David Herbert Richards Lawrence was born on September 11th, 1885, in the mining village of Eastwood, just north of Nottingham, which, like Zennor, honours its most famous son in something of a restrained fashion. He was the fourth child of cousins, Arthur Lawrence and Lydia Beardsall, who’d married ten years previously.

The tall, fully bearded Arthur Lawrence, was a hard working miner (he was actually a team leader with six men working under him), and Lydia a forthright former school teacher who constantly criticised Arthur’s heavy drinking, and what she saw as his uncouth habits and bad language. Nonetheless Arthur was a good provider who was only driven to verbal retaliation. There can be no doubt that his was greatly hurt by the way Lydia turned David against him.

But the young David observed well, and the couple’s difficult relationship ( and the relationship between the mother and son) is explored in all its emotional tension, and rawness, in the his magnificent novel, Sons and Lovers, and in his unforgiving play, A Collier’s Friday Night where, in an early scene, the married couple have been arguing over the merits of serving rice pudding:

FATHER (Shouting): You’re a liar, you’re a liar! A Man comes home after a hard day’s work to folks as never a word to say to ‘im, as shuts up the minute ‘e enters the house, as ‘ates the sight of ‘im as soon as ‘e comes in tha room!

MOTHER(With firmness): We’ve had quite enough, we’ve had quite enough! Our Ernest’ll be in in a minute and we’re not going to have this row going on; he’s coming home all the way from Derby, trailing from college to a house like this, tired out with study and all this journey: we’re not going to have it, I tell you.

This is writing that forshadows the gritty dramas of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the novels of Stan Barstow, Alan Sillitoe, and the novels and plays of David Storey.

Although an unhealthy child, who was constantly bullied at school, Lawrence nonetheless gained a teaching certificate from University College, Nottingham, and began his teaching career in Croydon. But his heart and TB infected lungs were not in it.

The gangling, re-headed Lawrence desperately wanted to be a writer, and sought advice and help wherever he could find it, which, in the early days was at Haggs Farm, on the outskirts of Eastwood. The farm was the home of Jessie Chambers, the well educated daughter of tenant farmer, Edmund Chambers. And Jessie gave Lawrence huge encouragement (she may also have been his first lover), and endless lists of books she insisted he must read. Jessie reappears throughout Lawrence’s fiction, perhaps most obviously in such early novels as The White Peacock (1911), The Trespasser (1912), and again, as Miriam, in Sons and Lovers (1913).

When not at Haggs Farm Lawrence also sought the advice of his old English professor, Ernest Weekley, and it was in the professor’s home, in 1911, the the aspiring writer not only found literary inspiration, but also the love of his life: Professor Weekley’s German wife, Frieda.

To Be Continued…