Chartres Biron

high treason trial[2] in which the defendant was found guilty and sentenced to death but later pardoned.

[1] In 1920, he became chief magistrate of the Metropolitan Police Courts following the retirement of Sir John Dickinson,[2] and received a knighthood as was customary on appointment to that position.

[1] In 1928, Biron presided over the trial for obscenity at Bow Street Magistrates' Court of Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, ruling that the book was an "obscene libel" and that all copies should be destroyed.

According to Biron, the book contained "not one word which suggested that anyone with the horrible tendencies described was in the least degree blameworthy.

All the characters in the book were presented as attractive people and put forward with admiration".

He loved literature, collected the sayings of Samuel Johnson in book form and as a young man wrote a parody of Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines as "Hyder Ragged", in 1887.