Report of the Forty-Fifth Meeting of the London D. H. Lawrence Group
Dudley Nichols
D.H. Lawrence: The War Years – People and Places
June 26th 2025
By Zoom
18.30-20.00 UK time
ATTENDERS
19 people attended, including, outside of England, Lee Jenkins in County Cork, Phil Bufithis in West Virginia, and Jim Phelps in Capetown
INTRODUCTION
In this illustrated talk (a development of one given to the UK D. H. Lawrence Society a year previously) Dudley Nichols explored why Lawrence and his wife Frieda lived at many different locations during the years 1914-1919. This was a frustrating time for Lawrence, trapped in England by war regulations, and short of money. He was unable to publish two of his greatest novels The Rainbow and Women in Love. However, during this time Lawrence established relationships with a range of fascinating individuals with talents in music, art and literature. This talk built on the presentation delivered to the Eastwood based UK D.H. Lawrence Society a year ago, but with some additional information included from recent research.
BIOGRAPHY
Dudley Nichols became interested in D. H. Lawrence through a family connection – his aunt was Louie Burrows who was engaged to Lawrence from December 1910 to February 1912. Although his wife Jane has been a member of the D. H. Lawrence Society since its inception over fifty years ago, Dudley has only had time to study Lawrence in depth since retiring from a career in business twenty years ago. Together, and since then, they have visited the majority of locations in the UK, Europe, USA and Australia where Lawrence and Frieda lived between 1912 and 1930.
READING
No advanced reading was required for this talk but participants were invited to examine :
The Cambridge Edition: The Letters of D.H. Lawrence ,volumes 2 and 3
D.H. Lawrence’s Nightmare, Paul Delaney
The Diaries of Lady Cynthia Asquith 1915-18
PRESENTATION
Dudley’s talk was illustrated by photos from his own travels to Lawrencian locations, and extracted striking, poignant, lesser-known details from the wealth of biographical detail that exists about Lawrence’s life in this period. Amongst the sources which had been most helpful to him, Dudley mentioned the biographies by Andrew Harrison, John Worthen, David Ellis, Mark Kinkead-Weekes’ and Paul Delaney, Edward Nehls’s composite biography, Cynthia Asquith’s wartime diaries, Frieda Lawrence and Catherine Carswell’s memoirs of Lawrence, Jane Costin’s work on Lawrence’s time in Cornwall, and Lawrence’s letters. He also made reference to Jonathan Long’s detailed paper from 2015 which can be found on the Etudes Lawrenciennes web site for those seeking further details on what Lawrence was able to publish during the war. Dudley showed particular interest in Lawrence’s ability to form contacts, and to remain part of his network despite his geographical isolation at many points during this period.
After his elopement with Frieda Weekley, and subsequent marriage to her in Kensington Registry Office in July 1914, Lawrence found himself trapped in England by the British wartime authorities which did not want him to travel with his German wife. After the publication and swift suppression of The Rainbow in 1915, he often found himself reliant on the generosity of friends, and eventually wrote several works, including the school textbook Movements in European History and Studies in Classic American Literature, principally in order to survive. Dudley described the Lawrences’ time staying near Gilbert and Mary Cannan, and John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield in the Chesham area, as a manifestation of kind of Rananim community, united in opposition to the War.
Lawrence’s getting to know Lady Ottoline Morrell drew him further into anti-War circles, which included Bertrand Russell, E. M. Forster and David Garnett. When he was staying in Greatham, Sussex, at the home of Viola Meynell, her sister Madeline and brother-in-law Percy Lucas were the models for Winifred and Egbert in ‘England, my England’, of which the publication offended the Meynell family. In the spring-summer of 1915, Ottoline, Russell, Forster, Koteliansky, Mansfield and Murry all visited him there. He then moved to 1 Byron Villas, Vale of Health, Hampstead, in order to be closer to his literary facilitators, whilst Frieda was hoping for access to her children by Ernest Weekley, who lived nearby. Dudley speculated that Mark Gertler’s most famous painting, The Merry-Go-Round, may have been based on the Hampstead Heath Easter funfair. On 9th September 1915, he witnessed Zeppelin bombs being dropped on London. By the end of 1915 he visited Ottoline (whom he later offended with Women in Love’s depiction of Hermione), and her Oxfordshire Garsington Manor, for the last time.
The Tinners Arms at Zennor, photo credit Dudley Nichols. Lawrence and Frieda stayed here for two weeks in early March 1916 while they were making their cottage at Higher Tregerthen ready for occupation.
