Lawrence was the fourth child of Arthur Lawrence (1846-1924) and Lydia
Beardsall (1851-1910), and their first to have been born in Eastwood. Ever since their
marriage in 1875, the couple had been on the move: Arthur's job as a miner had taken them
where the best-paid work had been during the boom years of the 1870s, and they had lived
in a succession of small and recently built grimy colliery villages all over
Nottinghamshire. But when they moved to Eastwood in 1883, it was to a place where they
would remain for the rest of their lives; the move seems to have marked a watershed in
their early history. Arthur Lawrence was a butty - that is, a man responsible for the
working of a small section of coal-face along with the team of workmen he organized - and
it seems possible that when he married Lydia he had not told her that he himself worked
underground. The loss of her own family, her disillusionment with her husband, and her
anger at the ease with which - after early promises - he slipped back into the male world
of evenings spent drinking with his mates, her dissatisfaction with her own roles as wife
and mother in the succession of - to her - alien villages in which they had lived, had
created in Lydia Lawrence both depression and a great deal of anger. Finding herself
pregnant again in the early months of 1885 cannot have helped. The Victoria Street shop
had not done well (Lydia was probably not an engaging saleswoman): and a new baby born in
September 1885 - they called him Bert - she had to care for signalled, perhaps, the end of
her attempt to be independent which the shop had marked. In 1887, shortly after the family
had moved down into a larger company house in "The Breach" - and the Breach, if
well-built, was notoriously common, even by Eastwood standards - she had another baby,
Lettice Ada (1887-1948): another link in the chain she felt binding her down.
Home life for the Lawrence children became polarized between loyalty to their mother as
she struggled to do her best for them, in scrimping and saving and encouraging them in
taking their education seriously, and a rather troubled love for their father, who was
increasingly treated by his wife as a drunken ne'er do well: and who drank to escape the
tensions he (as a consequence) experienced at home.
http://mss.library.nottingham.ac.uk/dhlbiog-chp1.html
