William Pickford was the last member of the first generation of Commercial Judges, that group of lawyers who were either already on the Bench or leading commercial QCs when the Court was established in 1895, and who presided over its first fifteen years. Pickford had a more fulfilled judicial career than any of the others, with the exception of Walter Phillimore's remarkable post-retirement renaissance. Richard Henn Collins went higher, for Pickford was never appointed a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary. But the latter stages of Collins's career were ruined by ill-health, and his time as a Law Lord amounted to little. By contrast, Pickford's progress was one of constant success, as he moved seamlessly from Queen's Bench to Court of Appeal, became the President of the Probate Divorce & Admiralty Division, and ended his career as a vigorous and highly-regarded Master of the Rolls. Unlike Collins, he retained his good health throughout, until his sudden and peaceful death in his mid-seventies, at the end of a happy day spent at his country home.
Pickford was born in Manchester in 1898. His father was a merchant in the city. But the Pickford family’s roots lay outside the metropolis, in rural Cheshire, where an ancestor, James Pickford, had plied his trade as a waggoner in the 18th Century. From this small beginning, James's sons and grandsons built up a substantial carrier's business, moving goods by both road and canal. Pickford’s grandfather brought one Joseph Baxendale into the firm as a partner, and the Baxendales eventually bought the Pickfords out. They continued to call the business “Pickfords”, but it was only a trade name, not an official title. This legal nicety explains why the leading case on remoteness of damages in contract is not called Hadley v Pickfords.
When Pickford was about ten, his father died, and his mother Georgina moved back to her own family roots, which were in Liverpool. Pickford went to school there, then studied classics at Exeter College, Oxford, where he obtained a second class degree. He joined the Inner Temple in 1871, and was called to the Bar in 1874. He joined the Northern Circuit, and, like Russell, Kennedy, Bigham, and Walton of the Commercial Judges before him, he started out in practice in Liverpool. He was not at all an instant success. References to "Pickford" in the law reports of the 1870's and early 1880's were much more likely to be to the former family firm than to the young barrister. (Appropriately, however, what appears to have been his first reported case was a dispute about bailment of goods: In Re Sadler (1881) 19 Ch D 86, a case about estoppel of title arising from the bankrutpcy of a Liverpool printer.) But, with perseverance, he steadily picked up work. There was a strong commercial side to his junior practice, indicating that he had acquired experience from the large volume of commercial litigation which was tried locally in Liverpool. In 1886, he was led by Walter Phillimore in a collision action in the Admiralty and then by Arthur Cohen in a charterparty case in the Court of Appeal (there were strong Liverpool connections in both cases). But his early career had quite a broad common law base, and he was instructed in reported cases about matters as diverse as licensing and burials and cremation.
For the general public, the most prominent case of Pickford’s career came in 1889, when he was Charles Arthur Russell's junior defending Florence Maybrick, charged with poisoning her husband with arsenic. After a trial which gripped the nation, she was convicted in what was widely perceived to be a miscarriage of justice (Russell fretted over the verdict for the rest of his life). In the face of popular outcry, the Home Secretary commuted the compulsory death sentence to one of imprisonment.
In the early 1890's, Pickford shifted the main focus of his practice to London. By now, he was familiar to readers of The 'Law Times' as "the well-known Liverpool barrister". After the move, he specialised increasingly in commercial work. He was led by William Kennedy, John Bigham, and John Gorell Barnes, among prominent commercial practitioners, and increasingly argued cases on his own. He was among the commercial specialists who established a practice which straddled the Queen's Bench and the Admiralty.
In 1893, Pickford appeared successfully for the shipowners in The 'Alps' (1893) 62 LJ Rep 59, a claim under a marine insurance policy for hire lost while the ship was being repaired following a fire. This apparently routine commercial case caught the attention of commercial practitioners for two reasons.
The trial of Mrs Maybrick. Pickford’s leader, future Lord Chief Justice and Commercial Judge Charles Arthur Russell QC, was convinced that their client’s decision to make an ill-judged statement from the dock fatally damaged her case and resulted in a wrongful conviction.
First, it was tried in the Probate, Divorce & Admiralty Division before John Gorell Barnes, the Division's Admiralty specialist, although it did not involve any issues of Admiralty law or practice. This was the consequence of pro-active "forum shopping" by Pickford and his solicitors who, by bringing the action in the Admiralty, avoided the notorious delays which at that time paralysed the progress of commercial and all other cases in the Queen's Bench (Barnes had announced, on his judicial appointment in 1892, that he was willing to hear marine insurance and other commercial cases in his Court). Second, the action came on for trial within a fortnight of the issue of the writ. Practitioners who were accustomed to a wait of 6 months or more for even the simplest commercial case in the Queen's Bench were astonished by this expedition. Barnes achieved it by directing that the meaning and effect of the policy should be tried as a preliminary issue on the basis of the evidence contained in the documents, without any need for witness evidence. This was a foretaste of the vigorous methods which Barnes's former pupil-master, J.C. Mathew (with whom Barnes had often discussed techniques for accelerating the pace of litigation) would bring to the Commercial Court in 1895.
