| Sydney Turing Barlow Lawford | |
| Nickname: | "Swanky Syd"[1] |
| Birth Date: | 16 November 1865 |
| Birth Place: | Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England |
| Allegiance: | United Kingdom |
| Branch: | British Army |
| Serviceyears: | 1885–1926 |
| Rank: | Lieutenant General |
| Unit: | Royal Fusiliers |
| Commands: | Essex Brigade 22nd Infantry Brigade 41st Division |
| Battles: | Second Boer War First World War |
Lieutenant-General Sir Sydney Turing Barlow Lawford, KCB (16 November 1865 – 15 February 1953), was a decorated British general, later to become the father of Hollywood actor Peter Lawford.
Lawford was born on 16 November 1865 at Tunbridge Wells in the county of Kent in England, the son of Thomas Acland Lawford. He was educated at Windlesham House School from 1870 to 1878 and thereafter at Wellington College.[2]
After receiving military training at Royal Military College at Sandhurst, he received a commission into the British Army as a lieutenant in the 7th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment) on 7 February 1885 and was promoted to captain on 3 September 1894.
He served in the Second Boer War in South Africa, commanding the 19th Battalion of mounted infantry, and was promoted to major on 21 November 1900.[3]
Following the end of the war he received the brevet rank of lieutenant colonel on 22 August 1902, before he returned home on the SS Briton the following month.[4] A brevet colonel from August 1908 onwards, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel in October 1910, he received his colonelcy in June 1912 and became the commandant of the School of Instruction for Mounted Infantry at Longmoor, taking over from Colonel Edward Ingouville-Williams.[2] In July 1913, after enduring a period on half-pay, he succeeded Brigadier General Edward Bulfin in command of the Essex Brigade, part of the East Anglian Division.
Shortly after the British entry into World War I, in August 1914, Lawford was promoted to the temporary rank of brigadier general that same month and commanded the 22nd Infantry Brigade, part of the newly organised 7th Division, during all of its engagements on the Western Front from 1914–1915, during which time he was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath in February 1915. He briefly served as acting commander of the 7th Division from 6 to 19 April 1915 in the absence of its general officer commanding (GOC), Major General Thompson Capper, until 19 April when Major General Hubert Gough assumed command. He again assumed command, from 14 to 19 July, when Capper once again arrived to took over, with Lawford reverting to the 22nd Brigade.[5]
He remained in this post until September when he returned to England and, promoted to the temporary rank of major general, was appointed to the command of the 41st Division. This was the most junior division of Lord Kitchener's New Armies, and Lawford would remain as its GOC from 1915 to 1919, which included brief service on the Italian front from December 1917 until March 1918.[6]
His military nickname was 'Swanky Syd', apparently derived from his habit of donning full dress regalia, including all of his medal entitlement, regularly.[7] He was knighted in the field.[8] General Sir Douglas Haig, then commanding the First Army of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), noted in his personal diary in early 1915 the following assessment of Lawford, then still commanding the 22nd Brigade, as a general: "I was at Sandhurst with Lawford, ... although endowed with no great ability, he is hard fighting and plucky."[6]
After the war Lawford, whose major general's rank became permanent in January 1917, received promotion to the rank of lieutenant general in January 1923 and was posted to the British Indian Army. He retired from the army in 1926.[2]
Lawford died on 15 February 1953.[9]
Lawford led a somewhat complicated private life. His first marriage was on 30 September 1893, at St. Paul's Church, Knightsbridge, London, to Lillian Maud Cass, who died on 26 November 1900.[10] His second marriage was on 20 May 1914 in London to Muriel Williams.[10] While serving in India in the early 1920s, and while still married to Muriel, he fell in love with the wife of one of his officers, May Somerville Aylen (4 November 188323 January 1972), and she became pregnant with his child. Colonel Ernest Aylen, May's husband, upon hearing this news, divorced her over the scandal.[11] General Lawford and Muriel divorced. He then married May Aylen, and their child, the actor Peter Lawford, was born in 1923, when his father was 58 years of age. The Lawfords returned to England but the scandal eventually drove the family to settle in France, and they then moved to the United States in the late 1930s.[12]