Unfailingly courteous, and patient quite literally to a fault, John William Morris had a reputation as a first-instance Judge for setting a pedestrian pace at odds with the energetic spirit which was supposed to animate the Commercial Court. But, though Morris could be slow, he was always thoughtful and hardworking, and his dedication to judicial office, combined with all-round common law skills, carried him to the pinnacle of his career as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary for fifteen years.
Morris's surname pointed to his father's family roots in Portmadoc (as it was commonly known at the time, although Porthmadog is generally preferred today), on the North-West coast of Wales. But he was born over the border, in Liverpool. The city was his mother's family home, and his father had moved there for work, becoming a bank manager. Morris’s family (he had an older sister) holidayed in Wales when he was a child, and like Richard Atkin a generation before him, the adult Morris felt a strong sense of Welsh identity. He held office as Pro-Chancellor of the University of Wales for nearly two decades (he had been the University's standing counsel while he was at the Bar), was President of the London Welsh Association, and became a member of the Gorsedd of the Bards (although he never perfected his grasp of the Welsh language).
Morris went to school in Liverpool. He reached school-leaving age around the outbreak of the Great War, and promptly volunteered for the army. He served in France with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, was awarded the Military Cross (the second-highest award for gallantry at the time, after the Victoria Cross), and became a Captain. After he was demobilized at the end of the War, Morris studied law at Trinity College, Cambridge. He demonstrated an enthusiasm and flair for public speaking at the Cambridge Union, and was elected as its President in 1919. The distractions of office may explain why Morris ended his Cambridge career with only a second class degree, but he was a good enough scholar to win funding for a year’s study at Harvard.
Returning to England in 1921, Morris was called to the Bar by Inner Temple. He joined the Northern Circuit, and based himself in his home city to start his professional career. He was an immediate success. Tall, with striking features, an abundance of ready charm, and a pleasing voice, Morris was blessed with natural attributes for success before juries in both criminal and civil cases, and he quickly found work. Within a couple of years of starting out, he was appearing as junior counsel in the House of Lords in a fatal accidents claim brought by the widow of a Liverpool dockworker who got lost in the fog on his way to the latrine and stumbled into the harbour (Mersey Docks v Procter [1923] AC 253: a majority of the Lords held that the man's death was a freak accident, and dismissed the claim).
Health and safety litigation was just one aspect of Morris's busy junior career across a spread of common law fields, including bankruptcy, buildings and construction, companies, crime, defamation, divorce, and tort. There was also a commercial element to his practice: he appeared in a couple of reported sale of goods cases, and the Liverpool Passage Court dealt with a healthy quantity of local commercial litigation. But Morris did not specialise in commercial work in the way of his Liverpool (and, later, judicial) contemporary, Frederic Sellers. As a "Liverpool local", Morris did not feature much in the London trials and appeals which drew the attention of the law reporters: only around twenty of his cases as junior counsel were reported, most of them criminal appeals. But, while Morris may have been relatively anonymous away from his home ground, his career progression was rapid. When he was appointed King's Counsel in 1935, in the same intake as Sellers, only one of that year’s fifteen other appointees had been in practice for a shorter period than Morris (Cyril Radcliffe, the star of the Chancery Bar who, in 1949, became the last Lord of Appeal in Ordinary appointed direct from the Bar).
The centre of gravity of Morris's work shifted to London after he became a KC, and he joined Chambers in Farrar’s Buildings. He remained a common law generalist, appearing in reported cases about copyright, employment, landlord and tenant, local government, and professional negligence, as well as more personal injuries work and criminal appeals. But he was instructed in a handful of notable insurance and sale of goods cases. General Accident v Midland Bank [1940] 2 KB 388 was a significant decision on when an insurance covering several insureds is "joint" (the issue being whether the insurer could rely on a fraud by one insured as a defence against all). With v O'Flanagan 1936] Ch 575 (a dispute about the sale of a doctor's practice) confirmed that a contracting party may be obliged to correct a continuing representation which is overtaken by events, even if the contract is not one of the utmost good faith which attracts a duty of disclosure.
In Soag Machine Tools v Gilette (1939) 63 Lloyd's Rep 216, Morris lost out to A.T. Denning KC in a dispute about the passing of risk in a sale of machine tools for the manufacture of razor blades (the buyer's employees dropped the machine while lifting it from the seller's lorry: Denning convinced George Branson that risk had already passed, so that the buyers had to pay the contract price and bear the loss). A few years later, in Dies v British & International Mining [1939] 1 KB 724, the case from his career at the Bar which is best-known today, Morris led Denning in defending a claim brought by a purchaser of rifles and ammunition to recover £100,000 paid as an advance on the purchase price. The seller had terminated the contract after the buyer had repudiated it, and Morris and Denning argued that a buyer which wsa a wrongdoer could not get its money back. But the Court disagreed, in a decision which would now be categorised as restitution for total failure of consideration. Morris also developed a sideline as a commercial arbitrator (in Focke v Hecht (1938) 60 Lloyd’s Rep 135, his decision that an inspection certificate was final and binding as to quality in a CIF sale of Australian eggs was upheld on appeal). In Great Western Railway v Norwegian Government (1945) 78 Lloyd's Rep 152, he even appeared in a Commercial Court tug-and-tow case, leading future Commercial Judge and Law Lord, Patrick Devlin.
