When TE Lawrence - immortalised as Lawrence of Arabia - died 80 years ago he could not have known that the accident which took his life, and the surgeon who tried to save him, would eventually help to save thousands of others.
It was pouring with rain on the morning of Sunday 19 May 1935 when TE Lawrence died.
The man made famous by his Great War exploits in the Middle East finally succumbed to the head injuries he had suffered six days earlier in a motorcycle accident.
"In Lawrence we have lost one of the greatest beings of our time," said his friend Winston Churchill. "I had hoped to see him quit his retirement and take a commanding part in facing the dangers which now threaten the country."
It was not to be. At the age of 46, Lawrence of Arabia was dead.
Mourning was international. The New York Times called it a "tragic waste" and speculated that the accident which brought his death had been "unwarranted and perhaps avoidable".
Lawrence had been pitched over his motorcycle, a Brough Superior SS100, near his Dorset home. A dip in the road apparently obscured his view of two boys on cycles ahead. The manoeuvring to avoid them cost him his own life.
The machine on which Lawrence suffered his fatal crash was guaranteed to be capable of more than 100mph, though there is no firm evidence that he was speeding recklessly when he came off it.
Lawrence had nicknamed it "Boa" or "Boanerges" which means "Son of Thunder" in Aramaic, and recorded his love of speed on previous rides.
"Boa and I took the Newark road for the last hour of daylight. He ambles at forty-five and when roaring his utmost, surpasses the hundred. A skittish motor-bike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth," he wrote.
Whether Lawrence was riding safely in the run-up to the accident is unclear. "It's difficult to know exactly what the road would have been like in 1935 because it has changed so much, but the evidence is it was purely an accident," says Philip Neale, chairman of the TE Lawrence Society.
"He lost control and went over the handlebars. The Broughs didn't have fantastic brakes. The roads were very different in those days. Even the road in Dorset would have allowed some speed because traffic was light."
There was no mention in his obituaries that Lawrence had been without a crash helmet. In 1935 riders were typically bare-headed. Lawrence's death was to help change that - eventually.
One of the medics who attended Lawrence was a young doctor called Hugh Cairns, one of Britain's very first neurosurgeons.
His post-mortem examination established that Lawrence had suffered "severe lacerations and damage to the brain" when his unprotected head struck the ground. Had he survived, brain damage would probably have left him blind and unable to speak.
The loss of Lawrence was not forgotten by Cairns.
