REVIEWS
| Published date | 01 March 1988 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1988.tb01756.x |
| Date | 01 March 1988 |
REVIEWS
Lms
OF
THE
JARD
CHANCELLORS 194G1970,
By
R.
F.
V.
HEUSTON
(Oxford:
O.U.P.
1987.
253
pp.
E25.)
What are Lord Chancellors for? They do not have to be competent
politicians and often are not. They do not have to be particularly good
lawyers and often are not. They do not have to be papabile as Law Lords
and often are not. Of the
six
considered in professor Heuston’s new
survey, Simon and Kilmuir were career politicians first and Lord
Chancellors second. Jowitt and Kilmuir and Dilhorne were Law Officers.
Simonds became a High Court judge (Chancery) in
1937,
a Law Lord in
1944,
and no-one seems to know why he was appointed Lord Chancellor
in
1951,
except that Churchill wanted Maxwell Fyfe in the Commons as
Home Secretary (Simonds was ignominiously dismissed in
1954
when
Maxwell Fyfe claimed his inheritance). As judges, Simon and Simonds
were notable but did not need to be Lord Chancellors to be
so.
The only
one
of
the six who made a real job
of
being Lord Chancellor was Gerald
Gardiner because he acted like a modern Minister
of
Justice and set about
improving law and administration by way
of
the Beeching Commission the
Law Commission, and the Ombudsman.
I
am a great admirer
of
Professor Heuston’s
Lives
188.5-1940.
There he
most remarkably pulled
off
the difficult task of short but full biographies
of
men who were, amongst other things, Lord Chancellors. The book was
stylishly put together and stylishly written. But something has gone wrong.
Perhaps the author was forced to decimate his first draft. He says
of
the
earlier book that in the
1960s
“nobody mentioned the topic
of
length;
twenty-five years later the economic position made severe restrictions
necessary.” What economic position? This is a Clarendon Press, O.U.P.
production
of
253
pages priced
at
E25.00.
Then, it appears,
“a
little more
space was made available.”
So
the author decided to “devote it all” to
Lord Jowitt. In the result, Simonds
(3
years in office) gets
18
pages,
Kilmuir
(7
years
9
months)
20
pages, Dilhorne
(2
years
3
months)
22
pages, Simon
(5
years
2
months)
26
pages, Gardiner
(5
years
8
months)
37
pages; and Jowitt
(6
years
3
months)
74
pages. That is distortion. As
public people, Simon and Kilmuir are the most interesting. And
our
author does, in a fashion, tell us about the lives
of
his characters both
before and after they were Lord Chancellors. But by no criteria is a dead
Jowitt worth twice as many pages as a live Gardiner.
In his preface our author thanks someone who “gave valuable help with
proofs.” I will not mention his name as I have not read a learned book
published in this country which has more errors. It is
so
sloppily produced
that I wonder whether the author quarreled with his publishers at some
point and refused to read the proofs at all.
Now, of course, the author being Professor Heuston, there is much in
the book to give both instruction and pleasure. I like to learn that an
Attorney-General, given a Cabinet seat, should remember when summoned
to a Court at Buckingham Palace, to wear a black damask tufted gown
and lace stock, his costume as a Queen’s Counsel not being appropriate as
it is the mourning costume
of
an 18th cent. gentleman.
I
am glad to know
that “two
of
the four members
of
the inner Cabinet
. . .
shared
a
taste for
solitary gyrations on a frozen surface” (Simon and Hoare). There is
another account
of
the reproofs given to Atkin for his outspokenness in
268
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