Laurence Hartnett - Childhood

Childhood

Hartnett was born into a middle class family in Woking, England. His mother, Katherine Jane Taplin, daughter of George and Kate Taplin was from a middle class Wiltshire farming family. His father, Irish born John Joseph Hartnett, was a doctor and inventor of patent medicines from Clonakilty, County Cork, who had an M.D. from Dublin and in 1892 had published a pamphlet on the treatment of tuberculosis. In addition he had invented an inhaling machine by means of which tubercular patients could breathe fresh, dry, medicated air. John Hartnett and Katherine Taplin married in Portsmouth on 1 May 1897 and went to live in Woking where in March of the following year their only child, Laurence (known as Larry) was born. The latter, however, was to retain no memory of his father who died nine months later. Shortly afterwards, mother and son went to live with Katherine’s childless sister and brother-in-law for whom Katherine acted as housekeeper, initially in Southsea and then in Kingston-upon-Thames. Larry began his schooling in 1903 in the home of a pair of middle-aged spinsters who taught him and some eight or nine other children in their dining room. From there he graduated two years later to Kingston Grammar School and from 1909 he attended Epsom College, which specialised in educating the sons of doctors who were, themselves, generally destined to enter that profession. Larry had obtained a foundation scholarship offered to those doctors’ sons whose families could not afford the fees. In his first year, the school’s Natural History Society created an Aeroplane Section in which he took a close interest, pasting photos of aircraft and newspaper cuttings about aviation into an exercise book as well as making detailed drawings of their parts and participating in the construction of a full-sized glider which the Section launched on a five hundred metre flight in 1912. Epsom was the first school in England to include aeronautical training as an optional extra subject. While College records show that Hartnett did not on the whole shine academically, in 1914 an essay he wrote on China won the Epsom college geography prize for which he received a book called Engineering Today by Thomas Corbin.