Alfred Tristram Lawrence was one of a number of Queen's Bench Judges who did short-service in the Commercial Court to help with the workload during the dramatic but temporary expansion of business in the years immediately after the Great War. But he is remembered not for that, but for being the subject of one of the most discreditable judicial appointments of modern times.
Lawrence was born in Pontypool, South Wales, in 1843. His father was a surgeon, and Lawrence himself initially intended a career in medicine. He switched his plans to the law after watching the trial of a property case in which the family had an interest. He studied law at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and was called to the Bar by Middle Temple in 1869. Lawrence's career progression was slow: he did not begin to make recurrent appearances in the law reports until the late 1870's, and he did not become Queen’s Counsel until 1897, when he was already fifty-four. He eventually established a strong, but not spectacular, common law practice in areas including companies, landlord and tenant, local government, rating, railways, and taxation.
Before becoming a KC, he had been Junior Counsel to the Admiralty, so he had at least some ties to shipping work, although this post apparently did not lead to many appearances in the Admiralty Court. He was instructed in a handful of charterparty cases in the 1880's, and in MacKenzie v Whitworth (1875) 1 Ex D 36 he was led by Judah P Benjamin QC, author of the definitive text on sale of goods law in a marine re-insurance action (in which the Court of Appeal confirmed that a reinsurance is an insurance of the underlying risk, not of the insurer's liability to the underlying insured). But by the 1890's, the only commercial element to Lawrence's practice appears to have been actions on bills of exchange and cheques. He did not acquire any Commercial Court profile after the Court's creation in 1895, and Great Western v London & County [1899] 2 QB 172, a bill of exchange case before John Bigham, appears to have been his only reported case there as counsel (he won).
“Lorry”’: A. T. Lawrence, depicted by ‘Vanity Fair’ in 1907. The affectionate nickname implies that he was well-liked, notwithstanding that his appointment was political and his judicial performance mediocre.
Lawrence argued eight cases in the House of Lords and Privy Council as leading counsel, and won five of them. Most were about bills of exchange and cheques and, with the increasing marginilisation of these payment instruments in modern banking, they have limited modern significance. The most high-profile of his Lords appeals was Gluckstein v Barnes [1900] AC 240, in which a syndicate of businessmen bought the Olympia exhibition and events centre in Kensington with a view to re-selling it to a newly-incorporated company, of which they appointed themselves directors. In a prospectus promoting shares in the company, they stated the notional price which they had paid for the building. But they concealed the fact that they had, in effect, obtained a discount by buying up mortgages on the property on the cheap and netting their full value off against the price. The Lords accepted Lawrence's argument that this "fraudulent pretence" was an unlawful secret profit, and that the members of the syndicate were liable to account to the company for "the produce of their nefarious plans".
But while Lawrence plainly had some solid professional ability, his elevation to the King's Bench in 1904 was, like Charles Darling's a few years previously, one of Lord Halsbury's overtly political appointments. Lawrence had never been an MP, but he had links to the Conservative party. He had also helped Arthur Balfour, the Conservative leader in the Commons, with the preparation of a draft bill. Balfour wrote to Halsbury implying that this was a sound qualification for elevation to the Bench, and the helpful Halsbury, always anxious to oblige a political colleague, took the hint. The 'Law Times' acidly commented that judicial promotion no longer seemed to depend upon merit. But it thought, and the rest of the legal press, agreed, that Lawrence would probably make a good enough Judge nonetheless.
Lawrence did not really live up to even these limited expectations. His handful of Commercial Court cases in 1919-1920 were as immemorable as the rest of his body of work. Carl Grabowsky v Vladimir Sagovsky & Sir M De Routhowsky (1919) 1 Lloyd's Rep 657 at least had eye-catching facts, but was of no legal significance. The plaintiff, a Russian businessman, accused the defendants, officials of the Russian embassy in London, of conspiring to cheat him out of a contract to supply coal to the Russian navy. On the opening day of the trial, his unhappy counsel informed Lawrence and the defendants' large legal team (which included two future Lords Chancellor, Douglas Hogg and William Jowitt) that his client had gone back to Russia and could only be contacted by telegram with a several week timelag. Lawrence showed firm case management in the best traditions of the Commercial Court when he struck the claim out on the spot. Among his other commercial judgments, Italian State Railways v Mavrogordatos [1919] 2 KB 305 remains a significant decision on what is involved in "redelivery" under a time charter, though Lawrence was helping out in the Court of Appeal in that case, not sitting in the Commercial Court. The most memorable case of his judicial career was a criminal one, R v Casement (1917) 12 Cr App Rep 99, in which he was one of five Commercial Judges (the others were Darling, Bray, Scrutton, and Atkin) who dismissed Sir Roger Casement's appeal from his conviction for treason.
By the beginning of 1921, Lawrence had been on the Bench for sixteen years and was fast approaching his eighties. He had been overlooked for promotion to the Court of Appeal on half a dozen occasions, and it seemed obvious that he would never go any further. Then fate took a hand.
The Earl of Reading, formerly Commercial Court practitioner Rufus Isaacs KC, had been Lord Chief Justice since 1913. He had never been entirely happy in the role. Isaacs had always felt ambivalent about giving up his prominent political career as a Liberal MP and Attorney-General to become a Judge. He had relished a return to politics during the Great War, when he took leave of absence from his judicial role to act as special commissioner and then ambassador to the United States. Isaacs missed the glamour of international diplomacy when he had to return to the Bench at the end of the War. When the post of Viceroy of India fell vacant, he angled for the opportunity to return to a frontline political role, and Prime Minister Lloyd George granted his wish.
