"My family isn't from Galway (we were an Elizabethan plantation from Leicestershire in Meath without one drop of Irish blood in us ever)". This was from a man known to most as Lawrence of Arabia, first World War hero and scholar and writer, in a letter to E. M. Forster correcting details written about him by Lowell Thomas, an American. To John Buchan in a letter, he expands on this: "My father's people were merchants in the Middle Ages, then squires in Leicestershire. In Tudor times they had promoted themselves to soldiering, and had married with a Devon family; by favour of one of these cousins (Sir Walter Raleigh) they got a huge grant of County Meath in Ireland from Queen Elizabeth and there they lived until the Irish Land Acts did away with most of their estate."
Elsewhere he tells that his father was a younger son of an Irish family called Chapman of Killua, in Co Meath. "His own place was called Southhill, also in Meath. There is a lot of land in that name knocking about; and I don't want to chuck it away, as Walter Raleigh, for whom I have a certain regard, gave it to my first Irish ancestor. I have a feeling it should be kept in the line. My father's death wound up the baronetcy (a union title, of all the rubbish!) and one of my brothers is breeding heirs." This letter was to the trustees of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom being the author's great book of his wartime experiences of the Middle East. Why all this detail? Well, a copy of the first edition of the book published for general circulation in 1935 was recently listed in the regular catalogue of Greene's Bookshop of Clare Street in Dublin. (The book is gone now.)
Much argument about the Lawrence/ Chapman name. Briefly, Chapman sired four daughters by his wife, then went off to Wales and England with the governess, by whom he had five sons. T.E. or Ned was the second. Some doubts about why or how Chapman took the name Lawrence. These letters were written in the middle-to-late Twenties, but in 1932 W. B. Yeats wrote to him informing him that he had been nominated to the new Irish Academy of Letters by virtue of being the son of an Irishman. Lawrence wrote to his good friend Charlotte Shaw (wife of GBS) and asked her to reply for him, he hadn't thought himself regarded as a writer. She did so.
The reply came: "Your acceptance of our nomination has given me great pleasure, for you are among my chief of men, being one of the few charming and gallant figures of our time and as considerable in intellect as in gallantry and charm. I thank you, yours W. B. Yeats." All these quotations from The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, selected by Malcolm Brown, Dent, 1988.