| Description | Work completed by volunteer includes the following information:
Lawrence was born in Beverley in either 1876 or 1878 but was baptised at St Mary’s on 2 Oct 1881. He was one of four children born to Bridlington born John Robert Scrivener (1850-1897) and his locally born wife Anna (nee Mason) (1854-1906). John was a butcher, and the family business would pass to Lawrence’s elder brother John William, born in Beverley in 1875. Lawrence was brought up in Duffill’s Yard, Eastgate and later at 20 Eastgate where the family business was situated. By the time of the war Lawrence was lodging with his sister and her family at 8 Albert Terrace and working as a butcher at 5 Saturday Market. He was unmarried.
Lawrence enlisted in the army at Hull on 26 Apr 1915. He became a private in the Army Service Corps whose role was to support and supply the front-line troops. Lawrence’s skills as a butcher were tested at Aldershot in May 1915 and he may have served as a butcher though his army number suggests that he may have been involved in transportation. Lawrence left the UK for Egypt on 1 Jun 1915, and served in the Gallipoli Campaign where allied forces attempted to capture a peninsula controlling access to Turkey, the Straits and the Black Sea. Lawrence’s precise role there is not clear in his army records. Having contracted enteric fever (typhoid) he was sent back to Alexandria in Egypt in Nov 1915 and then returned to a hospital in Manchester on the hospital ship, S S Dover Castle. In May 1916 he was released from a convalescence home in Rochdale and returned to Beverley on six weeks leave.
On 26 Jun 1916, Lawrence’s body was found hanging from a beam in a hayloft in Lawton’s Yard on Wood Lane. An inquest was told that Lawrence had been due to return to the army at Catterick on 23 Jun and doctor concluded that he had taken his own life on this day. It was noted that "he had been very low since he came home”. The Coroner’s Jury concluded that the cause of death was “suicide by hanging being of unsound mind at the time”.
Lawrence was buried in St Mary’s Cemetery and in Nov 2023 an official war grave memorial headstone was put in place there by the CWGC. He is commemorated on the Hengate Memorial and on the Brookwood 1914-18 Memorial but not on the East Riding Memorial in the Minster. He was awarded the War and Victory Medals and the 1915 Star. |