The outstanding athletic achievements of Montague Shearman's youth always rather overshadowed the more modest successes of his later legal and judicial careers. Shearman was born in 1857. His father was a Wimbledon solicitor, and his mother was descended from French royalist exiles. He first demonstrated his sporting skills at Merchant Taylor's School, where he captained the rugby team. At St John's College, Oxford from 1876-1879, Shearman represented the University against Cambridge in the hundred-yard sprint (which he won in 1876), the quarter-mile run, the shot-put (apparently his weakest event), and rugby (in which he played at different positions in different years). He rowed for his College, although not well enough to win a seat in the University Eight, was a good long-jumper and boxer, and was President of the University Athletics Club. But sport did not entirely dominate Shearman's University life: he took his studies sufficiently seriously to obtain a first class degree in classics.
Shearman did not confine his sporting horizons to University competitions. He was national amateur champion in the hundred-yards in 1876 (10½ seconds) and the quarter-mile in 1880 (52½ seconds). He twice made it onto the reserve list for the England rugby team, but was not called up: it fell to John Megaw to become the first (and, to date, only) Commercial Judge to play an international match. Keen to try something new, Shearman swam the Niagara River below the Falls in 1881. He was not impressed by the way in which amateur sporting competitions in England were run. Organisation was generally shambolic, and social snobbery often restricted entry to “gentlemen”, to the exclusion of "mechanics, artisans, and labourers". In 1880, Shearman and some like-minded friends created the Amateur Athletic Association, offering better-organised competitions which were open to all. He was the Association's first Honorary Secretary, and later its Vice-President and President.
“AAA”: Vanity Fair ranked Montague Shearman as a notable personality for his sporting achievements, not for distinction as a barrister or Judge.
Shearman would have to have been spectacularly successful in whatever career he chose if he was to match his early athletic triumphs. His professional life in the law did not ultimately reach the same heights. He joined Inner Temple in 1877, and was called to the Bar in 1881. Working in London, Birmingham, and on Circuit in the Midlands, he established a solid common law practice practice in areas including employment, insolvency, landlord and tenant, and local government. Shearman did not do much criminal work, although, appropriately, he did once prosecute in a case involving skulduggery in the athletics world. The defendant, who was in fact "a fine performer" on the track, pretended to be the "very moderate" Mr Sims of the Thames Ironworks Athletics Club, and was granted a head start of 11 yards in the 120 yards race and 33 yards in the 440 yards race at a contest at Leicester in 1899. He won both races, and pocketed 20 guineas in prize money. His story that it had just been a bit of fun did not convince the jury, and he was convicted of obtaining by deception: R v Button [1900] 2 QB 497.
Shearman became a barrister of choice for money-lenders, which brought him plenty of cases. But his progress at the Bar was steady rather than rapid. He made only a handful of appearances in reported cases before the 1890's. His name became more prominent after that, often in cases concerned with loans, although he also ventured into other areas, including intellectual property. In 1895, he appeared in a copyright case with John Bigham and T.E. Scrutton (Exchange Telegraph v Gregory [1896] 1 QB 147, a case about the wrongful interception of subscriber-only stock market which was distributed by the then cutting-edge technology of the telegraph system). But this was a rare encounter with the commercial Bar. Shearman argued a handful of non-marine insurance cases in his career, but he did not establish a Commercial Court practice. He did not become King's Counsel until 1903, and his appointment did not generate any expectation that he would become a leading figure of the Bar.
In the event, Shearman did very well indeed as leading counsel. He was good-tempered, and his pleasant personality appealed to both Judges and juries. He appeared in most types of common law work, and established a niche practice in high-profile divorce cases. He argued fifteen appeals in the House of Lords. They included, right at the end of his time at the Bar, two significant sale of goods cases which had started out in the Commercial Court: Wallis v Pratt [1911] AC 394, the first in a line of cases which established that an exclusion of “warranties” does not affect clauses which are conditions; and Biddell v Clemens Horst [1912] AC 18, which confirmed the buyer’s obligation to pay against documents under a CIF contract. But Shearman’s appearance in these cases was more a case of a fashionable KC being parachuted in to argue a difficult case than of a late blooming as a commercial specialist. (Shearman won Wallis and lost Bidell. His opponent on each occasion was future Commercial Court Judge and Law Lord Richard Atkin.) The 'Times' speculated that Shearman earned as much as anyone at the Bar in these late years of practice.
Shearman was appointed to the King’s Bench in 1914, at the same time as John Sankey, who would also sit in the Commercial Court. The legal press approved him as a good choice, and the surprise which The 'Solicitors' Journal' expressed about Sankey did not extend to Shearman. He was assigned to staple King's Bench work in such areas as employment, land, licensing, local government, and crime. He also helped out in the Probate, Divorce & Admiralty Division during the Great War, hearing divorce cases. (The Division was effectively a Judge short, because the Prize jurisdiction, which had been revived at the outbreak of war, absorbed much of President Sir Samuel Evans’s time after August 1914.) Shearman was that type of Judge who can reliably tackle a wide variety of work competently, if without any particular flair. His obituarists repeatedly described him by the word "useful". They did not intend to damn him with faint praise: Courts always need useful Judges, but they sometimes end up with useless ones. Just as he had been at the Bar, Shearman was well-liked on the Bench. The main criticism made of him was that he was one of those Judges who slows things down by asking questions about the very point which counsel was just about to deal with.
Shearman's most prominent cases were criminal. Not long after his appointment, he was the Judge at the trial of Nicholas Ahlers, a German-born but British-nationalised German Consul, who had helped Germans caught in Britain at the outbreak of war to get home. The jury convicted Ahlers of assisting the enemy, but the Court of Criminal Appeal held that, as a matter of law, he had committed no offence on the facts. Less interesting to lawyers, but far more engrossing for the press and public, was the sensational trial in 1922 of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson for the murder of Thompson's husband. In addition to his judicial work, Shearman was a member of a commission which investigated the 1916 Easter Rising.
Shearman as a King’s Bench Judge.
At the Bar, Shearman had been a generalist at a time when commercial law was practised largely by specialists. The 'Times' thought that he had only "a nodding acquaintance" with the Commercial Court. As with Charles Darling and A.T. Lawrence, he probably would not have sat there but for the sudden expansion of commercial work after the Great War. From 1919, Shearman dealt with a fairly steady run of reported cases about shipping and sale of goods, alongside his more regular King’s Bench work. Some of his decisions were overturned by the Court of Appeal, but, considering his lack of experience, he performed well. Shearman's career as a Commercial Court Judge appears to have been over by early 1923, as the volume of work began to drop back. But his decision in Tibermede v Graham (1921) 7 Lloyd's Rep 250 on the measure of damages for misdescription of a chartered ship is still cited as a leading authority in modern texts.
Shearman maintained links to the sporting world. He wrote books about athletics and football (covering both rugby and soccer, as well as Australian rules and American football), took up golf, and stayed involved with the Amateur Athletics Association. Shearman may also have been adept at more sedentary games: as Judge in a case in which poker featured as part of the factual background, he demonstrated a surprising familiarity with the rules, though he claimed at the time that he had picked this knowledge up watching the game, not playing it.
Shearman married Louise Long, a New Yorker, in 1884. They had two sons. The youngest was killed in the Great War.
Montague Shearman's health declined in his early seventies, after he had an operation to relieve an old rugby injury. He retired on health-grounds in 1929, and died in January 1930.