Charles George Garton was the second Labour candidate to contest this seat. After leaving school at 14, he was apprenticed to a blacksmith and then became an electrical engineer in Rugby. On his adoption for the 1929 election, the Leamington Spa Courier noted that he was “a revolutionary in the matter of dress . . . wearing in winter and summer alike an open-necked tennis shirt and no hat”.
In 1925, a Rugby vicar took issue with his “moonlight rambles” with members of the Labour Guild of Youth, though he said he “was not attacking his personal integrity”. Garton replied that the guild believed that its “members should work and play together without distinction of sex”.
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