IT QUITE ruined my breakfast. There I was, reading the newspaper, when my eye fell on an article about research done by the University of Bristol in the Arabian Desert. Apparently they have visited the scenes of some of the actions described by Lawrence of Arabia in his autobiography Seven Pillars of Wisdom and, after examining spent cartridge cases etc, have come to the conclusion that things happened very much as he reported them.
Well, what spoilsports! It has always been the conventional view of Lawrence that his account was wildly exaggerated and, indeed, it was only that which made reading about him tolerable; a classical scholar and archaeologist who wrote like a God; an Arabist who understood the subtle relationships between the tribes; a man who could ride a camel across impassable deserts; so tough that when struck down by a fever he spent his illness planning his strategy against the Turks; a fellow of All Souls. Oh yes, I nearly forgot. Wasn't he the man who organised the Arab revolt and took Aqaba and Damascus? After all that, a little human weakness is needed to stop the rest of us from feeling painfully inferior. Now we are left face to face with our mediocrity.
It is always unsettling when myths one had discounted as fiction turn out to be true. The discovery that Richard III really did have a deformed back for example. We cynics had all written the story off as Tudor propaganda. Shakespeare would have had to fill his theatres and attract patronage so naturally he would have gone with the politically acceptable version of events. Ooops, Romantics: 1, Cynics: 0. Remember the Richard III society being told that the body had been pulled out of its parking lot. "Well that will get rid of that silly story about the deformity", they crowed into the cameras. "Well, I am not quite sure how to put this..." said the voice at the other end of the phone.
I have never thought Oliver Cromwell a particularly attractive man. He had warts for one thing and he closed the theatres for another, but perhaps when he wrote to the Church of Scotland: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken", he had a point. Not that it will have had any effect on the Scottish Church mind you, try telling the successors to John Knox that they are mistaken about anything, but for those of us south of the border a little uncertainty is not a bad thing, which is what inspired the statistician Dennis Lindley to introduce "Cromwell's rule". That says that you never assign anything a probability of zero unless you can actually prove that it is impossible.
There are plenty of examples. Many celebrated achievements have been accomplished "against the odds". Who would have put any money on Cortes and his band carving out an empire in South America.? Cromwell's rule says that it was never impossible; just very unlikely.