In September 1896 the Lawrence family moved into 2 Polstead Road, a substantial red-brick Victorian villa in the north of Oxford. The boys were enrolled in the fee-paying City of Oxford High School; and on May 2 1900, a fifth brother Arnold Walter (Arnie) was born.
2 Polstead Road would remain the Lawrences’ home for twenty-five years; when Sarah Lawrence sold it in the early 1920s, the family had disbursed: her husband dead from pneumonia, Will and Frank killed in the war, Bob becoming a medical missionary in China and Arnie starting his career as an archaeologist. Her second son, Ned, had just been introduced to the world as the ‘Uncrowned King of Arabia’.