When the Lawrences then moved to Porthcothan in Cornwall, they initially stayed at the house owned or leased by the science fiction novelist John Davys Beresford, before moving to rented cottages at Higher Tregerthen at which they carried out some significant interior painting (every place they stayed in, Dudley commented, Lawrence would transform into a home). During this period, they were again visited by friends, including Catherine Carswell, the composer Philip Heseltine/Peter Warlock and his friend Cecil Gray, Esther Andrews and Robert Mountsier, and Mansfield and Murry. The Murrys soon moved away to Mylor near Falmouth on the softer, Southern Cornish coast, put off by the bad weather, the Lawrences’ quarrels, and Lawrence’s demands on Murry for blood brotherhood. Lawrence wrote much of the final version of Women in Love in Higher Tregerthen, but the chances of its publication were reduced when Lloyd George replaced Asquith as Prime Minister in December 1916. Lawrence also became friends with the local farmer William Henry Hocking, who was included in his Christmas celebrations in 1916. Eventually the authorities, nervous about their proximity to the coast where German U-boats were passing, searched the Lawrences’ cottage and expelled them from Cornwall; Cecil Gray loaned them the money for their rail tickets to London. There they first lived with Dollie Radford in Well Walk, Hampstead, and then with the poet H. D. and her husband Richard Aldington at 44 Mecklenburgh Square, at a time when she was recovering from the stillbirth of a child. It was during this period that Lawrence began Aaron’s Rod (which he finished in Taormina, Sicily in 1921); it is also a period fictionalised in H. D.’s novel Bid Me to Live.
In December 1917 the Lawrences left London again, and stayed in Hermitage near Newbury, Berkshire (the current owner was very welcoming to the Nichols when they visited, showing them all her Lawrence books). The ten-year-old daughter of neighbours temporarily moved in with the Lawrences, and later recalled that the local boys called Lawrence ‘walking Jesus’. She was amazed at the speed with which Lawrence wrote; at the time he was writing ‘The Fox’.
The Fox Inn at Hermitage, near Newbury close to where Lawrence conceived his short story “The Fox” set at Grimsbury Farm. The Inn was well known by this name well before Lawrence and Frieda arrived in December 1917, photo credit Dudley Nichols
Next, they moved to Mountain Cottage in Derbyshire, leased by Lawrence’s younger sister Ada Clark, where Lawrence wrote Movements in European History. Two months before the end of the war he was called up for a third time, and graded unfit for combat but fit for secondary work, which he never undertook. Soon after 11th November 1918 he attended an armistice party at art collector Monty Shearman’s flat in the Adelphi and was reported by David Garnett to have said, prophetically: ‘I suppose you think the war is over and we will go back to the kind of world you lived in before it … soon war will break out again and overwhelm you … the crowd outside thinks Germany is crushed forever … whatever happens, there can be no peace on earth.’
Dudley considered Lawrence fortunate to have survived the post-War Spanish flu which killed thousands. When he was allowed to leave England, in 1919, he vowed that he would never spend any significant time in England for the rest of his life (and kept to this). Three years later he reflected on his war years in the ‘Nightmare’ chapter of his Australian novel Kangaroo. The Nichols found the war memorial opened at Thirroul on ANZAC day in 1920, which Somers and Lawrence had described sympathetically. In 1932, Richard Aldington introducing Lawrence’s Apocalypse in the form of a letter addressed to Frieda, asserted that a significant reason for The Rainbow’s suppression was Lawrence’s opposition to the War. Its suppression hurt him more than the poverty that resulted from it; indeed, his acceptance of poverty was ‘one of the sweet things about him.’
DISCUSSION
Dudley mentioned that, of the places that the Lawrences lived in or visited, they had not yet been to Ceylon or Mexico (though he recognised that today’s Oaxaca and Chapala present dangers, albeit not as great as in Lawrence’s time). Jonathan Long shared that he had recently visited Villa Fontana Vecchia in Taormina; he did not find it easy to locate, but is happy to provide guidance to anyone who would like to make the trip themselves.
Catherine Brown asked whether – given the impetus that bereavement gave to spiritualism during the War years – Lawrence was close to any spiritualists. Dudley said that he wasn’t aware of anyone, but that Lawrence’s former fiancée (and his own aunt) Louie Burrows became interested in spiritualism in later life, and met the man she was eventually to marry at a spiritualist meeting. Lee Jenkins noted that H. D. believed that she and Lawrence had a strong spiritual connection; Lawrence does not seem to have shared this intensity, though he did have a high regard for her poetry.
