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Recording the idiosyncrasies Personal archives often reflect the recorded evidence of the activity of their creators, in the same way as collections of organisations do (respect des fonds) as well as the history of the owner- ship of the records (provenance). One critically important aspect of person- al archives, in which they differ from institutional and corporate archives, is the documentation of the personal and professional activities of individuals, whereas in personal archives, what is also recorded is the individual, the idio- syncratic, the singular views of people as they do the things that they do and comment on them. They also contain traces of the characters of their creators, and glimpses of their professionalism, an outer manifestation of their inner souls.1


Lawrence was once described as “the least pushy or self-publicising of men... with a voice that was classless in the best possible way, a judgement that was shrewd and always scrupulously well in- formed.2


A BBC man of the Old School – courtly, cultured, gentle and polite,3 his journalistic temperament was humanistic and personal. While many other reporters made a name for them- selves by exposing graft and righting institutional wrongs, Lawrence quietly went about his business, reporting the dramas of real people in human terms. He once wrote ‘an important part of a foreign correspondent’s job is to find out what the local people think.” In 1953 Lawrence produced a report titled A Subaltern’s Life in Korea:


“It was a personal sadness to me when man after man left on demobili- sation, and when, ultimately, the pla- toon was disbanded and its members sent to other companies to training recruits. Human nature lends itself to the building up of morale, all but a very few men possess patent attach-


June 2023


Anthony Lawrence – Foreign Correspondent.


ment or an enthusiasm for something or someone, right or wrong.”


His report titled War in South Vietnam, dated 6 April 1961, described not only horrific scenes of conflict but the reality and brutality of human nature:


“Saigon the capital is a place of broad boulevards with high trees shading the cafes and the flower stalls, and great white buildings dreaming in the sun… it’s a place for legends and idleness… but the sad thing is, how quickly these impressions fade, once you get past the guidebook and find to your surprise and horror that this country is deep in a war, and that everyday people are being killed, and that hardly a night passes without the scream of mortar fire and the rattle of small arms.”


In his report titled Vietnam Refugees, dated 4 September 1979, Lawrence wrote:


“Stories of what the refugees have to go through before arriving are among the most gruesome ever heard. Death by drowning, cold inhumanity of port officials who see leaking boats towed out to sea again in the season of monsoon storms. The latest witness was a small


boy rescued by fishermen as he was found clinging to a plank off Macao…”


Lawrence joined the army on the out- break of the Second World War and was posted to France with the Royal Artillery, where he rose to the rank of captain. He served in France after D-Day, and while there, received a telegram saying that his first wife, Sylvia, was killed when a bomb hit the hostel for expectant mothers where she was sheltering. When the war ended, Lawrence was part of the occupying forces based in Hamburg, Germany. He was assigned to the army’s Information Control Unit which was helping Germans to set up a de-Nazified post-war press and helped to set up the magazine Die Zeit, which was to become Germany’s most popular weekly. He fell in love with his secretary Irmgrad Noll – ‘the enemy’ as he affectionately called her – and the couple married in 1946.


Much later, while in Germany, their son,


Alex, wrote a letter to them dated 9 January 1973, documenting in detail his journey by train from West Berlin to Ostbahnhof in East Berlin, Posnan in Poland, and from Hermitage to the famous Hotel Astoria in


INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 45


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