Lord Wilberforce

Richard Orme Wilberforce, judge: born Jullundur, India 11 March 1907; Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford 1932-2003; called to the Bar, Middle Temple, 1932; OBE 1944; Under-Secretary, Control Office Germany and Austria 1946-47; CMG 1946; QC 1954; Judge of the High Court of Justice (Chancery Division) 1961-64; Kt 1961; created 1964 Baron Wilberforce; a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary 1964-82; PC 1964; Chairman, Executive Council, International Law Association 1966-88; High Steward, Oxford University 1967-90; President, Fédération Internationale du Droit Européen 1978; Chancellor, Hull University 1978-94; President, Appeal Tribunal, Lloyd's of London 1983-87; married 1947 Yvette Lenoan (one son, one daughter); died London 15 February 2003.

Richard Wilberforce – a Lord of Appeal for nearly 30 years from 1964, for the last eight of them as the senior law lord – came from a very English background: minor gentry with a tradition of service to church and state. In appearance and manner he was a typical product of Winchester, New College and the Chancery Bar, but the county side occasionally appeared. In a judgment dealing with the ownership of Aintree racecourse he dryly observed that one of the solicitors was "fittingly named Arkle".

After a glittering academic career, Wilberforce was called to the Bar (Middle Temple) in the same year, 1932, as he was elected a Fellow of All Souls after his third attempt at that notoriously difficult examination. But pertinacity was a family characteristic – his great-great-grandfather the Emancipator William Wilberforce introduced his Bill to abolish the Slave Trade seven times before it passed.

The connection with All Souls was always maintained, especially after Wilberforce became High Steward of Oxford University in 1968. It was a difficult time in which to hold a disciplinary post, but there was a touch of steel under the donnish exterior. He had ended the Second World War as a Gunner Brigadier high up in the Control Commission for Germany.

By the middle of the 1950s Wilberforce was a prominent leader at the Chancery Bar, which was just beginning to broaden out from its traditional subjects of wills and trusts. Cases with a complex economic dimension and an international flavour were becoming common. Wilberforce revelled in all this. Both as counsel and as judge he had an extraordinary flair for guessing the direction from which the next big wave would come and riding it triumphantly. By 1964, when he was promoted direct to the House of Lords after only three years on the Chancery Bench, he was one of the mandarins of English law.

Wilberforce as a law lord was admirable – not least in that he avoided the temptations to which other exceptionally gifted colleagues had succumbed. Unlike Lord Denning, he did not try to change everything in his desire for justice; nor did he aspire to be a Wise Old Man, presiding constantly over committees.

He was ready to innovate – within limits. Holding, contrary to previous cases, that an English court could give judgment in a foreign currency, he said, "The law should be responsive as well as enunciatory" (Miliangos, 1976). In Anns (1978) he attempted to restate the law of negligence – as it related to defective houses – which had become excessively subtle and refined. In a many-layered judgment of dazzling insouciance he cleared a path through the jungle.

For some years other courts in England and throughout the Commonwealth admiringly followed the Wilberforce judgment in Anns. But unforeseen difficulties appeared, and in 1990 seven law lords in Murphy declared Anns to be "an impermissible piece of judicial legislation". This was very severe, and to many unjustified, criticism in a year in which Wilberforce also had to bear great family trouble – he was named in the forged will of his cousin Lady Illingworth, and gave evidence for the prosecution at the trial of Baron Michael de Stempel for conspiracy to steal from her.

Wilberforce had little to do with criminal law, but one obiter dictum may be recalled. In the early Sixties there were a number of sensational criminal trials. Wilberforce found himself in a group of Old Bailey practitioners remembering the events of the day. One of them apologised for any offence given by their rough anecdotage. In his thin mandarin voice Wilberforce replied: "Please go on – a good trial, well conducted, has a cathartic effect on the body politic."

In an age in which state trials revolve around money rather than sex the remark is still memorable.

R. F. V. Heuston

Richard Wilberforce was always so reticent, so reserved a human being, there can be few people who felt that they really knew him, even in the intimacy of college life at All Souls, writes A. L. Rowse. Several Fellows there had been elected at their second attempt, Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang for one. But Wilberforce was the only one to have been successful in that strenuous competition on a third time of asking.

That may in itself indicate something in his secretive, hidden personality. It may also propound the perfect judge – as he certainly had justice of mind, hardly possessed by his fellow lawyer and Wykehamist John Sparrow, whose personality was much more in evidence, more human and sometimes at fault. Wilberforce never put a foot wrong.

Willing enough to be friendly to me, he somehow did not surface. One thing I noticed from earliest days: his eyes observed everything, nothing escaped him – yet he said nothing. I suppose that here was another qualification for the distinguished judicial office he rose to. He had a distinguished line of descent direct from the Liberator and from the celebrated Victorian Bishop of Oxford, "Soapy Sam". Nothing soapy about their descendant: rather laconic (unlike them), he was crisp and dry, very precise in his articulation, stylish with never a superfluous word.

I had a curious experience once in their historic family house at Hull, now a museum, when I turned round and saw a life-size figure of William Wilberforce, the champion of anti-slavery. It made me jump – it was so very like the Richard Wilberforce I knew.

Richard Pares, who was another Wykehamist – in those days All Souls was dominated by Wykehamists – had a theory that there was a regular "college face". He himself had it, so had Humphrey Sumner and John Sparrow, and so – quintessentially – had Wilberforce. I suppose that there was something of their Winchester training about it: something repressed, meticulous, almost finicky. It should be emphasised that Wilberforce was an exceptionally sensitive, but controlled, man.

He would have made a good, if austere, Warden. In the critical years after the war, when two wardens died within the year, Wilberforce would have liked to be Warden, so his wife told me, and would return from our election discussions trembling. But nobody thought of him, nobody even guessed that he would have liked to take on the chore. Fortunately – for he lived on to become an eminent servant of the state, as Lord of Appeal, on whom many chores were imposed more important than those of any academic institution, and which he faithfully carried out.

* R. F. V. Houston died 21 December 1995; A. L. Rowse died 3 October 1997