The extract from the Memoire below tells you how Lord Denning profoundly influenced my life – and not just as a lawyer.  I idolized him – in the certain and God given knowledge of his failings, and the misgivings of judges who knew so much more than me.  Like Justice T W (Tom) Smith.

I have just read a biography – Lord Denning, Life, Law and Legacy, by James Wilson.  I found it to be excellent.  The author does not lack industry, insight, or maturity, and he is well prepared to square up and avoid idolatry.  I shall not comment further here, but I offer a couple of brief notes – which are reflected in the extracts. 

First, Denning was born in 1899.  In the reign of Queen Victoria, Empress of India.  He put on a uniform and fought – on horseback – in the First World War.  He came not just from a different clime, but a different age.  Do we know what practising law was like when Denning started in it?

Secondly, I am acutely conscious of the differences in judicial technique between Denning and Dixon or Smith.  We cannot afford too much of the former.  About one a century.  Wannabes are bloody dangerous, and self-serving pests.

Thirdly, and relatedly, you would be very unwise not to recognize the sheer horsepower of that intellect.  Again, about one in a century.

Fourthly, I rate Denning as highly as Mansfield – there is none higher – for one simple reason.  They both saw that their main job was to get through their list and release litigants from their agony.  And they did just that, in a way no one since has matched.

Finally, there is that spell-binding courtesy, inside court and out.  It is the first requisite of a judge, and it is just wonderful to see in action, not least so high.  I was so lucky to do just that.  There is something to be said for the good manners they taught under Queen Victoria.

Extract from Memoire

Here is another judge some called ‘Tom’.  Alfred Thompson Denning was known throughout his life as Tom to his friends.  He came from the family of a draper in Hampshire.  He was brought up to avow not only the King James Bible and Shakespeare, but also A Pilgrim’s Progress.  He went to a grammar school and from there on a scholarship to Magdalen at Oxford.  He got First Class Honours in Mathematics and Law. 

Like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Denning put on the uniform, and the Great War had nearly as much impact on him as the Civil War had on Holmes.  One brother became a general in the next war, but another brother died of tuberculosis after the battle of Jutland.  Denning never forgave Admiral Jellicoe for not having a go in trying to finish off the German fleet. 

Like Mansfield, Denning had a horror of unfinished business, and he was never in awe of rank.  He himself survived a gas attack in France, and the snobbery of some at Magdalen, which they say then had a reputation of being a rich man’s college. 

He went to the bench near the end of the Second World War.  He did not give one reserved judgment in his first twelve months.  He almost immediately came under notice as an innovative lawyer with a judgment – given ‘off the reel’- that revived the doctrine of equity precluding people going back on their word in respect of the effect of their contract.  He also wrote prolifically and soon became the darling of law students, and teachers, throughout the common law world.  He had a simple magnetic style that makes governments jittery. 

Denning was the Master of the Rolls, the head of the Court of Appeal in England, for twenty years.  In that time, he redefined the way in which judgments were written in England and elsewhere.  He had a remarkable capacity to state facts simply and then the law just as simply – or so it looked. 

Although he was idolised by academia and younger lawyers, he was distrusted by the old guard on the bench.  He was from time to time criticised, if not savaged, by more conservative lawyers, particularly Lord Simonds.  ‘I, too, was ambitious.  I, too, was accused of heresy – and verbally beheaded, by Lord Simonds.’ 

Our greatest lawyer, Sir Owen Dixon, gave a famous paper (which Smith, J would certainly have agreed with) on the dangers of conscious judicial innovation, and Denning promptly verballed him. 

Denning was protected in his reputation as a radical because this very old-fashioned Englishman, and adherent of the Church of England, was rarely exposed to crime, industrial relations, race relations, or morals generally.  If he had been let loose in those fields, he would have gone down in the esteem of a lot of his admirers. 

Holmes had admired the way that the English Court of Appeal dealt with appeals on the spot.  Denning continued that tradition.  When Denning presided over the Court of Appeal, it heard about 800 cases a year (about the number decided by Lord Mansfield).  About fifty or sixty reached the ultimate court, the House of Lords.  The Court sat five days a week, all day.  Only about one case in ten was reserved.  Judgments had to be written at the weekend.  Only comparatively recently has the court stopped sitting on Fridays. 

Some said that he sat under a palm tree – who knows where the nut may fall? – but it is impossible to find any appellate court in the common law world today operating with the degree of speed, efficiency, rigour, and sheer juristic horse-power, as that over which Denning presided.   Not one appellate court in Australia gets even close now.  Not one of them even tries.  We are only talking of a distance of one generation or so. 

In the course of my grand hitch-hiking tour of Europe, I had a letter of introduction to Lord Denning.  This was a coup for me in January 1967.  Denning was a hero or, as they say now, an icon, for a whole generation of lawyers and law students.  (He still is for me.  He understood Mansfield’s imperative to get the job done and release litigants from their misery.)  I unnerved his associate by asking how you should address a lord.  I found Lord Denning to be a most charming and kindly man.  His first words were, ‘Have we met before?’  After our chat he said that I might care to sit in on the case he was hearing at the moment, but he would not recommend it, because it was a tax case and therefore boring. 

He arranged for me to be shown around the Courts.  His clerk rang me up and asked if I minded if it was a black man.  This sounded odd, but the English were still adjusting to the number of blacks coming there from the former Empire.  A black man did show me around.  We sat down for lunch in Lincoln’s Inn (which goes back to 1422).  There was not a great rush for the others to come and talk to us.  Lord Denning was sitting at the high table.  When he had finished his lunch, he came to ask me how everything was going.  After that, every bastard wanted to talk to us. 

His lordship gave me letters of introduction to big hitters at Oxford and Cambridge.  The envelopes were impressed with the dry seal of his office.  When I produced one to French hitch-hikers at the youth hostel at Stratford, the timbre sec almost blinded them. 

But when I look back now – and I often do – at what Lord Denning did for me, I feel like Charlie Black did when he first saw his King.  Here was the most influential judge in the world, with a forensic mind built like a Rolls Royce engine, at the historical seat of the common law and therefore the British Constitution, meeting a ruffled, pimply law student from the colonies – and remembering him and going out of his way to talk to him.  And he called me by my name.  ‘Hello, Mr Gibson – is everyone looking after you?’  To adapt the response of Charlie Black, ‘it is impossible to overstate the significance of a’ law student being treated by such great man and great judge in this way.  ‘It had simply never entered my mind that I would see this for the first time’ in such a man. 

‘You don’t get over that…’  I floated out to the Strand as if on the clouds.  I would not have been in the least surprised if I had run into Ronald Barassi and he had said ‘G’day, Gibbo – where’ve you been hiding?’  And I often think back on it when I run into one of those bumptious, stuffed prunes or prudes preening themselves as if the world owes them a bloody living, the latterday jumpmasters of footnoted waste.