When Sir Gainsford Bruce died in 1912, the editors of The 'Solicitors' Journal' were shocked: they had, they implied to their readers, assumed that he had been dead for years. The manner in which the late Judge had largely dropped from view after his retirement in 1904 was in keeping with a low-profile life and career. The editors of The 'Dictionary of National Biography' generally considered that High Court Judges merited an entry, but Bruce was one of those for whom they made an exception. His 'Times' obituarist did not know even the month of his birth, let alone the day.
John Collingwood Bruce.
Bruce was born in Newcastle, in 1834. He maintained strong links with the North-East of England throughout his life. His father, John Collingwood Bruce, was a schoolmaster and antiquarian who had inherited the Percy Street Academy, a private school in central Newcastle, from his own father. The school was sufficiently successful that John Collingwood could afford to retire in his early forties to concentrate on historical study. His interests included the Bayeux Tapestry, Northumbrian folk music, and, in particular, Hadrian’s Wall. He published a guide to the Wall in 1861. Its 14th edition appeared in 2006. John Collingwood Bruce was married in 1833 to Charlotte Gainsford. They had two sons and two daughters, and gave Charlotte’s family name to their firstborn.
Gainsford studied at the University of Glasgow, and was called to the Bar in 1859 by Middle Temple. Joining the Northern Circuit, he practised largely in Durham and his home city of Newcastle, appearing in the local courts and before the royal Judges when they visited the North East on their regular tours of the Circuits. (The Northern Circuit originally embraced the whole of the North of England. When the North-Eastern Circuit broke away, Bruce joined the new Circuit, which covered the area where he did almost all of his work. His appearances in London cases were relatively seldom.)
He made his first appearance in the law reports prosecuting a man for obtaining a mare by deception at the Newcastle horse fair (R v Bulmer 169 ER 1479), but thereafter appeared primarily in more obviously commercial cases. Perhaps it was his Newcastle links which attracted him to areas of law related to shipping. He developed an Admiralty practice, edited and updated a book on shipping, and co-wrote another one about Admiralty procedure, although neither work survives in modern editions. He later contributed to the 'Admiralty’ volume of 'Halsbury's Laws of England'.
Bruce was junior counsel in Bowes v Shand (1877) 2 App Case 455, an important House of Lords decision on sale of goods by description. (His leader was "Mr Benjamin QC", ie Judah Philip Benjamin, author of the leading sale of goods textbook which has weathered the test of time better than Bruce's own works. They won the appeal.) He was also instructed in insurance and banking cases, and occasionally stepped beyond the boundaries of commercial work with reported appearances in areas as diverse as landlord and tenant and election litigation. His progress was steady, rather than spectacular (he supplemented his income for while by moonlighting as a law reporter). It was the best part of a quarter of a century before he became Queen's Counsel, in 1883, and he had a reputation as a solid, cautious practitioner (The ‘Times’ commented that there was “no spice of speculation or adventure” about Bruce’s approach to practice). In the latter part of his career at the Bar, he was more active as an arbitrator than as an advocate.
But if this makes Bruce sound rather uninspiring, there was an edge of steely determination to his character. In no fewer than four general elections in the 1880's, he tried, and failed, to win election as a Conservative MP. All of these attempts were ventured in his native North East. Changing his tactics, he was rewarded for his persistence by winning Holborn in London at a by-election in 1888. He did not light up Parliament with his speeches, but he held Holborn at the general election in 1892. The Conservatives, in government before that election, won the largest number of seats. But they did not have a majority, and left office about a month later. One of the relatively few government acts during that month was the appointment of Bruce to the Queen's Bench Division. Since it was not immediately obvious that his legal abilities merited the honour, commentators looked for more sinister explanations (the Conservative Lord Chancellor, Lord Halsbury, was notorious for nominating Judges for partisan reasons). The general suspicion was that the government wanted to free-up Bruce's safe Holborn seat for a more glamorous candidate.
Gainsford Bruce lampooned by ‘Spy’ as an MP in May 1892…
…and as a Judge in December 1900.
Perhaps nervous that Bruce would prove reluctant to surrender his seat, Halsbury dispensed with the usual routine for offering places on the Bench, which was to send a formal letter on which the candidate could reflect with a degree of leisure. Instead, he sent his Assistant Secretary in person to haul Bruce out of a hearing over which he was presiding as arbitrator and obtain an immediate answer. After some initial hesitation, Bruce said “yes”. His acceptance of judicial office did not excite the legal press: The 'Law Times' remarked that searching for his name in the law reports was "like looking for a needle in a bunch of hay". This was unfair, since Bruce had the best part of a hundred reported cases to his name, and had argued appeals in the Court of Appeal and House of Lords since becoming a QC. (His most significant case as a QC was probably Leduc v Ward (1888) 20 QBD 475, in which he failed to persuade the Court of Appeal that the holder of a bill of lading was bound by an oral understanding between the shipper and the carrier. It is still often cited for the proposition that, as between carrier and holder, the bill alone represents the contract of carriage.) He also had considerable experience presiding over both civil and criminal cases, both from his practice as an arbitrator and as Recorder of Bradford since 1877. But the press and legal profession were upset by what they perceived as the blatantly political nature of the appointment. While acknowledging that Bruce himself was "popular with those who know him", The 'Law Times' condemned the circumstances surrounding his appointment as "scandalous". The 'Law Journal' confined itself to the observation that Bruce's elevation to the Bench "has been the occasion of considerable adverse comment".
