Lord Devlin

Justice John Sackar

• Publisher: Hart Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781509944699
• eBook ISBN: 9781509923717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Lord Devlin was a leading lawyer of his generation. Moreover, he was one of the most recognised figures in the judiciary, thanks to his role in the John Bodkin Adams trial and the Nyasaland Commission of Inquiry. It is hard then to believe that he retired as a Law Lord at a mere 58 years of age. This important book looks at the life, influences and impact of this most important judicial figure. Starting with his earliest days as a schoolboy before moving on to his later years, the author draws a compelling picture of a complex, brilliant man who would shape not just the law but society more generally in post-war Britain.

1

Ab Ovo

The luckiest day of William John Devlin’s life would appear to have been a chance meeting with Frances (Fanny) Crombie on a sea voyage back from South Africa in 1898. Patrick’s parents, William and Frances, were married in 1900 and for a time went to live in Chiselhurst on the outskirts of London. William was a devout Irish Catholic and Frances, though of Scottish Protestant blood, would embrace Catholicism with some vigour. As in many Catholic families of that time, numerous children followed – five in all. Patrick was the second eldest and was born there on 25 November 1905.

Patrick’s father was an architect. But he had no practice of any substance and was never to have one. Equally he had no business sense. He was slow, earnest and trusting but more importantly trusted.¹ A move to Aberdeen in the hope of work from the Catholic Church which never materialised did little to enhance the family’s wellbeing. By some means his family was able eventually to purchase a house in Aberdeen. Patrick did not know his father particularly well, but was provoked to describe his father’s career as a manifest and total failure.²

His mother was a member of a wealthy Aberdeen family of cloth manufacturers whose support was not infrequently resorted to for financial back-up. After Patrick’s maternal grandfather died his mother’s income from the estate kept the family going. The famous Crombie overcoat was an item of clothing of which Patrick was always proud. It was the flagship item of apparel for the business. Readers of Patrick’s memoir Taken at the Flood will readily appreciate he was far better informed about his mother’s family lineage than that of his father. Part of the reason is that, as Patrick explains, his father never spoke to him or his siblings about his family in Ireland. He knew his paternal grandmother had died prematurely and, as Patrick describes it, the family then disintegrated. On the other hand, almost all of the Crombies are mentioned in the memoir. Although his maternal grandfather was affectionately referred to as Papa, he seems clearly to have been a most unlikeable and immensely selfish widower.³

According to Patrick, his father was, as it seems, not only an unsuccessful but also an uncommunicative man. He was fortunate to have a wife with some means, as his practice could not have at any time comfortably supported his wife and their three sons at Stonyhurst, a Jesuit school in Lancashire that all three boys attended. It must be said that at the time the difference between fees at Stonyhurst as compared to one of the equivalent Protestant schools such as Winchester or Westminster was stark indeed. The latter were almost double. Somehow, his parents found the money to secure their children’s education, supplemented from time to time when the boys in particular won prizes. Eventually his two sisters became nuns. One brother became a priest, the other an actor. Arthur Conan Doyle, however, may well have the explanation for how Patrick’s parents managed to pay the fees. The Jesuits at Stonyhurst were very happy do deals with parents. If the child was dedicated to the church the fees would be remitted. Conan Doyle’s mother did not agree,⁴ but Patrick’s parents especially may well have done so. After all, out of the three boys, the church secured one out of three, and almost two.⁵

Patrick’s mentor, benefactor and de facto father was, for all relevant purposes, his Uncle George, one of his mother’s brothers. A bachelor of clear and abiding Protestant views and prejudices, Uncle George clearly favoured two of his sister’s sons, for when he died in 1946 Patrick (by then a successful barrister) and his brother William were two of the principal beneficiaries. Each inherited £15,000. While he refused to make any contribution to the fees at Stonyhurst, he gave Patrick’s mother about £200 a year. He did, however, provide the means by which Patrick could go to Cambridge.⁶

Uncle George taught Patrick about business and political philosophy. He persuaded him that, as Aesop had advocated, the ant was perfectly correct to shut the door in the face of the grasshopper. As Patrick puts it, he also taught him about the facts of life. Patrick and Uncle George became very close over the years. So much so that he appointed Patrick his co-executor (along with his solicitor) and entrusted him with his funeral arrangements.

Patrick attended Stonyhurst, ‘a school for Catholic gentlemen’,⁷ in the years 1914 to 1922. The school was situated in an area which had historically been very much a Catholic part of England, notwithstanding the persecutions in Elizabethan times. The recusants had never been fully rooted out. As far as can be seen, Patrick’s family had no connections with Stonyhurst, whereas some families had sent their children there for generations. No entrance examinations were necessary, not that that would have been an obstacle for Patrick or his brothers. Each of them was obviously intelligent, charming, if not bordering on cheeky. The Jesuits can and did do wonders with mediocre intellects but with Patrick and his brothers they were presented with an embarrassment of riches.

