During the Commercial Court's earliest days, there appeared to be an unwritten rule that its Judges must have been born in Ireland. Sidney Arthur Rowlatt broke new ground by coming into the world in Cairo, where his father was a manager at the Bank of Egypt. Rowlatt's younger brother eventually became Governor of the Bank, and, while Rowlatt himself followed a different career path, it seems plausible that it was his family connections to banking and finance which planted the idea for the textbook on guarantees for which he is best-known to lawyers today.
Rowlatt's family sent him back to Britain for his schooling. He went to Fettes College in Edinburgh, then studied classics at King's College, Cambridge. He was a prize-winning student, and graduated with first class honours. After a short spell teaching at public school, he was called to the Bar as a member of Inner Temple in 1886. He joined the Oxford Circuit, whose members practised in the Courts at Oxford, Gloucester, Reading, Monmouth, Worcester, and other county towns towards the southern end of central of England and in the east of Wales.
Although Rowlatt was intelligent, he found it difficult to establish himself at the Bar, and it was many years before his name began to appear with any regularity in the law reports. Like numerous other struggling young barristers before him, Rowlatt set out acquire some experience - and some useful professional contacts - by "devilling" for a more established and busy practitioner. Rowlatt devilled for Robert Finlay, to whom he was introduced by Finlay's friend A.T. Lawrence, who would later have very brief tenures as both a Commercial Court Judge and a makeshift Lord Chief Justice.)
Finlay was a successful common law barrister, with a commercial element to his practice, who had been a QC since 1882. As Finlay’s devil Rowlatt produced producing first drafts of his paperwork and helped him with trial preparation. The arrangement transformed Rowlatt's fortunes. In the short term, it gave him the opportunity to make an impression on Finlay's instructing solicitors, and to generate some work on his own account as a result. But the real benefits came in the longer term. Finlay combined practice at the Bar with membership of the House of Commons as a Liberal Unionist MP. He became Solicitor-General in the Conservative & Liberal Unionist government in 1895, and Attorney-General in 1900. As a Law Officer, he enjoyed considerable patronage in the allocation of instructions for government litigation. He ensured that cases were sent to Rowlatt, and, in 1900, secured for his former devil a post as standing junior counsel to the Inland Revenue. This position brought in a great deal of work at the time, since the taxation system had recently been shaken up in order to raise funds to pay for the Boer War, and the reforms threw out numerous disputed points. After appearing in only a handful of reported cases during the 1890's, Rowlatt became a recurrent presence in the law reports from 1900 with a constant flow of cases, invariably with a tax or other financial element to them. He was regularly led by either Finlay himself or Solicitor-General Sir Edward Carson QC (and sometimes by both). He also worked on a number of occasions with Reginald Bray, who would later be a colleague on the Bench.
After more than half a century in law and politics, Robert Finlay eventually reached the judicial summit, as Lord Chancellor from 1916 - 1919. Along the way, he was helped by Rowlatt, and he helped Rowlatt in turn.
The turn of the century was a significant time in Rowlatt's life, and not only because of his lucrative relationship with the Revenue. 1899 saw the publication of the first edition of his 'Law of Principal & Surety', a textbook on the English law of guarantees. It made no pretensions to academic scholarship, but it stated the key principles clearly and concisely (though not concisely enough for The 'Law Times', which grumbled that a textbook should simply state bullet-point propositions of law in alphabetical order, and not discuss the cases). It became an established text, and 'Rowlatt' remains in print today, in modern editions. The same year was also marked by Rowlatt's marriage to Elizabeth Hemingway. They had six children.
Rowlatt retained his Revenue position until 1905. Finlay then handed him an ever better post as Junior Counsel to the Treasury, just before the Conservatives & Liberal Unionists were replaced in government by the Liberals at the 1906 general election. (Finlay gave the Revenue role to his own son, William. The fact that William had barely been in practice for four years gave real weight to the inevitable accusations of nepotism. William Finlay was a close friend of future Commercial Judge Robert Wright, and became a King's Bench Judge himself in 1924, although he did not sit in the Commercial Court.)
In his new function as "Treasury Devil", Rowlatt was expected to act as junior counsel for the government in a wide variety of litigation. In the years after 1905, he appeared in cases involving banking, companies, education, employment, health and safety, land, local government, and even criminal procedure, not to mention yet more tax disputes. Government work took up most of his time, but he found room for the occasional private case. In Hamilton v P&O [1908] 2 KB 298, he was led by T.E. Scrutton in a general average claim, and in Northfield v Compagnie l'Union des Gaz [1912] 1 KB 434 he was junior to R.A. Atkin in a charterparty case.
Rowlatt had no real background in shipping, and the fact that he was instructed in such cases is probably an indication of how his reputation had flourished thanks to his high-profile Treasury role. He worked with other prominent leaders too, including the Liberal Law Officers Sir Lawton Walton, Sir William Robson, Sir Samuel Evans, and Sir Rufus Isaacs. He was still led from time to time by his benefactor, Finlay, who was instructed in government cases even when his party was out of office. Rowlatt also appeared increasingly frequently arguing cases on his own.
