one of the first in Britain – was deeply affected by Lawrence’s death. He grew absorbed by the problem of head traumas suffered by the victims of motorbike accidents and wanted to find out to what extent crash helmets prevented them. It seems an all-too-obvious line of thought to pursue now, but back in the 1930s such notions were groundbreaking.

He had his first report published in the British Medical Journal in 1941 while serving in the army. It contained the shocking statistic that in the 21 months leading up to the outbreak of World War II, 1,884 motorcyclists had perished on Britain’s roads, two-thirds of them as a result of head injuries. With the advent of blackouts during the war, the death toll rose even higher, to between three and four every day. While crash helmets could never bring this horrifying total down to zero, Cairns’ investigations convinced him that they would at least reduce the casualties.

By November, Cairns’ work had persuaded the army top brass to issue an order that henceforth all despatch riders should wear a helmet. By the end of the war, death from accidents among army motorcyclists had fallen by around 75 per cent.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that Cairns had compiled to show that the wearing of crash helmet made the motorcyclist much less likely to die in a crash that involved a blow to the head, it wasn’t until 1973 that legislation was introduced in Britain making their use compulsory. There had been a good deal of opposition from those who saw their imposition as an infringement of personal freedom, but the counter-argument won the day. The law paved the way for another major piece of road-safety legislation ten years later – the compulsory use of seat belts by those in the front of cars (back-seat passengers were also obliged to belt up by 1991).

In his relative short span on Earth, Lawrence demonstrated both figuratively and literally that he did not have a ‘crash helmet’ approach to life. It’s an irony, therefore, that his death brought about legislation that forced his fellow motorcyclists to adopt a measure that would contribute considerably to their safety, but which one can hardly imagine Lawrence adopting himself.

Motorcycle usage in Britain, in terms of miles ridden, is slightly higher nowadays than it was in 1973, when helmets became compulsory. Despite that, fatalities among motorcyclists have fallen from over 700 that year to 331 in 2013. The drop in serious injuries to bikers resulting in accidents on the road has been even more acute. Naturally, not all of this can be put down to the use of crash helmets, but the statistics tend to support the idea that their adoption has saved the lives of thousands of riders and kept many more from sustaining severe head injuries. And all because there was a dip in the road near Lawrence of Arabia’s Hampshire home.