Talk:A. W. Lawrence

Avebury Trusloe

I heard that A W Lawrence bought the land at Avebury Trusloe, to the south west of Avebury, for the construction of new council housing to house the villagers removed from the village by Alexander Keiller when he started excavating there and demolishing houses within the henge. I can't find a ref to back this up - the ref from the Dictionary of Art Historians saying "In the 1930s when part of the Avebury megaliths site was threatened by development, Lawrence used his personal funds to buy the land in order to preserve it" I think is in error, muddling Keiller's purchase of the megalithic site including the henge and the West Kennet Avenue (for excavation: it was never threatened with development) with Lawrence's purchase of archaeologically "empty" land some distance away for the new housing development needed as a result of Keiller's work in the henge. The Alexander Keiller Museum at Avebury would be able to clear this up. 86.134.26.55 (talk) 07:50, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

On 21 November 1985 A.W. told me personally, in Langford, that he had "bribed" the authorities in Avebury to abandon the plan to build houses on Waden Hill and instead move the project to what is now Avebury Trusloe. He used the word "bribed" and said he had done so with 3000 pounds of Seven Pillars Royalties. Rabbit1833 (talk) 21:41, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Intro

I have removed the reference to T.E. from the introduction, because A.W. was extremely fed up with being seen by others as the brother of someone else. Rightly so, if only because he was such a great man himself. During the last six years of his life I was in close contact with him and I just knew that I could not annoy him more than by bringing up the T.E.-subject, which I never did, although he himself sometimes mentioned T.E., always briefly and more or less obliquely. In Devizes, where he spent the last four years of his life, less than half a dozen people knew that he was T.E.'s brother and they had to remain silent about it. I heard that a couple of years before his death, while visiting friends, a lady was introduced to A.W. who proudly told she was working on a paper about T.E. A.W. reacted with "Vomit! Vomit! Vomit!" During a long discussion I had with him on 22 September 1988, I expressed surprise about the huge number of books about T.E. - wouldn't just a few good ones be enough? A.W. totally agreed and said that the production of the avalanche of books about T.E. was "a complete waste of time". Rabbit1833 (talk) 21:53, 20 November 2009 (UTC) He wrote to me on 27 March 1985: "I have not set eyes on some of the (avowed) biographies & have read none completely exept Mack's, whose narrative is as nearly incontrovertible as possible (though I would not say as much for some of his interpretations). Larès, of whom I have read little, is reliable." During a meeting I had with A.W. on 17 August 1987 he told that Jeremy Wilson had just sent him drafts of the first and the last chapter of his authorized T.E.-biography, and that he found them "very good".--Rabbit1833 (talk) 21:11, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

• Despite whatever may have been AWL's feelings on the matter, the fact that he was TEL's brother is of importance, was the hook on the article's DYK, and I reinstate the fact to the opening section. Jack1956 (talk) 21:13, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
• I do not agree. It may be correct to mention TE briefly in the main article, but TE was just an unpleasant sideshow in AW's life - not TE himself of course, but all the endless consequences of TE's fame and reputation for AW's life. I strongly feel it is unfair to A.W., a great man in his own right and fully entitled to a Wikipedia entry because of his many achievements, to haunt him, even after he has gone, with his being-the-brother-of, a source of much unhappiness while he was among us.Rabbit1833 (talk) 11:07, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

I am perfectly happy with your latest addition to the article. I feel it covers both points of view fairly. I met AWL a couple of times myself when I was living in Biggleswade and the subject of TEL never came up. Now I know why. Jack1956 (talk) 11:36, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Good we reached agreement, I appreciate that! Will add more to the article later. In 1988 some discussions were going on between me and Peggy Guido (who had discussed it with A.W.) about writing an A.W. biography, but I thought it was too much work. A.W. hadn't made things easier by burning boxes full of correspondence when he moved from Bouthwaite to Langford, in 1985. I once discussed the A.W.-biography-idea with T.E.'s biographer Jeremy Wilson, who reacted with enthusiasm and said: "That would really be interesting." Hopefully someone will do it. Rabbit1833 (talk) 13:52, 23 November 2009 (UTC)