Patrick was eight years old when he was taken by train from Aberdeen to Stonyhurst in Lancashire.⁸ It was a very long way by any standards. It was somewhat reminiscent of the great journey on horseback from Scotland undertaken in 1718 by the other Jacobite, William Murray (later Lord Mansfield), then only 13 years old.⁹ Mansfield travelled alone. Almost certainly Patrick did not. This was no doubt an adventure habitually made by young men at this time.

Stonyhurst’s history is nothing short of dramatic. Originally founded in northern France at St Omer in 1592 to provide education for English Catholics, it was forced by the French Government to seek asylum at Bruges in 1762, later in Liège in 1773, and finally at its current location in 1794 as a result of a benefaction of Thomas Weld. In an advertisement for the school published in The Dublin Review in September 1922 it was described as being ‘360 feet above sea level, and with a bracing and healthy climate’ providing the usual ‘English public school education’.¹⁰

In the early twentieth century, the train to Stonyhurst stopped at Whalley, from which transport to the school was available by a two-horse-drawn carriage. On a clear night from the railway line between Clitheroe and Blackburn a line of lights could be noticed blinking in the West, against the dark shape of Longridge Fell. Stonyhurst College stood alone on that hillside a little way from the village of Hurst Green, above the Hodder, a tributary of the Ribble. Its Catholic owner, Thomas Weld, gave the then sandstone Tudor manor house to the Jesuits after they fled the French Revolutionary Army in 1794.

Over the years, Stonyhurst College has been extended. It is now an architectural melange, some have said a monstrosity. In parts it echoes the Bodleian library, and in parts King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder and it was not sufficiently ugly or ungrand to deter Country Life in October 1910 (just a few years before Patrick started) from devoting large slabs of two of its issues to the College. In typical Country Life style, big lavish photographs in sepia-like tones were spread over eight pages in the first issue and nine pages the following week. Appropriately, perhaps, in neither article is there a photograph of a student. Instead we have a priest either wandering in the garden reading or peering up at some ornamentation on a garden house. The College, now co-educational, appears regularly today in the same magazine in blazing colour as part of its annual marketing and recruitment campaign.

Notwithstanding the Dublin Review advertisement, Stonyhurst was described by others as a secluded, spartan place in an unwelcoming climate.¹¹ It should be acknowledged, however, that it was the first private institution with its own gas works and the first also to have a macadamised road into its grounds,¹² all through the resourcefulness and genius of the Jesuits. The praise should not stop there. It is lovingly and lavishly captured in great detail along with much more of its history by Father John Gerard SJ in his ‘Centenary Record’, published in 1894, by which time the school had reached its peak and was the leading Catholic school in the country.¹³

Patrick started at Hodder, the preparatory school, a few miles from Stonyhurst. Until 1855 when it became a preparatory school, it had been run as a Jesuit novitiate. Patrick was starting his education at the beginning of the Great War. Compelling children to leave home at such an age and sensitive moment and to board a long way from home is something peculiarly English, and the perceived benefits of which many have found to be more than debatable.

In his memoir Patrick only allows the reader a brief and somewhat narrow window into Stonyhurst and his activities there. There is no mention at all of the preparatory school Hodder. No teachers, in those days almost all priests, are mentioned either. Privacy or circumspection might explain some of this, but it certainly cannot be put down to memory lapse. There is a brief reference to the regime of assigning a boy to read to the others at mealtimes. One of the students mentioned, ‘Bolshie Curran’, is singled out seemingly for two reasons. The first is that he supplied Patrick at a cost with a speech for Patrick’s debating audition; secondly, because Patrick found him a ‘quiet and ugly’ boy. What of all things would possess Patrick to waste one of his preciously crafted sentences to share that particular observation is a little hard to fathom, apart from a streak of cruelty not unknown amongst certain other members of his own family.¹⁴

At Hodder the prefects were in a powerful position. One eccentric old boy Charles Waterton, writing in his autobiography in 1837, called them ‘lynx-eyed’ guardians.¹⁵ Some of them meted out appalling corporal punishment to some of the junior boys.

The routine at Hodder was strict, often severe, and, Father Turner thought, far too narrow.¹⁶ Mass in the morning and evening was customary. Holy Communion to one side, confession, which was encouraged, was a little lacking in utility one might think for a seven year old. However, the Jesuits also encouraged and had a capacity to cultivate a student’s interest and love for cultural things, thea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• 1. Ab Ovo
• 2. God’s House
• 3. The Early Years in the Law
• 4. A Relentless Workload
• 5. The Celebrity
• 6. Friends Across the Atlantic
• 7. Up a Notch
• 8. Darkest Africa
• 9. The Return to Normality?
• 10. Appellate Life
• 11. Not Quite the Wilderness
• 12. New Challenges and the Enem>y Within
• 13. Revenge
• Biographical Details of Some of the Figures Appearing in the Book
• Index
• Copyright Page