Oral history interview with Thomas Lawson, 2018 August 9-10 Funding for this interview was provided by the Lichtenberg Family Foundation. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Thomas Lawson on August 9 and 10, 2018. The interview took place at Lawson's home in Los Angeles, CA, and was conducted by Russell Ferguson for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Thomas Lawson has reviewed the transcript. His corrections and emendations appear below in brackets with initials. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview RUSSELL FERGUSON: Okay, this is Russell Ferguson. I'm Russell Ferguson with Tom Lawson. Tom will be the next voice you hear after mine. And it's August 9, 2018. This is our oral history interview for the Archives of American Art. THOMAS LAWSON: And we're in Los Angeles. RUSSELL FERGUSON: Yes, we're in Los Angeles. A hot day in Los Angeles. So Tom, let's start. The format is basically go through your things right from the beginning. So I was wondering if you could start by talking a little bit about your family, your family background, where you were born, all the circumstances of your early life. [00:02:02] THOMAS LAWSON: Okay. Well, I was born in Glasgow, in Scotland, in 1951. And interestingly, just this summer, I came across a cache of letters that my mother wrote to her mother in the years leading up to that event, and a little after. Luckily enough, I know a little bit more about this question than I actually knew before. [Laughs.] My family has always been a little secretive. Nobody talked about family history when I was growing up. It was just— RUSSELL FERGUSON: My family was the same. It just never came up. THOMAS LAWSON: It just—yeah, didn't—it wasn't—and I didn't find it interesting to ask. RUSSELL FERGUSON: [Laughs.] THOMAS LAWSON: So I don't quite know what that means. Maybe it's a Scottish thing, I don't know. [They laugh.] Anyways, both sides of my family are essentially rooted in Glasgow. My mother's family were tradespeople. And— RUSSELL FERGUSON: What kind of trade? THOMAS LAWSON: Just a variety of things. My grandfather worked for a company called Gardner's [A. Gardner & Son] in Glasgow that was a furnishings—they have a famous building, or had. I mean, they no longer exist. But the building is still there. It's a cast-iron building on Jamaica Street, just near the river. My grandfather was in the carpets department, and made his way up from being a carpet layer to being, I think, a buyer. I don't think he was—he never—I can't imagine that he had the personality to be a seller. [They laugh.] RUSSELL FERGUSON: From what you remember about him? THOMAS LAWSON: Yeah, he was a grumpy old guy. [Laughs.] [00:04:00] On my grandmother's family, her brother was an accountant, and was married to a really powerful woman, who was a doctor and an early advocate for birth control. In the '20s, talking about birth control in Glasgow. RUSSELL FERGUSON: Very early on. THOMAS LAWSON: It was really very—and I knew her growing up, and she was a fearsome, very strong, intelligent presence. So a bit of an outlier, because the rest of—I think she was the only person in the whole history of my family who went anywhere close to a college until my brother and I. So it's—you know. And earlier—I mean, I know that a little further back in time, the family that I come from, in some way, were on the land. They had a croft or something. RUSSELL FERGUSON: This is still your mother's side? THOMAS LAWSON: This is mother's side. They had a croft south of Glasgow, in Ayrshire. And another branch, I think more from the grandmother's side, had farm land in Aberdeenshire. At one point, someone there moved to Newfoundland, and then moved back. Apparently, it was too cold. RUSSELL FERGUSON: Wow. Must be cold there. THOMAS LAWSON: Yeah. So there was something about, he and his wife moved there to—new future life, big farm, all this kind of thing. And she was back within the year. He tried to keep it going for a bit longer, and just couldn't do it. [00:06:04] So anyways. So there's this fairly sort of—just, I think, a fairly typical Scottish family of moving from the country into the city, getting work that— RUSSELL FERGUSON: Yeah, becoming more urban. THOMAS LAWSON: —over the generations, becomes a little higher status or something. But all that. My father's side, his father also came from Glasgow, and was in kind of retail trade, and moved to Algiers, in the sort of 1910-ish time. RUSSELL FERGUSON: To be in retail business there? THOMAS LAWSON: To become a partner with a French guy in a grocery store. RUSSELL FERGUSON: Do you know what prompted that? You know, the move to Canada on the other side, I mean, that's— THOMAS LAWSON: That seems normal. RUSSELL FERGUSON: —typically Scottish in a way. Moving to Algeria, with a partnership with a French guy and a retail business, that— THOMAS LAWSON: It seems weird. RUSSELL FERGUSON: —seems very untypical. THOMAS LAWSON: It sounds very strange, and I kind of wonder if— RUSSELL FERGUSON: There's an untold story? [Laughs.] THOMAS LAWSON: Stories. Anyway, he moved there. He met a woman there whose family came from Derbyshire and had been blacksmiths. And they married and had four children, one of them being my dad. So my dad grew up in Algiers. Which, in the '20s and '30s, it sounded—when he did talk about it—that was one thing he talked about. It sounded idyllic. They lived in the city in the winter, and on the beach in the summer. RUSSELL FERGUSON: So it's a French colony then, and it's a little bit before the movement for independence? THOMAS LAWSON: Yeah. So— RUSSELL FERGUSON: So for white people living there, I assume— THOMAS LAWSON: It was pretty nice, I guess. [00:08:02] RUSSELL FERGUSON: Pretty nice, yeah. THOMAS LAWSON: So the war breaks out, 1939, and he immediately goes back to Britain to sign up for the war effort. His war experience was that the first years, he worked in intelligence, and he was posted in the Middle East. And he was— RUSSELL FERGUSON: I'm sure as soon as they saw that he had been in North Africa— THOMAS LAWSON: Exactly. He was fluent in French, and he had some Arabic. He was a young man, but he had already started working, and he had been working for Anglo-Iranian Oil, which became BP later. So he had access to information, and so he spent several years in that Middle Eastern theater. You know, Iran and Iraq. I don't know what he was doing, but that's where he was doing it. Then in the second part of the war, he was in the European theater, and he was in a light armored division, driving a tank. I believe he was involved in the Battle of Arnhem. I think evidence points to that, but I don't know for sure, and of course he's not around to ask. He was certainly involved in the Battle of Hamburg, which was in 1945. So '44, '45. RUSSELL FERGUSON: So the final battles of the war. THOMAS LAWSON: The final battles of the war. He was in this tank corps, in the front lines. RUSSELL FERGUSON: Pretty intense. THOMAS LAWSON: Intense. RUSSELL FERGUSON: I mean, driving a tank into the last— THOMAS LAWSON: Super intense, yes. RUSSELL FERGUSON: —German defenses. THOMAS LAWSON: And, I would imagine, one of the reasons he didn't really like talking much about the past, or about much of anything. [00:10:01] And certainly, he never drove a car. RUSSELL FERGUSON: That's so interesting. THOMAS LAWSON: In the Middle East, he had ridden a motorbike. I've seen pictures of him on this giant motorbike. And then he drove a tank. But he couldn't, or wouldn't, drive a car. [Laughs.] RUSSELL FERGUSON: That's so funny. THOMAS LAWSON: So there's my dad, up to 1945. My mother grew up in Glasgow, this very kind of middling life. She seems to have been a bit of a jock: liked playing tennis, liked Scottish country dancing, and liked boys. [Laughs.] Seems to be her interests. In '44, she was called up to join the Women's Auxiliary, and spent the next two years also in the Netherlands sort of area. RUSSELL FERGUSON: Oh, okay. So she went overseas? THOMAS LAWSON: She was overseas. She was behind the lines of these same battles. RUSSELL FERGUSON: Yeah, but not far behind the line. THOMAS LAWSON: But not far behind. No, she was in Nijmegen, which is like 10 miles away from Arnhem. She was in Ghent on VE Day. So I mean, yeah, she was there. Her duty seems to have been about entertaining the lads who were coming back from being messed up by the fighting, and kind of trying to patch them together and put them back again.