ROBERT Lynch remembers playing as a young boy in the streets of Glasgow. "My father came up to me and said, 'Where's the button from your shirt?' He told me to go home and get that tended to, right away."

But then, his father, Benny, one-time flyweight champion of the world, was like that: he always had an eye for a smart appearance. In 2003 the late boxer's cousin, Josie Livingston MBE, remembered him as a dignified and well-dressed figure, even when he was struggling with alcoholism. When he visited her family home, he was scolded by her mother for being ''conceited'' because of his fashionable clothes.

Lynch died 70 years ago this August. He had not long passed his 33rd birthday when he succumbed to malnutrition-induced respiratory failure at the Southern General Hospital. His story is well-known, but it has not died with him. It has, instead, gone the distance.

A grassroots campaign has sprung up to erect a stature in his memory in his native Glasgow. Actor Robert Carlyle is its patron; through him, fellow actor Tommy Flanagan, best known as Chibs in the US TV series Sons of Anarchy, also got involved. The campaign's Marie McLelland describes Lynch as the David Beckham of his day, which seems about right. Now Glasgow Museums' Open Museum is staging a small travelling display to mark the anniversary of his birth on April 2.

It's easy to become fixated with the details of Lynch's death on August 6, 1946, but the real Lynch makes more interesting reading. He was born in 1913, a year before the outbreak of war. A Gorbals boy, he had a tough upbringing. He turned to boxing while still in his teens, learning the craft at local boxing clubs or in fairground booths on Glasgow Green. His slight frame must have deceived many opponents but they quickly discovered the power of his punch.

He turned professional in 1931, a fast, tough, brave boxer. He was "as strong as a horse", his friend and one-time sparring partner Johnny McManus told a documentary a few years ago. On a single Monday evening in Manchester in September 1935, Lynch won the world, European and British flyweight titles, dismantling the holder, Jacky Brown. You can see the footage today on YouTube: the wee Glaswegian, all 5ft 4in of him, laying into Brown, fighting "like a human tornado" (in the words of the Glasgow Herald's ringside correspondent), putting Brown on the canvas no fewer than 10 times in the opening two rounds. By the end, Brown didn't know what day of the week it was. The fighting had lasted less than five minutes.

Delirious Scots in the 7,000-strong audience who tried to clamber into the ring to congratulate Lynch were held back by burly Manchester coppers. When he arrived at Central Station two days later, a huge crowd was there to acclaim him. The Gordon Street and Union Street approaches to the station were jam-packed. Some of his supporters hoisted him on to their shoulders and waded through the throng into the Grosvenor restaurant in Gordon Street.

Lynch went on to stage successful defences of his titles against Pat Palmer (Glasgow, September 1936), Small Montana (London, January 1937) and Peter Kane (Glasgow, October 1937). But he lost his titles when he was found to be six-and-a-half pounds overweight when matched against America's Jackie Jurich in a bout at St Mirren Park in Paisley in June 1938. He was stripped of his world title in the afternoon but went ahead with the match, now a catchweight contest. Jurich was brave but Lynch gradually overwhelmed him. The end came in the 12th round when Lynch dropped him with a tremendous blow. The Glaswegian won, but the loss of his world title would have a lasting impact on him.

After that bout, noted The Herald's obituary in August 1946, he only had two contests; he was outpointed in the first, at Shawfield, and KO'd in the second, in London. In 1939, British boxing's Board of Boxing Control refused his application for a boxer's licence.

Lynch's name has not been consigned to the sport's dusty attic, though. In 1999 he was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, which said he was "generally considered one of the finest ringmen below lightweight in the pre-World War II era and is generally regarded as the greatest fighter ever to come out of Scotland". He remains an object of fascination even now. Something has kept his name alive.

His son, Robert, now 78, has lived in Ontario, Canada since 1966. Before retiring he worked as the manager of a manufacturing company. Of his father, he says: "I don't remember that much, because he left my mother, or my mother left him. I remember a few things, though, like the day he took me into a cafe in Glasgow and bought me an iced drink; things like that, small things. He loved Glasgow, and it was a sore point with him when they used to write different things, because he loved the city.

