Daily Telegraph
08 February 2001
Reader’s Letter
SIR&emdash;Sir Frederick Lawton (obituary, Feb. 5) was earlier a founder of Cambridge University Fascist Association.It was not in 1936 that he “almost stood as a Mosleyite candidate in the Hammersmith by-election”, but in the general election scheduled for 1940 but postponed by the declaration of war.
He had been chosen as candidate for Hammersmith South and in the late 1930s was to be seen speaking for his beliefs at that borough’s street corner meetings.Called to the Bar in 1935, he afterwards defended individual Blackshirts accused of alleged offences under the new Public Order Act, an exercise that no doubt helped him to become known as a no-nonsense judge, firm against violence, tempered by a sympathetic streak for lesser offenders.John Warburton London SW11