A term of service as Junior Treasury Counsel was usually rewarded with a High Court Judgeship. In 1905-1906, Rowlatt acquired some judicial experience as Recorder of Windsor, a part-time position. A full time appointment came in 1912, when he was elevated to the King's Bench (to replace J. A Hamilton, who went to the Court of Appeal). The legal press greeted the news more as a matter of inevitability than as a cause for celebration, or even enthusiasm. But his varied practice as Treasury Junior was very good preparation for the range of work which Rowlatt was expected to deal with on the King's Bench. He started his judicial career in the Court of Criminal Appeal, and was soon hearing cases about landlord and tenant, licensing, planning, rivers and sewers, social security, and buses. After a couple of years, however, Rowlatt began to establish a niche position for himself as the Division's tax expert. From round about the outbreak of the Great War, tax disputes accounted for a substantial proportion of his caseload when he was not doing criminal trial or appeal work. He was generally thought of by the legal profession and press as a tax Judge above all else. But Rowlatt sat recurrently in the Commercial Court from about 1914 through to the end of his career, ultimately handling well over a hundred reported sale of goods, insurance, and shipping cases, and serving one of the longest terms of service of all Commercial Judges.
Considering that commercial law had barely featured in Rowlatt’s practice at the Bar, he established an impressive body of Commercial Court work. There were other Commercial Judges who came to the Court without much relevant experience. Neither Richard Henn Collins nor Arthur Channell had ever been seasoned shipping and insurance practitioners, while a number of common law generalists - J.C. Darling, A.T. Lawrence, John Sankey, Montague Shearman, and Henry McCardie - were drafted in to help tackle the boom in commercial litigation after the Great War. But Collins and Channell both passed through the Court relatively quickly, while Darling and the others generally drifted from view as the volume of work dropped away. Rowlatt was exceptional among the non-specialists in sitting frequently in the Court over a long period, the best part of two decades in the end. If his judgments did not contribute significantly to the development of English commercial law, he was nevertheless a highly capable Commercial Judge: the very fact that he was repeatedly assigned to the Court shows as much, and he had a creditable record in decisions which were taken to the Court of Appeal.
Among Rowlatt’s Commercial Court judgments, his decision in Isaacs v McCallum (1921) 6 Lloyd’s Rep 289 that an owner must not alter the ship (or its legal status) in any way which significantly affects the charterers’ use of the vessel remains important. He was the trial Judge in the notoriously obscure The ‘Grelwen’ (1922) 12 Lloyd’s Rep 69, although the Case’s reputation was down to poorly thought out comments by Scrutton LJ and Lord Sumner about vicarious immunity, not to Rowlatt’s admirably straightforward conclusion that the ship was unseaworthy because it was not structurally suited to the West African Trade. (Rowlatt was upheld by a majority in the Court of Appeal, and overruled by a majority in the Lords: [1924] AC 522.)
In 1917, Rowlatt was put in charge of a committee to investigate criminal conspirators (or independence campaigners, as the individuals in question would probably have preferred to put it) in India. The committee's report led to new emergency powers legislation for India in 1919. The "Rowlatt Act" proved, alongside his textbook, to be Rowlatt's best-remembered contribution to the law.
Rowlatt was a popular Judge. He was pleasant to appear before, with a youthful enthusiasm for his work. He had a reputation for getting to the point of a case quickly, but without brusqueness or excessive interruption. Notwithstanding the muted response which had greeted his arrival on the Bench, it became a cause of surprise that he was never promoted to the Court of Appeal. In the end, his tenure in the King's Bench came to a rather acrimonious conclusion. The 1920's and 1930's were times of economic crisis and political turbulence across the world. In 1932, the UK's National Government (a coalition of between the Conservatives and a breakaway Labour group) decided to extend to the Judiciary a salary reduction scheme which had already been applied to civil servants as a way of cutting state costs. This produced a backlash from the High Court Judges, on grounds both pragmatic and principled. The pragmatic point was that no-one likes a pay cut. (In fairness to the Judges, their pay had been frozen in absolute terms for decades, while its relative value had fallen steadily as a result of tax increases and inflation: in real terms, post-War Judges were much worse off than their Victorian predecessors.) The more principled concern was that including the judiciary in measures directed at state employees implied that Judges were just civil servants, grander than most, perhaps, but ultimately state functionaries, there to implement the will of the government of the day. This, it was argued, was a corrosive suggestion, which would undermine the independence of the judiciary. Who can say which of the two arguments was uppermost in Rowlatt's mind when he told the Lord Chancellor's office that, if the plan was implemented, he would resign to make a living from private work, and take five other Judges with him. (Presumably what Rowlatt had in mind was hiring himself out as an arbitrator: it was an established convention that a Judge could not return to practice at the Bar.) Either way, the threat was effective, and a compromise was concluded to mitigate the impact of the pay cut through adjustments to the tax system. The judicial mutiny appears to have been largely kept out of the public eye.
Rowlatt retired the following year. He was made a Privy Councillor, a customary honour for retiring first-instance Judges. It qualified him to sit on Privy Council appeals, and he participated in about thirty reported cases down to the end of the 1930's, a couple of commercial appeals among them. This did not enhance his judicial renown. In particular, he acquired a reputation for siding with Lord Atkin in adopting a restrictive interpretation of the powers which Westminster had devolved to Commonwealth governments, an attitude which generated considerable resentment in Australia and Canada. He was regarded as more useful as chair of a Commission on gambling in 1932-1933 and of a war damage compensation tribunal during the Second World War. He died shortly before the end of the War in Europe, on 1st March 1945.