Although Wilfrid Hubert Poyer Lewis's name betrayed his Welsh heritage, and he always thought of himself as a Welshman, he was born in London. His father, Arthur, was from Narberth, Pembrokeshire, in South West Wales, where the Lewis family had owned a small country estate for hundreds of years. Arthur's father had been the Bishop of Landaff, the ancestral home of the Mathews, the family of the first Commercial Judge. Arthur was a barrister, and became Recorder of Camarthen. His wife, Wiflrid’s mother, Annie, was the daughter of a doctor who had been surgeon to the royal family. Lewis went to school at Eton, then studied history at University College, Oxford. More successful as a sportsman than as a scholar, he played cricket, soccer, and rugby fives, and graduated with a third class degree. But academic incompetence was no barrier to entry to the professions in the early 20th Century, and Lewis was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple in 1908 (after managing a second class in the Bar Examinations). In the same year, he married Margaret Bankes, daughter of John Eldon Bankes, King's Counsel and future Lord Justice of the Court of Appeal. Like the Lewises, the Bankes family were Welsh gentry.
Wilfrid Hubert Poyer Lewis around the time of his appointment to the King’s Bench Division.
Lewis's pupil masters were two future Lords Chancellor, John Simon and John Sankey. Sankey had Welsh roots too, and he still maintained a Welsh practice when Lewis was his pupil. Lewis himself joined the South Wales Circuit, practising in the Courts in and around Cardiff and Swansea. Tall, and possessed of physical presence and an easy charm, he had the qualities to make a favourable impression on local juries, and he made a successful start in general common law work. In the years after 1910, he made a handful of appearances in the law reports, in criminal and personal injuries cases. But his career was interrupted by the outbreak of the Great War. Commissioned in the Glamorgan Yeomanry, Lewis served largely in staff roles. He was awarded a military OBE for his work.
Returning to civilian life at the end of the War, Lewis accepted an invitation to join his father-in-law's old chambers at 3 Hare Court, in the Temple. The head of the set at the time was yet another future Lord Chancellor, Thomas Inskip. The move to London enabled Lewis to raise his professional profile, and he quickly established a flourishing and varied practice, with a steady succession of reported appearances in common law fields as diverse as agricultural landholding, crime, defamation and libel, and rating and taxation. He also had a significant practice in ecclesiastical law, an interest which perhaps reflected his grandfather's influence. Lewis built up a commercial sideline with some agency, banking, and sale of goods cases, and was instructed in a goodly number of Prize actions in the Admiralty.
By the end of the 1920's, Lewis had also been involved in a smattering of bill of lading and charterparty cases. He seldom appeared alone in reported cases. His leaders included Inskip, future Commercial Judges Robert Wright, Samuel Porter, and Rayner Goddard (in a defamation action), and, in Prize cases, the irrepressible George Langton, who became an Admiralty Judge in 1925 and drowned in unexplained circumstances in 1942. Lewis's best-known case at the Bar was Bell v Lever Brothers [1932] AC 161, in which the question was whether the senior executives of a company should have disclosed the fact that they had committed gross misconduct, which would have justified their summary dismissal, before they accepted generous redundancy payments. Lewis was a member of the company's legal team. Trial Judge Robert Wright, sitting with a special jury, and a strong Court of Appeal which included T.E. Scrutton and Frederick Greer, took relatively little persuading that the company was entitled to get its money back. But the majority of a generally lightweight panel in the House of Lords (Richard Atkin was the heavyweight exception) saw things otherwise, and Lewis's side lost in the highest Court.
This defeat was a relatively minor setback in the upwards trajectory of Lewis's career. By the time Bell v Lever Brothers reached the House of Lords in late 1931, he had been appointed Junior Counsel to the Treasury, making him the junior barrister of choice for government common law litigation. It was a busy post, and the holder was expected to take on cases in a wide range of fields. Lewis's broad professional repertoire made him well-fitted for the task, although it is difficult to avoid altogether the suspicion that his links to three leading barristers who had government connections must have boosted his candidacy. (John Sankey was Lord Chancellor at the time of Lewis's appointment, and Inskip had recently been Attorney-General.) As Treasury Junior, Lewis acted for the government in constitutional, criminal, health and safety, licensing, rating, taxation, and transportation cases, and worked with government Law Officers including William Jowitt KC, who had had a significant commercial practice and would later nurture the career of future Commercial Judge Patrick Devlin, and Inskip, who became Attorney-General again in 1932. Lewis also managed to squeeze in a few private instructions, maintaining a profile in libel litigation and ecclesiastical disputes.
As well as providing a steady supply of high-profile work, the post of Junior Counsel to the Treasury was a traditional springboard to judicial office: a High Court Judgeship was customarily offered as a reward after a number of years' service, and Sidney Rowlatt and George Branson had both reached the Bench by this route. Lewis followed them, although after a shorter term as Treasury Junior than either. He was elevated to the King's Bench in 1935, replacing the formidable Horace Avory, a criminal specialist and cold-hearted "hanging Judge", who had died in office aged eighty-four.
