About a year ago, to mark the centenary of the NUI Galway Law Society, I wrote about some distinguished nineteenth and early twentieth century lawyers with NUIG or West of Ireland connections. Now that the students have completed their examinations (in person for the first time in ages) and are awaiting their results, it is worth considering how poorly examination performance can reflect a person’s real ability. Formal examinations certainly suit some, and high grades are often, not necessarily always, a prelude to significant achievements in later life. But, more importantly, many students who do not shine in examinations go on to achieve great things once they get the opportunity to develop their true talents and abilities. Consider the careers of two eminent lawyers with West of Ireland roots. One, as far as we know, never completed his degree programme here in Galway. This was Thomas O’Shaughnessy. The other, Lord Halsbury, was the son of a woman from Ballina and a man who spent time in Castlebar jail. He graduated from Oxford with a fourth-class degree but went on to become Lord Chancellor of Great Britain no fewer than three times.
Lord Halsbury
Lord Halsbury was born Hardinge Stanley Giffard in London in 1823. He had a rather unconventional upbringing because his father educated all his children at home mainly, in the case of the sons at least, in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. However, the father himself, Lees Giffard, had quite a colourful career. He was born in Dublin where the family owned Dromartin Castle, which seems to have been in the vicinity of Dundrum. He graduated in Law from Trinity College where he also received the LLD degree quite young, and this led to him being widely known afterwards as “the Doctor.” However, the family had difficulty persuading him to settle into any occupation (they wanted him to become a barrister as he eventually did), so they got him an appointment in the Stamp Office in County Mayo. While there, he met and in 1814 married Susanna Moran from Downhill, Ballina. But he soon ran into problems. First of all, he was still “seeing” another young lady who bore him a child and, as Robert Heuston states in his Lives of the Lord Chancellors 1885-1940, Giffard “seems to have been less than frank with either of the ladies.” Then he was found to have engaged in fraudulent conversion to the sum of £4,000 for which he was imprisoned in Castlebar. By all accounts, he was in no hurry to leave prison because he knew that, once outside, he would have to face his wife, the other woman with whom he had a child and his father (the High Sheriff of Dublin).
However, he was released in 1816 and moved to London where he eventually had some success, though not financially, as a newspaper editor. The family lived at Pentonville where Hardinge (the future Lord Halsbury) was born in 1823. Susanna died in 1828 after which Lees married a cousin of his who was still in her teens. Hardinge was admitted to Oxford in 1842 and graduated with a fourth-class degree in Greats (Classics) in 1845. This result probably reflected more on the system than prevailing at Oxford than on the knowledge or ability of the student himself, as some contemporary sources confirm. After a few years dabbling in journalism and other things, Hardinge was called to the Bar in 1850 and became a Queen’s Counsel in 1865. He had a tremendously successful career as a criminal trial lawyer and was made Solicitor General by Disraeli in 1875. Two years later he was elected as a Conservative MP. Thereafter, his career really took off.
Baron Halsbury, as he became, was appointed Lord Chancellor by the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, in 1885. His first tenure of that post was very short because, eight months later, the government went out of office. However, it was back in 1886 with Halsbury as Lord Chancellor and he retained that position until 1892. Then there was a three-year break while Gladstone was in power, but Halsbury had another spell as Lord Chancellor from 1895 to 1905 when he retired. In all, he was Chancellor for 17 years. Only one other person had held the office for longer. Then something happened that has made him a household name (at least in the legal world) ever since. In 1907, the legal publishers Butterworths decided to embark on the ambitious project of producing an encyclopedia of the entire law of England. Halsbury, then in retirement, was approached to act as editor-in-chief and he agreed, The first edition of Halsbury’s Laws of England appeared with remarkable speed in 31 volumes between 1907 and 1917. New editions have appeared periodically since then, and it became the tradition to have a retired Lord Chancellor as editor-in-chief. Both Lord Hailsham and Lord Mackay have taken on that role. This traditional may not survive because, as a result of constitutional reforms enacted early in this century, the Lord Chancellor is no longer a judge and need not even be a senior lawyer (though the holder usually has a legal background). However, irrespective of future editorial arrangements, the name of Halsbury will doubtless endure.
Halsbury, like his father, married twice, his first wife having died in 1873. He himself died in 1921 at the ripe old age of 98. One further accomplishment of his I should mention is that during his final term as Lord Chancellor, he succeeded in having enacted the Criminal Evidence Act 1898 which he had always supported and which permitted accused persons to testify in their own defence. That’s the one about “losing the shield”, familiar to, if not held in great affection by, generations of Evidence students. And yes, there was a question on the exam paper about it again this year!
