User:Carbon Caryatid/Lawrence family

Here are some rough notes to be used for an article on the Lawrence family, influential in Unitarianism in England in the C19. Several were Liberal politicians, usually in London; the family money came from construction. Some of this info comes from thepeerage.com, and I'm not sure if that is to a high enough standard for Wikipedia. What is below is copied fairly directly and would need more rewriting.

The founder of the family, for our purposes, is William Lawrence, born 4 February 1789. He was the son of Thomas Lawrence and Mary Tonkin. He married Jane Clarke, daughter of James Clarke, on 21 September 1817. He died on 25 November 1855 at age 66, having held various posts: Justice of the Peace (J.P.) for Middlesex, and for the City of Westminster; Alderman of London in 1848; Sheriff of London and Middlesex between 1848 and 1849. He lived at Tavistock Square.

Children

William and Jane had ten children, but remarkably only two gave them grandchildren.

• Sir William Lawrence was born 2 Sep 1818, just a year after the marriage. He is WP:NOTABLE as a politician, having held many of the same offices as his father, and also serving on the national stage. He was Deputy Lieutenant (D.L.) of London; Alderman of London in 1855, the year his father died; Sheriff of London and Middlesex between 1857 and 1858; Lord Mayor of London between 1863 and 1864; Member of Parliament (M.P.) for London between 1865 - 1874 and 1880 - 1885. If the WP entry (which has four sources, none of which I've checked yet) is correct, "He was a builder in London and a partner in the firm of William Lawrence and Sons Builders." He had no children, so the business must have been one set up by his father, who had them in Victorian abundance. It's not clear to me how he got his knighthood; is it almost automatic after, or just before, serving as Lord Mayor? He never married, and died 18 Apr 1897.

• The second son was Sir James Clarke Lawrence, 1st and last Bt. b. 1 Sep 1820, d. 21 May 1897. He followed in his father's footsteps, holding the office of Justice of the Peace (J.P.) for Surrey; Alderman of London in 1860; Justice of the Peace (J.P.) for Middlesex, and for the City of Westminster; Sheriff of London and Middlesex in 1862; Lord Mayor of London between 1868 and 1869; Member of Parliament (M.P.) for Lambeth between 1868 - 1885. He was created 1st Baronet Lawrence on 16 December 1869. On his death, his baronetcy became extinct. In his late 60s he decided to marry, and chose a woman whose birth date I do not have access to, but who survived to 1944. I think we can assume that Agnes Harriette Castle was significantly younger than her 67 year old groom. They married in 1887 and had one child, born 11 Dec 1889 and christened Theodora Agnes Clarke Lawrence. That makes Sir James 69 when she was born; she would have been 8 years old when she lost her father. In 1914 she changed her name to Theodora Agnes Clarke Durning-Lawrence.

• The third child was Jane Lawrence b. 10 Sep 1822, d. 2 May 1897. She lived 74 years and never married. These first three children were the only ones, aside from the youngest sibling, to live into old age.

• The babies are coming about every two years. The next one, Alfred Lawrence, dies at a year old. ( b. 29 Oct 1824, d. Nov 1825.) By this point the mother is pregnant again, and names the resulting baby after his just-dead sibling. Ah, those Victorians!

• The second version of Alfred Lawrence was born 19 June 1826 and died 9 Jun 1875, aged 48. He was the first child to marry, wedding Mary Elizabeth Ridge in 1858, when he was only 22. He was a Commissioner of Lieutenancy for London and lived at 2 Gloucester Gardens, Bayswater, and by the time his son registered at Cambridge, at Lancaster Gate.
  • He was the only one of the brood who had a large family; theirs may have been cut off by his untimely death at age 48, when his youngest child was 3. The eldest was Henry Lawrence, then three girls, Ellen Mary, Annie Jane, and Caroline Aspland Lawrence, and finally Frederick, later known as Frederick William Pethick-Lawrence, 1st and last Baron Pethick-Lawrence, b. 28 Dec 1871, d. 10 Sep 1961. More on him later. (No more news of the first four, but presumably born from 1860 onwards every couple of years.)

• Two years later, on 4 Apr 1828, along comes Frederick Lawrence. He dies 31 May 1864, age 36, unmarried. Presumably his elder brother Alfred named his younger son Frederick, born 1871, after him.

• Then a sixth son, seventh child, who dies within weeks: Joseph Lawrence b. 9 Apr 1830, d. 30 Apr 1830. Even London's wealthy cannot protect themselves entirely from the diseases of filth and ignorance that surround them. Or were the babies congenitally weak?

• Then on 6 Aug 1832 a second girl to join her elder sister: Emma Lawrence. She died unmarried aged 41, on 4 Feb 1874, and her mother died ten days later.

• The final daughter: Caroline Lawrence, b. 11 Dec 1834, d. 24 Jun 1853, age 18, unmarried of course.

