Although Robert Alderson Wright was one of the most significant British judicial figures of the 20th Century, he spent periods of his life in almost total obscurity. He was born in South Shields, County Durham, in 1869. Fittingly for a lawyer whose career would focus on cases about ships, he was the son of a marine superintendent. The Dictionary of National Biography speculates that Wright worked with his father when he was young, which might explain his chosen field of expertise after he joined the Bar. But little is known for sure about Wright's early life. All that is recorded about his schooling is that it was "private", and his early adult years are a blank. Wright was twenty-four, an age by which most students had already completed a degree, when he became an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. He studied classics and moral sciences with sufficient distinction to be awarded a Prize Fellowship by his College in 1899. Called to the Bar by Inner Temple in 1900, Wright served his pupillage with the great T.E Scrutton. Scrutton was at the height of his success as one of the Commercial Court's most prominent junior counsel, and about to make a seamless transition to become one of its outstanding KCs (Wright was one of his last pupils). Wright also spent time in pupillage with another future Commercial Court Judge, Sidney Rowlatt, and he joined J.R. Atkin's Chambers. Furnished with sparkling academic credentials and connections with established practitioners, including one of the leaders of the commercial Bar, Wright should have been well-positioned to launch a successful practice of his own.
Robert Alderson Wright in June 1925, a month after his appointment as a King’s Bench Judge.
Somehow, it did not happen that way. Whereas Frank Mackinnon, who preceded Wright as a Scrutton pupil (although he was a year younger) rapidly established himself in commercial practice, Wright later used to say that he had to wait ten years before any solicitor instructed him. Several other Commercial Judges liked to frighten junior practitioners with similar stories, and there was usually an element of exaggeration in them. But it is true that Wright more or less disappeared from sight for nearly a decade. He made no appearances in the law reports before 1904, and only a handful before 1910. And while Mackinnon was a commercial litigation specialist from the outset, Wright, when he eventually established a practice, had a more generalist one, ranging from Australian land law cases in the Privy Council to police pensions. He even appeared in a copyright case with Scrutton, who had been a copyright specialist before he turned to commercial law. The fact that the demanding Scrutton used Wright as his junior suggests that he had a good opinion of his former pupil. Wright was also led in a few commercial cases by such prominent KCs as Hamilton, Atkin, and Roche. But although Wright had supporters at the Bar, his career stubbornly refused to take off. When he was led by Roche in Dennis & Sons v Cork Steamship Co [1913] 2 KB 393, Roche was already a KC at forty-two, and one of the leading commercial practitioners, with an impressive collection of reported cases. Wright was nearly two years older, with fewer than a dozen appearances in the law reports after a decade in practice. He filled some of his empty time by lecturing in law at the London School of Economics. He also edited the 5th edition of ‘Carver’s Carriage of Goods By Sea', and considered abandoning the Bar for academia.
Gwyneth Bebb married Thomas Thompson in 1917. The photograph shows her with their daughter Diana in 1920.
Wright's most prominent case before the Great War was far removed from the Commercial Court. Gwyneth Bebb had studied law at St Hugh's College, Oxford and wanted to become a solicitor. Since she had been the first woman to obtain first class marks in Oxford’s final law examinations, she had excellent qualifications. (The University considered that it was being more than sufficiently broad-minded in admitting women as students and letting them sit exams: it did not award them actual degrees until 1920.) But when Bebb submitted her application and fee to the Law Society, it refused to admit her. She took the Society to Court, and Wright was instructed as junior counsel. The Court of Appeal ruled that a woman was barred from becoming a solicitor as a matter of common law. Gwyneth Bebb lived to see the law changed by the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, by when she had decided that she would rather be a barrister. But in 1921, before she had completed the Bar exams, she died as the result of a catastrophic childbirth. The following year, Ivy Williams became the first woman called to the Bar. By then, Wright's own career had been transformed, and he had become one of the most prominent practitioners at the commercial Bar.
