JUDGES WHO DIED SUDDENLY

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXX, 19 September 1936, Page 4

JUDGES WHO DIED SUDDENLY

LORD TREVETIIIN’S UNEXPECTED END (By Air Mail—From Our Own Correspondent) LONDON, 13th August. Lord Trevethin is now added to the growing list of judges, active and retired, whose end has been unexpected, and in several cases dramatic. There was the lamentable case of Mr Justice McCardie in 1933. In 1923 Mi Justice Salter died suddenly. In 1927 Mr Justice Fraser passed "away when on circuit in Manchester. And only eighteen months ago Mr Justice Avory died suddenly in a Rye golf club house. It was during Long Vacation two years ago that Lord Justice Scutton was stricken down! Lord Trevethin had the unusual, possibly unique, distinction of being appointed a judge very early in the Long Vacation. This made him entitled to eight weeks’ salary at £IOO a week before he actually began work, a fact not, however, to be cavilled at, having regard to the modest salary of a judge, and to the circumstance that he sacrificed a very much larger income at the Bar. One of his first trials was that of Ernest Tirah Hooley, which lasted thirty days. In this he was said to have exhibited “a patience which Job never equalled, and the late Lord Brampton never surpassed.” In disposition a merciful Judge, he suppressed this trait when confronted at .Cardiff Assizes with a gang of garrotters who were terrifying the city. A free application of the “cat” put a stop to the epidemic, and the protests of so-called humanitarians were of no avail.