Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (19 page)

At some point between 1878 and 1880, Thomas Chapman sought a governess for his daughters, and hired a young woman from Scotland named Sarah Lawrence. Edith Chapman’s religious zeal was increasing rapidly, and it may be that she was unwilling to hire an Irish Catholic woman. If this is the case she must have been pleased by the choice, since Sarah Lawrence was deeply religious, as firmly opposed to liquor as Mrs. Chapman herself, and a fervent Protestant. Sarah was short, energetic, intelligent, and despite a very determined jaw, quite pretty. The Chapman girls adored her, and she quickly took over managing the house as well, leaving Edith Chapman to her prayers. Thomas Chapman’s drinking (and Edith’s objection to it) had by then reached the stage where he was obliged to hide liquor bottles in odd places around the house, while his wife devoted herself, when she was not holding prayer meetings, to hunting them down and emptying them. It does not sound like a happy household, but the daughters may have been shielded from much of this—or perhaps like many people, once they grew up they remembered only the happier moments and repressed the rest.

As to why Sarah was called a governess, instead of a nanny, it is hard to say. She may have been in charge of the education, moral welfare, and upbringing of the Chapman girls, with an “Irish girl” to do the heavy work of cleaning, bathing, cooking, making beds, etc.; or perhaps calling her a governess was intended put her in a higher station than that of the rest of the servants, who were, of course Irish and Catholic. In any case, her role soon became that of governess, and in later life, when she was keeping a house of her own, her five sons would all comment on her fanatical zeal, energy, and eagle eye.

Sometime in 1885 a crisis occurred. Sarah Lawrence became pregnant and was obliged to leave in disgrace and settle in Dublin. The Chapman girls were deeply distressed and upset by her departure—the second of them, Rose, could still describe, nearly seventy years later, a spiral-shaped crystal scent bottle with a silver top which Sarah had given her on leaving, and which her mother took away from her. It is clear that there was a deep affection between the girls and Sarah. Rose would describe her years later as “so gay and pretty.”

A Catholic neighbor of the Chapmans would comment, decades later, that Edith Chapman “was the sort of woman who was terribly pious, and would go to church at all hours of the day, and then if a wretched kitchen maid got into trouble, would cast her out without a character [reference]. Where did Christianity come [into] that?” It seems likely that Edith would have been even less forgiving of a governess who became pregnant than a mere kitchen maid, but in this case there was worse to come. Several months after Sarah’s departure, a family servant happened to see Sarah and Thomas Chapman together in Dublin, and—perhaps having been jealous of Sarah’s privileged place in the household—reported the fact to Edith. After an angry confrontation, Thomas “eloped,” which is to say that he walked out of his home and his marriage and went to join Sarah, who had given birth to his child, in lodgings “over an oyster bar, near the Abbey or the Gaiety theater,” in Dublin.

The scandal was enormous—the wealthy sportsman and landowner had abandoned his wife and children for the daughters’ governess, having gotten her pregnant under his own roof, challenging every assumption of a class society: the sanctity of marriage, the place of servants, the privileges and obligations of birth and wealth—all perhaps best expressed in the words of that favorite, richly complacent Victorian hymn: “The richman in his castle, the poor man at the gate, He made them high or lowly, and ordered their estate.”

The oyster bar is a wonderful touch too, of course—there is something truly Dickensian about Chapman’s instant descent from South Hill with its eighteenth-century pillared hallway to lodgings in a back street of Dublin. A neighbor remembered that the day Chapman left South Hill he had one of his horses tacked up to take a last ride over his property at five-thirty in the morning, saying good-bye not so much to his family, perhaps, as to his land and the life of a wealthy sportsman that went with it. Despite this, one of his foxhunting companions, named Magan, commented gruffly that it was “The only sensible thing that Tommy ever did—can’t think why he didn’t do it sooner.”

Sarah Lawrence, who would present Thomas Chapman with five sons, of which T. E. Lawrence was the second, lived until 1959, dying at the age of ninety-eight. She was, even in her youth, a woman of firm principles and amazing determination. Her most famous son, T. E. Lawrence, spent a lifetime trying to fathom his relationship with his mother, and never quite succeeded. He saw in her much of himself—one friend of his (a woman) remarked, “T. E. got his firm chin and the piercing blue eyes from his mother, his strength of character and ability to martyr himself in the desert. She had those martyr qualities She forced herself.” Lawrence himself would write of Sarah, “No trust ever existed between my mother and myself…. I always felt that she was laying siege to me, and would conquer, if I left a chink unguarded.” Almost everybody who met Sarah commented on the intensity of her personality, and on her indomitable will, as well as her refusal to compromise on most moral issues.

