William Edgard Rayner Goddard (always known as "Rayner", which had been his maternal grandmother’s family name) is remembered as the first non-political Lord Chief Justice since the Judicature Acts, and for his unsatisfactory handling of a well-publicised murder trial. But his practice at the Bar focussed more on commerce than on crime, and he presided in the Commercial Court long before he became the senior criminal Judge of England & Wales.

Goddard was born in London’s Notting Hill in 1877. His father was a solicitor, and Goddard appears to have decided on a legal career at an early age. A contemporary at Marlborough College recalled that new pupils had to deliver a public performance, typically by reading a poem or singing a song. Goddard chose instead to recite the formal words of the death sentence. After Marlborough, he studied law at Trinity College, Oxford (he would become the first Chief Justice to have a law degree). He also represented the University in the hundred yard sprint. His victory in 10.35 seconds in 1898 was probably the greatest athletic accomplishment by any future Commercial Judge since Montague Shearman's golden years.

Goddard became King's Counsel in 1923. The fact that the appointment came after more than two decades in practice suggests that his success was steady and solid rather than spectacular. His performance as a barrister was characterised by a strong work-ethic and a deep knowledge of legal sources. He was always thoroughly prepared, and was able to cite relevant cases and statutes from memory. He was also interested in legal history, and was known to drop references to Bracton and other historical sources into his submissions.

His best-known case at the Bar came almost as soon as he became a KC. In Rowland v Divall [1923] KB 500, the plaintiff motor trader bought a car from the defendant in May 1922. The plaintiff sold the car on to a customer. For a time, all parties involved in these transactions were happy. But in November 1922, it emerged that the car had not been the defendant's to sell. The plaintiff's disgruntled sub-buyer was compelled to return it to its true owner, and demanded compensation from the plaintiff. The plaintiff in turn sued the defendant for the return of the purchase price on the grounds of total failure of consideration. Trial Judge Reginald Bray was persuaded by the defendant's argument that there had bee no total failure, because the plaintiff and his sub-buyer had had the use of the car for five months. But Goddard convinced the mighty Bankes-Scrutton-Atkin Court of Appeal that the "consideration" for which the plaintiff had contract was ownership of the car, not mere use, and that he was entitled to his money back.

Rowland v Divall did not go beyond the Court of Appeal, but Goddard argued more than half a dozen House of Lords appeals as a KC, including Hall v Pim (1928) 30 Lloyd's Rep 159, a significant decision on the vexed question of when sub-sales can be taken into account in the assessment of damages in sale of goods. Most of Goddard's other Lords cases were also commercial in nature, but he never became a narrow specialist: Tolley v Fry [1931] AC 333 was an appeal in a libel case, in which a prominent amateur golfer claimed that the unauthorised use of his image in a chocolate bar advertisement implied that he had "prostituted his reputation as an amateur for advertising purposes, for gain and reward"; and other reported cases in which Goddard was retained as leading counsel involved divorce, unlicensed gambling machines, landlord and tenant, and personal injuries.

Goddard was successively Recorder of Poole, Bath, and Plymouth. Part-time judicial service as a Recorder was often a prelude to a permanent judicial career, and Goddard's appointment to the King's Bench in 1932 (replacing retiring Commercial Judge Sidney Rowlatt) caused little surprise. At fifty-five, he was not a precocious appointee in the fashion of Atkin, McCardie, and Roche. But The Law Times reckoned that he nevertheless became the youngest serving Judge when he joined the Bench. He certainly displayed an element of youthful vigour in case management. In a lecture in America in later years, Goddard suggested that the most important judicial qualities were the "ability to make up one's mind and to do so expeditiously", and, as a first-instance Judge, he was both quick and decisive. He acquired a reputation for going straight to the real point in a case, and was impatient with counsel who persisted with poor or peripheral arguments. He also struck out bad cases before trial with an enthusiasm which had become rare even in the Commercial Court. Goddard sat in that Court regularly. More than half of his reported first-instance judgments were commercial, and he handled the full range of the Court’s work, from charterparties and bills of lading to reinsurance and towage contracts. They included Studebaker v Charlton [1938] 1 KB 459, an early case on what constitutes a unit for limitation purposes (Goddard decided that a car which was loaded into a ship's hold without being boxed-up or covered was not a "package"), and Tynedale v Anglo-Soviet (1935) 52 Lloyd's Rep 282, in which Goddard's conclusion that an off-hire clause in common form could apply even though the ship was capable of partial working was upheld in the Court of Appeal (1936) 54 Lloyd's Rep 341.

