John Edward Singleton overcame early incompetence as a law student to build an admirable professional life in the law, first as a tremendously successful common law barrister and then as a highly regarded and well-liked first-instance and appellate Judge.
Singleton was born into a farming family at Howick Cross, south-west of Preston, in 1885. The Singleton family's roots in their native Lancashire went deep, and their name came from a village just outside Blackpool. Singleton went to grammar school in Lancaster, then studied law at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he contrived to get a third class degree. He was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple in 1906, and returned to Lancashire to launch his career, joining the Northern Circuit and making Liverpool his base. Several future Commercial Court Judges had made their early reputations in the port city, and the local Courts still dealt with a good quantity of commercial litigation. The fact that Singleton was considered qualified to sit in the Commercial Court when he was a Judge suggests that he picked up some of this work while he was at the Bar. But since local cases seldom made it into the law reports, it is difficult to be sure how prominently commercial litigation featured in Singleton’s early practice.
However, it is certain that he was no narrow commercial specialist. In fact, his first reported cases (beginning in 1909) were criminal, and he later appeared in a range of common law cases, including employment, health and safety, landlord and tenant, local government, personal injury, and more crime. Singleton quickly built up a good practice. By 1915, he was appearing as junior counsel in the House of Lords in a workmen's compensation claim arising from the death of a Lancashire coal miner.
His career was then interrupted by service in the Great War. Singleton saw action with the Royal Field Artillery in France and Belgium. He became a Captain, was mentioned in dispatches, was wounded, persuaded a doctor to pass him as fully recovered when he was no such thing, returned to active service, was wounded again, and was finally invalided out of the army. He appears to have picked up his practice again fairly quickly when he returned to civilian life. His first reported case of a distinctly commercial nature did not arrive until 1920: Cheshire v Vaughan [1920] 3 KB 24, an action by Liverpudlian importers against their insurance brokers for failing to make proper disclosure to the underwriters. Singleton and his leader, representing the brokers, won the trial before Commercial Judge Alfred McCardie, who heard the case in Liverpool. They then had a pleasant day in the Court of Appeal, which did not call upon them to respond to the importers' case before dismissing the appeal.
In March 1922, SIngleton was appointed King's Counsel aged only thirty-seven. The only practitioners junior to him on the list of new KC's were future Master of the Rolls Wilfred Greene and future Lord Chancellor William Jowitt. It was a year of high achievement for Singleton. In the general election that November, he won the Lancaster constituency for the Conservatives. But he lost the seat to the Liberals at another general election a year later, and did not stand for Parliament again.
As a KC, Singleton shifted the focus of his practice to London, and made more frequent appearances in the law reports. He was one of the counsel in Brandt v Liverpool [1924] 1 KB 575, a leading case on implied contracts in the carriage of goods by sea. As in Cheshire v Vaughan, Singleton's clients were Liverpool-based (this time, they were shipowners), and a number of his cases as KC had connections to Liverpool or Manchester, indicating that he retained strong professional links with his native Lancashire. Singleton appeared in a few banking cases during the 1920's. But commercial disputes represented a relatively small proportion of his reported cases. To judge from the law reports, he remained very much a common law generalist, with local government and rating and licensing being his principal forte. He also argued the occasional case in the Chancery, and even appeared once or twice in family litigation in the Probate, Divorce & Admiralty Division. As an advocate, Singleton presented as a bluff, plain-speaking, sensible Northerner. When he was a Judge, his down-to-earth personality helped him to build a rapport with juries (The Times thought that "he could generally get from a jury the verdict that he thought would meet the justice of the case"). This gift must have been extremely useful at the Bar in an age when jury trial was still relatively common in civil cases outside the Commercial Court and was the norm in serious crime. But Singleton was also effective where there was no jury: he appeared frequently in the Court of Appeal, both civil and criminal, and argued more than half a dozen cases in the House of Lords and Privy Council as a KC.
Singleton was interested in the ethical aspects of advocacy, and lectured on the topic to Bar students. The lectures were published as "Conduct at the Bar", and for many years a copy was presented to all students called by the Inner Temple. Singleton donated all of his royalties to the Barristers' Benevolent Association.
Singleton acquired judicial experience in part-time posts as a Judge of Appeal in the Isle of Man and Recorder of Preston. In 1934, he was made a Judge of the King's Bench at the same time as Samuel Porter. The announcement caused little surprise: there had been some expectation that Singleton would become a Judge a year earlier, as replacement for Henry McCardie. The legal press thought that he was a good choice, with The Law Journal praising him as "an admirable advocate and lawyer, and the fortunate possessor of a quite unusual charm of manner".
Singleton made an unusual start to his judicial career. It was common enough for new King's Bench Judges to begin with a stint in the Court of Criminal Appeal. But practically Singleton's first case was in the civil Court of Appeal: Deen v Davies [1935] 2KB 282, in which a Welsh farmer's elderly and normally well-behaved pony, fed up with waiting while its owner attended to business in Merthyr Tydfil, set off home on its own, knocking down and injuring the plaintiff en route.
