In John Thomas and Lady Jane, Lawrence made Jack Strangeways a substantial figure. However, he downgraded his characterisation in the revised text. One cannot but speculate that Lawrence wanted, for reasons best-known to himself, to "water down" his original depiction of Strangeways in the text that he knew was going to be published.

In John Thomas and Lady Jane, Jack Strangeways is 35 (Scott was 34 in 1922).

Strangeways is "a lady's man" - the precise words used by many to describe Scott. In Kangaroo, Lawrence portrays Scott as being attractive to women (though he ascribes this characteristic to "Jaz", by way of disguise, or perhaps for prudence's sake):

I believe he'd make any woman like him, if he laid himself out to do it. Got that quiet way with him, you know, and a sly sort of touch-the-harp-gently, that's what they like on the quiet.

Strangeways' good looks, however, are fading (Scott was going bald).

Connie Chatterley did not think Strangeways was "a good-looking boy" any more, rather he was "flat-faced and a little insipid. And his posterior was too large...[he was] a bit too fat and vapid". (In reality, it was Scott's ears that were large.)

Strangeways has a particular technique with women..."he loved to get some sympathetic woman into a corner...his blue eyes would get wider and wider, his low secret voice hotter and hotter, as he talked about himself".

Lawrence invests Strangeways with some of Scott's interests - and indeed, his strange ways.

Both are interested in military matters (Scott's lifelong obsession). Both have a pet subject - in Scott's and Callcott's case Japan (Scott was an expert on Japan, and later reported Japan's military invasion of Manchuria for the Sydney Morning Herald), but in Strangeways' case (of all things) "Spanish architecture".

(One can see where Lawrence might have got architecture - Rosenthal was an architect. It is tempting to think that the Spanish ingredient might have come from GD Hum's "Spanish persona" - he had spent some time in South America, and had named his Sydney house "Casita".)

However, it is in two other respects where the similarities between Scott and Strangeways are inescapable.

The JTLJ Jack Strangeways seems to be involved in some sort of anti-socialist activity. At a Christmas party, Connie's crippled husband Clifford puts forward the notion that there should be a "small and ruthless armed aristocracy" ready to combat rampant socialism.

But Strangeways wants something more vigorous than that:

"My God, if we ever get a revolution here in England, how I should love to charge the rabble with machine-guns".

Connie suggests that, come the revolution, it might be the socialists who have the machine-guns. Strangeways would have none of it...

"That's just what we don't intend it to be."

 

(We? - and who might "we" be? No doubt Clifford Chatterley's "small and ruthless armed aristocracy".)

The Christmas party conversation turns from controlling the rabble to a future world in which some women were mere "breeders". The question is asked what role the men might have in such a world.

"I think I might apply for a job as a breeder," said Jack. "Where are your testimonials?" cried Olive [Jack's wife] contemptuously (she had no children). "Testi-monials!" said [one of the other men present].

 

Jack Strangeways, like Jack Callcott's mate Fred Wilmott in Kangaroo, and Jack Scott in real life, "can't get his pecker up". (An inadequacy that Lawrence subsequently transferred to the unfortunate Clifford Chatterley, who bears a striking similarity to Jack Scott in more ways than one.)

In the second Lady Chatterley, Lawrence not only put the knife in, but twisted it.