Donaldson Obit

Speech [images and captions added by this website] September 2, 2005 Lord Donalds

on October 6, 1920 – August 31, 2005 Veteran of the presidency of the National Indutrial Relations Court who became a reform-minded Master of the Rolls IN 1982 Sir John Donaldson was handed the near-impossible task of replacing Lord Denning as Master of the Rolls (the president of the Civil Division of the Court of Appeal and the third most senior judge in England and Wales).

In contrast to his high-profile predecessor, Donaldson — though undoubtedly astute — was not a profound legal thinker, had no grand plan to go down in legal history and did not monopolise the biggest and best cases.

David Irving comments: IN 1989 we issued an edition of the famous Leuchter Report to which I wrote an Introduction , stating that, while it might contain in my view minor methodological flaws, the forensic tests carried out by a reputable New England laboratory needed explanation.

The tests showed no significant trace of cyanide compounds in the Auschwitz buildings where allegedly a million or more human beings had been “gassed” with the chemical — while a fumigation room in the same wartime slave labor camp using the toxic chemical for fumigating the clothes of inmates showed substantial quantities of the cyanide compound.

We sent copies to every Member of Parliament in the UK and to every member of the House of Lords who had voted on the recent and controversial war criminals bill. To our surprise we received a letter from Lord Donaldson , second highest lawyer in the land (see the image below) revealing that he too was concerned. House of Lords 22 June 90 Dear Thank you for yr letter of 14 June about the Gas ovens. I have read it with interest, but am less than convinced.

However, I think there is a case, for history’s sake, for a full enquiry. Yours truly Donaldson Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge Donaldson nonetheless made a significant and lasting contribution during his decade as Master of the Rolls. Many of his judgments were of a high calibre, even if few now stand out.

And, turning his attention to an area that had been neglected by Denning, he won admiration for a series of much-needed procedural and administrative reforms that slashed the Court of Appeal’s huge backlog of cases. Less happily, Donaldson’s name will also be linked to two of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history — the trial of the Guildford Four in 1975 and the trial of the Maguire Seven the next year.

In 1990 his handling of the 1976 Maguire hearing was criticised by the May inquiry’s interim report — criticism that, as with his colleague Lord Lane, somewhat disproportionately overshadowed his achievements. The son of a Hampshire gynaecologist, John Francis Donaldson was born in 1920. He was educated at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became the Union’s secretary of debates and chairman of the Federation of University Conservative and Unionist Associations.

After graduating with a second-class law degree in 1941, he was commissioned in the Signals Corps. He served in the post-D-Day campaign and then with the military government of Schleswig-Holstein, leaving the Army as a lieutenant-colonel. Called to the Bar by Middle Temple in 1946, he entered the chambers of Sir William Willink QC at 3 Essex Court in the Temple.

This was then the country’s leading commercial set, with a workload which comprised principally shipping, marine insurance, banking and other big-money cases. Nevertheless, Donaldson’s main source of income during his early years at the Bar was a solicitor who regularly instructed him in Rent Act cases at Edmonton County Court. Much of his spare time, meanwhile, was devoted to rewriting the standard textbook on an esoteric area of maritime law.

Donaldson was a Conservative councillor in Croydon from 1949 to 1953 and served as a member of the Bar Council for five years from 1956. He was junior counsel at the bank rate inquiry in 1957 and junior counsel to the Registrar of Restrictive Trading Agreements in 1959-61, appearing in many of the early important cases in the Restrictive Practices Court. As an advocate, Donaldson was known for his no-frills approach and concision.

After establishing a substantial commercial practice, he took silk in 1961. Unlike many QCs, he made few demands of his juniors, preferring to do the work himself. He was leading counsel at the Vassal spy tribunal in 1962, deputy chairman of Hampshire Quarter Sessions from 1961 to 1966, and a member of the Council on Tribunals in 1965-66. Donaldson was appointed a judge of the Queen’s Bench Division in 1966. At 46, he was the youngest High Court judge for many years.

He proved solid, sensible and polite, if a little pompous on occasion. Having assisted the Solicitor-General, Sir Geoffrey Howe, in drafting the Industrial Relations Act 1971, Donaldson was an obvious choice as the first president of the National Industrial Relations Court. He certainly wanted the job and assumed his new role with immense enthusiasm and efficiency. To put everyone at ease, he wore plain clothes rather than a wig and robes.

Donaldson went out of his way to give the unions a fair crack of the whip and worked hard behind the scenes to win their leaders’ trust. Although he achieved some success in this, he could not overcome the unions’ extreme antagonism to both the court and the Industrial Relations Act and found himself dubbed “Black Jack” and the judge with the “fastest gun in the West”. No British judge can have operated in more difficult circumstances.

During his three-year presidency, Donaldson was subject to constant media surveillance and was repeatedly attacked by Labour MPs as a political appointment. Breaking with the tradition that members of the judiciary should not indulge in public debate, Donaldson defended his role, declaring that he was merely fulfilling the will of Parliament: “It may or may not be a good idea to inject the law into industrial relations. That is a political matter and not for us.” Upon its