Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  Thomas Chapman, her employer, had been educated at Eton and Cirencester, the grandson of a baronet and the scion of seven generations of colonial English landlords who had originally been granted land in Kerry under the patronage of Sir Walter Ralegh. He had all the benefits of a privileged birth – education, breeding, a vast estate, an opulent mansion, horses, carriages and servants, and the wealth and leisure with which to enjoy them. Yet he was not a happy man. His wife, Edith, was a shrew who regarded any form of pleasure as sinful – ‘the kind of woman’, a neighbour later observed, ‘who was terribly pious, who would go to church all hours of the day, and then if a wretched kitchen maid got herself into trouble, would cast her out without a character’.1 Edith’s belligerence – which found its most extreme expression in attempts to convert the local Roman Catholic peasants to Protestantism – had become so painful that Thomas could hardly endure her company. When Sarah first appeared on his horizon he was the father of four young daughters and found himself approaching middle age, trapped in marriage to a woman he had long ago ceased to love. Morose, ineffectual, much given to drink, he had abandoned even the pleasures of hunting, shooting and fishing with which most country gentlemen filled their days. Into his dark universe the beautiful Miss Lawrence shot like a comet. She captivated him. As gay and energetic as Edith was ethereal and sour, she was an indomitable organizer. She came to his mansion – South Hill – to take charge of his daughters, but very soon she had taken over the running of the entire household. Thomas was seen to revive visibly whenever she entered the room. Presently – inevitably perhaps – squire and governess fell in love.

  It was no rare thing, of course, for a bored Victorian gentleman to dally with an attractive servant-girl. But in an era when the British aristocracy still preserved an almost supernatural reputation, the idea of a gentleman actually forsaking his caste for a liaison with a minion was almost unthinkable. Sarah was aware that she walked a tightrope. She had nothing to offer but herself, and any young girl less determined, or less charismatic, might easily have ended up an unmarried young mother with recourse only to the workhouse – or worse. Her hold over Thomas tightened by degrees, however. In 1885 she became pregnant and left the post of governess at his mansion, to reappear as his mistress in a house in Dublin. It was here, in December 1885, that their first son, Montague Robert – Bob – was born. For a while, Thomas led a double life, commuting between his wife and daughters at South Hill and his mistress and son in Dublin, but soon prudish tongues wagged. The Chapmans’ butler once spied Miss Lawrence in a Dublin store and overheard her giving her name as ‘Mrs Chapman’. Curious, he followed her to her lodgings, where he saw Thomas Chapman emerge. He rushed to Edith with the news, and she erupted with fury. Thomas was obliged to choose between his privileged but emotionally barren marriage with her, and an unconventional, materially pinched, but fulfilling relationship with Sarah. In choosing Sarah, he made the most courageous decision of his life. Some time in 1887, he left his mansion with its unkempt park of green meadows and Irish yews, forsook his inheritance and his culture for ever, and joined Sarah in Dublin. At her insistence, perhaps, he asked his wife for a divorce. Edith stubbornly refused, and in defiance they decided to elope to Britain, where, together, they could make a new start. They left Ireland by ferry on an evening towards the end of 1887. When they stepped ashore in North Wales the next day, they were no longer Thomas Chapman, landowner, and Sarah Lawrence, governess, but ‘Mr and Mrs Thomas Lawrence’ – identities they would continue to assume successfully for the rest of their lives.

  They could scarcely have chosen a more repressive moment in the entire history of British morals in which to commit themselves to a common-law marriage. Since the end of the relatively liberal eighteenth century, society had been growing ever more puritanical under the influence of the Evangelical Revival – a movement to which, ironically enough, Sarah belonged. The year 1885 marked the climax of the so-called ‘Purity Campaign’ – a crusade against lax sexual morals which had harnessed powerful Victorian terrors of social chaos and the degeneration of the ‘Imperial race’. Sex had become the great taboo, and society was so fanatically leery of anything smacking of bodies or nudity that polite people went so far as to lap the legs of grand pianos in cloth so that they should not be seen ‘naked’. The moral code was rigid. Chastity was the ideal, the family was sacrosanct, and ‘the fallen woman’ who had been ‘seduced’ was deserving of utter contempt. The pervading omertà on all things sexual led to such incredible ignorance at all levels of society that even a learned Oxford physician could be heard to declare that ‘nine out of ten women are indifferent to sex or actively dislike it; the tenth, who enjoys it, will always be a harlot’.2 The dark complement to Victorian prudishness, however, was captured with superb imagination by Robert Louis Stevenson in his novel The Strange Case of Dr Fekyll and Mr Hyde, published in 1886. At the height of the purity campaign, London was actually an international centre of prostitution, where there were more brothels than schools. Many of these bordellos were frequented by respectable ‘gentlemen’, who, by day, were pillars of the establishment. Despite the strict ban on pre-marital sex, many middle- and upper-class boys had their first sexual experience with a female servant living in the same house.