"What's not remembered, going back to the time he lost his titles, he was six and a half pounds overweight. That was a lot for a flyweight. But he was on the scales in the camp every day, and he knew his weight, every day. So to go the [venue] and go on the scales and be overweight like that, doesn't seem right. He was very upset at that. I think there was money changed hands. There used to be a lot of bookmakers at the fights, and he was odds-on to win [against Jurich] but to lose, that was unheard of. So I think that was a lot to do with it. I think they cheated him. That's where the drink started to come in, after that. He was broken-hearted when he lost his titles."

Incidentally, Lynch brought up that episode just a few weeks before his death. In July 1946, after watching the Jackie Paterson-Joe Curran bout at Hampden, he met the Evening Times sportswriter Euan Wellwood, who had covered his 1935 triumph. "What a fool I was," Wellwood quoted Lynch as saying, "not to pass the scales at Paisley ... I feel certain that I could have beaten both Paterson and Curran on the form they displayed tonight."

To Robert I mention the YouTube footage of that 1935 fight, and how, even 81 years after the event, his father comes across a formidable, and formidably clever, boxer. "You're talking about boxing: when he fought Small Montana, the newspapers and Ring magazine said he was a streetfighter – he had learned his calling from the booths, and Montana would box the head off him.

"Well, he went out there with the purpose of boxing, and he gave him a demonstration - it was a schooling to Small Montana. And after the fight, there's not a mark on my father. Not a mark. But Small Montana was all chewed up. He was a brilliant boxer. He'd learned from fighting in the booths against bigger men, he learned how to hit big and how to stay out of their way."

He recalls that when his father returned to Glasgow in 1935, the size of the crowd at Central Station "was miraculous. That's why, when they asked us where we would like the statue to be erected we said Central Station, because that's where most of his fans showed up."

How did his father handle fame? Was he comfortable with it? "I don't think boxers are ever accountants," he says. "He couldn't handle his money. My mother used to say that continuously. You could ask for anything, because no matter what it was, he would go and get it. When he went in to buy my mother a fur coat, she couldn't make up her mind whether she wanted this one or that one, and he bought her two. He was very generous."

Looking back on his father's boxing career, Robert adds: "He was never rated. He was always the underdog, no matter who he fought. That's why the crowd loved him. He fought Peter Kane and knocked him down right away; Kane had never been knocked off his feet in his life. My father knocked him down with the very first blow.

"Kane was saying to me [later] that my father just knocked him all about the place, but he says he didn't know where he was for the first six rounds. The guy who was with him said, '[Kane] never knew where he was after that first round. Your daddy kept him up to show the people what he could do,' and then my father knocked him down in the 13th."

Robert adds that he is very happy with the statue campaign, especially as it is taking place in a city that was so close to his father's heart.

THE Beckham analogy comes from Marie McLelland – or rather, her grandmother, her Nana. It's hard to argue with it. After all, what Scottish boxer apart from Benny Lynch could draw a crowd of 50,000 to Glasgow Green? Not to watch him in a bout, though: they turned up simply to watch him train.

McLelland is one of those involved in raising funds for a Lynch statue. Her third cousin happens to be Lynch's grand-daughter, Sharon, Robert's daughter, who lives in Canada. The campaign target is £100,000 and though only a modest amount has been raised so far the organisers are greatly encouraged by the interest. "One of the things about Benny," she says, "is not so much what he achieved as where he came from. He came from the poverty-stricken Gorbals of the 1920s and 1930s where it was an achievement in itself just to move on from that. It's quite a story in social-history terms as to how Glasgow was at that time.

"He was a superstar. Everyone knew him. Everyone had a story about him, because he was a Glasgow boy. Even today, if you mention his name, people will say, 'My grandfather's from the Gorbals and he used to talk about him.' [Indeed, Carlyle's grandfather often saw Lynch box.] People have a real affinity with him. He captured their imagination. When he arrived back at Central Station, thousands and thousands of people tried to squeeze on to the concourse to see him. This was, of course, long, long before the age of social media or even television. All you had were newspapers, radio, and word of mouth.