Once he settled down in the King's Bench Division, Singleton's workload reflected his profile as a KC, with cases about health and safety, licencing and local governmet, rating and taxation, and tort, and regular outings in the Court of Criminal Appeal.But, in the first decade of his judicial career, he was deployed in the Commercial Court from time to time, mostly hearing shipping cases about charterparties and bills of lading. Singleton never overcame that third class start to become a profound legal thinker, and his judgments did not make any profound contribution to the development of English common law. But Petrofina v Compagnia Italiana (1936) 56 Lloyd's Rep 141, in which he held that a clause obliging owners to clean the holds to the satisfaction of charterers' surveyors supplemented but did not replace the duty of seaworthiness (and was upheld in the Court of Appeal: (1937) 57 Lloyd's Rep 247) was significant.
Singleton’s most prominent case at first-instance was criminal, the 1936 trial of the improbably-named Buck Ruxton, an Indian-born Lancaster doctor who had murdered his wife and housemaid, dismembered their bodies, and dumped the remains in the Scottish borders. (The killer had changed his name from Bukhytar Hakim when he moved to Britain, perhaps imagining that "Buck Ruxton" sounded traditionally Anglo-Saxon. In the event, he ended up being most commonly known as "The Savage Surgeon".) Ruxton denied murder, but he had difficulty explaining why his house was full of blood-stains and why he had removed his (blood-stained) carpets and burned his (blood-stained) towels. The fact that he had been involved in a road accident on his way back from Scotland after dumping the bodies did not help his defence either, because his car registration and the date and location had been logged by the police. The jury convicted him in less than an hour after an eleven day trial. Ruxton's appeal on grounds that Singleton had misdirected the jury proved as hopeless as his defence, and he was hanged.
More familiar to modern lawyers is Hartog v Colin & Shields [1939] 3 All ER 566, in which a careless dealer in furs offered to sell Argentine hare skins to the plaintiff at a specified price per pound, when the market invariably priced hare skins by the piece, and that was what the dealer had intended to say. Since there were roughly three pieces to a pound, this was an excellent deal for the plaintiff, who enthusiastically accepted the offer. But Singleton held that, since the plaintiff should reasonably have known that the dealer meant per piece, there was no binding contract (although one might have thought that the correct analysis was that there was a contract, but at the per piece rate which the dealer intended and which the plaintiff should have known he intended).
Singleton chaired a number of inquiries into aspects of the War effort between 1939-1945, and was joint chairman of an Anglo-American committee of inquiry into Jewish immigration in Mandate Palestine after the War ended. With this extra-judicial service, and his reputation as a sensible and reliable trial Judge, Singleton was generally thought to have earned his promotion to the Court of Appeal in 1948. He put in eight years' solid service as a Lord Justice. He sometimes heard appeals in shipping cases, including Renton v Palmyra [1946] 1 QB 462, a significant decision on the construction of bill of lading exclusion clauses and the scope of the Hague Rules, and Blane Steamships v Minister of Transport [1951] 2 KB 965¸ on the impact of frustration on a charterer's contractual option to buy the ship. Other prominent cases from Singleton's time in the Court of Appeal included Biggin v Permanite [1951] 2 KB 314, which considered the right of a plaintiff who has been exposed to third party claims as a result of the defendant's breach of contract to settle those claims and recover the settlement sum from the defendant as damages; Victoria Laundry v Newman [1949] 2 KB 528, which became for a time the leading authority on remoteness of damages in contract; and Rickards v Oppenheim [1950] 1 KB 616, on making time of the essence in sale contracts.
Singleton as a King’s Bench Judge, attending the annual service at Westminster Abbey to mark the opening of the Legal Year.
Meanwhile, Rose v Pim [1953] QB 250 was a mistake case to rival Hartog v Colin & Shields, although this time the misunderstanding was mutual, rather than unilateral. A mix-up among commodity traders resulted in a string of contracts for the sale of generic "horsebeans", when what the ultimate buyer actually wanted was a more specific product, known as "feveroles". Singleton and his colleagues ruled that the contract between the plaintiff and the defendant, in the middle of the string, could not be rectified, because the parties had always intended to deal in "horsebeans", even if they had mistakenly believed that "horsebeans" and "feveroles" were synonymous..
By the mid-1950’s, Singleton had become one of the senior members of the Court of the Court of Appeal, which enabled him to sit as head of the panel which heard appeals from his native Northern Circuit. He was popular both with lawyers and with his fellow Judges, although The 'Guardian' thought that his usual good humour in Court was sometimes marred by an unwanted sarcasm in later years.
Like Samuel Porter, his fellow 1934 appointee to the King's Bench, Singleton did not marry. His pastimes were based outdoors. He emulated earlier Commercial Court Judge T.E. Scrutton by playing an enthusiastic but essentially incompetent game of golf, and he was a keen shot. Singleton had a serious operation in 1955, but appeared to make a full recovery. Apparently in fine health, he bid his judicial colleagues a cheery goodbye at the start of the 1956 Christmas Vacation, but fell severely ill after a day's shooting on the Yorkshire Moors in the New Year. Singleton died in hospital at Lytham in January 1957. Paying tribute in Court at the start of the new Term, Master of the Rolls Sir Raymond Evershed said that “he was a loveable man, and we loved him dearly”. The funeral was at the parish church in Singleton village.