Pickford became a QC in July 1893. The change from junior counsel to leader did not interrupt the rhythm of his success, as he made about a dozen reported appearances between his appointment and the end of the year. They were nearly all shipping cases although, as if to show that he had not entirely lost touch with the generalist roots of his practice, there was also a divorce action. (Rogers v Rogers [1894] P 161, in which the Court held that Pickford's client had condoned her husband's adultery, and dismissed her petition for divorce on the grounds that it was "collusive").Pickford continued to make regular appearances in reported cases as leading counsel. He was a regular feature in the Court of Appeal, although he only argued a handful of reported cases in the House of Lords.
Pickford's advocacy was characterised by slow build-up. His opening speeches were typically low-key, calculated to minimise the risk of over-stating his case before he knew how the witnesses would perform. But his closings were usually forceful, as he urged upon the Judge or jury the interpretation of the evidence which fitted his client's case. He was said to be just as effective before a jury as well as with Judges. He had the gift of a formidable memory, which enabled him to conduct a case with hardly any notes. Pickford was one of those practitioners for whom the Commercial Court came along at a good time, just as he had firmly established a reputation as a leading commercial barrister. He appeared regularly in the Court for nearly a decade. However, he never made it the dominant focus of his first-instance practice, and continued to divide his time between the Queen's Bench and the Admiralty. His most significant commercial cases as QC were Dobell v Rossmore [1895] 2 QB 408, which established that a shipowner cannot delegate the exercise of due diligence to make the ship seaworthy and is responsible for the negligence of employees and agents, and Kruger v Moel Tryvan [1907] 1 KB 809, on the scope of a shipowners' right to be indemnified by a time charterer against the consequences of signing bills of lading.
The ‘Dogger Bank Incident’, in which Russian warships mistook British North Sea trawlers for Japanese torpedo boats, raised questions about Russian naval competence. At the Battle of Tsushima seven months later, the Russians faced a more formidable foe than the Hull fishing fleet.
Pickford was made Recorder of Oldham in 1901, and then of his home city, Liverpool, three years later. He was given another significant and prominent appointment in 1905. The previous year, the Russian navy, while on its way to its date with disaster at Tsushima, had shot up the Hull fishing fleet on the Dogger Bank. There was a strong streak of farce in the manner in which the Russians, firing thousands of shells and missing with virtually all of them, mistook the British trawlers for Japanese torpedo boats inexplicably on the loose in the North Sea. But the British public found little to laugh about in the killing and wounding of about a dozen fishermen, and there was serious talk of war. In a diplomatic initiative aimed at defusing the tense situation, the British and the Russians agreed to participate in an international inquiry in Paris. Pickford was selected Britain's leading counsel. His cross-examination of Russian officers discredited their implausible claims that they had acted with due care and attention. The inquiry, while expressing its conclusions tactfully, put the blame squarely on the Russians, who agreed to pay compensation.
Pickford was made a King's Bench Judge in 1907, filling the vacancy left by William Kennedy's promotion to the Court of Appeal. The appointment was universally welcomed by the legal press. Pickford had an ideal temperament for a trial Judge, and he was regarded as close to a model by his contemporaries. Untroubled by the self-doubt which often afflicted Walton, he was decisive like Mathew, but without Bigham's vice of excessive haste. Pickford also had good judgment. A tall man, he had a physical presence which gave him an exemplary judicial dignity, but was a patient and pleasant (although not particularly humorous) tribunal, and a very popular one. The criminal experience of his early career made him as comfortable giving directions to a jury in crime as he was trying a charterparty dispute as Judge alone in the Commercial Court.
Pickford also dealt with health and safety, local government, tax, and tort cases during his time as a first-instance Judge. But his main areas of work, to judge from the law reports, were crime and commerce (and very much in that order: Pickford spent a lot of his time in the Court of Criminal Appeal). While none of his Commercial Court judgments were particularly ground-breaking, a sprinkling of his decisions are cited in modern shipping and marine insurance texts as reliable summaries or useful illustrations of key principles. Perhaps his most striking commercial case was Harper v Vigors [1909] 2 KB 549, in which shipbrokers signed one charterparty claiming to be agents for owners and another claiming to be agents for charterers when they were not in fact acting for any principals at all. Pickford decided that, although the brokers had entirely misrepresented the facts, they were entitled to sue on the charters on the basis that, since they were not agents, they must be principals. The judgment was characteristic of Pickford's judicial style: he had no great flair, but sumarised the facts and issues clearly and concisely and stated his conclusion in a way which left no ambiguity about either the outcome or his reasoning.
