Lord Denning, OM

Denning was sometimes regarded as prejudiced against trade unions, but in 1972, in the first case under the Heath Government's Industrial Relations Act, his judgment in the Court of Appeal that a union was not responsible for the conduct of its shop stewards completely undermined the new legislation. Although the decision was reversed in the Lords, the authority of the Act had been irrevocably compromised.

Yet when Denning considered that the demands of trade unions were extortionate he did not hesitate to attack their statutory immunity. Thus in Duport Steels Ltd v Sirs (1980), the Court of Appeal granted an injunction which effectively denied the right of secondary picketing.

Again the decision was reversed in the House of Lords, but later that year the Employment Act upheld Denning's position by making secondary picketing illegal. Lord Denning defeated, as one QC pointed out, was often simply the prelude to Lord Denning triumphant.

Denning's devotion to justice was rooted in his strong faith. "Without religion there is no morality," he wrote, "and without morality there is no law." For many years he was president of the Lawyers' Christian Fellowship, and he liked to have the Bible close to hand when writing judgments. "It is the most tattered book in my library," he said.

Even with divine aid, though, a man requires a remarkable combination of qualities to circumvent successfully the rules of English law. Denning had absorbed vast learning, and his quick, powerful, practical mind excelled in reducing issues to their essentials.

Readers of his judgments can see quickly and clearly the controversial points of a case, and the reasons which led him to his decisions. If he jumped over a gap in the argument with an assertion of questionable validity, the gap was there for all to see, never hidden in a mass of verbiage.

Denning's style, whether in his judgments or in his books, was always simple, clear, vigorous and direct. He used short sentences in which adjectives, sometimes even verbs, were at a premium; and he liked to present the facts in the form of a story.

"It happened on April 19 1964. It was bluebell time in Kent", began his judgment in Hinz v Berry (1970). "In summertime, village cricket is a delight to everyone" was the opening of his summary in Miller v Jackson (1977).

There were critics who kept a stern eye on Denning and his concept of justice - which he defined as the solution that the majority of right-minded people would consider fair.

In a parliamentary democracy, it was argued, a judge had no right to stretch the interpretation of precedents to an extent that destroyed certainty and virtually amounted to the creation of new law.

On several occasions Denning was rebuked by the House of Lords, but once satisfied that he had found the right answer he was confident enough to be entirely unperturbed by disapproval in high places. "If our liberties had to be protected by them [the House of Lords]," he wrote, "they would prove a leaky umbrella."

When Denning failed to carry his fellow judges with him, he liked to leave markers for the future in his dissenting judgments. In Candler v Crane, Christmas & Co (1951), for example, he held that a firm of accountants owed a duty of care not only to their clients but also to any third party to whom they showed the accounts. This opinion would prove a landmark in extending the scope of negligence - though it was 12 years before the House of Lords adopted his reasoning.

Denning's judgments, framed to reflect his own moral intuitions in particular cases, did not always make good precedents. But his word came to carry an authority difficult to sweep aside.

"Until the judges become, like Lord Denning, a national institution," Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone ruefully reflected when Lord Chancellor, "they cannot answer back." And Lord Scarman characterised the post-war period in the law as that of "legal aid, law reform and Lord Denning".

Yet it was in a non-judicial role that Denning first became a household name. In June 1963 the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, asked him to undertake the inquiry into the security risks arising from the resignation of the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo.

"The Denning Report", published the next September, became an instant best-seller. Its chapter headings would have passed muster in any twopenny thriller: "Christine tells her Story", "The Meeting of the Five Ministers, "The Slashing and the Shooting", "The Man in the Mask".

The text matched these promises of sensation. Readers discovered that, on Denning's suggestion, a Cabinet minister had submitted his genitals to inspection by a Harley Street specialist in order to clear himself of the charge of being "the headless man" in an obscene photograph.

Some felt that Denning's innate puritanism rendered him unfit for such an investigation. The report made unsubstantiated allegations against Stephen Ward, and a photograph of Christine Keeler, who was indeed very attractive, provoked him to comment that there was no doubt about the nature of her profession.

But Mandy Rice-Davies spoke for many when she remarked that Denning was "quite the nicest judge I ever met".

THE REPORT laid blame squarely on Profumo for lying to his colleagues about the nature of his association with Christine Keeler - though the Prime Minister and his colleagues were criticised for failing to respond adequately to evidence of the minister's adultery.

For all Denning's willingness to confront governments, he remained fiercely patriotic. "There are many things in life more worthwhile than money," he told the Appeal Court in 1968 (though he himself was inclined to be tight with the cash). "One is to be brought up in this our England which is still the envy of less happier lands."

