The only serious criminal known to have sat as a Commercial Judge, Patrick Arthur Devlin was one of the most prominent judicial figures of England & Wales in the 20th Century. In a meteoric career on the Bench which lasted just over fifteen years, he was appointed to the High Court at forty-two, passed briefly through the Court of Appeal on his way to the House of Lords, and retired aged fifty-eight because he was bored by life in the highest court of appeal. He became a well-known public figure for presiding over a sensational murder trial (and writing a best-selling book about it thirty years later), for his writings on the connection between law and morals (which led him into a famous debate with the legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart), and as a campaigner for the correction of miscarriages of justice. The grim contrast between Devlin's public advocacy of justice and morality and his own private behaviour remained unknown to the world at large until, three decades after his death, it emerged that he had habitually subjected one of his own children to sexual abuse.
Devlin was born in Kent in 1892. His father was an Irish Catholic who had moved to England to become an architect. His mother was from Aberdeen, where the family lived when Devlin was young. She was Protestant, but it was his father's religion which was the dominant moral force in the family while Devlin was growing up. Both of his sisters became nuns, one of his two brothers became a Jesuit priest, and Devlin spent a year as a novice in the Dominican order, before abandoning the idea of a religious life.
Devlin discovered at school that he enjoyed debating and that he was good at it. But he was less successful academically. Devlin's frame of mind was not well-suited to examinations. He liked to analyse an issue exhaustively from every angle to ensure that his thinking was watertight before reaching a conclusion, and answering set questions to a strict timetable did not play to his strengths. After his brief time with the Dominicans, Devlin went to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he studied history and then law. He again failed to excel in examinations, but the Cambridge Union afforded him the opportunity to polish his debating and public-speaking skills, and he was its President in 1926. He was called to the Bar by Gray's Inn in 1929. With his powerful intelligence, oratorical skills, a good strong voice, a pleasant manner, and a capacity for hard work, Devlin had the attributes to succeed at the Bar. But, like many capable barristers both before and after him, he found little employment at first, and needed an element of luck for his career to take off. In fact, Devlin had two lucky breaks.
First, he formed a close working relationship with Sir William Jowitt KC, a prominent common law barrister with a substantial commercial aspect to his practice, who had become Attorney-General in the Labour Government after the 1929 General Election. (Jowitt had been elected as a Liberal MP, but Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald persuaded him to become Attorney-General on the basis that there were no Labour MPs with suitable qualifications. Jowitt resigned his seat and successfully stood for re-election as a Labour candidate.) Around the time that Devlin was trying to launch his career at the Bar, Jowitt was looking for a "devil" to produce drafts of his paperwork and help him prepare for Court hearings. Devlin interviewed for the post, and Jowitt chose him. "Devilling" was the role which Sidney Rowlatt had performed for Robert Finlay KC, and George Branson for Rufus Isaacs KC. It had boosted the careers of Rowlatt and Branson, and Devlin would similarly benefit. Although his new role did not pay directly, Jowitt, as the government's senior Law Officer, exercised considerable patronage over the selection of counsel for government litigation. He soon began to steer cases in Devlin's direction.
While this brought Devlin an income, it did not generate a specialist practice. Although commercial litigation had been a significant part of Jowitt's career before 1929, the cases for which he was responsible as Attorney-General were necessarily more varied, and the work which Devlin acquired through Jowittt was not primarily commercial. To begin with, he appeared mostly in rating disputes, although he also picked up some criminal instructions. These included appearing as junior prosecution counsel at the trial of Annie Hearn, who was accused of murdering her neighbour by feeding her poisoned salmon sandwiches on a picnic. (Hearn was acquitted in the teeth of apparently strong evidence, one of the greatest successes of her defence counsel, the celebrated Norman Birkett KC. The Commercial Court's Adair Roche was the trial Judge.)
William Jowitt, successful barrister, Liberal MP, Labour Attorney-General and Lord Chancellor, and Devlin’s mentor. This portrait dates from around the time that he selected Devlin for the High Court Bench.
Devlin got his start in commercial law as the result of his second piece of luck, when he was unexpectedly instructed for Shell in a substantial case. As Devlin later told it, he was selected solely because Shell's in-house solicitor had Irish roots, the case had Irish links, and Devlin had the most Irish-sounding name among the junior barristers who were available. More work for Shell followed, and Devlin's commercial practice expanded from there. Meanwhile, Jowitt had chosen Devlin as standing counsel to the Royal Mint, a reasonably steady source of work prosecuting counterfeiting and similar offences. Devlin's professional position was further cemented when Jowitt lost his Parliamentary seat at the 1932 general election, in which Labour was bitterly divided over MacDonald's decision to go into a National Government with the Conservatives. Since the Attorney-General must be an MP, Jowitt lost his government job and returned to private practice. He invited Devlin to join his Chambers at 1 Brick Court. Devlin's career blossomed, and by the late 1930's, he was making regular appearances in commercial cases reported in Lloyd's Law Reports.
