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“…in February 1900, the estranged wife of Charles Edward Lewis made a solemn declaration at the Mansion House in the City of London, in accordance with the Statutory Declarations Act. Her only son had been born on the 18th day of November, 1882, at Amherst, Nova Scotia, in the Dominion on Canada. The declaration was being made, she claimed, because there had been no Registry of Births in Amherst at that time and, as a result, the boy did not have a birth certificate. In his 18th year, the last of the 19th century, and for the price of a shilling stamp, it was belatedly certified by Anne Stuart Lewis and the Lord Mayor of London that Percy Wyndham Lewis had been born.
With no other documentation to back his mother’s statement, an individual’s birthdate becomes a matter of hearsay. For a man who was to spend the major part of his life creating an aura of mystery and drama around his vigorously self-promoted personality, the lack of a birth certificate would be a symbolic but potent advantage. It would afford him the opportunity, denied to those who had embarked upon more conventionally documented lives, the retrospective choice in the time, place and circumstances of his birth. It would shroud the fantastic event in mystery. Evasion would become a lifelong habit: evasion of creditors, of infatuated women, of importunate offspring.
The lack of birth certificate meant he could invent himself."