Peter Edlin Webster was a clever law student at university, and went on to great success as a barrister. Although he did not achieve the same level of distinction on the Bench, his performance in the Commercial Court, where he proved adroit in handling a range of cases well outside the scope of his practice at the Bar, demonstrated that his legal skills remained undimmed to the end of his career.
Peter Webster in his judicial robes.
Webster was born in 1924 in Walsall, to the north of Birmingham. His father, Herbert, was often away on business, and his mother, Florence, was apparently reluctant to manage a household on her own. As a result, Webster spent a good part of his childhood living in a series of small hotels, moving "home" once a year on average. Florence eventually settled with her children (Webster had an older sister) at the Odney Club, an 18th Century manor house at Cookham in Berkshire. Today, it serves as an in-house conference facility and hotel for the John Lewis Partnership. Tennis and bridge were popular among the Odney's residents and members in Webster's day. He was dragooned into so many games that he developed a lifelong aversion to both.
Herbert and Florence do not appear to have been particularly wealthy, but an uncle helped fund Webster's private education at a preparatory school in Cirencester. An excellent pupil, Webster won a scholarship to Haileybury, where he continued to shine academically. He also discovered a love of rowing and, after the school chaplain encouraged him to perform voluntary service at a mission in London's East End, a strong sense of social responsibility.
Webster sailed as well as rowed. Presumably his love of the water influenced his decision to do his war service in the Royal Navy. He enlisted in 1943, and was assigned to the Fleet Air Arm. After training in Canada, he flew from aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean. He was one of only two men from his training class of nineteen who survived the Second World War.After demobilisation, Webster studied law at Merton College, Oxford. He graduated with first class honours. It took him several years to settle to a career. To begin with, he felt a call to go into industry, fired with an ambition to improve the working partnership between management and the shop floor. But a practical exposure to the realities of post-War industrial relations at Imperial Tobacco soon blunted his youthful enthusiasm. He left within a year, and returned to Oxford as a law tutor at Lincoln College. Not settling to academic life either, Webster was called to the Bar by Middle Temple in 1952. He joined chambers in Crown Office Row. In the 1970's, the set would change location, become Fountain Court Chambers, and focus increasingly on commercial litigation. But its range of work was far broader when Webster arrived. Head of chambers Melford Stevenson, for example, practised primarily in the divorce and libel courts (although he ultimately became best known as an outspoken and hard-sentencing criminal Judge), while the Lord Chancellor's Department thought that the practice of another tenant, future Law Lord Leslie Scarman, made him a natural choice to try family cases when he was made a Judge in 1961.
Webster started out in criminal and common law litigation, practised in local courts across the South Eastern Circuit as well as in London, and maintained a diverse practice throughout his time at the Bar. He conducted criminal prosecutions in health and safety cases into the late 1960's. In Nagle v Feilden [1966] 2 QB 633, he and his leader, future Commercial Judge Desmond Ackner, argued that the Jockey Club's blanket refusal to issue a trainer's licence to women did not contravene sex discrimination legislation. (Unsurprisingly, the Court of Appeal ruled that the Club had a case to answer.) In Wallersteiner v Moir [1975] 1 QB 373, he grappled with company law and the rights of a minority shareholder to be indemnified by the company against the costs of litigation involving its interests. And in Johnson v The Commission [1975] 1 CMLR 638 he argued a takeovers and mergers dispute before the European Court of Justice.
Over time, however, Webster came to concentrate increasingly on three particular (but very divergent) fields: employment (he was standing counsel to the Ministry of Labour for three years); medical negligence; and aviation. Virtually all of Webster's cases towards the commercial end of the litigation spectrum had some aviation aspect. By contrast, a series of industrial dispute cases in which he was instructed by the National Dock Labour Board appear to have been the closest he came to shipping litigation. Webster did successfully defend an insurance claim in Bartlett v Meller [1961] 1 Lloyd's 487, in which his junior was future Commercial Judge and Law Lord John Hobhouse. But that was a rare Commercial Court appearance for Webster. (For the Judge, Eric Sachs, a future Lord Justice of Appeal, too: although Sachs did try a number of tort cases involving personal injuries to stevedores and dockworkers.)
Crusading animal lover, Florence Nagle. Future Commercial Judges Desmond Ackner and Peter Webster failed to convince Lord Dennning’s Court of Appeal that the Jockey Club was perfectly free to refuse to grant her a training license solely because she was a woman. A decade later, Robert Gatehouse embarked on a similar mission, when Nagle (who bred Irish Setters and Irish Wolfhounds) sued the Kennel Club. The Club sensibly amended its constitution to admit women as members before a final judgment.