• And the baby of the family, the lucky seventh son, Edwin, b. 2 Feb 1837, who lived into old age. More on him later.

The older generation

The mater familias, Jane Clarke Lawrence, had had 20 years of pregnancy, childbirth, and (presumably) breast-feeding. There may have been miscarriages, and possibly stillbirths, or babies who died too soon after birth to have been christened; the spacing of the live births is about every 20 to 28 months, and the larger gap would allow for another pregnancy. Chloroform was not available in England until much later. (Queen Victoria famously made it respectable in 1853, with her eighth confinement.)

The pater familias, William Lawrence, died in 1855, so he would have seen the death of two babies and one daughter on the verge of adulthood. None of his children had married by the time he died, aged 66.

By the time Jane died in 1874, another adult daughter had preceded her to the grave. This was a mere ten days before her own death: an epidemic, perhaps? Contagion in the house? Another adult son followed her the next year. A brood of ten children begins to look like self-protection, not excess, when they drop at this rate. Neither of them could have imagined that James would marry in 1887, aged 67, and produce a child, but Jane had at least had the satisfaction of seeing Alfred marry in 1858 and give her five grandchildren in a dozen years. They must have been the apples of her eyes.

Individuals of interest

So we are left with a few individuals of interest: the two elder brothers, William and James have brief articles. Alfred Lawrence seems minimally notable, as a Commissioner of Lieutenancy for London. His son Frederick William Pethick-Lawrence has a better article, but it doesn't mention these familial links.

James's only child changed her name to Theodora Agnes Clarke Durning-Lawrence in 1914, aged 25. She appears to have been adopted in some sense by her childless uncle Edwin Durning-Lawrence and his wife, who had taken that name in 1898. She lived with them: "The house at no. 13 Carlton House Terrace, occupied during the 1840s by Gladstone, in which the Durning-Lawrences and their niece Theodora Durning-Lawrence had resided since early 1896, had never been cheap... In 1931 Theodora decided to vacate the property" for financial reasons. [1] She was active in the settlement movement, as were many of her extended family. (Theodora's father died when she was 8, but her mother Agnes Harriette Castle lived for almost half a century more. Was she unable to take care of her daughter?)

Back to the youngest of the ten, Edwin. Apparently he attended University College School from 1847 - 1852. He graduated from London University first with a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) and then a Bachelor of Law (LL.B.). He was admitted to Middle Temple in 1867 entitled to practice as a Barrister-at-Law. He held the office of Justice of the Peace (J.P.) for Berkshire, and Member of Parliament (M.P.) for Truro 1895 - 1906. He married Edith Jane Smith, daughter and co-heiress of politician John Benjamin Smith and his wife Jemima Durning, on 11 June 1874, only a few months after the death of his mother and sister -- how does that square with Victorian mourning protocol? Four years after their marriage Edith gave birth to an infant that survived only two days, and that was the end of any hopes of children. A generation later, on 2 February 1898, he changed his name to include that of her maternal grandfather, becoming by royal licence (posher than deed poll, or just its predecessor?) Edwin Durning-Lawrence. This may have been with the knowledge that he was to be created 1st Baronet Durning-Lawrence, of King's Ride, Ascot, Berkshire, the following month, on 11 March 1898, so he must have done something of interest to the authorities. In 1901 he made a generous donation to the V&A of 13 paintings (numbers 620 to 633-1901). He was a noted Baconian, being president of its society 1911-1912; his widow, who lived to 1929, donated his books - about 5750 of them - and money, to University College London, where a room and a professorship are named after him. This collection extended to a wide and valuable collection of Bibles. His baronetcy became extinct on his death, 21 April 1914 at age 77. A newsletter describes him as one of the founding members of Kensington Unitarian Church, in facilitating the move from Essex Street to Notting Hill, confirmed in the 1987 centenary history of KUC. (He and James bought the Kensington land for £5000 and donated it.) In 1888 he and his wife were noted as providing the Sunday School with a treat, i.e. an outing, around the time the congregation was moving. His funeral was taken by Rev. Alexander Gordon, a prolific biographer, whom his widow commissioned to write a eulogistic family history.

There is one intriguing and one sad parallel between this uncle and nephew. Both changed their names to acknowledge their wives -- very unusual. Both had one baby that died almost immediately, and had to accept that their wives could not bear more pregnancies.

Legacy

Adjacent to Essex Hall, the central London headquarters of British Unitarians, was a house that was purchased and donated to the organisation. In WWI and beyond it was operated as a simple hotel/hostel for (military) men passing through. It was given the name of Lawrence House.

Sources

Here are a few items about Edwin:

• "Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence: A Baconian and his Books" by K. E. ATTAR [2]
• "Beyond Baconian Boundaries: Bibles in the Durning-Lawrence Library" [3]
• Peerage.com