"A lot of the stories that have come out about Benny have focused on his alcoholism, the end of his life, the negative parts, but we really want to remember the positives. We want to understand why his life ended the way it did. We're a lot more enlightened now about alcohol abuse and about grief – he lost his older brother James at a very young age and remained stricken by grief his entire life. So we understand a lot more about these things, and we want to be more sympathetic, and celebratory, rather than critical."

She tells how a committee member was once stopped in a Gorbals street by a man who was looking for a Benny Lynch statue. When told none existed the man was taken aback. "He said, 'I've brought lots of people here, boxing fans, thinking there was a statue.'

"The year before last, 2014, was the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, and boxing is a Commonwealth sport. We should build on this legacy and remember our sporting heroes. A lot of local businesses have got behind the campaign. The Kelvin ABC gym in Govanhill has produced a Benny T-shirt, which has gone viral. People have been asking for it from all over the world." Among the celebrities who have been pictured wearing one are Zach Galifianakis, Pete Doherty and X-Man star Nicholas Hoult.

Lynne Lees, who runs the campaign's Facebook page, has met actor F Murray Abraham and told him about the campaign. Al Pacino has signed a T-shirt. "We're trying to harness the power of social media and get the message across," McLelland adds. "We only started it in August and it has really taken off. We've even had people donating stained-glass windows."

A fundraising event will be staged in the Clutha bar in April and the hope is that Carlyle, who is currently filming in Vancouver, will be able to attend. Sharon herself hopes to visit Glasgow in August, the 70th anniversary of Benny's death, when there may be a fundraising and promotional event. "We're happy to be working to preserve Benny's memory," says McLelland. "He's someone who transcended generations. I'm 36 but even people of my generation know who he is."

Years ago, Alan Crossan worked as a photographer at the old Scottish Film Council, where he would watch Lynch footage in the archive. "He was a terrific boxer and he packed some punch," he says. "At his peak he was unbeatable." Today Crossan owns the Clutha. One of the largest figures in the mural on its outside wall is based on a famous photograph of Lynch. "We put that up," says Crossan, who is himself from the Gorbals, "because the story is that he once lived above the pub at one point, and drank in it as well."

Any recognition of the boxer would be a good idea, he adds. "I think the campaign wanted to put the statue in Central Station but I asked Network Rail and they said it would be very difficult and would raise all sorts of issues. So I think it would make sense to locate it in the Gorbals. I think it will have some economic benefit for the area, because people will come to see it. Our mural has already gone worldwide." He hopes the forthcoming event "will raise a few thousand for the Benny campaign"; he muses that something could even be done for it on an annual basis.

Lynch retained his world flyweight title against Peter Kane at Shawfield stadium in October 1937; the small but distinctive trophy is today in the possession of Glasgow Museums and will feature in the travelling display alongside original photographs and ephemera such as cigarette cards. A private collector has granted permission for the inclusion of another Lynch trophy which he owns. Items held by the Lynch campaign group will also feature in the display, which is being assembled by outreach assistant Kevin Kerrigan.

"We hope to get it out on the date of Benny's birthday," says Kerrigan. "The group is doing a day of events and that's the day we're aiming for. The display will start with a small launch in the Gorbals and the hope is that we can get it into a big Glasgow venue for between six and 12 months – a place that holds big sporting events and where a lot of people will see it."

As a measure of Lynch's enduring popularity, McLelland mentions a story that has been passed down her family. In the early 1960s Robert Lynch married her cousin Mary and her mother was the flower girl. Her mother was only young at the time but remembers there being lots of newspaper photographers present, all of them drawn by the surname: Lynch.

"This was about 30 years after Benny's death, but there was still interest in him," says Marie. "He was still a famous name."

To find out more about the campaign, go to http://penny4benny.wix.com/bennylynch. To donate, visit gofundme.com/8d2j5678