Dudley Nichols<\/p>\n
Lawrencian Locations<\/p>\n
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Thursday 27th<\/sup> February 2020<\/p>\n <\/p>\n New College of the Humanities, 19 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3HH<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 6.30-8.30 pm<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n ATTENDERS<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Liza Belozerova<\/p>\n Catherine Brown<\/p>\n Jane Costin<\/p>\n Alex Korda<\/p>\n Pat Korda<\/p>\n Dudley Nichols<\/p>\n Jane Nichols<\/p>\n Anthony Pacitto<\/p>\n Sue Reid<\/p>\n Hugh Stevens<\/p>\n Nahla Torbay<\/p>\n Colin Yeates<\/p>\n Alexander Vasilkov<\/p>\n <\/p>\n THE PRESENTATION<\/p>\n Dudley\u2019s presentation took around ninety minutes, and was followed by questions. It centred on a Powerpoint presentation of over a hundred photographs taken by himself and his wife Jane of locations known to Lawrence between 1905 and his death, as visited by the Nichols over the past fifteen to twenty years. His accompanying commentary was based on the more than five and a half thousand extant Lawrence letters, Twilight in Italy<\/em>, autobiographies of various people who met Lawrence, and the papers of his Aunt Louie Burrows (1888-1962), who was engaged to Lawrence between November 1910 and February 1912. They had met at the pupil-teacher centre at Ilkeston, after which she became the headmistress of several Leicestershire primary schools. The presentation both opened and closed with discussion of her relationship to Lawrence; otherwise, it moved chronologically through Lawrence\u2019s adult life. It underscored Lawrence\u2019s restless energy for travel, finding new accommodation, and moving on again – despite all the greater arduousness of travel (especially when on a shoestring) of his day. It also struck me in what modest dwellings in what extraordinary locations with what extraordinary people Lawrence spent his life.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Early photos included ones of St. Catherine\u2019s Church, Cossall:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n St. Catherine\u2019s Church, Cossall<\/p>\n <\/p>\n the Cossethay of The Rainbow<\/em> – and the neighbouring Church Cottage where Will and Anna Brangwen lived:<\/p>\n Church Cottage, Cossall<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Dudley revealed the extent to which his own Grandfather, Alfred Burrows, was the model for Will Brangwen. He had lived in Church Cottage, and loved and tended the Church where he was choir master. These altar carvings were done by him:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Carvings at St. Catherine\u2019s Church, Cossall<\/p>\n <\/p>\n He and his wife also donated a window to this church:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n He was a lace designer, and teacher of arts and crafts in Leicestershire schools. Louie, born in 1888, was the oldest of his eight children; Dudley\u2019s mother was born in 1903. Louie recalls that in 1906 or 1907 Alan Chambers and \u2018Bert\u2019 (as she always called him) \u2018rode over one evening to borrow the carving tools\u2019 from her father.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n She also recalls a disagreement between her father and Bert about cathedrals and evensong. Against Bert, her father defended \u2018all Anglican dogma and practice\u2019. This recalls the disputes between Will and Anna Brangwen in The Rainbow<\/em>. Eventually in 1908 the family moved to a new and larger house in Quorndon, a village to the South, just as the Brangwens also size-up between The Rainbow <\/em>and Women in Love<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We saw The Cearne home of Edward and Constance Garnett, which stands close to where the Nichols now live. Lawrence stayed here for the first time in 1911 (during which he caught the pneumonia from which he nearly died) and again in 1913 (when he brought his new German lover Frieda). Our planned meeting of June 25th<\/sup> 2020 was to be a visit there, but due to coronavirus this is now postponed until summer 2021.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n In January 1912 he went to recuperate from his pneumonia in Bournemouth, and wrote to his fianc\u00e9e Louie Burrows (on 10th<\/sup> January) about \u2018a wonderfully fine church\u2019 – Christchurch Priory. Ten days later he urged again: \u2018You must go there some time\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Early in February he returned to stay with the Garnetts, and broke off his engagement on 4th<\/sup> February 1912 by letter. Dudley speculates on two possible factors behind this change of heart \u2013 the effects of his profound illness, and the example of the unconventional society and open marriage which he encountered at the Garnetts, which conflicted with Louie\u2019s more traditional principles. He signed his letter \u2018D.H. Lawrence\u2019- his pen-name \u2013 though John Worthen, when once asked by Dudley at a conference why Lawrence sometimes used this and sometimes used ‘DHL’ as a letter sign-off, denied that there was necessarily any significance his choices, since the length of his sign-offs could depend simply on how much remaining paper he had available.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Nichols have made their own Alpine walks in the footsteps of those made by Lawrence and Frieda in the summer of 1912. Dudley pointed out the subsequent changes to what would have seemed unchangeable to them then. The Pfitzer Joch which now marks the boundary between Austria and Italy was then well within the Austrian Empire. The Zillertal (as Dudley showed us on a contemporary postcard) contained a glacier then, but a lake now.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A propos of the Lawrences\u2019 move to Cornwall in 1915 , Dudley reminded us that Lawrence had written to Truro, Cornwall, for an application form for a teaching job whilst he was a teacher in Croydon. He was hoping that Louie would join him there if he got the job. This indicates that he may have had a hankering for Cornwall well before he actually moved there.