GREAT BRITAIN: The Last of the Tiger

For the first time in his career he was five minutes late. Otherwise Rayner Goddard, 81, gave no sign that this day in court would be different from any other in his twelve years as Lord Chief Justice of England. With his crimson robe sweeping the ground, his luxuriant wig, as usual, just a trifle askew, he strode into the paneled courtroom one day last week, seated himself in his big leather chair, jotted a note or two with a tiny silver pencil, and after fumbling with his ever-precarious pince-nez motioned for the session to begin. He seemed oblivious to the unusually large crowd that jammed the galleries. He might want this to be a session like any other, but everyone knew it was his last.

Though the office, if not the title, of the Lord Chief Justice goes back to 1268, few of its occupants have become so much of a legend in their own lifetime as Rayner Goddard. Unlike one famed predecessor. Sir Edward Coke, he made no great contribution to English law, but his blunt style and sharp knowledge of the law made him one of the most feared and respected men in England. The son of a London solicitor who had heard law around the house since childhood, Goddard, after Oxford, once stood for Parliament as the “Purity Candidate” against a man who had been divorced. His defeat was so disastrous that he never dabbled in politics again. In 1923 he “took silk,” i.e., became a King’s Counsel. The next 20 years brought him a succession of judgeships, a knighthood and a lifetime peerage. In 1946 he was appointed Lord Chief Justice, the senior criminal judge of the land (salary: £10,000, and the “perk” of receiving 4½ yds. of cloth from the City of London Corporation each year.

Justice-in-a-Jiffy. A short, stocky man, who presided over every kind of case, from the unsuccessful libel suit brought by Harold Laski against the paper that accused him of advocating violent revolution to the treason trial of Klaus Fuchs and the sensational cases of the “Chalk Pit Murder” and the “Vampire,” he soon became known as the “Tiger.” Green young barristers would sit up all night polishing their briefs before daring to appear before him in the morning and risk hearing him say, “Let’s skip the rest and hear your last point, please.” Even rich and famous lawyers, their names trailed by the initials of knighthood and honor, knew what it was like to be put in their place by Goddard. A quick and brilliant man, he was often impatient, earned for his court the nickname “justice-in-a-jiffy.” In one hour last July, he disposed of six appeals. To one man contesting a magistrate’s order, he snapped: “Go away. I simply don’t know what all this is about.” To another who insisted that he had been convicted under the wrong section of a municipal ordinance, he roared: “What section should you have been convicted under? I am sure you should have been convicted of something. Application dismissed.”

He had his gentler side. Once he ordered that a child, awarded £228 for personal damages, be paid £10 immediately so that the boy could go out and buy himself a present. Another time, having had to refuse an uneducated old man’s appeal, he turned to a colleague and said: “You can put this more nicely than I can. Break it to him gently.” He was as hard on bureaucrats who arbitrarily interfered with the liberties of citizens as he was on the criminal, and the public cheered his crusty pronouncements against officialdom. But for all his private Rabelaisian humor, his fame as an after-dinner speaker, his lonely widower’s life (but with a delight in his three daughters, six grandchildren), and his lack of personal arrogance (“I am an ordinary man who knows a little law, but I am an excellent judge—of port”), he had the reputation of being a man of the sternest kind of justice, who had absolutely no use for the “rubbishy” tosh of the do-gooders and the psychiatrists.

“Goodbye, Thompson.” “I believe,” he said, “that for years past we have thought too much of the criminal and not enough of the victim.” He derided those who believe that the first goal of any penal system is rehabilitation and not punishment. “I can always tell.” he insisted, “when a child who comes before me has seen a psychologist. He is cocky and self-assured and thinks he is interesting.” On more than one occasion he threatened to resign should capital punishment be abolished. He campaigned so vigorously for the return of the whipping post and “a good larruping” for young criminals that one bishop bitterly compared him to a birch-wielding “usher in a Victorian charity school.” “I advise all judges.” he once said, “to harden their hearts.” His own credo: “We have to take the law as we find it, always remembering that in other and higher hands mercy may be extended.”

On his last day, Lord Goddard was the same mixture of sternness and unexpected humanity as always. When a mother promised to see that her delinquent son would grow up to be a decent citizen if only he were released, Goddard nodded and said, “Do just that, Mrs. Kirk. Your son will be released.” But when a barrister tried to argue that his elderly client should not be hanged because the murder he committed had been completely unpremeditated, Goddard exploded: “The more one thinks of these arguments of yours, the more one is convinced there is nothing in them. The appeal will not be allowed.” Finally, all cases disposed of, the expressionless Lord Chief Justice gathered up his robes and bowed to the court. “Goodbye, m’Lord,” a court official seated beneath his bench unexpectedly murmured. With a quick catching of breath, as if to stifle any emotion that might escape, Goddard replied, “Goodbye, Thompson.” And with that, he was gone.