Lawrence of Arabia’s brother once lived in Langford
Arnold Walter Lawrence (2 May 1900–31 March 1991) was one of Britain’s leading authorities on classical sculpture and architecture. He was Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University in the 1940s, and in the late 1950s in Accra he founded the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board as well as the National Museum of Ghana. He was the youngest brother of T E Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’), and was his literary executor. T E’s fame was a great burden for A W, especially because most people saw A W Lawrence as the brother of someone else.
He was born in Oxford, on 2 May 1900, the youngest of five sons born to Sir Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman (1846–1919), and their mother Sarah Junner (1861–1959). The parents were unmarried and took the names ‘Thomas Robert Lawrence’ and ‘Sarah Lawrence’ to be able to raise their children together. Their second son was T E Lawrence, who later became ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. Arnold Lawrence and he were close.
The Lawrence children were brought up in Oxford by their mother, Sarah, who was very religious. This contributed to Arnold Lawrence’s outspoken anti-religious views. He once stated ‘All religion is vermin’. He attended the City of Oxford High School for Boys before joining New College, Oxford, obtaining a diploma in Classical Archaeology in 1920 and graduating with a third in literae humaniores in 1921. Classical archaeology was his second choice: the young A W Lawrence had wanted to specialise in South-American archaeology, but no British university offered courses.
Arnold Lawrence was a student at the British School at Rome in 1921 and then at the British School at Athens until 1926. In 1923 Lawrence worked on the excavation of Ur directed by Leonard Woolley, and under whom T E Lawrence had excavated at Carchemish before World War I. In 1925 Lawrence married Barbara Inness Thompson (1902–1986), with whom he had one child, Jane Helen Thera Lawrence (1926–1978).
Lawrence was the model for the statue of ‘Youth’ (1920), sculpted by Kathleen Scott, at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.
After T E Lawrence’s death, A W Lawrence promoted his older brother’s memory, collecting papers about him, and condemning any misrepresentation of his character in the press. He wrote widely on the subject of Greek architecture and sculpture as well as on fortifications in West Africa.
In 1930 he was elected to the Laurence readership in Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. In 1944 he succeeded A J B Wace as Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University and as such was elected to a Fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1951 he obtained a Leverhulme research fellowship for the study of ancient fortifications, a subject inherited from T E Lawrence.
In 1951 he resigned his post at Cambridge to become the Professor of Archaeology at the University of Ghana where he established a National Museum and was the Secretary and Conservator of the Monuments and Relics Committee. He resigned these posts in 1957 and soon after settled at Pateley Bridge in Yorkshire, later moving to Bouthwaite. Eventually, when neither he nor his wife could drive, they moved to Langford, close to where their two grandchildren were living.
There his wife died unexpectedly in 1986. In 1987–1988 Lawrence moved to the house of an old friend and fellow archaeologist in Devizes. Lawrence was a Fellow of the British Academy. He died at Devizes, Wiltshire on 31 March 1991 aged 90.
[Source: Wikipedia.