Harold Lawton

Professor Harold Walter Lawton (27 July 1899 – 24 December 2005, Greetham, Rutland) was a scholar of French literature and, prior to his death, one of the last surviving veterans and the last prisoner of war of World War I in Britain.

Lawton was born in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, England. He volunteered for military service in 1916, enlisting with Royal Welch Fusiliers before being transferred to the Cheshire Regiment. Upon completing training, in 1917 he was posted to the Western Front where he was transferred again, to The East Yorkshire Regiment. The German Spring Offensive of 1918 included an assault upon Armentières where his unit, the 1/4th Battalion the East Yorkshires, was posted. The Germans used Hutier tactics, where stormtroopers aimed to infiltrate weak points in defences, bypassing strongly held front line areas. Troops with heavier weapons would then attack the isolated strongpoints. Lawton, with troops from the Durham Light Infantry, did indeed become isolated in a forward trench during the assault; when they ran out of ammunition and food after three days' fighting the German advances they surrendered. He was imprisoned at a PoW camp at a fort in Lille and afterwards in Minden, Germany.

After the war, he completed a Master's degree in French at the University of Wales in Bangor, and received a doctorate in Latin and French from the Sorbonne in 1926. He became a lecturer, then a Professor of French at the University College Southampton. He later took the position of Professor of French, and was successively promoted within the university administration as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Pro Vice-Chancellor, at the University of Sheffield. He published a Handbook of French Renaissance Dramatic Theory in 1950, and Poems, Selected with Introduction and Notes (on the work of Joachim du Bellay) in 1961.

During World War II, he briefed behind the lines operatives and was listed in The Black Book of key people to be arrested upon a successful Nazi invasion of Britain.

In 1999, Lawton received the Légion d'honneur of the French Republic, honouring his services in World War I.

He died on Christmas Eve 2005 at the age of 106.

Selected publications

 * Vernacular Literature in Western Europe, in The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. I, The Renaissance, 1493-1520 (1957)