Devlin on the day that he was sworn in as a King’s Bench Judge, October 1948.
During the Second World War, Devlin was standing junior counsel to the Ministry of War and the Ministry of Transport Food & Supply. He also worked in the Ministry of Supply's legal department from 1940-1942. But he maintained his private practice alongside this government work, appearing in a steady stream of reported commercial cases. By the end of the War, he was appearing as often as not without a leader. He was not quite forty when he was made King's Counsel in July 1945. Devlin's transition from busy commercial junior to busy commercial leader was apparently seamless. He made ten appearances as a KC in Lloyd's Law Reports in 1945, mostly in shipping and marine insurance cases. The numbers began to fall away a little in subsequent years. But Commercial Court litigation began to enter a slump as the 1950's approached, and Devlin was not alone in seeing less Court work. He was presumably appearing as counsel in commercial arbitrations (which, being private and confidential, were not reported), and he took on on appointments as an arbitrator. But Devlin's bright career at the Bar was about to come to a premature end. In October 1948, he was made a King's Bench Judge. He was a little over a month short of his forty-third birthday, an astonishingly young age for appointment to the High Court: even the precocious Richard Atkin had been forty-five when he became a Judge.
Recommending names for judicial appointments was the responsibility of the Lord Chancellor, and the Lord Chancellor since the Labour victory at the 1945 general election had been Devlin's mentor, William Jowitt. It is more or less impossible to resist the inference that personal preferment played a part in his nomination of Devlin. But at least it could not be suggested that political considerations were a factor, for Devlin's leanings were not Labour-minded. (He once approvingly told the Conservative Lord Kilmuir that Kilmuir might be Lord Chancellor for twenty years or more, "barring some Socialist intermissions".) The legal press were sufficiently tactful not to emphasise that the youthful new Judge was the Lord Chancellor's former "devil" and a member of his Chambers to boot.
The Scindia Line general cargo ship ‘Jal-Azad’ featured in Devlin’s most prominent first-instance case after one of its cranes broke while loading a fire tender. In a chequered career, the vessel was also involved in two collisions at sea before it was scrapped in the 1980’s.
Just as for his Commercial Court contemporaries Frederic Sellers and William McNair, life on the King's Bench meant for Devlin a far wider variety of work than he had seen at the Bar. In his first-instance career, Devlin heard cases involving adoption, employment, fatal accidents and personal injury, landlord and tenant, licencing and rating, nuisance, planning, and social security. He more than met the challenge, winning the general approval of the legal profession, and without often being reversed on appeal. Devlin was particularly highly regarded as Judge in criminal cases, although he had no real experience of criminal litigation since the early part of his career. He also turned himself into something of an early competition law specialist, as the first President of the Restrictive Practices Court. (The King's Bench Judges as a whole were wary of this new tribunal, concerned that they would be drawn into disputes of an essentially political nature, but Devlin supported the idea of the Court.)
But Devlin's reputation as an outstanding first-instance Judge rests on his decisions in the Commercial Court, in the areas of law with which he was most familiar. In scholarly, lucid, and comprehensive judgments still regularly cited today, he provided definitive statements of the law in areas including dangerous cargoes (Chandris v Isbrandtsen-Moller [1951] 1 KB 240); the proper exercise of arbitral powers (Smeaton v Hanscomb [1953] 1 WLR 1481; bills of lading (Heskell v Continental Express (1949) 83 Lloyd's Rep 438); "QC" clauses in insurance policies (West Wake v Price [1957] 1 WLR 55); and repudiation of contracts (Universal Cargo Carriers v Citati [1957] 2 QB 401). Devlin's conclusion in Pyrene v Scindia [1954] 2 QB 402 that the Hague Rules gave shippers and carriers freedom to allocate responsibility for loading and discharge operations was sttrictly obiter, but it was nonetheless widely accepted as settling one of the most important questions on the wording of the Rules. It was endorsed by the House of Lords in Renton v Palmyra [1957] AC 149 and again almost half a century later in The 'Jordan II' [2005] 1 WLR 1363, when the Lords refused to depart from the opinion of "one of the most distinguished commercial judges of the 20th century".