Goddard's performance at first-instance and in the Court of Appeal had been very good, but not stellar (no-one suggested that he compared with Atkin, for example). And while his knowledge of caselaw was impressive, he made no pretensions to be a profound jurist. But the authorities could only work with the materials available, and the legal press did not suggest that there were any better candidates to be the new Lord of Appeal in Ordinary. Indeed, The Solicitors' Journal thought that Goddard was the "obvious" choice. But his time in his new post was brief, and he had barely heard his first and only reported shipping appeal in the Lords (Larrinaga Steamship v The King [1945] AC 246, a case on the T.99A timecharter which governed requisitioned ships in wartime) before he moved on to new things. In January 1946, Lord Chief Justice Caldecote retired. In his former incarnation as Thomas Inskip KC, Caldecote had been an MP and Attorney-General. His selection as Chief Justice in 1940 had been in keeping with a tradition of political appointments: every Lord Chief since the Judicature Acts had been an MP and Attorney-General at some point in his career. But the relatively young Hartley Shawcross KC, who was the Attorney-General in 1946, was rather a junior legal figure to make a credible Chief Justice. Moreover, Prime Minister Clement Atlee, whose government had only been in office for five months, did not have a long list of potential Law Officers, and could not readily afford to lose his Attorney-General. He decided to break with tradition by replacing Caldecote from the ranks of the senior judiciary, and Goddard became the first non-political Lord Chief Justice of modern times. (In fact, Goddard had once made a foray into politics. When the Conservative MP for South Kensington became involved in divorce proceedings, widely regarded as disreputable by polite society at the time, Goddard was persuaded to run against him as an independent Conservative at the 1929 general election. Goddard's supporters promoted him as "Purity Goddard", but his political programme was described as "nebulous", and he came last in the poll)

Two particular challenges faced the new Chief Justice: the High Court's failure to cope with a post-war increase in litigation, and a rise in crime. Goddard's brisk personality helped cure the first problem. He introduced a series of reforms, including more frequent use of fixed trial dates, which had always been the norm in the Commercial Court. On the criminal front, there was particular political and public concern about armed crime. An inevitable side-effect of the end of the Second World War was that there was a ready supply both of guns and of men who were accustomed to using them. Goddard's approach to crime was firmly moral. He believed in severe punishment (including hanging and corporal punishment) for wrongdoers, while he opposed the growth of regulatory offences of strict liability, which punished people who were not guilty of any substantial moral failing. At a time when academics were increasingly prone to suggest that crime was a sociological phenomenon, and, indeed, to deny any necessary connection between law and morals, Goddard's philosophy was not fashionable in intellectual circles. But he was probably in sympathy with much of the population, and his views were orthodox among the judiciary. However, the no-nonsense attitude which was appropriate in the Commercial Court did not always make Goddard an ideal criminal trial Judge. And, while commercial practitioners were quite used to Judges giving them the hurry-up, criminal barristers, rather more accustomed to being allowed to run on until they felt inclined to stop, sometimes regarded his active management of hearings as impatient and irritable

Goddard held office for more than twelve years, three times as long as Bingham, and longer than any post-war Chief Justice other than Lord Parker. There had been a strong suspicion that he would retire when he reached eighty. But that landmark passed, and there were eventually so many rumours of his departure that the official announcement, when it ultimately came, without fanfare and at the very end of the Legal Year in August 1958, caught the legal professions and the press by surprise. The Law Times thought that “the manner of his going is characteristic of the man, brisk, businesslike, unemotional, undramatic”. It was not a final retirement. The following year, Goddard was back in the Court of Appeal, helping to clear one its regular backlog of cases. He sat on the occasional House of Lords and Privy Council appeal until 1963, most notably in DPP v Smith [1961] AC 290, in which the Lords stated a purely objective test for the mental element in murder, contrary to Goddard's previously-stated view that conscious wrongdoing should be the touchstone for criminal liability. The decision was overruled by statute four years later.

Rayner Goddard loved the social side of the legal profession. Both at the Bar and as a King’s Bench Judge he had enjoyed the wining (he was a connoisseur of port) and dining which was part of Circuit life, and he was overjoyed that becoming Lord Chief Justice meant that he could go out on Circuit again and entertain guests to dinner in Judges' lodgings. He was active in his Inn, and he even lived in the Temple, in Queen Elizabeth Building. It was there that he died in 1971, shortly after his ninety-fourth birthday, the third-longest lived Commercial Judge after Robert Wright and Brian Neill. His wife, Mary, whom he had married in 1906, had died forty-three years before, but their three daughters survived him. When light entertainment personality Bernard Levin wrote an attention-seeking piece in The Times attacking Goddard's reputation, the storm of rebuttals from former Judges and other lawyers showed how highly Goddard had been regarded by his peers. By the time the row died down, Goddard had been laid to rest. At his own request, there was no memorial service.