These were the Gothic shadows lurking behind the respectable Victorian faзade – 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 college 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.