The ‘Illustrated London News’ was less angered than the legal journals by Bruce’s elevation to the Queen’s Bench.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Lord Chief Justice Coleridge complained to Halsbury about a breach of the protocol observed by previous Lords Chancellor, who had consulted Coleridge about appointments to his Division. Coleridge made it fairly clear that, if he had been consulted on this occasion, he would not have endorsed Bruce. Perhaps Halsbury had anticipated as much, and had bypassed Coleridge on the sound forensic principle of not asking a question to which he did not want to hear the probable answer.
But although Bruce's judicial career began under a cloud, he won the legal press and profession over in the end by his pleasant demeanour and a conscientious dedication to his work. A contemporary later recalled how Bruce willingly "plodded through long and dreary cases", refreshed each afternoon by a cup of tea brought to him on the bench punctually at 3.30, and his "earnest desire to do right and unfailing courtesy" were widely acknowledged and appreciated. He tackled cases involving bankruptcy and insolvency, crime, landlord and tenant, local government, personal injury, and tax.
In a field with which he was more familiar, Bruce delivered a string of Admiralty judgments in 1894-95. John Gorell Barnes, the principal Admiralty Judge, was gravely ill at this time, and it looks as though Bruce was transferred on loan to the Probate, Divorce & Admiralty Division. He was one of the signatories to the May 1894 Resolutions of the Queen's Bench Judges which called for the creation of a commercial court. However, although he had some background in commercial work, Bruce did not become one of the regular Commercial Judges, and his appearances in the Commercial Court were confined to a handful of reported cases over the period 1897-1904. He seems to have been used as a stopgap when none of the regular Judges - Mathew, Kennedy, Bigham, and Walton - were available. T.E. Scrutton, whose numerous personality flaws included crashing intellectual snobbery, sniffily commented in the short section of 'Charterparties' dedicated to the Commercial Court that Bruce had "briefly" been a Commercial Judge, but that he had never been on the regular rota.
Still, one of his Commercial Court cases did grab the attention of the public. In Bostock v Nicholson [1904] 1 KB 725, the defendant contracted to sell to the plaintiff sulphuric acid free from arsenic, but delivered product which was contaminated with arsenic. The plaintiff did not tell the defendant what it wanted the sulphuric acid for, but in fact used it to manufacture brewing sugars, which it sold to various breweries who used it to produce beer. The poisoned beer killed several people and made many others seriously ill. Bruce held that the plaintiff's claim for liabilities incurred to brewers and victims was too remote. Beyond the pure legal question of the quantum of damages, the incident caused a public scandal, and was the subject of a commission of inquiry.
The 'Times' thought that Bruce was neither a brilliant man nor a profound lawyer, but that he was a sound Judge. This appears a fair verdict. An overview of Bruce's reported cases does not reveal any instances of either eye-catching legal innovation or jaw-dropping judicial incompetence. His decisions were upheld on appeal much more frequently than they were over-turned. Reflecting his personality, Bruce's judicial style was quiet and under-stated. He did not draw attention to himself by littering his judgments with personal opinions about the issues of the day, and he remained a largely anonymous figure on the Bench. He did, however, mark out for himself something of a niche as the Queen's Bench's go-to Judge for equine litigation: he tried several cases about sale of horses and gambling, and in London & Eastern Counties v Creasey [1897]1 QB 422 he reached the sound conclusion that a horse was not a "fixture, plant, or trade machinery".
Gainsford Bruce does not (quite) survive only in caricature. This July 1892 photograph was published a fortnight before he became a Judge.
Bruce resigned due to ill-health in 1904. Quite what the nature of his ailment was is not clear, but its effects were severe: when, in honour of his service, he was sworn into the Privy Council shortly after his retirement, he was excused from kneeling in the presence of the King because he had not the strength to stand up again. The 'Law Times', which had so condemned the circumstances of his appointment, profoundly regretted the loss of a Judge who "possessed all those qualities that are so essential in an occupant of the Bench of the High Court." He had not quite served the fifteen years which entitled him as of right to receive two-thirds of his judicial salary in retirement, but he was granted the full pension on compassionate grounds. With appealing modesty, he managed to avoid the mortification of a public valedictory, complete with speeches in open Court, by organising instead a farewell drinks reception in Middle Temple. 400 members of the Bench and Bar turned out say good-bye, and it was reported that Bruce, seated in a chair by the entrance to the Hall, spoke to each one of them individually.
Bruce married Sophia Jackson in 1868: they were unburdened by children. He was a keen amateur astronomer, owned an extensive library, and enjoyed yachting. He was a Freemason, and gave his time to a number of charitable causes: he was a founding force of the Inns of Court Mission, which provided poor relief in an area near the Law Courts which was appallingly run-down in the late 19th Century, but is now the site of expensive modern buildings of the University of London. He made sufficient recovery in retirement to write a biography of his father.
Gainsford Bruce died at his home in Bromley, Kent, in January 1912. More than a century later, his name, written in pencil in his own hand, remains clearly visible on the door of his old locker in the Durham Crown Court robing room.
