No ordinary judge

Justice McCardie was anything but a conventional High Court judge. He left school at 15 and was called to the bar at 25. After ten years of provincial practice he turned down the offer from Joseph Chamberlain of a safe Conservative seat, although politics was then the conventional highway to the bench (unlike now when it is a cul de sac).

He also rejected an offer of silk, after withdrawing an earlier application which he thought the lord chancellor had been too slow to consider, and was, on the initiative of H.H. Asquith, the then liberal prime minister, appointed to the bench at 47 — the youngest of his generation — and the first junior to receive such promotion for over a century.

After his move to London chambers McCardie had become the counsel of choice of many city firms and was often preferred to established QCs. He managed,with the aid of ‘devils’, to conduct several cases at once.