LAWRENCE and ME: KEN FISHER
Ken Fisher is the President and greeter of the English Library in Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife. In 2019 a chance meeting with Ruth Hall led to plans to have Lawrence commemorated on a stamp. Here he explains more…

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I was born in Derby and raised in Long Eaton and remember the Lady Chatterley Trial as though it was yesterday. I run a history group at the library, which is mainly a study group of the Anglo/Canarian connection from the 16th century to date.

After meeting Ruth Hall, I thought that we could have some fun with the life and times of Lawrence, and so I began preparing some notes of introduction to my group. But then Covid came along, and plans were put on hold. During the isolation Lawrence became an obsession. I think I’ve read almost every article about him on the web, especially JStor, and I certainly enjoyed the Digital Pilgrimage. To cut a long story short, I devised a daily task for myself, whereby I selected a postage stamp from a different country, printed the stamp at the top of an A4 and described for my classes the history behind the stamp. I now have a collection of 130 sheets.

With my new obsession for Lawrence, I found that he figured nowhere in the philatelic world which I think is a shame. I have searched the countries that he visited and found that Italy would probably be interested as he was full of praise when he left for the first time a hundred years ago. On top of this he had translated two books by Giovanni Vega, the Sicilian author, into the English language and written the foreword to a translation of a book into English by the Nobel Prizewinner for Literature, Grazia Deledda, the Sardinian 1926 Nobel Prize winner. Both these Italian writers had postage stamps issued in their honour in Italy.

I have now become a member of the D.H.L Society with the hope of pushing for a stamp of Lawrence to be printed in Italy or in America to mark the centenary of his death in 2030.