HL Deb 25 March 1958 vol 208 cc383-8

2.36 p.m.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR (VISCOUNT KILMUIR)

My Lords, it is my privilege to-day to pay tribute to a distinguished predecessor on the Woolsack, Lord Maugham. He was a great Judge and a loyal friend. My mind inevitably turns back thirty-three years, to the time when I had to argue against him at the Bar, a responsibility at which many a more distinguished advocate would have had a tremor. A strong strand in the skein of advocacy at the English Bar is what might be termed the pellucid, high-powered mind, producing an argument so clear that at the moment it is almost impossible to imagine that an alternative exists. Lord Maugham as an advocate, had this gift; but behind it there was always a potent suggestion of almost imperious determination, which is not always the accompaniment of lucid exposition.

As a Judge, Lord Maugham listened patiently and courteously to the presentation of a case. He had the gift of encouraging the full development of an argument, a gift which again is not always bestowed upon a strong and determined mind. When he had reached his conclusion he not only added to the argument which had found his favour but transformed it by impeccable and polished prose into a real contribution and addition to the law. This power was based on a mastery of the law and on sound learning lightly worn, while his Evidence Act will always show the practical bent of his mind towards the improvement of our practice.

In his capacity as a Minister of the Crown, no one could have the least doubt as to where he stood. Whether your Lordships agreed or disagreed, your Lordships were left in no doubt as to his support of Mr. Neville Chamberlain and his colleagues in the difficulties of twenty years ago; and later, when another might have kept silence in the changing tide of opinion, Lord Maugham devoted the resources of a formidable controversialist to supporting his views by voice and by pen. My Lords, if, as I happen to believe, loyalty is the primary virtue, Lord Maugham had it to the full.

But I should not like your Lordships to think—because it would be quite wrong—that Lord Maugham was an amalgam of impersonal qualities, and I ask your Lordships to bear with me in two memories. The first is of twelve years ago, when I invited some French colleagues at Nuremberg to dinner to meet him; and he charmed them all especially by his recollection of the time when, as a very small boy, he was evacuated from Paris before the siege of 1870. The other was the remarkable gathering of his friends, at which I was privileged to be present, when his ninetieth birthday was celebrated eighteen months ago. My Lords, a long and full life has closed; and in extending our sympathy to his family I should like them to believe that we share not only their loss but their pride in a race so well and fully run.

2.42 p.m.

LORD SILKIN

My Lords, I rise on behalf of my noble friends and myself to join in the tribute which the noble and learned Viscount has just paid to a very great man. Few of us in this House are in the position of the Lord Chancellor, that of being able to speak of Lord Maugham from personal acquaintance or friendship; to us he was a legendary figure of an earlier generation, but a very great figure.

Looking at his career I feel that there can be few people in this country who have had as great a career as Lord Maugham had in the field of law. I gather he did not start in that way. He was a great athlete at his university, and he took mathematics and not law. But he finished as President of the Cambridge Union and was one of Trinity Hall's most distinguished sons, of whom they are, and have been, intensely proud. But from the time when he was called to the Bar his career was astonishing. He took Silk; in due course he was a Bencher of his Inn; he became a High Court Judge, and it is said, on the authority of The Times, at any rate, that there is no known instance of any decision of importance of his having been reversed. I imagine that there can be few judges of whom that can be said. He went to the Court of Appeal, he became a Law Lord, and he became Lord Chancellor. That must be a dream to which any young man would look forward as the highest ambition that could possibly be within his reach. There have been other Lord Chancellors, and there will be again, but there must be very few who attained that position purely as a lawyer—and that was Lord Maugham's position. He was not a politician—he did not aspire to be a politician—and his appointment was entirely due to his merits as a lawyer.

My own fleeting association with Lord Maugham was during the passage of the Town and Country Planning Act, 1947. He came to see me. He had made a study of the Bill; he seemed to have a knowledge of it which was certainly not shared by many others, and he was troubled about one or two points. I should like to pay this tribute to him. Obviously, he was no sympathiser of the Bill itself but he was most courteous and kindly and friendly (and I saw him several times), and understanding. He was very willing indeed to see the point of view that I put forward. Whether I persuaded him or not I could not say, but he came away expressing himself fully satisfied with the talks that we had had. I certainly regard it as a great privilege to have had the opportunity of discussing the measure with him in those circumstances. Since then, in the House, as every noble Lord knows, he has always been most courteous,, kindly and friendly—always ready to have a talk—and our memory of him is a very pleasant and agreeable one. I am very glad, on behalf of my noble friends, to support the tribute to this great legal figure who has just passed away, and to express our sympathy with his relatives in their loss.

2.48 p.m.

