Cecil Constant Philip Lawson, 1880–1967
Cecil Constant Philip Lawson, ‘military painter and writer’ (as he described himself in 1939) was born in Kensington on 20 September 1880, the son of Cecil Gordon Lawson (1849–82), landscape painter, and his wife, Constance (1854–1929), eldest daughter of the sculptor John Birnie Philip: they had married in Chelsea in 1879. She was a specialist flower painter who exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Grosvenor Gallery between 1874 and 1892, while her younger sister, Beatrice, married two well-known artists; first the architect/designer Edward William Godwin (d. 1886) and the painter James Abbot McNeil Whistler in 1888.
Cecil junior was educated at Charterhouse and spent many early years in Paris, where he exhibited at the Salon, played football for the Sporting Club de Paris and joined a large circle of military artists among whom he developed a distinctive style of painting. Shortly before the First World War he enlisted as a private (no. 1788) in the Westminster Dragoons, the only cavalry unit of the volunteer London Yeomanry, and for most of it served with them in the Middle East. He was at Gallipoli, then in Egypt and Palestine, including at the battle for Beersheba and the capture of Jerusalem in late 1917. In April 1918 the Dragoons were re-assigned to the 2nd Army on the Western Front, joining it by June, and became part of the Machine Gun Corps. In this Lawson was a corporal (no.151505) but report he made sergeant appears to be wrong Although he was never an official war artist, the Imperial War Museum (IWM) has a group of oil paintings by him of the Flanders battlefields: most are undated so perhaps done later from sketches, while the 1915 and 1917 dates listed for two are at least questionable. By April 1919 the Dragoons had demobilized but on 13 March that year Lawson was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps, though he resigned in May1921 and was permanently in England from 1922. As a painter he exhibited at the International Society, the Royal Academy and the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts between 1913 and 1923, but continued to do later oils including Second World War subjects of particular regiments, of which the IWM also has examples.
Between the wars Lawson began his main life work of writing and illustrating (in watercolors) the History of Uniforms of the British Army, to run parallel with Sir John Fortescue’s multi-volume history of the army itself. His first two volumes appeared in 1940/41 but WWII and post-war austerity delayed publication of the next until 1961. Volume 4 appeared in 1966, with the fifth at the publishers when he died aged 86 on 24th February 1967 in St Stephen’s Hospital, Fulham: by that time he was well advanced on volume 6. In 1933 he also published and illustrated a useful and attractive anthology of naval songs and ballads, to which his friend the naval social historian Commander C. N. Robinson wrote an introduction at his request: in this Robinson mentioned his parallel interest in sea dress and that he was a notable collector of images supporting his studies.
Lawson was a pioneer of serious research and publication on military uniforms. This included being very knowledgeable on Imperial and Commonwealth armies and foreign troops in British pay. In old age he took great interest in the creation of the National Army Museum and his library and archive of notes and sketches is preserved there. The IWM also has a good collection of his drawings of army uniforms and he was commissioned to do a large number for the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Rhode Island (now part of Brown University). When he died, practically unnoticed save by those who knew him, a brief obituary in the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research (vol. XLV, 1967, p. 121) also paid tribute to ‘his dry sense of humor and irreverence for modern developments in warfare’.
Some details above were kindly supplied by Charles Noble, from his investigation of an oil study by Lawson in the Royal Collection of the post-war Peace Pageant on the Thames on 4th August 1919 (RCIN 405085). This appears to have been obtained by Queen Mary and is a version of one of four other oil ‘sketches’ of the event, as Lawson called them when he gave them to the National Maritime Museum in 1936 (BHC0649–0652).
Lawson was twice married: first to Edith L.M. Fabris at Farnham, Surrey, in the first quarter of 1919 but how this ended is unclear; second to Phyllis E. Corben in Paddington in the second quarter of 1941, though in the 1939 Register (which gives her birth as on 17 July 1898) she already called herself Lawson. She died in the Gordon Hospital, Westminster, on 7th January 1963 and was buried at Chiswick, where her headstone gives her second name as Evelyn (but ‘Eveline’ in her probate record). The Lawsons had long lived in Chelsea, though specific electoral-register address detail is confusing. Their home at her death was 43 Smith Street, where Lawson remained until his own demise: if he or his ashes joined her at Chiswick, the headstone does not say so. Probate value of his estate was £4,270.
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