In 1936, Morris participated as counsel in Samuel Porter's Budget Inquiry, representing James Henry Thomas, the indiscreet Secretary of State for the Colonies. According to The 'Telegraph', he produced "one of the greatest pieces of advocacy" on behalf of the embattled Cabinet minister. (Notwithstanding his imposing physical presence, Morris was never any kind of bullying advocate, preferring a “golden-tongued” form of understated politeness.) Proving the adage that few cases are won by oratorical flourish, this bravura performance did his client little good: Thomas resigned in disgrace after Porter concluded that he had leaked Budget secrets to friends and business acquaintances, who had profited from the insider information.
Morris’s most (in)famous client, James Henry Thomas was a former Welsh railway worker and trade unionist turned Labour MP, who held office as Secretary of State for the Colonies for a decade in the National Governments of Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin. Commercial Judge Samuel Porter found that he had leaked Budget details to friends and business associates, who exploited the confidential information to take profitable positions on the stock and insurance markets.
Two years later, Morris obtained his first judicial experience when he was appointed a Judge of Appeal in the Isle of Man, a part-time post which was traditionally filled by senior members of the Liverpool Bar. In 1939, he became a magistrate in Caernarvon, another part-time office, and one which he held until 1969.Too old to fight in another World War, Morris performed government work on the Home Front between 1939 and 1945, writing a report for the Treasury on requisitioning of property for war use, sitting on several Home Office committees, and chairing an inquiry into possible ways of controlling house prices. He was awarded the CBE in recognition of his public service in June 1945. Six months later, he was made a Judge of King's Bench Division.
Although Morris had never had a high profile as a commercial practitioner, his first reported cases were as a Judge of the Commercial Court. In Comptoir D'Achat v Ridder (1947) 80 Lloyd's Rep 140, Morris revisited total failure of consideration when a CIF buyer sought restitution of part-payment of the purchase price after the carrying vessel diverted to seek refuge in a neutral port on the outbreak of war. (Morris held that it was not a Dies-type case, because risk had passed while the goods were afloat; the result was a victory for his former junior, Patrick Devlin, by now a KC.) He followed that up with cases about sales of yachts and converted lifeboats and the Canadian statute giving effect to the Hague Rules, and sat recurrently in the Commercial Court until the end of the 1940's. Morris also dealt with more general King's Bench work, such as company law, landlord and tenant, local government, tort, and took his turn in the Court of Criminal Appeal. In Attorney General v Hunter [1949] 2 KB 111, he combined crime with shipping in ordering the forfeiture of an American-owned yacht which had been used to smuggle wine and spirits from France to England.
Morris brought to the Bench the courtesy which had marked his career as an advocate. In his new role, this manifested itself in an apparently infinite patience in listening to the evidence of witnesses and the arguments from the Bar. While his pleasant demeanour was an admirable judicial quality, and, for counsel, a welcome one, he often exhibited a painstaking determination to explore all aspects of every point in each case. This, together with his reluctance to interrupt or force the pace of a hearing, meant that Morris acquired a reputation for slowness. But he was also thorough and careful, and he had the gift of good judgment. Morris was never overruled in reported first-instance cases, and in 1951 he was promoted to the Court of Appeal himself, after fewer than six years on the Bench.
“In June, 1952, Mrs Adler, a widow, who keeps a shop, decided to go for a cruise upon the P&O steamship Himalaya…”
When future Commercial Judges Alan Mocatta and Michael Kerr heard the plaintiff-sympathising opening to Lord Justice Denning’s judgment, they may have had a shrewd notion that their appeal on behalf of the careless Master and boatswain of The ‘Himalaya’ was not going to end well. The liner retired from service around the same time as John Morris.
Morris sat on a number of commercial appeals, including Atlantic Maritime v Gibbon [1954] 1 QB 88, a charterparty frustration case arising out of the Civil War in China between the government and the communists, and Blane v Minister of Transport [1951] 2 KB 965, which decided that a charterer's contractual option to purchase the ship did not survive the termination of the charter upon the vessel becoming a constructive total loss. Cullinane v British Rema [1954] 1 QB 292 was an important decision on the principle that "double counting" is not permitted in the assessment of damages for breach of contract, although the basis for the majority decision on the actual facts was never entirely clear, and Morris's dissent was perhaps well-advised. In Adler v Dickinson [1955] 1 QB 158, Morris, sitting with his former junior A.T. Denning, held that exemption clauses in a contract for a Mediterranean pleasure cruise did not prevent a passenger who fell from a badly-secured gangplank from suing the crew members who were responsible for the accident: on orthodox principles of privity of contract, the passenger's bargain was with the shipowner alone, and the crew members had no standing to invoke the protection of the clauses. The name of the ship was The 'Himalaya', and the decision inspired the creation of the "Himalaya Clause" as a mechanism for conferring "vicarious immunity" on employees. Morris gave the lead judgment in The 'Muncaster Castle' [1960] 1 QB 536, a landmark decision on shipowners' seaworthiness obligations under the Hague Rules. Morris's conclusion that a shipowner could discharge the obligation of due diligence by entrusting the vessel to reputable repairers was overturned by the House of Lords, who ruled that the duty was non-delegable. This was one of only a handful of reported Court of Appeal cases in which Morris was overruled. It did his career no harm: he was made a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary in early 1960, taking his title of Borth-y-Gest from a village just along the coast from Porthmadog.