Pickford was a very capable lawyer, if not a brilliant one. His promotion to the Court of Appeal in 1914 was recognised as an entirely-merited reward for judicial excellence. In further acknowledgment of official regard for his abilities, Pickford was appointed to the Commission which was established to investigate the Gallipoli campaign, Winston Churchill's scheme which had been supposed to land a rapid knock-out blow, but which had resulted in a protracted battle every bit as attritional as those on the Western Front. When the Commission's original chairman died, Pickford took over the role and oversaw the completion of the inquiry. The final report, published in 1919, was strikingly hard-hitting for the time. The Commission was robust in its core conclusion that the concept of landing troops to capture the Turkish forts and clear the way for the fleet to sail to Constantinople had been inherently topsy-turvy, because an infantry attack was always likely to stall unless the forts were first bombarded into submission from the sea. Pickford and his colleagues were also highly critical of the rudderless manner in which the campaign had been allowed to drift after the failure of the initial landings, and of the woefully inadequate supply and medical arrangements which had been provided for inexperienced troops struggling in the harsh environment of the Dardanelles.
Pickford quickly acquired a good reputation as an appellate Judge. Having made himself into something of a criminal specialist at first instance, in the Court of Appeal he had to acquire new expertise in industrial accidents law to deal with a succession of cases under The Workmen's Compensation Acts. (Queen's Bench Judges avoided this sort of work, because cases were tried in the County Court, with appeals direct to the Court of Appeal.) He also sat on appeals involving company law, insolvency, landlord and tenant, local government, taxation and a range of other subjects. There were some commercial appeals, including Walford v Les Affreteurs [1918] 2 KB 498, which decided that a charterparty clause providing for payment of commission to brokers who are not party to the contract creates a trust (a conclusion which was upheld in the House of Lords) and a couple of charterparty frustration cases during the Great War.
By 1918, Pickford was routinely presiding over the common law division of the Court of Appeal, where he regularly made a strong Court with J.E. Bankes, who was an able commercial lawyer, although he had never been a Commercial Judge, and the brilliant but bloody-minded T.E. Scrutton. Pickford generally prevented Scrutton from misbehaving. But in October 1918, his career in the Court of Appeal was abruptly interrupted when he followed John Bigham's precedent by becoming President of the Probate, Divorce & Admiralty Division.
This post had acquired new significance since 1914, because the Admiralty was responsible for the prize jurisdiction, determining the fate of enemy ships and cargoes captured at sea, of neutral ships suspected of trading with the enemy, and of neutral cargoes thought to be bound for Germany or Austria-Hungary. Pickford's predecessor, Sir Samuel Evans, had spent most of the previous four years dealing with prize, and Pickford took up where Evans left off, dealing almost exclusively with prize and other Admiralty cases during his time in the Division. But, although he was not expected to deal with divorce cases, Pickford was no more enthusiastic about being President than Bigham had been. Since he was already in the Court of Appeal, the post did not even represent a promotion, although he got peerage out of it, as Baron Sterndale, named for King Sterndale, near Buxton in Derbyshire, where he had bought a small rural estate.
Perhaps it was agreed when Pickford became President that he would be released from the role when the War ended and the waves of prize litigation receded. At all events, he returned full-time to the Court of Appeal after just over a year, becoming Master of the Rolls in succession to Charles Swinfen Eady. Pickford was happy with the move, and he was regarded as a great success, sitting in more than three hundred reported appeals during three and a half years in office. There was a boom in commercial litigation in the years immediately after the Great War, and Pickford heard more shipping, international sale, and marine insurance cases during his second spell as a permanent member of the Court of Appeal than the first, although these decisions generally did not establish any significant precedent.
Pickford was involved in various legal activities outside his professional practice and judicial duties. He served terms as a member of the Bar Council and of the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting. He was an active member of the International Maritime Committee, and attended conferences which thrashed out conventions on collision and salvage and limitation of shipowners' liabilities. After his elevation to the Lords, he presided over the Parliamentary Committee which reviewed the drafting of the Carriage of Goods by Sea Act, which incorporated the Hague Rules into English law. (This may not have endeared him to his Court of Appeal subordinate Scrutton, who steadfastly opposed the Act as a gross infringement of freedom of contract.) Pickford also contributed to The 'Laws of England', although, rather mystifyingly, his entry covered neither commercial nor Admiralty law, but "Intoxicating liquors".
After his career of unqualified success, Pickford also had the best death among the early Commercial Judges. In his spare time, he liked to involve himself in the agricultural work at King Sterndale. (Pickford enjoyed outdoors pursuits: he had rowed for his College, and was a keen member of the Alpine Club.) The Master of the Rolls spent the afternoon of 16th August 1923 working in a hayfield, after which he wound down before a convivial dinner with a spell of wood chopping. He went to bed happy and seeming perfectly well (his family later told the inquest that his health was so good that he had not seen a doctor since 1916), and died in his sleep, probably from a brain haemorrhage.
Pickford had married Alice Mary Brooke in 1880. They had two daughters. Alice died in 1884. The younger daughter, Mary Ada, became an MP and died, like her father, at King Sterndale.