Lawrence Stone's early life

 

Lawrence Stone’s early life

One of the slightly surprising features of the festschrift published in 1989 for Lawrence Stone on his retirement was the absence of any reference to his parents and to his early schooling. None of his former colleagues or pupils gave any information on these topics nor did Stone himself in his self-appreciation at the end of the volume.[1] But I have just come across a piece in a local history publication focused on Epsom which helps to fill in these gaps.[2] Lawrence Stone was born in 1919 and lived with his parents at No.3 Lower Court Road in Epsom, a street with solid houses  but relatively small gardens. Stone’s social origins  seem to have been lower middle class at best.



  It appears that his father, also named Lawrence, was a commercial artist in advertising and his mother, Mabel, later worked as a matron at a girls’ school in High Wycombe. Both parents were evidently living  in Leatherhead by 1934 but it is doubtful if they were together by then. Stone’s father had re-married by 1939 and died in the late-1950s or 1960s: his mother died in 1978. But there must have been money somewhere in the family since, at the age of eight, Stone went to a preparatory school and subsequently to Charterhouse before proceeding to Christ Church College in the University of Oxford. But Stone himself never elaborated on these matters.



[1] The First Modern Society. Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone. Edited by A.L.Beier, David Cannadine and James M. Rosenheim (Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, 1989) Pp.3-30, 575. Miriam Slater described him as ‘il magnifico’, the term used by his early postgraduate pupils at Princeton.

[2] By Linda Jackson In The Epsom and Ewell Explorer 2020 from which the photograph has been copied and pasted.

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