Morris spent a little over half of his judicial career as a Law Lord, sitting on more than four hundred and fifty House of Lords and Privy Council appeals, covering the full range of judicial work, from divorce to taxation, and from crime to shipping. In the latter field, he was a member of the panel which decided Midland v Scruttons [1962] AC 446, a successor to Adler v Dickson in which the Lords held that careless stevedores could not rely on exemption clauses to which they were not a party, and which was a further spur to "Himalaya Clauses". (As in Adler v Dickson, A.T. Denning, who had been promoted to the Lords in 1957, was one of Morris's co-panellists. Less sympathetic to commercial bill of lading holders than to injured cruise passengers, Denning dissented and would have held that there was "vicarious immunity" on the facts.) Morris delivered the judgment of the Privy Council in Attorney-General of Ceylon v Scindia [1962] AC 60, a leading case on representations of fact in bills of lading. In The 'Aello' [1961] AC 153, he was a member of a panel which took a narrow view of when a vessel under voyage charter became an arrived ship. When the Lords revisited this question a dozen years later in The 'Johanna Oldendorff' [1974] AC 479, Morris was again on the panel. He diplomatically suggested that The 'Aello' was distinguishable on its "very special facts". But his colleagues were rather more brutal: they concluded that The 'Aello' was wrong, and overruled it. Morris delivered judgments on the celebrated Centrocon Arbitration Clause in The 'Evje' [1975] AC 797; on the liabilities of negligent maritime salvors in The 'Evje' [1972] AC 242 (in which an inexperienced salvage diver fired a bolt gun into a gas-filled tank and blew up the ship; and remoteness of damages in contract in The 'Heron II' [1969] 1 AC 350 (still the leading authority).
Away from commercial cases, Morris showed an interest in the developing field of public law in cases such as Ridge v Baldwin [1964] AC 40, which emphasised the importance of "natural justice) and Anisminic v Foreign Compensation Commission [1969] 2 AC 147, in which the Lords held that a Parliamentary attempt to oust the Court's jurisdiction to review the decisions of a tribunal was ineffective (although Morris dissented). He was also prominent in landmark tort cases, including Hedley Byrne v Heller [1964] AC 465 (liability for negligent advice outside a contractual relationship, Home Office v Dorset Yacht [1970] AC 1004 (liability of prison authorities for damage done by escaping prisoners), and British Railways Board v Herrington [1972] AC 877 (duty of care owed by occupier of land to trespassers). Whatever the subject matter at hand, Morris's judgments were much commended for their well-ordered structure and clarity of exposition. Morris made the occasional foray into committee work as a Law Lord, heading an inquiry into jury service in 1963. He was the only former Commercial Court Judge who was party to the 1966 Practice Statement by which the Law Lords, departing from settled practice, announced that they regarded themselves as free to overrule earlier House of Lords decisions.
Overall, Morris's reputation was as a judge whose powers of legal analysis were dependable rather than inspired. But he was respected for his versatile reliability. To the end, he remained popular with counsel for his politeness, a welcome antidote to the more acerbic Kenneth Diplock, with whom he overlapped in the Lords for seven years. Had it not been for Lord Reid's quarter-century in the Lords, Morris would have become Senior Law Lord. As it was, he retired in early 1975, after almost thirty years on the Bench. The ‘Himalaya’ was sold for scrap later the same year.
Morris was made a Companion of Honour shortly after stepping down, only the second Judge (after Reid) to receive the award. He helped fill out the numbers in the Lords for another four years, hearing his last Privy Council appeals in the spring of 1979, a few weeks before his death. Morris did not marry. Without family distractions, he took time in retirement to rekindle an interest in politics. In the 1920's he had twice stood unsuccessfully for Parliament, as Liberal candidate for Ilford. In the mid-late 1970's, he used his position in the Lords to speak on Welsh affairs, supporting proposals for devolution and for the promotion of the Welsh language. John William Morris died at home Porthmadog on 9th June 1979, a little short of his eighty-third birthday. His former senior clerk at Farrar's Buildings, who had started out in the Temple at fourteen and was a clerk for nearly six decades, died a few months after him, at the age of ninety.