To the students of Lincoln's Inn, Denning quoted with gusto Lord Chief Justice Mansfield's peroration on the freeing of slaves: "The air of England has long been too pure for a slave and every man is free who breathes it. Every man who comes to England is entitled to the protection of English law whatever the colour of his skin . . . Let the Negro be discharged."

Towards the end of his life, though, Denning's nationalism could lead him into egregious error. In 1977, when the Birmingham Six applied to Denning for legal aid in an action against the police for injuries received while in custody, their request was summarily refused.

If the Six were to win, Denning explained with breathtaking aplomb, that would imply that the police had been guilty of perjury and violence. The Six might have to be pardoned, - a prospect which, the Master of the Rolls opined, no sensible person could entertain.

Some of the obiter dicta in Denning's books also gave cause for doubting his impartiality. In What Next In The Law (1982), he seemed to imply that some immigrants were not suitable to serve on juries as they did not have the same standard of conduct as English whites.

He further suggested that, in the trials following the Bristol riots of 1980, there had been attempts to pack the jury with coloured people in order to secure favourable verdicts.

Inevitably, there was an outcry, and Denning, then 83, realised that he had finally come to the end of the line. It was a sad denouement for a man with friends of all races and colours, who had done so much to promote legal education throughout the Commonwealth.

Private Eye summed up the situation with a cartoon which showed two barristers reading the headline "Denning To Retire". "I expect," observed one to the other, "the House of Lords will overrule his decision".

Alfred Thompson Denning was born at Whitchurch, Hampshire, on January 23 1899, the fourth of five sons of Charles Denning, a draper, and his wife Clara.

The Dennings claimed an illustrious past. A direct ancestor, Sir Sydenham Poyntz, commanded the Parliamentary forces at the battle of Rowton Heath in the Civil War, and later became Governor of Antigua; his brother Newdigate Poyntz fought for the King.

Around 1720, Sir Sydenham's grand-daughter eloped with a Richard Denning. In 1806 the Poyntz Dennings had their coat of arms registered at the College of Arms, but next year the family estates disappeared into the Court of Chancery, never to re-emerge.

Lord Denning's great-grandfather and grandfather were organists in Gloucestershire. His father, Charles Denning, was born at Leckhampton, although his apprenticeship took him to Lincoln, where he became engaged to Clara Thompson, a schoolmistress and daughter of a coal merchant.

It was very much a match of opposites: Charles, a humorous, easy-going man, with a penchant for poetry; Clara, a keen business woman with a backbone of steel, who intended her sons to be successes.

Though the family never lived in straitened circumstances - at times there was a maid - and pleasure was not entirely eschewed, the virtues of application and endeavour were soundly inculcated, with impressive results.

The second son, Reg, became a lieutenant-general, and the youngest, Norman, a vice-admiral and Chief of Naval Intelligence. The eldest, Jack, was killed in 1916, leading his men into action at Geuedecourt; the third boy, Gordon, a midshipman at Jutland, died of tuberculosis contracted during his naval service. "They were the best of us," Denning would say of his dead brothers.

Young Tom was considered by his mother to be the weakest of the brood. Nevertheless, after being educated at the local Whitchurch elementary school and at the grammar school in Andover, he served on the Western Front.

In the spring of 1918 he joined the 151st Field Company of the Royal Engineers, which was building bridges across the River Ancre under heavy fire. Denning escaped without injury, though he spent Armistice Day in hospital with the exceptionally fierce influenza that took even greater toll than the war.

HE RETURNED to take a First in mathematics at Magdalen College, Oxford, notwithstanding his diffidence about being a grammar school boy in a rich man's college.

For a brief time afterwards he taught at Winchester, where, so legend has it, he had difficulty in keeping order.

"I feel that I don't want to settle down here doing the same thing day after day, a very mediocre schoolmaster with no ambition or hope," he wrote to his future wife.

In 1921, therefore, he returned to Magdalen and next year gained another First, this time in Law. It was achieved despite a gamma in Jurisprudence - "too abstract a subject for my liking" - and a tutor whom he described as "the most ignorant man I ever met".

In the autumn of 1923 Denning joined the distinguished list of those who have failed the All Souls prize fellowship exam. But in June of that year he had been called to the Bar by Lincoln's Inn, after coming top in the Bar exams.

The essential qualities for success at the Bar, Denning believed, were good sense and a pleasing manner. He was well blessed with both of them.

He practised on the Western Circuit and in London, and dedicated "much research" to helping Sir Thomas Willes Chitty edit the 13th edition of Smith's Leading Cases on the Common Law. This task, he later claimed, "taught me most of the law I ever knew"; and even as a tyro Denning did not hesitate, in his glosses on the cases, to suggest new principles of law.

His practice was broad and grew steadily, until in 1938, when he was earning more than pounds 3,000 a year, he felt secure enough to take Silk. Though his salary did not actually decrease with his elevation, as often happens, he never commanded colossal fees.