Ironically, the tenure of this great commercial judge largely coincided with one of the the lowest points in the Commercial Court's history. From the 1940's and into the 1950's, there was a decline in commercial litigation which sometimes seemed unstoppable and terminal. By the mid-1950's, Devlin reckoned that a single Commercial Judge could deal with all of the available business with just a few days in Court each month. In some ways, this may have been beneficial, at least for Devlin. The Court's relatively relaxed workload enabled him to subject each case to the exhaustive analysis which his rigorous intellect demanded, but without acquiring a backlog of reserved judgments. It is possible that, under more demanding conditions, Devlin's judgments would have been less magisterial, and his reputation less glowing. But Devlin worried greatly about the future of the Commercial Court. In 1957, when the Court tried only fifteen cases, he wrote to Lord Chief Justice (and former Commercial Judge) Rayner Goddard, urging action to revive its reputation and fortune. This began the initiative which led to the Commercial Court Users' Conference and Report of the early 'sixties.
1957 was also the year in which Devlin burst into the public consciousness as the Judge in one of the most sensational murder trials of the decade. Dr John Bodkin Adams was a middle-aged doctor living and practising in Eastbourne. The seaside resort was popular with the retired, and Adams had many elderly patients. They liked him. Some of them even left him legacies when they died. This was financially convenient for Adams in era when professional incomes were the target of punitive taxation but gifts by will were treated more benevolently. By the mid 1950's, however, the police were becoming troubled by the number of Adams' patients who died under his care within a relatively short time of leaving money to him in their wills. In March 1957, the good doctor went on trial for his life before Devlin and an Old Bailey jury, charged with a specimen count of murder. Depending upon how one viewed the circumstantial evidence, Adams was a grasping and cold-blooded killer, a compassionate family physician determined to spare his patients from suffering at their life's close, or a rather slapdash general practitioner, with an unreliable sense of what represented an appropriate dose of sedatives. Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, the ambitious but dim Attorney-General, took it upon himself to convince the jury that the first interpretation was correct.
Devlin and his son Dennis, on their way to the Old Bailey during the Bodkin Adams trial, April 1957.
Dr John Bodkin Adams’s patients had an unfortunate tendency to die shortly after altering their wills to leave him money.
The publicity surrounding the trial appealed to a strongly egotistical element in Devlin’s personality, and brought out a streak of the showman. He posed for photographs on his daily walks to and from the Bailey, sometimes even stopping to sign autographs. He was less enthused by the Attorney-General's performance. Devlin believed that Manningham-Buller made a complete mess of the prosecution. After more than two weeks of evidence, the jury acquitted Adams in less than an hour. In 1985, when all of the other leading participants were dead, Devlin published his recollections of the trial in 'Easing The Passing'. The book caused almost as much of a sensation in legal circles as the original trial had done among the public, not least for Devlin's constant criticism of the man he called "Reggie". As Devlin explained, there had been something of an undercurrent of tension between the trial Judge and leading counsel for the prosecution, because both were being spoken of at the time of the trial as possible replacements for Goddard, whose retirement was thought to be imminent. In the event, Goddard stayed on for another year, and was succeeded by Lord Justice Parker. Manningham-Buller had to content himself with a short tenure as Lord Chancellor (and elevation to the peerage as Lord Dilhorne), followed by a decade as one of the less capable and more forgettable Lords of Appeal in Ordinary.
Devlin meanwhile had been on the King's Bench (by then the Queen's Bench) for nearly a decade by the time the dust settled on the Adams case. Given his obvious success as a Judge, this was, at first sight, a long time without promotion. But the wait was perhaps inevitable, given how young Devlin had been on appointment: when most Judges did not reach first-instance until their fifties, it would have been remarkable indeed if Devlin had arrived in the Court of Appeal in his forties.
He got there in early 1960 (not through Jowitt's good offices this time: the Conservatives were in government). But his stay was not much longer than J.A. Hamilton's half a century before. Like Hamilton, he was rapidly promoted upwards, becoming a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary in 1961, before he had any chance to make much of an impression in the Court of Appeal. His best-known case there is probably Ingram v Little [1961] 1 QB 31, on the effect of "mistake as to the person" on the formation of contracts. Devlin, dissenting, concluded that a crook's fraudulent misrepresentation that he was a reputable businessman did not prevent the formation of a binding contract.
On elevation to the Lords, he adopted the title Baron Devlin of West Wick, after West Wick House, a Wiltshire farmhouse which had been his country home since 1943. By any reasonable expectation, Devlin should now have been in his element. The Lords heard only the most important, and therefore often the most challenging cases (although the two do not always go together). Their role was to resolve the sorts of difficult legal issues which should have been calculated to stimulate Devlin's intellect. And, since the volume of cases was much lighter than in the Court of Appeal, there was opportunity for the exhaustive consideration which Devlin liked to devote to his decisions. And Devlin did indeed deliver important judgments on topics including economic torts and exemplary damages (Rookes v Barnard [1964] AC 1129), the incorporation of contractual terms by course of dealing (McCutcheon v McBrayne [1964] 1 WLR 125), and, most prominently, liability in tort for negligent misstatements causing economic loss (Hedley Byrne v Heller [1964] AC 465).
