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. 9Thomas’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!” ‘ 10Diffident, 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’. 11Thomas 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. 12In 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.’ 13Beside 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 signed an agreement handing over his estates in Ireland to the care of his younger brother Francis, in return for an annuity of Ј200. 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 Ј600 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 Ј160 per year. The 3 million persons with incomes of between Ј160 and Ј400 per year were described as ‘comfortably off’, while those with over Ј700 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 Ј100 – 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’, 15and 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. 16As 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