Author

Danny Lawrence

After retiring from lecturing in sociology at Nottingham University from 1965–2000, where I wrote Black Migrants: White Natives, A study of race relations in Nottingham (1974), I began work on Shiels to Shields: The Life Story of a North Tyneside Town (2016), a history of North Shields where I had been born and raised a few hundred yards from Stan Laurel’s boyhood home. I was then distracted by my growing interest in Stan’s connection with the town, which led to The Making of Stan Laurel: Echoes of a British Boyhood (2011). Arising from the research I did on Stan's family, I have also become fascinated by his father, the actor and theatre lessee Arthur Jefferson. My biography of him, Arthur Jefferson: Man of the Theatre and Father of Stan Laurel, was published in 2017, followed by The Making of Laurel and Hardy (2020) and Growing up with Gas: A History of the Gas Industry (2023), written with my wife Helen.