Lieutenant-Colonel Walter C. Lawson
Carleton and York Regiment

The Colonel says that we officers must work 24 hours a day and sleep when we can find time. He says we must study at night after our lecture. Naturally he doesn’t, and he even sleeps until 9 a.m. and has a sleep at noon. Everyone here is hoping he will be sent home. He hasn’t a friend, and all the men hate him which isn’t good for the Regt.

(anonymous Carleton and York officer, Nov 1941 censor reports)

Born in King’s County, New Brunswick on 1 February 1889, Walter Cyril Lawson was a teacher and cadet instructor. Commissioned with the 26th Battalion in February 1915, he earned a field promotion to captain and the Military Cross before being severely wounded by a shell explosion at Passchendaele. He became a lawyer after the war and was elected Liberal member of the provincial legislature for Sunbury County in 1935.

Having just been re-elected a member of the New Brunswick legislature in November 1939, Lawson went overseas the next month as second-in-command of the Carleton and York Regiment. When Lieutenant-Colonel Hardy Ganong was promoted to brigadier in March 1941, Lawson took over the regiment. The provincial legislature passed a resolution congratulating their absent member on his promotion to lieutenant-colonel.

Based on the description of CYR veteran and regimental historian Robert Tooley, the new colonel “was respected by most, feared by some, and hated by a few.” According to the anonymous Carleton and York officer whose letter passed through the censor screenings, perhaps many more of the troops despised Lawson’s authoritarian methods. In retrospect, Tooley added, “Time has softened the asperity of his image, so that when two or three CYR oldtimers are gathered together, the talk will as likely as not turn to Col Lawson, and what appeared at the time as severity is recounted as well meant eccentricity.” (Tooley, 70)

Lawson lasted just under a year until February 1942 when he was replaced by second-in-command Major F. Dodd Tweedie. His term in the legislature ended in 1944 and he went back to practicing law in Minto and later acting as a court clerk. Decades later, a New Brunswick justice and CYR veteran remembered his former commanding officer as “a hard-bitten old character and could deal with just about any situation.”

Lawson died in 1970 and is buried in Fredericton.