  These were the Gothic shadows lurking behind the respectable Victorian façade – the dark milieu into which Thomas Edward Lawrence – Ned to the family – came squalling in the early hours of 16 August 1888, the son of unmarried parents who had vanished from one life to recreate themselves in another. He was born in a house called Gorphrwysa at Tremadoc on the coast of North Wales, sufficiently near to the terminus of the Dublin ferry to suggest that the Lawrences had merely settled in the first convenient place. It was characteristic of Lawrence, perhaps, that as a boy he would claim proudly to have shared his birthday with Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the great military minds of the nineteenth century – even though Napoleon had actually been born on the 15th. In later life, having become a world-famous military hero himself, though, he revised his adulation, patronizing Bonaparte as ‘a vulgar genius who did things expected by the crowd’.3

  The fear of exposure which accompanied his parents’ elopement allowed them no rest. Within a year of Lawrence’s birth they moved again, to Kircudbright on the shores of western Scotland. There followed short-term halts on the Isle of Man and at St Helier in Jersey, and a longer one at Dinard in Brittany – all of them remote from the main centres of polite society in which Thomas Chapman might have been recognized – and during this period two more sons, William and Frank, were born. At last, in spring 1894, there came a turning point. Thomas and Sarah had been together for the best part of a decade, and their assumed identities had remained intact. Moreover, their four sons – educated until then largely by governesses – were growing fast and the eldest would soon need a good school and a more settled life. First they made the heady jump to the English home counties, settling at Fawley on the shores of Southampton Water, and then, in September 1896, came their last and most decisive migration, to Oxford, where, in a spacious semi-detached house at 2 Polstead Road, there arrived after three miscarriages the final addition to the family: Arnold, the fifth son, born in 1900.

  Here they had come to stay. The new home was an Englishman’s castle – a miniature fortress of red brick, bay windows and castellations, in the best tradition of Victorian Gothic. Had it been part of an older, more established community, the Lawrences might have stood out, but the street dated only from 1890, and was consequently full of displaced people like themselves. No one – in Thomas’s lifetime anyway – seems to have suspected their secret, and as children the Lawrence boys were not affected by it. Clearly, Lawrence’s illegitimacy was not a direct source of guilt or shame at least until after his character was formed. Yet it mattered desperately to Thomas and Sarah, and their terror that it might be discovered prevented them from entering an active social life. They avoided the prim tea-parties presided over by the widows of coll
ege Fellows, whom John Betjeman described as ‘the queens of north Oxford society’4 – perhaps without any great feeling of loss, especially on Sarah’s part – and settled into a somewhat introspective and secluded life: ‘the family didn’t go about much in Oxford,’ a neighbour recalled, ‘but they had some very true friends. They were always happy [with] a lot of fun and silly jokes, but of course Mrs Lawrence managed them all.’5

