Childhood

An early photograph of Lawrence, known throughout his childhood and youth as 'Ned'

Thomas Edward Lawrence was the second of five illegitimate sons of an Anglo-Irish landowner, Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman. His mother, Sarah, had been governess to Chapman's four legitimate daughters. 

After the birth of their first child the liaison was discovered and the couple fled from Ireland. Under the alias of Mr and Mrs T R Lawrence, they went first to Wales, where Lawrence was born in 1888, and lived in Scotland, the Channel Islands, Brittany and southern England, before settling in Oxford in 1896. 

Deeply religious and conscious of their guilt, they found there a church which gave them the hope of redemption. Oxford also offered a new school of high academic quality at which their sons could be educated. Under the influence of his strong-willed mother, Lawrence, then known as Ned, was a member of the Church Lads' Brigade and was briefly a Sunday School teacher.

In this relatively stable environment the family appeared to live a normal middle-class life, though Lawrence later claimed that he knew of his parents' secret from the age of ten. The stigma of illegitimacy would trouble him all his life.