“Reggie”: The Right Honourable Sir Reginald Edward Manningham-Buller QC, MP, did not emerge well from Devlin’s memoirs.
But he was not content. Although Devlin had apparently enjoyed the broad variety of work as a first instance Judge, he found too many of the Lords' miscellany of cases to be merely dull. Tax appeals in particular were not to his liking, and there was a lot of tax litigation in the 'sixties. Devlin was also frustrated by the working conditions. A Judge who became a Law Lord had to leave the Law Courts, in the heart of legal London, close to the Inns of Court and the then close-knit community of the Bar, for a more isolated existence at the Palace of Westminster. And the facilities were poor. On visits to the USA, Devlin had been impressed by the luxurious accommodation of the Supreme Court, and the extensive support network of court clerks and other staff. In the Lords, he was given a small room and access to a shared typing pool. When Devlin's near contemporary A.T. Denning had grown similarly frustrated with life as a Law Lord, he had escaped by swapping jobs with Master of the Rolls Lord Evershed and returning to the Court of Appeal. But neither Denning nor Lord Chief Justice Parker had any plans to retire, and so no similar way out was in the offing for Devlin. In January 1964, after fewer than three full years in the Lords and aged only fifty-eight, he resigned.
Devlin filled his lengthy retirement with a variety of activities. He chaired the Press Council and sat on the administrative tribunal of the International Labour Office. He returned to sitting as an arbitrator, and was a magistrate until the 1970's. He remained eligible to sit on Lords appeals, but, with a couple of reported exceptions, he resisted attempts to lure him back on a part-time basis. He did however participate in a number of Privy Council appeals in the 'sixties and 'seventies, sitting alongside "Reggie" Dilhorne in several of them. Devlin also wrote. A 1974 biography of Woodrow Wilson was exhaustive, but possibly also exhausting. Altogether shorter and more widely-read was 'The Enforcement of Morals' (1965), which drew together Devlin's thinking since the 1950's about the connections between law and morality. His most striking proposition was that a society was entitled, for the protection of its own integrity and, indeed, for its survival as a society, to impose its collective morality on individuals through the criminal law. Always happy in the limelight, Devlin explained his thinking further in public lectures and on cultural television programmes. Herbert Hart, Oxford Professor of Jurisprudence, countered Devlin with the argument, drawn from J.S Mill, that the only legitimate basis for the criminal law to intrude on the lives of individuals was for the protection of other individuals. To a mind less subtle than Hart's, Devlin's position could look like a crude manifesto for state oppression of minorities. But there was a more positive side to Devlin's thinking, for he saw the criminal jury as a vital bulwark against laws or prosecutions which were out of step with popular concepts of justice. Devlin was by no means minded to think that the state was always right, as his involvement in campaigns for the review of a number of shaky criminal convictions in the 1970's and 1980's showed.
Devlin married Madeleine Hilda Oppenheimer, daughter of a diamond magnate, in 1932. They had four sons, twin daughters, many grandchildren, and (for him, at least) a happy family life, though one which was dominated by Devlin's assertive personality: "he was God", one of his sons recalled many years later; "my father's word was law", said another. Although his wife and children became Catholics, Devlin himself had little contact with the Church in which he had grown up after his student days. But when he became seriously ill in the summer of 1992, he returned to the faith and the Catholic rites. He died in August that year, at home at West Wick.
There have been well over a hundred Commercial Judges since the Court’s creation in 1895. Given such a number, it was perhaps inevitable that at least one of them would turn out to be guilty of serious wrongdoing. In 2021, Clare, one of Devlin’s twin daughters, revealed to the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse that her father had sexually abused her from her early childhood to her teens.
The physical abuse ended after Clare challenged Devlin about his behaviour on the advice of John Heenan, a friend of the family who was a Catholic clergyman and a future Archbishop of Westminster. (Heenan immediately believed Clare when she confided in him, but does not seem to have felt a call to report Devlin's conduct to anyone.) But Devlin assumed a grotesque interest in Clare's sex life, which contininued well into her adult years. He never acknowledged that he had done anything wrong. Speaking publicly about her ordeal for the first time after more than sixty years, Clare told interviewers that "it is our silence which permits perpetrators to continue”.
"Something of my father’s evil was tangible. I wish, now, I had challenged him. One of the lessons for families is: be alert and find the right way of bringing things into the open."
One of Devlin’s sons, Mathew, speaking in 2021