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Dudley\u2019s photo of the buildings which Lawrence rented at Higher Tregerthen clearly shows the \u2018tower\u2019 (the square raised part of the building closest to the camera in the photograph below). This was in a building which Lawrence initially rented for the use of friends – their own cottage being just to the right of it below – but he ended up using the tower to write in. It was there that he wrote much of Women in Love<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The cottages which Lawrence rented in Higher Tregerthen<\/p>\n <\/p>\n After the War the Lawrences resumed their travels. They had a period in Taormina, Sicily, made a visit to Sardinia which Adam Lang was due to tell us about in the meeting of 24th<\/sup> April 2020, which has now been postponed due to coronavirus\u2019 and Lawrence spent around a month in Florence (where he had a brief relationship with Rosalind Baynes) whilst Frieda was visiting her mother at Ludwig Wilhelm Stift in Baden-Baden:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ludwig Wilhelm Stift, Baden-Baden<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Lawrences then went further afield – to Ceylon and then Australia:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thirroul, Australia, looking South<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Lawrence wrote to his Schwiegermutter <\/em>Baroness Anna von Richthofen on the 9th June 1922 from Thirroul as follows (translated from the German):<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018We bathe at midday, when the sun is very warm, and the beach quite, quite lonely: only the waves. \u2013 [\u2026] And sky and earth so new, as if nobody had yet taken one breath from it, set one foot on it. The great spiritual freight that weighs so heavily in Europe doesn\u2019t even exist here. One feels somewhat like a child that has no real cares.\u2019 [The Lawrence Letters<\/em>, Cambridge University Press, volume IV, p. 256]<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Those of us who will be going to Taos for the 14th<\/sup> International D. H. Lawrence Conference next July (the 2020 conference having been postponed by a year due to coronavirus) were given a foretaste of the place from Dudley\u2019s 1990 photo of the Kiowa Ranch, seventeen miles outside Taos.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Dudley helpfully classified Lawrence\u2019s times in\/near Taos as three, between autumn 1922 and autumn 1925, during which who period he was there only about half the time.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In his first stay, of September 1922-March 1923, he met Mabel Dodge Luhan, and helped her to write political tracts in defence of Indians. He and Frieda survived a winter at 8,500 feet (2,590 m) at the Del Monte Ranch.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In Spring 1923 they then went to Chapala, Mexico, for the summer. From there they went to New York, and Frieda returned to Europe whilst Lawrence travelled down the West Coast of America to Mexico. He then returned to London and had the \u2018last supper\u2019 at the Caf\u00e9 Royal.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n During his second stay, from March to October 1924, Lawrence had a very productive summer at the ranch at Kiowa (given by Mabel Dodge Luhan to Frieda not Lawrence, as he did not want to own real estate). There he wrote St Mawr<\/em>, The Princess<\/em>, and The Woman Who Rode Away<\/em>. In the winter of 1924 he returned to Oaxaca, Mexico.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Kiowa Ranch<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n His third stay in Taos, from spring 1925, allowed him to recover his health after a serious illness. He spent the summer recovering, and that autumn he and Frieda returned to Europe for good.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Villa Mirenda, near Florence<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Of the Villa Mirenda Lawrence wrote to Dorothy Brett on 13th<\/sup> May 1926:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018We\u2019ve taken the top half of this old villa out in the country about seven miles from Florence – crowning a little hilltop in the Tuscan style. Since the rent is only 3,000 Liras for a year – which is twenty-five pounds – I took the place for a year. Even if we go away, we can always keep it as a pied \u00e0 terre and let friends live in it. It is nice – looking far out over the Arno valley – and very nice country, real country, pine woods, around.\u2019<\/p>\n [The Lawrence Letters<\/em>, Cambridge University Press, volume V, p. 453]<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It was there that he took up painting. Dudley told us that Louie thought that the woman depicted in \u2018The Holy Family\u2019 was like her, because he had captured her head shape and facial features:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018The Holy Family\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Chapel at Taos<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Dudley made a coda regarding Christchurch Priory, Bournemouth, about which Lawrence in 1912 had twice written to Louie, encouraging her to visit it. In 1941 Louie, aged 52, was married for the first time to a widower named Frederick Seward-Heath (1885-1968). They were both spiritualists and had met at a s\u00e9ance; he was trying to contact his dead wife; Dudley speculated that she might have been trying to get in contact with Lawrence, who by then had been dead for ten years. She retired from teaching in 1941. In 1962 she decided to go to Bournemouth in order to recuperate from a heart problem. It was on that visit that she finally visited Christchurch Priory. Having seen it she returned to her hotel, and, whilst getting ready for dinner, collapsed and died.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Christchurch Priory, Bournemouth<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Dudley finished by reading out the last letter that Lawrence wrote to Louie, in 1912: \u2018you always treated me really well\u2026the wrong was all on my side.\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n He handed round Jon Turner\u2019s book on Louie Burrows, which is available here<\/a> from Reprint UK: Louie Burrows: Her Remarkable Midlands Life.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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Window in St. Catherine\u2019s Church, Cossall, donated by Alfred and Louisa Ann Burrows, 1947<\/p>\n
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