ornia a r THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES 1 lines Book (Jlub and is OT FOR SALE Subscribers wishing to purchase copies of this book, new or second- hand, should write to the Manager, as other copies are available or will be quickly obtained. WS13 JOHN GORELL BARNES FIRST LORD GORELL (1848-1913) JOHN GORELL BARNES FIRST LORD GORELL (1848-1913) A MEMOIR BY J. E. G. DE MONTMORENCY WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RONALD, THIRD LORD GORELL WITH PORTRAIT LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. i 1920 All righ.it reserved. 56 S' CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE INTRODUCTION 1 I. FORERUNNERS - 20 II. BEGINNINGS - - 28 HI. CAMBRIDGE - 37 IV. THE BAR - 46 V. THE BENCH - - - - - 73 | VI. IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS - 100 VH. AT HOME AND ABROAD 116 VITI. EXTRA-JUDICIAL WORK 152 DC. THE DIVORCE COMMISSION - - 164 APPENDICES I. PRINCIPLES OF DIVORCE LEGISLATION - 191 " II. AN ADDRESS TO THE CADETS OF H.M.S. WORCESTER" 292 INDEX - - 300 JOHN GORELL BARNES FIRST LORD GORELL (1848-1913) INTRODUCTION BY RONALD, THIRD LORD GORELL IT was my mother's wish that some account of my father's life and work should be placed on record in a more concrete form than could be gathered from the volumes of the Law Reports or scattered notices in the Press; and it is in fulfilment of that wish that the following memoir is now published. In the first instance my mother asked me whether I could not undertake it myself, but, even if the war had not made that impossible, we agreed after discussion that the cases are rare in which a son can successfully gain that detachment of mind and impartiality of view over a subject so close and so dear to him as his father, and that in this case it was eminentlv desirable that the task should be under- IP taken by one professionally qualified to review and express an opinion upon a life so unremittingly devoted to the enunciation of legal principles. It was accordingly entrusted by my mother to Mr. de Montmorency, not only a practising barrister, but also an indefatigable and most learned fellow- worker over the Divorce Commission, which crowned 1 2 INTRODUCTION and in some degree shortened my father's life. Mr. de Montmorency had many opportunities during my father's lifetime of forming a personal estimate of him, both as a man and as a lawyer, and all the material available has since been placed at his disposal. The early chapters of this memoir were written in time for my mother to have the pleasure of them before her death in November, 1918, and my sister and I have given such little later assist- ance as was required. As regards my own part, that, however difficult, is constricted in its aim to try to the best of my ability to present my father as he appeared to us at home a matter of special importance to any esti- mate of his character because few men of eminence can ever have been so concentrated in their affections or so completely happy in their home life. Two things, reacting to some extent upon each other, stand out pre-eminent in all the latter half of his life, of which alone I can write with any degree of personal knowledge: the first is the beautiful idyll of his married life, and the second is the long and bitter struggle with the results of continued over- work, which first became manifest in 1892 and ended only with his death in April, 1913. The effort of rising from the position of an entirely unknown barrister in London to that of the youngest Judge on the Bench led to a serious breakdown, from the effects of which he was never afterwards entirely free. Had he been able on his elevation to the peerage to have taken a real rest he might have been spared for many years, but he accepted his peerage, reluctantly, at a big financial sacrifice, and in reference to the earnest wishes of Lord Loreburn, INTRODUCTION 3 then Lord Chancellor, only to plunge into wider and harder work. He used to say that he had never worked so hard in his life as in the months after he quitted the Bench, and to comment humorously on the amount of unpaid work England had the special knack of extracting from her sons. On a single day in March, 1910, he delivered a judgment in the House of Lords, gave lengthy evidence before the Pilotage Committee, presided over the Prize Committee, and spent the evening studying evidence on divorce. He was mentally unable to be idle, and threw himself always into whatever lay to his hand with energy: throughout his life he retained to a marked degree those qualities of youth which make it distasteful to be half-hearted, and he be- lieved tremendously in doing things for himself, often quoting to us boys a saying of his own father: " If you want a thing done, go; if you don't want it done, send.'* This trait was always coming out in big and little things alike. It was most publicly apparent in his work on the Divorce Commission, when he personally pursued investigation even into the remotest corners of his vast subject. It came out strongly for those who lived with him at Stratford Hills, where he superintended personally with the same concentrated energy all the ramifications of a small farm. Looking back with older knowledge now it is a real and touching surprise to me that the burden of overwork was so little allowed to affect the sweet- ness of his temper or the boyishness of his sense of fun. The courtesy and patience for which he was noted in court were not laid aside when he came home: we children saw little of the weariness of brain 4 INTRODUCTION which was, I know now, often intense. Sleep was his greatest enemy, and often he took no part in the family talk, but, though he was the centre around which my mother moved her world, we were seldom checked for the natural exuberance of children, and whenever he was not too tired or too busy rare times unfortunately he shared our fun. He could outdo us all in stories of his own boyhood, tales of digging carefully concealed pits in the garden of his old home at Anfield into which unsuspecting visitors were led; of fastening a loaded musket with a string from a door-handle to the trigger, and of the retribution which fell next day on him and his brother, Allen, when their father came home late at night and set it off unexpectedly; of another musket loaded with stones and fixed with a string to the trigger and its butt against a tree, and the bursting thereof; of their uncle Charles who looked out of an adjoining window just as they fired at some pigeons beyond and nearly had his nose blown off, and who could hardly be persuaded that they had not fired of the of fire- deliberately at him ; making works and the terrible day when a damp one stuck to and burnt itself out on Allen's hand with these and many other tales of his boyhood in the sixties he would cap our quite mild accounts of escapades, adding at the same time with laughter in his eyes the parental caution that we must not take him for our model as he and his brother had lived in a stone house detached from others, and even so he never knew how they had escaped killing each other and other people. He had been a boy of boys, and preserved so large a boyhood in his heart that it rose above toil and INTRODUCTION 5 weariness and, in addition to adding to the humour of our lives, helped him to an understanding of our youthful points of view. He was invariably gentle with us even when we must have tried him most, and hardly in the whole course of my youth did I see him in anger. I remember one incident charac- teristic both of his outward sense of dignity and internal enjoyment of a joke; he came back from Court one evening chuckling, and told us what he described as the funniest thing he'd ever seen on the Bench. A lady giving evidence had turned rather faint, and been given a glass of water; she had just sipped it and put it down still practically full. Her successor in the witness-box, moving his hand " excitedly, knocked the glass over. The whole " contents/' went on my father, shot like an aval- anche straight down the neck of the reporter sitting below: the unhappy wretch bounded from his seat with a yell as if he'd been shot. I sat quite solemn, but the Court simply roared "; and, as he finished, he threw himself back and laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks, as he had wished to do, but had refrained from doing, on the Bench. This power of repression, when he deemed re- pression necessary, stood him in good stead both on the Bench and in private life. He did not suffer fools gladly by nature, but only by the exercise of patience and courtesy, so that none knew how profoundly, he was often bored except we of the household who noted the tell-tale sign of his slowly moving foot. Similarly at the Bar he had been so frequently vexed by talkative Judges that when he ascended the Bench he never spoke to ask unneces- sary questions, to put suppositions, or to make jokes.