"Hon. Edward Eliot
16.VI.27
Dear Eliot,
Yes, I want to change my name formally. Will you try and do it as quietly and inexpensively as it can be done? I'd better be
Thomas Edward Shaw
in future. Of Pole Hill, Chingford, Essex, if they require an address. I'm in some doubt as to my previous name, for I've never seen my birth certificate. I fancy I was registered on 15 August, 1888 (which was not the real date however!) at Tremadoc, in Carnarvon County, N. Wales. My father and mother who were not married: - or rather he was, but not to her - called themselves Lawrence, at least from 1892 onwards. I do not know whether they did so when I was born or not. He died in 1919. She is still alive. I believe Lawrence was the name of her supposed father: but her mother (called Jenner) was not married to the original Lawrence. My father was a younger son of an Irish family called Chapman, of Killua, in Co. Meath. His own place was called Southill, also in Meath. His widow, Lady Chapman, and her daughters still live there: but Killua has been sold. Debrett, I fancy, shows him as still alive: but actually, as I say, he lived with my mother elsewhere than in Ireland, from 1885 onwards, and died in Oxford in 1919 as T. R. Lawrence. Whether he changed his name formally or not I don't know. I suppose not, or his widow would have changed too, wouldn't she? They were not divorced: there isn't much divorce in Ireland.
I suppose we were an odd family, because it never struck me to ask him the facts of the name Lawrence. His will might solve the question.
Perhaps, though, you won't require parents' names, for my deed-poll. Better not, if possible, for I don't want anyone to know about it, while my mother and step-mother are both alive. There are two or three skeletons, besides this, in the last generation's history.
Of course, if Father registered me as Chapman, that will do, and there's no need to have the intermediate stage of Shaw, between Lawrence and it: for eventually, I suppose, Chapman it will have to be. 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 father's first Irish ancestor. I have a feeling that 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. So the family looks like continuing, in the illegitimate branch!
[...]
I've tried to give you
(i) my present name and address
(ii)my name since birth
(iii)my father's name & address (he was British, & not a Free-State subject: rather a hot unionist, too!)
(iv)my mother's name
(v)my date & place of birth.
[...]
I'm an airman, now: and as 'Lawrence' was last employed in the Colonial Office as a temporary civil servant. I gave up the use of L. in August 1922.
Apologies again
Yours
T E Shaw"
From The Selected Letters by Malcolm Brown