Incidentally, it was in a solicitor’s office Castlebar many decades ago that I first caught sight of Halsbury’s Laws of England. I instantly decided that whatever else I might do in life, it would not be law. Imagine having to learn all of that. Obviously, I took some wrong turns thereafter, but only now do I realise how appropriate it was that I should first encounter Halsbury in that locality!
Judge Thomas O’Shaughnessy
Thomas O’Shaughnessy, or Sir Thomas Lopdell O’Shaughnessy, to give him his full and proper title, was born in Dublin in 1850. His father’s family came from Mohill in County Leitrim and his mother, Mary Anne Lopdell, from Gort in County Galway. He received his primary and secondary education in Dublin, and later studied at Queen’s College Galway (as NUIG was known between 1845 and 1908). He does not seem to have been awarded a degree as his name appears nowhere in the list of graduates published in the annual College Calendar during the late nineteenth century. However, on his appointment as Recorder of Dublin in 1905, the Irish Independent (24 June 1905) reported: “His early education was obtained at Belvedere College and Sullivan’s School and he had a distinguished course at Queen’s College Galway.” He was called to the Irish Bar in 1874, when he would have been about 24, and at the time it was not unusual for aspiring barristers to study for a short time at university before taking the professional examinations.
He built up a very successful practice and, unlike many of his contemporaries, he resisted the lure of politics. Ar one point, he was prosecutor in Belfast but, during the land war, he became a vigorous defence counsel. V.T.H. Delany in his biography of Chief Baron Palles (Christopher Palles, Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1960, p. 99) lists O’Shaughnessy as one of the titans practising in the Exchequer Court during the land war. He was also instrumental in moves to establish a General Council of the Bar of Ireland in 1897.
In 1905, O’Shaughnessy was appointed Recorder of Dublin, an office first established in 1564. It had a wide jurisdiction over civil and criminal matters. According to his biographer:
“O’Shaughnessy spoke of himself as “the citizens’ judge,” He earned a reputation for fairness and compassion and brought to the bench a wide knowledge of human nature and a knowledge, hardly ever at fault, of the law. Understanding of the first offender who was the victim of circumstances, O’Shaughnessy was intolerant of violent crime, and while he was firm in his suppression of the mala fide traveller, he was just and fair to the law-abiding publican, notwithstanding his commitment to temperance.”
(Robert D. Marshall, “O’Shaughnessy, Sir Thomas Lopdell”, Dictionary of Irish Biography (Royal Irish Academy)).
He moved the court from Kilmainham to Green Street, but it was effectively abolished by the Courts of Justice Act 1924 which transferred its jurisdiction to the Circuit Court. O’Shaughnessy was then offered a High Court appointment which he accepted although, to the surprise of many, he retired in late 1925 (by which time he was, of course, in his mid-seventies). However, he was remarkably energetic during his short term as a High Court judge. He was almost solely responsible for setting up the Central Criminal Court and presided at the first trial held there, and at several more after that. He also sat on the Court of Criminal Appeal, including in the case of Attorney General v Keane (the bigamy case described in the previous post). The Central Criminal Court was presented with a very heavy list of more than 50 cases, including 16 murders, when it first sat in late June/early July 1924. From newspaper reports, Judge O’Shaughnessy was generally prepared to give offenders a chance, but if the crime was particularly serious he did not hesitate to add a few strokes of the lash to a sentence of imprisonment.
O’Shaughnessy died in Dublin in 1933. Sadly, both of his sons, one of them a King’s Counsel, predeceased him. One of his daughters was among the first women to be admitted to Trinity College Dublin from which she graduated in 1906. Her daughter (Dame Patricia Ridsdale), in turn, had quite a career. During the Second World War, she was Ian Fleming’s secretary and, assuming Wikipedia has got it right, she was the model for Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond novels. She was married to Julian Ridsdale, a long-serving MP for Harwich, and she was Chairperson of the Conservative MP Wives Association from 1978 to 1991 (which more or less coincided with the Thatcher era).
On a lighter and totally unrelated note, Vincent Delany in his book on Chief Baron Palles records that in 1854, leave was given to one Margaret Heffernan to have a stand for the sale of oysters in the yard of the Four Courts. What effect, if any, these delicacies had on learned counsel remains unrecorded. However, they had a choice of snacks from 1867 onwards because, in that year, on the recommendation of the Master, Mary Sullivan was allowed to have a stand outside the Master’s offices selling cake and fruit. Today we have the “Tea Room” with cake (if you’re lucky) and fruit, but not an oyster in sight.
I owe almost all the information given above about Thomas O’Shaughnessy to Robert D. Marshall’s excellent entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography and to a lengthy obituary of O’Shaughnessy published in the Irish Times on 11 March 1933, as well as to some shorter pieces in other newspapers.
Sentencing, Crime and Justice 