Lawrence
Laurence of Rome, England's Registers repeat him.
- Origin
- South West, England
- Famous bearer
- T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935), "Lawrence of Arabia", soldier and writer
- Register
- English family
CoreHistoric reach
The seat of Lawrence
Seat vacantChief
No one leads the Lawrence community yet. When the movement opens, you can stand for its leadership, or help elect whoever does.
Current mission
No shared goal set yet. Once Lawrence has leadership, it sets the public focus: a restoration, a gathering, a real-world project that helps its own.
The Lawrence clan is being rebuilt. Join the waiting list for the movement today, and you help decide who leads it and what it does.
Help rebuild the Lawrence clan →What does the Lawrence name mean?
From Laurence, Roman laurel-crowned martyr; spread by the Church.
The history of Lawrence
Lawrence of Rome roasted on a gridiron yet joked about turning, martyrdom as stand-up for the ages. Boys christened for that courage filled England's registers; Lawrence beside Laurence vowel-swaps seldom change the godfather's intent.
Champions of the Lawrence name
The bearers whose lives are inseparable from this surname. Each has its own page — biography, achievements, geography, connection to the family.
Step Into History
Walk the streets and seats the Lawrence name knew — a photoreal walk through time, on foot.
Notable bearers of the Lawrence name
- T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935), "Lawrence of Arabia", soldier and writer
- D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), novelist and poet
Stories of Lawrence
T. E. Lawrence at Aqaba
1917On the morning of the sixth of July 1917, after a 600-mile camel march across the Nefud desert from Wejh on the Red Sea coast through the eastern flank of the Hejaz, Captain T. E. Lawrence of the British liaison mission to the Arab Revolt entered the port of Aqaba at the head of a force of about two thousand bedouin under Auda abu Tayi of the Howeitat. The Turkish garrison, whose guns were sited to defend the port from the seaward side, had been taken from the desert side at Aba el Lissan two days earlier in a charge by Auda's horse. The garrison at Aqaba surrendered without firing on the British and Arab force coming down out of the hills behind them. The capture opened the Red Sea coast to British supply and turned the Arab Revolt from a Hejaz sideshow into a strategic flank of Allenby's Palestine campaign. Lawrence was twenty-eight years old. He had been on a camel for two months. He rode another four hundred miles, in the heat of July, alone with two bedouin escort, to bring the news to Allenby in Cairo.
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Lady Chatterley acquitted
1960Penguin Books published the unexpurgated text of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover in Britain on the sixteenth of August 1960. Lawrence had died in 1930. The novel had been printed in Florence in 1928 and had circulated in unexpurgated foreign editions for thirty-two years. Penguin's first British printing was 200,000 copies; not one was distributed; the firm sent twelve copies to the Director of Public Prosecutions on publication day. The DPP charged Penguin under the new Obscene Publications Act of 1959, which for the first time allowed an obscenity defence on grounds of literary merit. The trial at the Old Bailey ran from the twentieth of October to the second of November. The prosecution called no expert witnesses. The defence called thirty-five, including E. M. Forster, Richard Hoggart, the Bishop of Woolwich, and a 25-year-old Cambridge don called Helen Gardner. The jury of three women and nine men returned not guilty in three hours. Penguin sold two hundred thousand copies on the third of November and three million copies in the next twelve months. The verdict ended literary censorship in Britain.
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