Comfortably the longest-named of all Commercial Judges, Christopher Stephen Thomas Jonathan Thayer Staughton had a large judicial personality to match. Few Judges today, for example, would announce that they intended to read the newspaper if counsel persisted with a bad point, let alone make good on the threat when the barrister carried on regardless.

Staughton was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple in 1957, and became a tenant at 3 Essex Court. With a cast of future Commercial Judges among its existing members  (John Megaw, Alan Mocatta, Eustace Roskill, John Donaldson, Michael Kerr, Anthony Lloyd, and Michael Mustill) it was the leading commercial set of the time. But the post-War slump in commercial litigation was not yet over, there was little work for new tenants, and Staughton appeared in only a couple of reported cases during the 1950's. In 1960, however, he found gainful employment in The 'Tropaioforos' [1960] 2 Lloyd's 469. The ship which gave its name to the case had sunk mysteriously in benign conditions in the Bay of Bengal. When the owners claimed on their insurance policy, the underwriters decided that the ship had been deliberately sunk with the owners’ connivance, in order to make a false claim. The trial before Colin Pearson occupied some of the commercial Bar's brightest talents for three months: Mocatta, Kerr, and Mustill were all retained by the owners, and only the participation of Henry Brandon, who joined Roskill and Staughton on the insurers' team, broke 3 Essex Court's monopoly on the case. Staughton's first major outing in the Commercial Court ended in triumph when Pearson ruled that The 'Tropaioforos' had indeed been scuttled, and dismissed the owners' claim. Pearson recognised Staughton's contribution by certifying that it had been a fit case for three counsel (so that the costs of all three could be recovered), which was a relatively unusual occurrence at the time.

Staughton's involvement in this high-profile case helped launch his career in earnest. After only two reported cases in the first years of his career, he made half a dozen appearances in Lloyd's Law Reports for 1960-1961. He maintained a similar record in subsequent years, with a succession of insurance, sale of goods, and shipping cases. Prominent among them were The 'Hong Kong Fir' [1962] 2 QB 26, the foundational modern case on innominate terms, and The 'Suisse Atlantique' [1967] 1 AC 361, a laytime and demurrage action which blossomed into a leading authority on the effects of repudiation on exclusion and limitation clauses when it reached the House of Lords.

He also branched out from carriage by sea to carriage by air in Fothergill v Monarch [1981] AC 251, one of the very few aviation cases to reach the Lords. (The case turned on whether the airline's liability was excluded by statute. Staughton won before Michael Kerr and Lord Denning's Court of Appeal, but fell at the final hurdle in the Lords.) Staughton argued around a dozen cases in the House of Lords altogether, including The 'Folias' [1979] AC 685 on when damages should be awarded in a foreign currency (often of important practical concern in commercial disputes) and Bunge v Tradax [1981] 1 WLR 711, in which the Lords accepted his submission that a provision in a commercial contract which fixes a time for performance should usually be treated as a condition. A tall man, Staughton had good physical presence for a trial lawyer, while his deep voice and long, grave face lent gravitas to his advocacy. He always believed in putting his case plainly, and in concentrating on his best points.

Staughton was increasingly in demand as an arbitrator during the 1970's, so that he acquired good experience of deciding commercial disputes as well as arguing them. He became a Recorder, a part-time judicial office in criminal litigation, in 1972, and was made a Queen's Bench Judge in 1981. At forty-seven, he was almost, but not quite, the youngest Commercial Judge since John Donaldson in the 1960's (Thomas Bingham had been slightly younger on his appointment the previous year).

With his background at the Bar, Staughton might have been expected to confine himself to cases about ships and insurance policies. The vast majority of his reported first instance cases were indeed in the Commercial Court, although he made the occasional foray into the Admiralty, and even heard the odd personal injury case. Striving for a commercial solution in the face of legal difficulties presented by the complex facts of The 'Aliakmon' [1983] 1 Lloyd's Rep 203, he did his best for cargo buyers who had never become owners of the goods or holders of the bill of lading. The more hard-hearted House of Lords held that the buyers had no title to sue, and that the buyers claims for damage to the goods must fail. Staughton broke new ground in The 'Cape Hatteras' [1982] 1 Lloyd's Rep 518 by applying the "prevention principle" to ship-building/repair contracts. As trial Judge in The 'Hannah Blumenthal' [1983] 1 AC 854 and  JH Rayner v Department of Trade [1990] 2 AC 418 respectively, he held that an arbitration could be and had been terminated by frustration and that the International Tin Council had sufficient legal personality to be sued. In the first case, demonstrating his independence of mind, Staughton had to find a way around a recent House of Lords decision to arrive at the sensible result. The Court of Appeal endorsed his initiative, but his decision was overturned in the House of Lords. In Rayner, on the other hand, he was upheld both in the Court of Appeal and in the Lords. Staughton was a good lawyer and had sound judgment. His overall record on cases which went to the higher courts was impressive, particularly when he spent such a high proportion of his time dealing with commercial cases, which were more likely than most to raise real points of law.