Sarah’s unflinching sense of right and wrong and her moral certainty were no doubt made a more painful burden for her by the fact that she not only bore Thomas Chapman five illegitimate sons—for his wife would never agree to a divorce—but was illegitimate herself, as her own mother had been. Sarah was born in 1861, in the north of England; her birth name was Junner, and her mother, Elizabeth Junner, had been a servant in the household of an insurance surveyor, Thomas Lawrence, in Sunder-land, County Durham. A case has been made, very convincingly, that Sarah was the child of “Thomas Lawrence’s eldest son, John,” and this certainly does seem possible—it is a reflection of a well-known social problem during the Victorian age, when female servants were often made pregnant by the master of the house (as was the case with Sarah) or by one of his sons (as was apparently the case with her mother). Almost invariably in such circumstances, the young woman paid the price, being sacked without a letter of reference, and the illegitimate babies that resulted often ended up in orphanages.

Elizabeth Junner apparently died of alcoholism (not an uncommon fate for such women). Her daughter Sarah seems to have been taken in by a grandfather and to have spent her childhood in Spartan conditions on his farm in Perthshire, Scotland, where she had to walk six miles back and forth to school five days a week. The death of her grandmother made it necessary to place Sarah in the care of an aunt, who may have been the servant of the rector of “a low church” parish. Sarah spent several unhappy years there, subjected to a strong and unforgiving religious upbringing, apparently unalleviated by any warmth or affection. Typically of Scotland, she received a good education, however. At some point she was sent to Skye, an island of bleak and barren beauty, where she may have done housework; and at the age of eighteen she was selected by the agent for the Chapman estate, who had been searching for a reliably Protestant Scottish nanny or governess to look after the Chapmans’ daughters. Sarah shortly journeyed to Ireland to join the household at South Hills, with consequences we already know. She seems to have adopted the surname Lawrence along the way, borrowing it no doubt from whatever her mother had told her about the man who had been her father; but like her son T. E. Lawrence she changed her surname often, and on the birth certificates of her sons she is variously identified as “Sarah Chapman (formerly Laurence) [sic],” “Sarah Maden,” and “Sarah Jenner.” Some of this variation may be due to inattention or careless spelling by busy clerks, but it is still unusual, and perhaps reveals a certain anxiety about her ambiguous position as an unmarried mother.

In an age when reliable contraception was largely unavailable, illegitimacy was a widespread consequence of placing young single women as domestic employees in large households, where they were exposed to temptation and were at the mercy of their employers or older male servants; hence, the housemaid “in the family way” is a stock figure in Victorian melodrama and music hall.

Unlike her mother, Sarah Junner managed to create a better life for herself by the sheer strength of her personality and her good education. It may be that once she was fired, Thomas Chapman’s first instinct had been to keep her in lodgings in Dublin and visit her on his frequent trips there. If so, he underestimated her determination, and perhaps also the strength of his feelings for her. In the event, he continued living at home and visiting Sarah in Dublin until their son Montagu Robert (always known in the family as “Bob”) was born in December 1885. It was only then, when they were already illicit parents, that they were observed by a servant, and that Edith Chapman confronted her husband.

It is testimony to Sarah’s strength of character that Thomas Chapman not only gave up his own name but also adopted for himself what he assumed was Sarah’s surname. He did not do this by deed poll or any other legal document—he simply started calling himself Lawrence, and that was that. It is not clear whether he took the name voluntarily, or whether this was one of Edith’s demands for their separation, but in any case changing his name does not seem to have bothered him. Between Sarah’s various surnames and Thomas’s change of name, it is hardly surprising that T. E. Lawrence found it so easy to adopt different names for his own service in the army and the RAF.

In 1885 the modern need for official documents about one’s identity hardly existed. There were of course no computers, no credit cards, and no driver’s licenses; the idea of attaching a photograph to a document was still in its infancy; birth and death certificates were more likely to be kept in parish archives than in government files, and were therefore subject to the perils of poor spelling, bad handwriting, hearsay evidence, and a pious concern to tidy up the written record and gloss over small human failings among the parishioners.

