Cyril Atkinson, KC and MP, in 1930.
Of eight Commercial Judges appointed during the 1930’s and ‘40’s, five became Lords of Appeal in Ordinary and two others Lords Justices of the Court of Appeal. The conscientious and capable Cyril Atkinson was the odd Judge out, spending his entire career at first instance.
The son of a Manchester cotton trader, Atkinson was born in 1874. After private school, he studied law at Owens College, part of the Victoria University of Manchester. He did well, winning prizes in equity and in real property and conveyancing. He was awarded a first class degree by the University of London in 1896 (Owens was a regional examination centre for London), gaining the highest marks in the year. Atkinson was an active member of the Manchester branch of the Law Students' Society, serving as Honorary Treasurer and participating in debates on topics as diverse as the law of distress for rent and the future of the House of Lords (Atkinson proposed that it should be abolished, but he lost the motion).
Notwithstanding this enthusiasm for public speaking, Atkinson did not begin his legal career at the Bar. Instead, he was articled to F.G. Atkinson of Manchester solicitors Atkinson, Saunders & Co. Maintaining his prize-winning student performance, he won a gold medal in the Law Society examinations. But he quickly abandoned plans to practise as a solicitor, and was called to the Bar by Lincoln's Inn in 1897. The change of profession did not interfere with Atkinson's habit of picking up awards, and the Council of Legal Education gave him a scholarship for his performance in the Bar exam. In 1899, he added a graduate law degree from London to his collection, although this time the top honours went to another candidate.
Atkinson joined the Northern Circuit. This enabled him to maintain his strong links with Manchester, which became the main geographical focus for his practice. He also kept up his connections with Victoria University, where he lectured in Roman Law. Atkinson made only a handful of appearances in the law reports during the first fifteen years of his career. But this low profile was a reflection of his limited London presence, not an indication of professional failure. On the contrary, Atkinson was obviously a great success in the Manchester Courts, because he was made King's Counsel in 1913, when he was not yet forty. After that, he cropped up more frequently in reported cases. To judge from the law reports, he had a mixed common law practice which included copyright, employment, industrial accidents and workmen's compensation, land, local government, tort, and the occasional appearance in the criminal courts (during the Great War, he prosecuted a high-profile conspiracy case in Liverpool, after army recruiting officers took bribes to provide bogus certificates of exemption to men who were legally liable to conscription). He also developed such a successful niche practice in cases about car accidents and other legal aspects of road traffic that contemporaries referred to him as "Automobile Atkinson".
Atkinson, looking less than thrilled at the prospect of his new career, on the day of his appointment to the King’s Bench in 1933.
But although Atkinson was far from being a Commercial Court specialist in the style of Roche or MacKinnon, he was instructed in a solid number of international sale and banking cases. Slater v Hoyle [1920] 2 KB 11 remains a prominent authority on that perennial controversy, when (if ever) sub-contracts can be taken into account in the assessment of damages in sale of goods cases. Atkinson's experience of commercial litigation did not always make him think very highly of his clients. In a 1928 letter to The 'Times', he complained that many cases were the result of elementary mistakes which could be avoided if business people could only be bothered to acquire a basic understanding of contract law.
In 1924, Atkinson expanded his career horizons by standing at the general election as Conservative candidate for the Manchester constituency of Altrincham, close to where he had been born. Being a local candidate seems to have helped: Atkinson took the seat from the Liberals, winning a 9,000 majority. Atkinson held the constituency with an increased majority at the 1929. In 1931, opposition parties apparently did not think that there was any point in challenging him, and Atkinson was re-elected unopposed.
The shortage of references to him in newspaper reports of Parliamentary debates suggests that Atkinson did not make a great splash on the floor of the House of Commons, although he spoke from time to time in debates relating to law reform, transport, and trade and tariffs. (Atkinson was keenly interested in the use of import taxes to protect domestic industries deemed essential to the national interest, and served for a time as a Referee under the Safeguarding Of Industries Act, deciding which business sectors should qualify for protection.) He resigned his seat in May 1933, when he was made a King's Bench Judge to fill the vacancy resulting from Henry McCardie's suicide. The government of the day was a coalition between the Conservatives and the National wing of a divided Labour party. The Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor (Ramsay MacDonald and John Sankey) were both Labour, so it is not obvious that Atkinson owed his elevation to political considerations, even though he was a serving MP. Certainly, the legal press thought that he was worthy of a place on the Bench on his own merits (The Solicitors' Journal congratulated Sankey for his "excellent choice"), although his selection did cause some surprise.
Just as during his time at the Bar, Atkinson as a Judge was more of a generalist with a commercial slant than a genuine commercial law specialist. Indeed, up until 1939, hardly any of his reported cases could be characterised as commercial. But, throughout the Second World War, Atkinson regularly tried shipping cases. They usually had some connection with the War, such as Larrinaga Steamship v The Crown (1943) 75 Lloyd's Rep 64, on the interpretation of the T.99A, the form of time charter which governed the employment of ships requisitioned by the government for war service, and a succession of cases about marine war risks insurance. In the charterparty frustration case Imperial Smelting v Joseph Constantine [1940] 1 KB 812, Atkinson held that a party claiming frustration does not have to prove as a negative that the frustration was not self-induced, the burden being on the other party to prove as a positive that the first party was at fault. He was overruled by the Court of Appeal, but vindicated in the House of Lords ([1942] AC 154). Atkinson's judgment in Hector Steamship v Sovfracht [1945] KB 343 on the ambit of a time charter clause dealing with the rate of hire for the final voyage is still cited today, while his interpretation of an exception excluding liability for "indirect or consequential" loss or damage in Saint Line v Richardsons [1940] 2 KB 99 proved influential, though controversial. As the Commercial Court entered a long period of under-employment in the post-War period, Atkinson dropped out of participation in commercial cases after 1945.
Atkinson appears to have had a commendable judicial attitude, if rather a dry one. The Times described him as "dignified, courteous, careful, and conscientious", but conceded that he exhibited few signs of a sense of humour. His judgment appears to have been generally sound, and in cases in which he was appealed, his decisions were upheld more frequently than they were overturned. He was regarded as sufficiently sound to be asked to help out in the Court of Appeal for a spell during the War. But, though clearly competent, Atkinson was rather anonymous. (His most eye-catching trial was a share-sale case which lasted sixty-two days, an astonishing length for the time. It did not make the law reports.) When he retired in 1948, after fifteen years judicial service, The Law Times appeared not to notice, although The Solicitors' Journal praised not only "his great abilities, but also his rare sympathy and understanding".
Away from the law, Atkinson was active in the Church of England, and was a member of the Church Assembly for five years after his retirement. He was married twice, first in 1900 to Kathleen Longridge, with whom he had a son and a daughter, and then, after Kathleen died in 1948, to Florence Henderson. In retirement, he and Florence made their home in Perth (Scotland, not Western Australia), which was where Cyril Atkinson died in 1967, at the age of ninety-two. He had lived to see his son, Fenton, become a Queen's Bench Judge in 1960. Fenton, who looked remarkably like Cyril, did not sit in the Commercial Court, although in 1968 he outdid his father by becoming a Lord Justice of the Court of Appeal.
