Famous Derry statue of former Foyle pupil being moved to new school building

By Ciaran O’Neill

A famous Derry statue is on the move again.

The statue of Sir John Lawrence, a former pupil of Foyle & Londonderry College, has stood at the entrance to the school’s Springtown Road building for around 50 years.

However, the statue was taken down last week and will be re-erected at the school’s new base at Limavady Road.

The moves marks the latest chapter in the statue’s varied history.

It was first erected in Lahore in Pakistan in the late 1880s in honour of Lawrence who served as Viceroy of India from 1864 to 1869.

However, the statue was taken down during the violence of the 1940s which led to the creation of Pakistan.

It lay on a scrapheap until the 1960s when a former pupil of Foyle & Londonderry College, now known as Foyle College, heard about the plight of the statue which had suffered significant damage in the intervening years.

The Foyle Old Boys Association decided that Lawrence should come back to his former school, where he had been a pupil for four years, and so they launched a campaign to bring him home.

The P & O Shipping Co. volunteered to bring the statue back from Karachi to London.

Once in London, the statue’s missing right hand and sword were replaced.

It was then transported to Derry by train and ferry.

After its journey across the world, the statue was erected at the Lawrence Hill campus of the local school in the 1960s.

However, that was not the ends of its travel, as the school moved to a new base at Springtown Road at the end of the 1960s.

It has remained there for the last 50 years but is now on the moved again.

The statue will be erected at a prominent location at Foyle College’s multi-million campus in the Waterside.

It is not the only statue erected in honour of Lawrence.

There is another which was erected at Waterloo Place in London in 1882.

Lawrence was born at Matara, Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka, in 1806.

He was the fifth child of Alexander Lawrence of Coleraine and Catherine Letitia Knox of Strabane.

In 1808, after serving abroad in the Indian Territories for several years, the family returned home to Coleraine and Henry, along with his two brothers, attended Foyle College from 1815 until 1819 where his maternal uncle, the Reverend James Knox, was headmaster.

Lawrence Hill, on which Foyle & Londonderry College previously stood, was named after the family.

Henry moved to England to finish his schooling and in 1822, aged 16 years, he sailed for India and joined the headquarters of the Bengal Artillery near Calcutta.

He spent most of his life serving in Asia.

He was killed during a seige at Lucknow, India, in 1857.