Henry Montgomery Lawrence

Brigadier-General Sir Henry Montgomery Lawrence KCB (28 June 18064 July 1857) was a British military officer, surveyor, administrator and statesman in British India. He is best known for leading a group of administrators in the Punjab affectionately known as Henry Lawrence's "Young Men", as the founder of the Lawrence Military Asylums and for his death at the Siege of Lucknow during the Indian Rebellion. Background Lawrence was born in June 1806 into an Ulster-Scots family at Matara in Ceylon. Both his parents were from Ulster, the northern province of Ireland. His mother Letitia was the daughter of the Rev. George Knox from County Donegal, while his father, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander William Lawrence, was born the son of a mill owner from Coleraine, County Londonderry, entered the service of the British Army and achieved distinction at the 1799 Siege of Seringapatnam. The Lawrences had seven sons, the first died in infancy and the fifth at the age of eighteen. The remaining five all achieved distinction in India; of them Sir George Lawrence and Lord Lawrence would achieve particular fame. In 1812, Lawrence, along with his elder brothers Alexander and George, was sent to Foyle College in Derry, a city in Ulster, where their uncle Rev. James Knox was headmaster. In 1818 he rejoined his parents in Bristol where they had since settled, and completed his schooling there. In August 1820 he again followed his elder brothers by entering the East India Company Military Seminary in Addiscombe, Surrey. (His father, having felt slighted by the lack of recognition afforded to him for his service in the British Army, encouraged his sons to instead enter the service of the East India Company in India.) Whilst at the seminary, he was saved from drowning by a fellow cadet Robert Guthrie MacGregor. On another occasion, he developed sympathy for a lady in poverty, and begged old clothes from his family which he then carried to her through the streets of London. That same lady would be remembered in his will some thirty-five years later. Contemporaries in his class at Addiscombe included Sir Frederick Abbott. Early career On passing out from Addiscombe in 1822 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Bengal Artillery, arriving in India the following year. He was based at the Calcutta suburb of Dum Dum, where Henry Havelock was also stationed about the same time.