Still, even under his new name, Thomas Lawrence could hardly expect to go unnoticed in a small city like Dublin in the 1880s. The scandal of his departure from home certainly was public knowledge. A shopkeeper in Delvin said many years later that from the moment of Thomas’s departure, Edith refused to “go out in society,” and fell back on the support of her numerous relatives.

Perhaps inevitably, the newly named Lawrence family soon took up a rootless and wandering existence outside Ireland, in remote places where Thomas was unlikely to be recognized. First they moved to the village of Tremadoc, in Carnarvon, North Wales, where Sarah gave birth to their second child, Thomas Edward Lawrence, on August 16, 1888; then to a house in Kirkcudbright, Scotland, where Sarah gave birth to their third son, William George, in December 1889; then briefly to the Isle of Man, then to Saint Helier in Jersey, in the Channel Islands; then to Dinard, a seaside resort in Brittany, where there were many English visitors and residents—perhaps too many, for they moved again, first to a rented house on an estate in New Forest, in Hampshire, and finally to a large, comfortable redbrick house of their own in Oxford, at 2 Polstead Road.

A photograph taken of Sarah with four of her sons (Arnold was not yet born) in the summer 1894 at Langley Lodge, in the New Forest, is interesting. First, the picture shows Sarah in an elegant ruffled blouse and a fashionably tight skirt, holding baby Frank, and makes it clear that despite giving birth to four children she still had a remarkably trim figure and a tiny waist, as well as a very pretty face. Second, the house looks rather grand, with big columns on the porch, and carefully tended greenery. The boys look healthy, are blond, and are all dressed in sailor suits, with straw hats. Next to Ned’s bare knees sits an alert small dog, apparently a terrier, its doubts about being photographed mirrored by the expression on Ned’s face. The boys’ little shoes are brightly polished—evidence, one suspects, of a nanny or maid behind the scenes hard at work. It does not look exactly like the penurious background that the grown-up T. E. Lawrence describes when writing about his childhood; and judging from the expression on Sarah’s face it rather bears out his rare, and somewhatbaffled, admiring description of his parents’ relationship as “a real love match.”

Although Thomas Chapman—now Thomas Lawrence—had left behind most of his wealth, he received a modest but comfortable yearly income, and had some limited access to capital—they were by no means penniless exiles. What is more, there was a certain pattern to their moves. All these places were near enough to Ireland to make it easy for Thomas to go back to Dublin on “family business” connected with the estate when necessary; and the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, and Dinard were well placed to give him the maximum opportunity to indulge his love of sailing. The eventual move back to England, first to a house in Hampshire, then to one in suburban Oxford, reflects both a concern that if one of their boys was born in France he would become subject to military service there, and a desire to have the boys educated at home in their own language. By the time they reached Oxford in 1896, they had four children: Bob, Ned, Bill, and Frank. (The fifth boy, Arnold, was born in Oxford in 1900. In addition, Sarah gave birth to three other sons, two stillborn and one who lived for only a few hours.)

If one reason for the deterioration of the Chapmans’ marriage was that Edith Chapman produced four girls in succession and no son, Thomas can only have been satisfied by his decision to leave her for Sarah, who bore him eight boys, of whom five lived and thrived. In fact, by all accounts, Thomas, though not an ebullient personality, seems to have become far more cheerful than he had been when he was living with Edith. He enjoyed the company of his sons, and was anything but remote or diffident where they were concerned; indeed no detail of what they were doing seems to have been too small to interest him, and his letters to them when they were older are models of a what a parent’s letters ought to be—full of practical advice and commonsense suggestions, as well as letting the boys, particularly Ned, explore their own limits without nagging or scolding. Thomas remained an enthusiastic shot, though now on a smaller scale, having given up his estates, and he taught the older boys to shoot well, although they did not share his enthusiasm for shooting gamebirds. He also taught them how to sail, enjoyed bicycling with them, conveyed to them his own skill at carpentry and photography, and imparted, at least to Ned, his interest in church architecture. In an age when upper-class parents were often distant, and left the upbringing of their children to nannies and tutors, he was quite the reverse, deeply involved in everything they did.