Brief History of Lawrence Schools

The link below is to an article of Old Lawrencian Joseph Thomas

A Brief History of Lawrence Schools by Joseph Thomas

Let me begin by congratulating Joseph Thomas who graduated from the school in 1957, a year before I joined as a 6 year old. His achievements in life are outstanding. Sadly, I have never had the pleasure of meeting him. I would also like to congratulate his son Ranjith for following in his father’s footsteps. Alas, by the time Ranjith joined school, I had left! I would like to acknowledge Joseph Thomas’ goodwill and good intent in composing the piece above.

My various Pages will, however, not take the rose tinted view of the School that Joseph Thomas has taken. I would urge readers to view, among others the following of my Pages:

1. Lawrence Schools – a questionable foundation
2. Lady Honoria Lawrence
3. First War of Independence and aftermath

• Lawrence Schools were not founded as schools, they were founded as asylums. An asylum is defined as a safe or inviolable place of refuge especially as offered by the CHRISTIAN Church.
• Sir Henry specified that only children, both of whose parents were Europeans could be accepted. Thus, not even Anglo-Indians were accepted.
• Sir Henry preferred Protestants but accepted Catholics on sufferance
• Sir Henry was not the benevolent soldier/statesman he is made out to be. He was an employee of a disreputable joint stock company East India Company
• The highlight of Sir Henry’s career was his stint as a Revenue Surveyor. The very nature of his job was to extort taxes which is what Revenue Survey is all about. All that followed was as a result in extorting taxes.
• Sir Henry was prepared to use force to extort taxes notwithstanding the inability of the poorest of the poor to pay. Here are his direct quotes: “bayonets and red coats” remain essential, and he asks rhetorically, “how could any Government, however beneficent, subsist for a day simply by its civil policy on the ruins of such a tempest-tost land? How in a day convert tribes who have lived only by war to habits of peace; how make cultivators, who for centuries have never paid a rupee, but under fear of the sword or the scourge — how induce them to pay their dues, unless they know that the civil officer has the power of calling in the military : and that the latter is prompt and bold? In other words, Lawrence went about his job of exacting taxes knowing that he had military backing to exact such taxes. and “In 1844, while serving as Resident in Nepal, he [Lawrence] wrote the first of a number of anonymous articles for the Calcutta Review that advocated sweeping military reform. Entitled ‘Military Defence and our Indian Empire’, it declared his belief that the British deceived themselves if they thought that their government was “maintained otherwise than by the sword”. It was necessary, therefore, to keep that sword from rusting. Not least because, in his opinion, the greatest threat to British rule “is from our own troops” and the recruitment policy of the Bengal Army was partly to blame.
• Joseph Thomas refers to the House names at Sanawar. A reference to the original names would have given a truer History. These names are: Lawrence, Nicholson, Roberts, Hodson, Havelock and Edwards. All of these characters were part of the same establishment as Lawrence and played their parts in the so called Mutiny and the shameful savage aftermath. Please see my Page First War of Independence and aftermath. I cannot emphasise enough the words ‘shameful savage’.
• I would urge readers not to view Lady Honoria Lawrence as worthy of respect. Far from it. Please see my Page Lady Honoria Lawrence.