  Within the home, indeed, Sarah Lawrence ‘managed them all’ with a rod of iron. She was, as a friend later observed, ‘an utterly fascinating but rather alarming person’, who exercised a relentless, obsessive control over all domestic details.6 Tiny and trim, with beautiful small hands and feet, she had rich blonde hair, penetrating methylene-blue eyes and a determined set of jaw. Her movements were precise, her speech clear and deliberate, and her bearing dignified. She looked directly at anyone who spoke to her, with a wide-eyed, slightly disarming expression, and she missed nothing. Her observations were acute and her memory prodigious. Her small figure radiated authority. She was frugal in habit, baking her own bread and feeding the family on porridge which was painstakingly prepared and left to cook slowly overnight in a leather haybox packed with straw. In her household there was only one way to do things, and that was Sarah’s way. Servants and children argued at their peril. Her kitchen lore was graven in stone: apples were never to be peeled and cored, but wiped, quartered and stewed or baked whole; leftovers must never be thrown away but added to the stockpot. Possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of plants, she would proclaim the qualities of exotic vegetables such as calabrese and butter-beans, and she was an avid gardener, tirelessly pressing seeds and cuttings on to others, and demanding to know their results with equal gusto. She read widely, spoke decent French, and wrote a fair letter in the same clean copperplate hand with which she kept her punctilious housekeeping accounts. Intelligent, opinionated, bossy, a woman who ‘seemed to know about everything’ – as one neighbour commented – she was also generous to a fault and capable of great warmth and devotion: to those she liked ‘a faithful true friend’.7 Slightly ill at ease with social superiors, she was decidedly autocratic with everyone else: ‘she fitted you into a pattern of the moment as into a delicate and important piece of machinery,’ Mrs Kennington commented, ‘and there you had no function [but that of] a cog, a tappet or a lever – as she wished, so you were. You felt the forces arrayed against you so vast should you protest, that I for one never tried … I just handed my will completely over to her.’8

  To Sarah the world was either black or white, either right or wrong – there was no room for discussion, no margin for debate. The only yardstick of morality was God’s ten commandments, the only authority the Bible. It is hardly surprising that the fundamentalist doctrine of the Evangelical Movement should have appealed to her. Her own venial sin of adultery with Thomas was a burden she would carry with her to the grave, yet her mantra ‘God hates the sin, but loves the sinner’ reminded her that redemption was possible. She glimpsed a path to redemption through the children of her sinful union, and made it her duty to rear them as immaculate soldiers for Christ. She found encouragement in Canon A. W. D. Christopher, Rector of St Aldate’s church in Pembroke Square, Oxford. It may well have been partly to join the Canon’s flock that the Lawrences had moved to Oxford in the first place, for they had heard him preach at Ryde on the Isle of Wight while living at Fawley, and had been struck by the message of love he proclaimed.

  The Canon was regarded as a saintly old man. Almost eighty years old when the Lawrences first knew him, he was renowned both for his gentleness and his enthusiasm, and for the vitality which took him out in all weathers and at any time of the night to visit the sick and the aged. Christopher’s brand of fundamentalism had developed as a reaction to the increasingly self-critical views of the Anglican High Church which, he believed, had led to the disenchantment of the poorer classes. He advocated a clear assertion of Christian principles, the literal interpretation of the Bible, and a return to the extreme orthodoxy of traditional English Protestantism. It is unlikely that the Lawrences confessed their secret to him, but it is certain that he became a very dear and influential figure in their lives. They were regular members of St Aldate’s congregation and Thomas sat on the church council, partly because of his generous donations to the collection box. Christopher was vice-president of the Church Missionary Society, and immensely proud that St Aldate’s had provided a crop of missionaries from among its own curates. Both Bob and Ned Lawrence were to become Sunday School teachers at St Aldate’s and officers in the St Aldate’s section of the Boys’ Brigade. It was Sarah’s highest ambition that they too would become missionaries, and thus redeem the unholy circumstances of their birth.