The catalyst for this enormous change in Wright’s fortunes was the Great War, which broke out just as he was beginning to make more regular reported appearances in commercial cases. In his mid-forties, Wright was too old to enlist, and he remained in London as part of a greatly-reduced practising bar (Scrutton reckoned that more than 1,400 barristers had joined the armed forces by 1918). He was ideally placed for the opportunities which the conflict created for commercial practitioners, most importantly the resurrection, after half a century, of the Prize jurisdiction of the Admiralty. The Prize Court had last sat during the Crimean War. For generations, lawyers had not had to know anything about Prize, and there were no existing specialists. Wright was one of a number of commercial practitioners who became prominent the field. As the War progressed, he also picked up an increasing number of cases about war risks insurance, requisition of ships, frustration of charterparties, and other legal issues concerning the effects of the hostilities on commercial transactions. Between 1914 and 1918, Wright appeared in well over a hundred reported cases about Prize or commerce.
Wright became King's Counsel in 1917. Reflecting the diminished size of the practising Bar, he was one of only four appointments. Douglas Hogg, the future Lord Chancellor Hailsham, was one of the others. Whereas his junior practice had started painfully slowly, Wright's career as a KC was an uninterrupted continuation of his wartime success. As commercial litigation expanded dramatically in the years after 1918, Wright became one of the leaders of the Commercial Bar. He was instructed in most of the major commercial cases, and, appeared more than twenty times in the Lords and the Privy Council.
For all of his eminence, reports suggest that Wright was a rather indifferent advocate. The Times described his style as "lugubrious rather than brisk". It appears that he could be long-winded, and, while he was said to possess a dry humour, he could also be irritable. But there was no doubting Wright's legal learning and ability, and the law journals thoroughly approved when he was made a King's Bench Judge in 1925. Noting that Wright had only been in practice for twenty-five years, The Solicitors' Journal commented approvingly on the appointment of younger Judges, overlooking the fact that Wright was already in his mid-fifties after his late start at the Bar: McCardie and Roche had been the best part of a decade younger on appointment, while Atkin had become a Judge at forty-two.
If Wright's advancing years suggested that his King's Bench career might be relatively short, then that proved to be the case. He spent only seven years as a first-instance Judge. Unsurprisingly, most of his reported cases were in the Commercial Court. But he also sat in the Court of Criminal Appeal, heard some landlord and tenant and employment cases, and did his share of Circuit work. Prominent among his commercial decisions were Gosse Millerd v Canadian Government [1927] 2 KB 432, the first significant English case on the interpretation of the Hague Rules, and the famous Bell v Lever Brothers [1931] 1 KB 557, where the issue was whether a contract was void or voidable because one party had concealed wrongdoing. In Gosse Millerd, Wright's decision was reversed by the Court of Appeal but restored by the House of Lords, although in Bell the Lords decided that Wright and the Court of Appeal had both got it wrong.
Wright's most high-profile first-instance case was a criminal one, but with a strong commercial context. From small beginnings in the 1880's, Owen Philipps had created a ship-owning empire which, by the late 1920's, included such famous names as the Union-Castle and White Star Lines. Philipps's success made him both wealthy and respectable: he was an MP for more than a decade, and was elevated to the peerage as Baron Kylsant in 1923. Unfortunately, a complex corporate structure concealed the fact that Philipps's companies had liabilities in excess of £10 million, although the fact that his business was insolvent did not prevent him from paying dividends to himself and other shareholders, funded by more debt. Wright presided over Philipps's trial in 1931. The disgraced magnate was convicted of deception and jailed.
Wright was considered a great success as a Judge. Concerns that his temper might break out on the Bench proved unfounded, and he was regarded as patient (he seldom interrupted counsel while at first-instance) thoughtful (although he acquired a reputation for never showing quite what he was thinking) and clever. Indeed, the one criticism made of him was that he was sometimes a little too thoughtful. The Solicitors' Journal, describing him as "pre-eminently painstaking", believed that he was sometimes slow in getting through his cases. But Wright's thoroughness and intelligence meant that, when he reached a decision, his judgment was usually reliable. He was overturned on appeal relatively rarely.
Dishonest shipping tycoon Owen Phlipps, Baron Kylsant, was the principal character in Wright’s most well-publicised first-instance case.
