T.E. Lawrence: A Life
“ Who am I ?”
Lawrence was born illegitimately in Tremadoc, North Wales, on the 16th of August 1888 (his birth certificate states the 15th, but his mother always claimed it was the 16th) in a small, grey stone, detached house that is today a hostel.
Lawrence’s father was Sir Thomas Chapman, an Anglo-Irish Baronet, and his mother, Sarah Junner (sometimes known as Maden) was the family housekeeper at the Chapman home at South Hill, in County Westmeath, Ireland.
Sarah was Sir Thomas Chapman’s mistress, and a young woman with an iron will (she was known as Miss Lawrence by the staff in the Chapman household, and someone to be obeyed), and was born (also illegitimately) of a Norwegian father, John Junner, and a Scottish mother, Elizabeth Junner, in Sunderland in 1861. The couple were cousins, and the sharing of a common surname helped prevent any local scandal. After the death of her alcoholic mother, Sarah, at the age of nine, was brought up by her strict Episcopalian grandparents in Perthshire, and at their death by an aunt who was married to a very dour Episcopalian minister. It was while the minister and his wife were based in Skye that Sarah, in 1879, began to work for the Chapman family.
Thomas Robert Chapman, Lawrence’s father, was born in 1846 and came from a family that had, through ‘trade’, become wealthy landowners in Tudor…