Webster was appointed Queen's Counsel in 1967. Tall and solidly-built, he had a good physical presence for the courtroom. Although he was never a theatrical advocate, it was said that he tended to adopt a robustly firm and emphatic approach in the early part of his career, but that he came to recognise the power of understatement as his style matured.
In 1976, Webster was elected Chairman of the General Council of the Bar, an indication of his high standing within the profession. His term in office coincided with one of those recurrent debates about whether barristers and solicitors should be merged into a single profession. Proposals for fusion were very much in vogue. Webster, a firm believer in the value of the Bar as a separate and independent body, led the resistance, and saw the idea off (for another decade or so, at least).
Webster had been a Recorder since 1972, acquiring part-time judicial experience in criminal cases. He was made a Judge of the Queen's Bench Division in 1980. As he had done at the Bar, he did a range of common law work. He tried criminal cases and was a regular member of the Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal; sat often in the Administrative Court; and was trial Judge in employment, personal injuries, planning, and tax cases. About one third of his reported first-instance judgments were in the Commercial Court, including a good number of shipping cases, although he had not been a shipping practitioner at the Bar. He was the first-instance Judge in The 'Kyzikos' [1987] 1 Lloyd's Reports 48, a leading authority on delays in berthing under a voyage charter: the Court of Appeal overturned Webster's decision that a "WIBON" clause applied to weather delays but not congestion, but the House of Lords said that he had been right after all. His decision in The 'Altus' [1985] 1 Lloyd's Rep 423 that the shipowner's conduct could interrupt the running of the laytime was important in applying the "prevention principle" to charterparties. More controversially, his decision in The 'Henrik Sif' [1982] 1 Lloyd's 456 that the defendant was estopped from denying that it was a party to the contract stretched the boundaries of the principle that estoppel is not a cause of action. Among subsequent commentators who queried whether Webster was right was Webster himself, in observations in his judgment in the gargantuan Shearson Lehman v MacLaine Watson [1989] 2 Lloyd's Rep 570, a six month trial which was part of a wave of litigation following the collapse of the International Tin Council.
The skills and disciplines required to decide the merits of a dispute on all of the evidence as a Judge are not necessarily the same as those involved in arguing one side of a case as counsel. Not all practitioners find the transition from Bar to Bench easy, and Webster's contemporaries thought that he was never as content as a Judge as he been as an advocate. Although he was a good lawyer, there was a perception that he rebelled against having to follow established legal principles in cases where they did not lead to the outcome which he thought was merited on the facts. The 'Texaco Melbourne' [1992] 1 Lloyd's Rep 303, one of his most high-profile commercial cases, supports the theory. The action concerned the misappropriation of a cargo of Ghanaian oil. It was clear that the plaintiff was entitled to damages, and the principal issue was whether damages should be awarded in US$, the currency of the international oil market, or in or Ghanaian Cedis, the plaintiff’s own currency. At first sight, this was a purely formal question. But it assumed critical importance in the light of exchange rate changes. A collapse in the value of the Cedi meant that, by the time of the trial, the US$ value of damages in Cedis was only 1% of what it had been at the time of the loss. The lawyer in Webster recognised that legal principle pointed towards damages in Cedis. But his instincts recoiled from a perceived injustice, and he conjured a way of awarding US$. Both the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords ruled that he should have curbed his instincts and followed the principles.
To add to a degree of job dissatisfaction caused by such cases, Webster began to suffer from health problems in his late sixties. He retired from the Bench in 1992 when he was only sixty-eight, well short of the prevailing compulsory retirement age of seventy-five. He returned very occasionally to sit as a Deputy Judge, helping out when the Court was particularly busy. In his last reported case, Callaghan v Dominion Insurance [1997] 2 Lloyd's 541, he delivered a useful judgment which helpfully drew together the threads of the existing caselaw on the nature of indemnity insurance. Webster also practised as an arbitrator and mediator in retirement, and sat as a member of the City Disputes Panel. He helped broker a settlement for pensioners of Mirror Group Newspapers, whose funds had been plundered by Robert Maxwell. Retaining that sympathy for those less fortunate than himself which he had acquired in the East End in the 1930's, he provided his services for free.
In addition to rowing and sailing, Peter Webster was a keen reader, and enjoyed opera and other forms of classical music. Twice married, he had three children and two stepchildren. He died in 2009.