Staughton quickly established a reputation on the Bench for decisiveness, a droll sense of humour, and an impatience to the get to the key points in each case. These personality characteristics did not always combine well. If Staughton decided that a point was really bad or irrelevant, his sarcastic interjections could verge on the wounding, in the manner of J.C. Mathew, a blunt Commercial Court humourist from an earlier age. But, while his witticisms could sometimes be unsettling for those on the receiving end, Staughton was essentially good-natured, as, for example, when he sent the usher to rouse a tired junior counsel gently from his slumbers, rather than embarrassing the youngster in public with a wake-up call from the Bench.

But perhaps Staughton's defining judicial characteristic was his passion for plain-speaking. Not only did he always express himself in a way which was direct to the point of being blunt, but he also insisted that others in his Court should use plain English, rather than what he castigated as lawyers' circumlocutions.

Staughton was made a Lord Justice of Appeal in 1988, a relatively rapid promotion after less than seven years on the Bench. Some of his more prominent Court of Appeal judgments were not well received in the House of Lords. In Charter Re v Fagan [1997] AC 313, he took a lone stand against the increasing slide towards purposive construction of contracts. Declaring that there must come a point at which the modern judicial tendency to ignore the literal meaning of words had to stop, he decided that a contractual requirement for money to be "actually paid" meant that the money must actually be paid. But his fellow Lords Justice disagreed, and so did the Lords. In Ruxley v Forsyth [1994] 1 WLR 650, Staughton ruled that a contractor who dug a swimming pool to less than the specified depth was liable for the cost of putting the defect right, but the Lords held that nominal damages were an adequate remedy. Staughton fared better in Bradley v Eagle Star [1989] AC 957, in which the Lords endorsed his views on when a cause of action accrued under a liability insurance policy. Away from commercial and contract law, Staughton sat on numerous criminal appeals, and there were also administrative law, employment, family, landlord and tenant, and tort cases among his more than eight hundred appeals.

As an appellate Judge, Staughton retained his reputation for forthright speaking. Now, however, it was not only counsel who were on the receiving end of his broadsides, but sometimes also his fellow Judges. His injunction to a fellow Lord Justice who persisted with unfocussed interjections to "for goodness sake, shut up" may well have been intended humorously. But such bluntness was not necessarily calculated to endear Staughton to his colleagues. It is possible that an impression that Staughton could be a prickly character contributed to his failure to rise further up the judicial ladder. But simple bad timing must also have been a factor. Staughton had the misfortune of reaching judicial seniority at a time when the Commercial Court was already well represented in the House of Lords, with Henry Brandon, Desmond Ackner, Robert Goff, Anthony Lloyd, and Michael Mustill all sitting there during Staughton's time in the Court of Appeal.

Staughton also established himself as one of  the busiest maritime arbitrators in London. In 2002, he received a rare distinction when one of his Awards was published in the law reports. In the anonymised The 'Sine Nomine' [2002] 1 Lloyd's 805 (surely a Staughtonian joke), he and his co-arbitrators rejected a time charterer's claim for an account of the profits which the owner had made by wrongfully withdrawing the vessel and chartering it to someone else at a higher rate: damages at the market rate, Staughton said, were remedy enough. Staughton also found time to sit as an occasional member of the Board in Privy Council appeals, and part-time as an appeal Judge in Gibraltar. These were busy years in the Staughton household. Over the same period, Joanna held a series of governance posts in local education and health institutions, and served as High Sheriff and Deputy Lieutenant of Hertfordshire, for which she was awarded an OBE.

A logical thinker, Staughton was an enthusiastic and skilful bridge player. He also enjoyed shooting and gardening, with a particular passion for dahlias. He could be persuaded to participate in amateur dramatics from time to time, and was able to supply his own costume when he performed the 'Judge's Song' from Gilbert & Sullivan's 'Trial By Jury' at a village-hall event.

Christopher Staughton died in October 2014.