On the outbreak of the Second World War, Denning immediately volunteered for service, but was rejected as too old. So he continued to practice law until December 1943, when he made his debut on the Bench as a Commissioner of Assize in Manchester for three weeks, replacing a judge taken ill. Then in March 1944 Lord Simon appointed him a High Court Judge in the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division.

"Thank goodness I only did Divorce for 18 months," Denning later reflected; he found the work "sordid in the extreme". Firmly committed himself to family life, he naturally tended to look askance at whatever threatened it.

He pronounced an unmarried woman who had been found with a man in her room at a teacher training college to be "quite unsuitable" for teaching. In another case he deemed it "a shocking thing" that a man had had himself sterilised.

Denning held that a divorced person should not be made a divorce judge. His own service in this role ended in October 1945 when Lord Chancellor Jowitt, under whom he had often served as a junior, transferred him to the King's Bench Division. But Denning had not altogether finished with divorce: in June 1946 Jowitt appointed him to chair the Committee on Procedure in Matrimonial Causes.

"No committee has ever worked so quickly or so well," the chairman recorded. It made three main recommendations, all of which were accepted, notably that the period between decree nisi and decree absolute should be reduced from six months to six weeks.

Throughout his career Denning worked determinedly to improve the position of the deserted wife, seeking to establish her equity in the matrimonial home. His efforts were invariably overruled, and he received some irate letters.

"You are a disgrace to all mankind," wrote one outraged husband, "to let these women break up homes and expect us chaps to keep them while they rob us of what we have worked for. I only hope you have the same trouble as us." Denning's views, however, were eventually enshrined in the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1967.

As an Assize judge he found himself obliged on occasion to sentence men to death; it was only later in his life that he concluded that capital punishment was morally wrong. And in the case of a youth who had hit an old woman over the head in order to steal pounds 20, he did not hesitate to order 25 strokes of the birch.

In civil cases Denning immediately showed an extraordinary resourcefulness in manipulating the law to the end which he desired. In Central London Property Trust v High Trees House Ltd (1947), he overruled the established Common Law tradition that variations in a lease must be made by deed, in favour of the principle that that a mere promise to vary should be kept when another party had relied upon it to his detriment.

Promotion continued to come swiftly: in October 1948, after only four and a half years as a trial judge, Denning was elevated to the Court of Appeal. In 1957 he was made a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, with the usual life peerage attached to that office. But five years later, he moved back to the Court of Appeal as Master of the Rolls.

The appointment reflected tensions of a personal and professional nature. Denning did not enjoy his time in the House of Lords: "To most lawyers on the Bench," he remarked, "the House of Lords is like heaven - you want to get there some day - but not while there is any life in you."

Some of his colleagues in the House of Lords looked askance at his maverick zeal. Denning declared in his autobiography that he was accused of "heresy" by Lord Chancellor Simonds, and "verbally beheaded". It was probably a relief to all when, in 1962, he took Sir Raymond Evershed's place as Master of the Rolls.

This official still retains vestigial traces of his ancient function as keeper of the rolls, being head of the Public Record Office, and chairman of both the Advisory Committee on Public Records and the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. Denning, who was deeply interested in the history of the English law, took these duties extremely seriously.

In 1965 he played a leading part in the 750th celebrations of the Magna Carta, both at the Law Courts and at Runnymede.

Denning became a Bencher of Lincoln's Inn in 1944 and was Treasurer in 1972. He was also the principal founder of the British Institute of Comparative and International Law (which absorbed the Grotius Society).

He was appointed to the Order of Merit in November 1997.

In 1963, when a large house called The Lawn came up for sale at Whitchurch, Denning seized the opportunity to move from his home at Cuckfield, West Sussex, and return to his birthplace.

He fought hard to preserve the character of Whitchurch, taking a dispute with Hampshire County Council over two footpaths into a magistrates' court when he was 88. His claim was dismissed, but he had the satisfaction of seeing his opponents made responsible for repair and maintenance.

Readers of The Daily Telegraph's correspondence column were regularly treated to doses of Denning's common sense.

An interview with the Spectator in August 1990, however, proved less happy. The Guildford Four had just been released from jail after 15 years on grounds that their original conviction had been unjust. Denning, however, refused to be grateful that the death sentence had not been applied. "They'd probably have hanged the right men," he considered. "Not proved against them, that's all."

Denning was blessed with two exceptionally happy marriages. He married first, in 1932, his childhood sweetheart Mary Harvey, whose father had been Vicar of Whitchurch - though she only agreed to have him after years of unsuccessful sighing. They had a son, but her health was never good, and she died in 1941.

Lord Denning married secondly, in 1945, Joan Stuart, a widow with two daughters and a son. She died in 1992.