  By the time they reached Oxford, Sarah had long ago parted Thomas from the bottle and, as Sir Basil Blackwell later commented, the Lawrences had a reputation as ‘punctilious, church-going and water-drinking’ folk even by the strict standards of the day.9 Thomas’s religious convictions provided him with a degree of spiritual comfort, and he would read to the boys from a well-thumbed and annotated Bible before school every morning, and lead the domestic prayers at home on Sundays. A tall, bearded, retiring man, he made little impression on outsiders: ‘He was always friendly and charming,’ said Mrs Ballard, whose son often played with the Lawrence boys. ‘But it was Mrs Lawrence who was the leading spirit… I said to my boy once, “you talk a lot about Ma Lawrence but you don’t even [mention] Pa Lawrence.” He replied, “Oh yes, he’s just Mrs Lawrence’s husband!” ‘10 Diffident, shy, seeming to feel out of place in the genteel surroundings of Oxford, he rarely expressed his feelings. Some thought him distinguished-looking, others remembered him as a cadaverous figure on whom the clothes flapped like a scarecrow. Some believed him eccentric, idealist, or just plain barmy. Lawrence later painted a romantic picture of his father as a man ‘on the large scale, tolerant, experienced, grand, rash, humoursome … naturally lord-like’, who, before having been ‘tamed’ by Sarah, had been ‘a spend-thrift, a sportsman, a hard rider and drinker’.11 Thomas was a gentleman by profession and, despite his somewhat reduced circumstances, never needed to work. He spent his days pursuing interests such as photography, cycling, carpentry, or the study of church architecture, and occasionally yachting or potting pheasant and snipe in the New Forest, where he had taken out a shooting licence. He had plenty of spare time on his hands to teach these skills to his sons, and as a result Lawrence’s photography became technically accomplished even before he left school. Like his father, he became a devoted cyclist and waterman, a carpenter of sorts, an expert on medieval architecture, and a crack pistol shot. Thomas enjoyed the company of his sons, playing word-games with them, leafing through boys’ magazines, taking them on outings to hunt for fossils or to explore medieval ruins. But his influence was far less profound than Sarah’s. Their characters were so much in contrast that Lawrence was later to blame their ‘discordant natures’ for the demons that haunted him.12 In fact, there is little evidence of discord. By all accounts, indeed, their relationship was affectionate and the domestic atmosphere a harmonious one. Thomas’s reserved nature seems to have complemented Sarah’s more fiery spirit: peace-loving and gentle, he had consummate skills in tact, diplomacy and tolerance to impart. Lawrence’s picture of his ‘hard riding, hard-drinking’ younger days, though, was highly idealized. Thomas was essentially a submissive man, clearly dominated by Sarah, and, subconsciously, Lawrence despised his lack of authority. He would search for more powerful father-figures throughout his life, writing to one of them, Lord Tren-chard, in 1928, ‘If my father had been as big as you the world would not have had spare ears for my freakish doings.’13 Beside Sarah, Thomas remains a shadowy figure, a reformed drinker whittling out his days, ‘just sitting in his chair and smoking and perhaps reading a book’, as Mrs Ballard recalled.14

  It was, nevertheless, Thomas’s income upon which the family depended. Shortly before his second son’s birth in 1888, he had sig
ned an agreement handing over his estates in Ireland to the care of his younger brother Francis, in return for an annuity of £200. Lawrence later claimed that his parents lived in near poverty, a fiction taken up with righteous conviction by his biographer Basil Liddell Hart. In fact, with other capital, income and inheritances, the family may have had an income of up to £600 per year. This placed them fairly high up in the social scale of the day, for in 1903-4 the population of Great Britain amounted to 43 million, of whom only 5 million lived on an income of more than £160 per year. The 3 million persons with incomes of between £160 and £400 per year were described as ‘comfortably off’, while those with over £700 were said to be ‘rich’. Though for most of Lawrence’s childhood the family did not fit into this latter category, they were able to employ one or two servants and to enjoy expensive holidays every year. Lawrence’s trip to Syria in 1909, for instance, cost over £100 – a good annual wage for most Britons of the era. By any other standards than the very highest, their financial circumstances were extremely happy ones.

  Lawrence said later that he regarded his father as a friend rather than a figure of authority, suggesting an equality unusual in father-son relationships of the time. In fact, Thomas was too gentle and imaginative to administer corporal punishment to his sons, and left this task to the more resolute Sarah – an inversion of the generally accepted Victorian ethos. Reared strictly by her puritan foster-parents, she had imbibed the Biblical adage, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child; but he who loves him chastens him betimes’,15 and would administer severe thrashings to the boys’ bare buttocks for disobedience, wilfulness or dishonesty, convinced that in doing so she was perpetuating God’s will. According to the Evangelical canon, babies were born not innocent, but tainted with the sins of their forefathers: the children of adulterous parents were likely to develop a premature sensuality themselves.16 As the boys grew up, Sarah exercised a hawk-like vigilance for the appearance of such sensual traits, ready to nip them in the bud with a sound thrashing. She stood guard over her brood with the possessive greed of one who has known abandonment, distrusting women as dishonest schemers: ‘she never wanted any of the sons to marry,’ Mrs Ballard said. ‘In fact, when Arnie [the youngest son] was engaged he wrote and asked me to break it to [his] mother.’17