The 'Law Times' noted that this promotion of the incumbent Treasury Junior was "orthodox", but thought that Lewis was "extremely able and deservedly popular". (Lewis's replacement as "Treasury Devil" was Valentine Holmes, a mentor of future Commercial Judge Kenneth Diplock. Holmes, who broke with tradition by remaining in practice at the Bar - as a KC - at the end of his time as Treasury Junior, was famous for the brevity of his written work. One opinion read "No", crossed out and replaced with "Yes".) At 6 foot 2 inches tall, Lewis became the tallest Judge on the Bench. This made him the successor of "Long" John Lawrence, the villain of Rose v Bank of Australasia who, in T.E Scrutton's unreliable account, was the true begetter of the Commercial Court. But Lewis did not share those characteristics, such as stupidity and incompetence, which made Lawrence's High Court career ultimately unsatisfactory. The 'Law Journal' predicted that the diversity of Lewis's practice at the Bar had equipped him to cope with any challenge which the King's Bench could present, and this proved accurate. Lewis dealt confidently with a full range of common law work, including crime, employment, health and safety, intellectual property, landlord and tenant, local government, personal injuries, and rating and taxation. He acquired a solid reputation for handling cases of all kinds with common sense and appropriate judicial dignity (with his great height, Lewis presented an imposing figure in his robes). While he had no intellectual pretensions and was never regarded as a significant legal thinker, he had sound judgment, and his decisions were seldom overturned on appeal
Lewis’s early career brought him into contact with three future Lords Chancellor: (from top) John Sankey, John Simon, and Thomas Inskip.
Throughout his judicial career, Lewis was selected to try disputes which had a distinct commercial-law slant to them, without being quite the type of case which was typically dealt with in the Commercial Court itself: agency; motor and other forms of "consumer" insurance; domestic sales; and some of the earliest cases about carriage by air. That he was allocated this type of work must have reflected the fact that he had flirted with commercial litigation at the Bar, without ever developing a real specialism. But for a few years either side of the Second World War, Lewis was Judge in a number of cases which were truly commercial, albeit that the law reports do not always explicitly state that they were heard in the Commercial Court: time charters (eg, Rederi Unda v Burdon (1936) 55 Lloyd's Rep 149); voyage charters (eg, Government of Spain v North of England Steamship Co (1938) 61 Lloyd's Rep 44); marine insurance (eg, Willis Steamship v United Kingdom Mutual (1946) 80 Lloyd's Rep 389); and international sales (eg, Goddard v Rahe (1935) 53 Lloyd's Rep 208). Several of these cases raised issues about the impact on contractual performance of the outbreak of the War. If Lewis's judgments did not contribute to the development of English commercial law, he at least decided these cases with the same steady competence which he demonstrated in other fields.
Lewis as a King’s Bench Judge.
The law was Lewis's profession, but he never made it his life. He inherited the family estate in Pembrokeshire, and his real centre was his domestic life with his family in the Welsh countryside. He enjoyed golf, shooting, fishing, and riding: trying a case at the Royal Courts of Justice in which the temperament of a horse was an issue, he had the animal brought into central London, rode it around the judicial car park, and found its behaviour exemplary. He was active in the Welsh Church, and assumed the duties appropriate to a country squire as a magistrate, deputy county lieutenant, and trustee and board member of various civic institutions. He and Annie had three daughters and a son. After Annie died in 1932 (her father survived her by fourteen years, and died aged ninety-two), Lewis married Elizabeth Barty, who was also a doctor's daughter. They had two sons. In the company of family and friends, he relaxed the austerely dignified demeanour which he was inclined to assume in Court.
Lewis enlisted in the Home Guard during the Second World War. He was also temporarily impressed into the Court of Appeal, to help dispose of a series of Admiralty appeals, drawing on his experience from his days litigating Prize cases.
But neither of the two previous Commercial Judges who had been Treasury Junior had won permanent promotion as a Lord Justice of Appeal, and Lewis did not break the trend. He was still a Judge of first instance in January 1950, when he fell seriously ill at the end of the first day of the trial at the Old Bailey of Donald Hume, accused of robbing and murdering car dealer Stanley Setty, whose headless and legless corpse had been discovered floating on the Essex marshes. (Hume, a member of a flying club, had dropped the dismembered body parts from a plane.) The trial was started afresh, with Frederic Sellers replacing Lewis as Judge. Lewis underwent an emergency operation. It appeared to be successful, and the hospital reported that his condition was "quite satisfactory". But he needed a second operation at the end of the month, and died in hospital on 15th March. His replacement on the Bench was another Junior Counsel to the Treasury, Hubert Parker, who went on to become Lord Chief Justice.
Wilfrid Lewis was cremated in a small ceremony at Golder's Green Crematorium, and commemorated by memorial services at St Andrew's Church in Narberth and at St Dunstan's, Fleet Street, in London. Donald Hume was acquitted of the murder of Stanley Setty, but immediately charged with having been complicit in Setty's murder by disposing of his body, to which he pleaded guilty. A year after his release from Dartmoor, he killed a Swiss taxi-driver during his attempt to escape after robbing a Zurich bank. Captured by the Swiss police, he admitted that he had murdered Stanley Setty after all.