The news that the Queen's Bench was going to need a new Chief Justice was announced in January 1921. There was then an unseemly delay in naming a successor. By political convention, the Attorney-General of the day, whether or not evidencing any signs of judicial potential, was entitled to claim a vacant Chief Justiceship. Liberal Attorney-General Gordon Hewart wanted the job. Lloyd George was eager to oblige. But Lloyd George believed that he needed Hewart in the Commons, and he wanted to avoid - or at least delay - a bye-election.
The situation should have been chalked up to Hewart's bad luck and bad timing, with a capable Chief Justice appointed from the Bench: the legal press speculated about Lord Sterndale or Lord Sumner, both former Commercial Judges. But Lloyd George did not want to disappoint a colleague, and he came up with a cunning solution. More than thirty years before, as a young solicitor in North Wales, Lloyd George had briefed Lawrence to appear for a client in a case at Birmingham Assizes. Now, he offered Lawrence the Chief Justiceship, but strictly on condition that Lawrence must sign an undated letter of resignation, to be released at a date of Lloyd George's choosing. (A slightly - though only slightly - more charitable account claims that Lawrence had actually tendered the resignation letter already, after deciding to retire, and was induced by promise of the Chief Justiceship to postpone his departure to suit Lloyd's George's political convenience.) Lloyd George notoriously struggled with such sophisticated concepts as right and wrong, so it is not particularly surprising that he should make such an offer. What is extraordinary is that not only did Lawrence accept this squalid deal, but he had to fight off competition: fellow Queen's Bench Judge Charles Darling made clear to Hewart that he would be more than willing to serve as a stopgap Chief Justice, even, he said, if only for ten minutes. In fairness to him, Darling had served as acting Chief Justice during Reading’s wartime sojourn in the States, which made him a more credible candidate than Lawrence. Darling, who was seventy-one, later joked that he had been too young to suit Lloyd George's purpose. The position duly went to Lawrence, who was six years older and so deaf that he could no longer follow cases properly.
The ‘Times’ photographed the rather cheerless swearing-in on 15th April 1921: a stony-faced Lord Chancellor Birkenhead (who privately condemned the whole affair as unlawful) presiding in the centre; Lawrence on his left.
Little attempt was made to conceal what was going on. When Lawrence first took his seat in Court after being sworn-in in April 1921, Hewart made a speech of welcome on behalf of the Bar. In his reply, Lawrence candidly acknowledged that it should have been Hewart who was taking office. The legal press had no illusions that Lawrence's appointment to the head of the Queen's Bench at the age of seventy-seven was anything other an act of short-term political expediency.
Lawrence's tenure was short indeed. Lloyd George sacked him less than a year later, releasing the resignation letter in early March 1922 and appointing Hewart to the position which he craved. Lawrence supposedly read about his own resignation in the newspaper in the back of his morning taxi: it was said that he left home as Lord Chief Justice and arrived at the Law Courts unemployed. But the sordid saga, which was subsequently exacerbated by Hewart's shameless incompetence as Chief Justice, may ultimately have had the beneficial effect of hastening the end of the corrupt practice of treating the office as an automatic reward for time-served government mediocrities: Hewart's successor, Thomas Inskip, was the last former Law Officer to become Chief Justice. (In a grim irony, Hewart left office in circumstances distinctly reminiscent of those of 1922. When Winston Churchill rearranged his Cabinet in October 1940, he dispensed with Inskip’s ministerial services, and needed to find a suitably prestigious consolatory role for his party colleague. In consequence, Hewart received an unexpected phone call from 10 Downing Street, ordering him to resign to make way for Inskip.)
Already nearly eighty when he was humiliatingly fired, Lawrence at least enjoyed the consolation of a lengthy retirement. He was invited to sit in a handful of Privy Council appeals, although he never actually delivered a judgment. He remained physically active, and enjoyed his favourite pastime of salmon fishing on the River Wye into his nineties. (Lawrence liked being outdoors: he had cycled and ridden to hounds as a young man, and took up golf in middle age.) On 3rd August 1936, trying his fortune on an unfamiliar stretch near Built Wells, he stumbled, fell into the cold water, and died of a heart attack. Jessie Elizabeth, his wife of fifty-five years, had died five years earlier. They had one daughter and three sons, the youngest of whom, Geoffrey, became a King's Bench Judge in 1932. Geoffrey performed with some distinction as the principal British Judge at the Nuremburg War Trials, but his appointment as Lord of Appeal by way of reward (as Lord Oaksey) proved to be another case of over-promotion.
Captain Benn: Is it a fact that the Lord Chief Justice was unaware that he had resigned, and that he announced on Friday that he would sit on Monday, and then learned on Saturday that he had resigned?
Mr Chamberlain: That assumption is quite as inaccurate as most of the assumptions of the honourable and gallant Gentleman.
Mr Gwynne: Is it not a fact that the Lord Chief Justice was in the middle of the trial of a case when the announcement was made?
Mr Chamberlain: Yes; he was trying a case which he was able to finish next morning.
Lloyd George left it to Leader of the House Austen Chamberlain to handle some awkward questions about Lawrence’s “retirement”. (Hansard, House of Commons, Oral Answers to Oral Questions, 9th March 1922)