George William Lawrence was born in Charters Towers, Queensland Australia during the gold rush years. He returned to England with his family around 1906. They returned to Madeley in Shropshire where his father John Lawrence was born. The family story is that they returned to Great Britain due to his grandmother being ill. The family had just lost their youngest child, Lucy to the Diptheria outbreak of 1901, they returned sometime after this date.

He did not have much schooling and was working in the pit at the age of 13. The 1911 Census shows the family living in Harrow Street and George William is listed as 18 years old and working as a ‘pony driver underground’ at Frickley Colliery. Frickley Colliery opened in 1910, there is no record of the family on the previous census. His father John Lawrence is listed as a coal hauler. He lived in Harrow Street his whole life. The house was a pit house with outside toilet and no bath, cooking was done on an open fire and water was heated in a copper in the scullery.

He did not fight in the 1918 war, as a miner he was exempt from service as he was working in a protected industry essential for the war effort. His brother Frederick did serve in the army.

He married Marion Parkes. Census records show that she also lived in the same miming houses and her father was also a miner from Madeley, Shropshire. They lived in Harrow Street their whole married life. They had 4 children, Lucy, Jesse, John and Dorothy. Marion did not have good health and was bedridden.

In his later years, George William Lawrence, was a bit of a character.  He always wore a suit jacket and waistcoat with a gold watch chain with a watch at the end of it and a medal, like a St Christopher.  He had crooked hands, just his thumb and first finger worked on his right hand and the thumb and first and second fingers on the left.  The other fingers were completely bent over into his palm and could not be moved.    Apparently, it was the fault of a doctor who did an operation on his hands that did not go well.   He managed to cook chips in an open pan of fat on the fire at his home with those hands. He liked to have a drink, he was the glass collector at the Chequers Inn pub in South Elmsall and spent many a night there.

.He liked to tell stories about growing up in Charters Towers , Queensland, Australia  before the turn of the century 1900.   The watch and chain he said belonged to his father and he got them from the gold fields of Queensland.  This made him very exotic and exciting. He would describe the aboriginies or the “black fellas” coming to the house to ask for work. “ Choppy wood Mista” he would say and then tell us how scared he was and how he used to hide under the veranda.  He told us about his older brother John Reginald, how he would go off with the “Black fellas” and be gone for days with his dog cart and come back as though nothing had happened. 

He moved into sheltered housing in his late 60s after living 3 months at a time with his children. He suffered 4 strokes and later moved into an old folks home where he died of another stroke at the age of 89.