21 MAY 1965, Page 7

One-Man Crusade The uncompromising individualist has a tough role in

British industry today. Such a man par excellence was Lionel Sefton, whose death at the age of sixty I learn of with regret. I had followed appreciatively his one-man crusade on behalf of the engineering and aircraft industries. This was conducted largely in the highly personal adver- tisements which Sefton's company, Premier Precision, scattered furiously around the press.

The slightest hint of governmental indifference towards the attainments or potentialities of British skills set him off on an angry display of typographical and linguistic fireworks. He had founded his own company and it had flourished: he became a single-handed resistance movement against the dismal proposition that the gentleman in Whitehall always knows best.

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