In March 1932, the octogenarian Lord Dunedin, a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary since 1913, retired. Dunedin, a former MP who had sat in Cabinet as Scottish Secretary, was an old-style Law Lord, owing his appointment more to political than judicial qualifications. Since the Great War, there had been a shift away from such overtly partisan appointments. Lord Chancellor (and former Commercial Court Judge) John Sankey contributed to the process of professionalising the Law Lords by nominating Wright as Dunedin's successor. The promotion from the King’s Bench straight to the highest Court was striking: even J.A. Hamilton had had to serve a year in the Court of Appeal before going to the Lords. But the legal press welcomed Wright's appointment, although The Solicitors' Journal qualified its endorsement with an implied grumble about the number of former Commercial Court practitioners in senior judicial posts. The new Law Lord styled himself Baron Wright of Durley, after his country home, Durley House, at Savernake, in Wiltshire.
Over the next three years, Wright sat on around a hundred reported House of Lords and Privy Council appeals, in areas as diverse as constitutional law, crime divorce, employment, and tax, as well as a few cases with more familiar commercial contexts. Wright's considered and studious style, although frustrating to some impatient practitioners and litigants at first instance, was ideally-suited to the highest court of appeal. He established a position alongside Atkin as one of the two pre-eminent common lawyers in the Lords. But in 1935, his career as a Law Lord was unexpectedly interrupted. Viscount Hanworth, the personable but undistinguished Master of the Rolls (a former Attorney-General and another political appointee) retired due to ill-health. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin half-heartedly offered the post to his own Attorney-General, Thomas Inskip, but expressed the hope that Inskip would stay on in his existing job. Inskip duly did the decent thing, and declined the offer. (As consolation, he would later become Lord Chancellor and then Lord Chief Justice.) Casting around for alternatives, Baldwin and his Lord Chancellor, who was none other than Wright’s fellow KC of 1917, Lord Hailsham, chose Wright.
Wright as a High Court Judge in 1930 (left) and a Lord of Appeal In Ordinary in 1937
Although Wright had bypassed the Court of Appeal on his dizzying ascent of the judicial ladder, he had sat there from time to time since 1932 to help clear a backlog of cases. Now, he dropped down a judicial rung to become head of the Court, while another former Commercial Judge, Adair Roche, took his place in the Lords. But Wright's arm had to be twisted before he accepted the appointment. The office of Master of the Rolls was demanding, with significant administrative responsibilities. Wright agreed to do the job only on a short-term basis, on condition that he would return to the House of Lords at the earliest opportunity. He had to wait longer than he would have liked. But when Lord Blanesburgh retired in 1937, Wright was appointed Lord of Appeal in Ordinary for a second time, to renew his rivalry with Atkin. Emphasising pragmatism where Atkin valued principle, Wright tended to propose flexible legal tests which were sensitive to the facts of individual cases, rather than the more universal principles in which Atkin sometimes stated his conclusions. Trends come and go in law as in other fields, but Wright's philosophy appears to be the more in fashion today: the Supreme Court, for example, has dismissed Atkin’s quest for a single test for liability in negligence, launched in Donoghue v Stevenson, as a fool's errand.
William Finlay, his wife Beatrice, and Robert Wright in 1925. Three years later, Finlay was best man at Wright’s rather furtive wedding.
Wright's second stint in the Lords lasted a decade, although he took another break in 1945 to Chair the United Nations War Crimes Commission, which collected evidence for the Nuremburg Trials. These were the golden years of Wright's judicial career. The obituarist for The Law Times remembered him, "short, craggy, indomitable, rather testy, with his heavily lined face and keen eyes, endlessly probing the arguments of counsel with searching questions" (Wright abandoned his Sphinx-like inscrutability and his taciturnity when he left the King's Bench). He sat throughout the Second World War, complaining about the need to suspend sittings during flying-bomb attacks, and retired in 1947.
Like previous Commercial Judges Hamilton, Scrutton, and Pickford, Wright had enjoyed climbing in his younger days. But, like Roche before him and Diplock afterwards, his real passion away from the law was horseriding. He found a soulmate in Marjory Avis Burrows, an accomplished horsewoman who was Master of the Tedworth Hounds. They were married in Temple Church in 1928, with King's Bench Judge William Finlay (son of the late Lord Chancellor) as best man. The ceremony was low-key: hardly any guests were invited, and no music was played. The Law Journal described the whole event as "stealthy". Given that Wright was nearly fifty-nine at the time, it is perhaps not surprising that there were no children of the marriage. Wright rode regularly in retirement, but was forced to give up after a car accident when he was ninety. The longest-lived of all Commercial Judges to date, Robert Alderson Wright died at Durley house in June 1964, a few months short of his ninety-fifth birthday.