LORD AMULREE

My Lords, I should just like to add one word on behalf of noble Lords on these Benches about the late Lord Maugham. Like a great many of your Lordships I have no knowledge of him as Lord Chancellor; I knew him only when I became a Member of this House, when I think Lord Maugham was not taking a very active part in the affairs. But there were two points which were most impressive about his work. The first was in regard to his book, The Tichborne Case. There was also his publication The Trial of Jean Calas, which again brought his name before a much wider range of public thought. Lord Maugham was a person of considerable courage. I want to remind your Lordships of the book which he wrote about the Nuremberg Trials, in which he passed two criticisms which were not altogether popular at the time. Those younger Members of your Lordships' House who knew him in the Dining Room and met him in the corridors found him an extremely gentle and courteous person to speak to, and he always impressed us by his wisdom. We should like to be associated with the kind words of the Lord Chancellor and Lord Silkin.

2.50 p.m.

VISCOUNT SIMONDS

My Lords, I should like to add a few words to the tributes that have been paid to one who was, to me, a very old friend. I knew him first as a junior counsel at the Chancery Bar more than fifty years ago; I knew him as a King's Counsel, then as a Judge, as a Lord Justice, as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, and, finally, as Lord Chancellor. In the end, I had the rare privilege of sitting with him as his colleague in the hearing of appeals in this House.

Those are circumstances, my Lords, in which every quality of mind and heart make themselves known. I cannot, in a few sentences, say what I would of my old friend. But this at least I must say—and I think it is something he would have liked most to have said about him: of all the great advocates and great Judges that I have known, there was none in whom the passion for justice flamed more fiercely. Whether as advocate or Judge he gave himself without stint to that cause, determined, as an advocate, to obtain justice on behalf of his client and, as Judge, to dispense it with an even hand to the parties. And he was, in truth, by his rare intellectual endowments, well equipped to carry out what the shining integrity of his character prescribed. My Lords, he will leave behind him a tradition and a memory which those who practise the law will long honour.

2.51 p.m.

LORD CHATFIELD

My Lords, perhaps I may be excused for speaking, not as a Cross-Bencher here but as one of the few who were colleagues of the late Lord Maugham in the last Cabinet to which he belonged. The noble Viscount, Lord Swinton, was one also, but there are very few of that Cabinet who have not now passed away. I am sure they would all have been glad that this most distinguished and charming character has been paid by your Lordships' House this afternoon the tributes so greatly due to him.

When I became a Cabinet Minister, almost by telegram, coming from India, I had never before been in the House of Lords, and I should have been completely lost in the work that I had to do had it not been for the most remarkable assistance I received from Lord Maugham. I mention that not to recall my own story but to recall the exceeding kindness, willingness and delight with which one was received on approaching him on some difficult problem the nature of which one had never had to tackle before. I believe I could not possibly have got on, even as badly as I did, had it not been for the kindness of Lord Maugham and the way in which sometimes he would almost take my place on the Front Bench and tell me what to do—or get up and speak himself. That was typical of him, and in our long friendship afterwards I always had a great feeling of gratitude to him for what he had done to help me and thereby prevent the Service to which I belonged from being less well represented than it was.

2.54 p.m.

THE EARL OF SWINTON

My Lords, as one of the few survivors of those earlier days I should like to pay my tribute to a great Judge and a great friend. Like the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Simonds, I knew him from my earliest days, and I well remember, as a very humble member of the Bar, how kind he was when one went to him or had the tremendous honour to be led by him. No one could have been more kind; and even those who started at the Bar and have now attained great judicial posts, which I never did, will agree what a difference it made when so great a leader would say to some leading solicitor what help he had had from his junior counsel—when one knew one had been really rather an impediment to him.

We remained friends as he went up the scale, and there came a day when a new Lord Chancellor had to be appointed. I do not think I reveal any secret when I say that the Prime Minister discussed with two or three of his colleagues who that should be. When the name of Lord Maugham was suggested by one of them, the Prime Minister said, "But he knows nothing about politics. He has never sat in the House of Commons, or been a Minister." Then I—well, that other person—said, "I believe that if Lord Maugham is appointed you will find that he will learn that side very well and that he is what a Lord Chancellor should be—an ideal colleague in Cabinet. "Obviously his judicial qualifications were supreme.

In Cabinet, Lord Maugham was all that. He took his place, modestly at first, but always ready to give an opinion, as time went on, not only on those judicial matters on which obviously his colleagues would look to him but with that wise understanding of affairs which had given him his enormous practice at the Bar and that sympathetic understanding which is so valuable in a colleague, a Minister, or anyone else. So to-day we remember a dear friend and a great colleague who came, like the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Simonds, with no previous political experience into the high office of Lord Chancellor; and those who served in Cabinet with them both will say that nobody ever had better colleagues than those two.