Lawrence of Oxford

Welcome to Oxford, the city of dreaming spires.

Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman, seventh heir to the Chapman baronetcy, and Sarah Maden or Junner, the Chapman household's nursery governess, fell in love, and when their secret was discovered, they left Ireland and Chapman's wife and four daughters in something of a hurry, taking with them their illegitimate first-born son, Montague Robert.

Over the next few years they lived an appropriately nomadic life, settling for varying lengths of time in Wales, Scotland, Dinard in northern France, Jersey, the Isle of Wight, and the New Forest area of southern England. But after eight years the metamorphosis was complete, and it was as Mr and Mrs Thomas Lawrence, with a family of by then four boys - Bob [Montague Robert], Ned (Thomas Edward], Will and Frank - that they arrived in Oxford in the autumn of 1896.

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