C Celebrate the Life Master Richard Southwell

CELEBRATE THE LIFE: MASTER RICHARD SOUTHWELL

An address delivered by the Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, The Very Reverend Nicholas Papadopoulos, at a memorial service for Master Richard Southwell held on 20 June 2022.

“If one is in court or having to address a public assembly or the senate, a lavish and extravagant eloquence is appropriate. But when speaking of God, our master, the absolute sincerity of what we say will communicate to others not by our eloquence but by the substance of our lives”.

The Bible does not give lawyers a good press. Like the Pharisees, and like the tax-collectors, lawyers are the target of Christ’s invective. The specific criticism that he levels at them is that they use their mastery of words to increase the burdens that others bear.

Saint Cyprian was Bishop of Carthage and a Christian martyr of the 3rd century, but before his baptism and his ordination he practised as a lawyer. He was an advocate and a teacher of rhetoric. He was steeped in the dark arts of the courtroom: a master of words. In the letter that he writes to his friend Donatus, with which I began, he as good as admits this. He knows all about lavish eloquence – the well-tuned phrase, the irresistible argument. But he knows too that when we speak of God the elegance of our prose communicates nothing. When we speak of God the substance of our lives communicates everything.

“And now these three remain” writes Paul “faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love”. If the substance of our lives communicates everything, then how greatly we have loved is perhaps the measure of the substance of our lives.

Richard died on 26 December, St Stephen’s Day. St Stephen was not a lawyer, but he was no stranger to the witness box, either. The biblical account of his life consists almost entirely of the record of his appearance before the court which condemns him to death. He confesses his faith in Christ and in consequence is stoned outside the city wall. So far as we know it, that is the substance of his life – that he gives everything for the sake of his love of his Lord. When good King Wenceslas, wealth and rank possessing, sets out to bring food and fuel to the peasant who lives a good league hence he does so on St Stephen’s Day. So far as the carol tells it, that is substance of his life: that in his love for his Lord he gives what he has to the poor. The intensity of his love even warms the feet of his page amidst the rude wind’s wild lament.

If the Bible gives lawyers a bad press, what is the law’s opinion of love? Lord Atkin spoke of Christ’s commandment to love in his celebrated judgement in Donoghue v Stephenson (1932 – as I’m sure I have no need to remind many of you). In that case a widow found a decomposed snail in the ginger beer that her friend had bought her, which unhappy incident established the tort of negligence independent of contractual relations. Lord Atkin said this: “The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law, you must not injure your neighbour. Who, then, in law is my neighbour? Persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected”. Richard was a man of law to his fingertips, but a man of faith to his core. I’m sure he respected Lord Atkin’s dictum professionally; but I know he breached it personally. In law, to love is to refrain from harming others; in faith, to love is to live as did Cyprian, Stephen, and Wenceslas – to give without conditions. And Richard gave the Church so much. He was a lay Canon of this Cathedral, occupying the prebendal stall of Warminster, on the north side of the Quire. He represented us on the Crown Nominations Commission twelve years when our last Bishop was appointed. He would have loved to be here yesterday when our current Bishop was enthroned, an occasion attended by the Deans of Jersey and Guernsey, whose Bailiwicks are soon to become attached to our Diocese. He was Chair of the House of Laity in the Diocesan Synod, Chair of Heytesbury Deanery Synod, and a longstanding Churchwarden.

Richard was a man of law to his fingertips, but a man of faith to his core.

Now, anyone who serves the life of the Church for as long as Richard did might be forgiven for chafing at Lord Atkin’s words “you must not injure your neighbour” as the parish share, or the vicarage gutters, or the redrawing of the parochial boundaries reappears on the agenda for the 99th time. Yet those who worked with Richard remember only his wisdom, his kindness, his generosity, and his integrity. If it’s the substance of our lives that communicates what we know of God; if it’s how greatly we have loved that communicates what we know of God; then in Richard’s life we have learned much of God.

In the north Quire aisle of the Cathedral, directly behind Richard’s former stall, are inscribed the words of T S Eliot which were read this morning:

“All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.”

Eliot understands that ultimately the righteousness of God and the mercy of God are indistinguishable: all that there is, is the love of God for those who have loved. To that love we have commended God’s faithful servant Richard. May he rest in peace – and rise in glory.

Dean of Salisbury Cathedral

Published by kind permission of The Very Revd Nicholas Papadopulos

Master Richard Southwell © Birkbeck

Second address by Howard Page KC.

Belinda has generously asked me to say a little about Richard’s professional life.

It was at Trinity College Cambridge, as an Exhibitioner, that Richard’s formal legal education began, when he decided to read law rather than classics at which he had excelled at school. But the seeds of his interest in the law can, perhaps, be traced to his period of National Service in the Royal Navy between Winchester and Cambridge, when in a foretaste of things to come – and characteristically you may think – he took it upon himself to re-rewrite much of the Mediterranean Fleet’s Standing Orders while based at the Malta headquarters.

In 1961, following Call to Bar by The Inner Temple and a period of pupillage, he was invited to join Harry Fisher, Roger Parker, Gordon Slynn and Patrick Neill (as they then were) as a member of a small set of chambers specialising in high-end civil work at One Hare Court in the Temple. This was to remain his professional home for the next almost 40 years, until, in 2000, the chambers, joined forces with another set and moved to Lincoln’s Inn. There, Richard continued to practise, from a room with one of the finest views in London, until he retired in 2004.

What, more than anything, distinguished Richard was an exceptional gift of speed in digesting daunting quantities of documents and producing the opinion, judgment or whatever else was required of him, in finished form, while the rest of us were still sharpening our pencils. And it was this gift, coupled with astute judgment and innate courtesy, that resulted in leading City solicitors frequently turning to him as their counsel of choice in cases of particular complexity or delicacy, the development of an extensive practice in a broad range of commercial advice and litigation, and a case load which took him to San Francisco, the Dead Sea, Abu Dhabi, the Far East and Venice among others places. It is, however, his pro bono roles as a leading member of the Bar Council for many years and as a Bencher of The Inner Temple – and, in 2002, Treasurer – that are most likely to be remembered as his lasting legacies. Among other things:-

He was the principal author of the Bar’s magnum opus in response to the Thatcher Government’s 1989 Green Papers on the future of the legal profession; he was the chief architect, in the face of considerable opposition, of the revolutionary idea that all practising members of the Bar should undergo continuing education and advocacy training; he was largely responsible for crucial, if unpopular, reforms of The Inner Temple’s finances; and, above all perhaps, there was his quiet, un-trumpeted initiative – aided by a fellow Bencher expert in pensions law – in establishing, for the first time, and building up a pension scheme for Inner Temple staff and his unstinting chairmanship of the trustees of that fund for the next 34 years – a role only relinquished shortly before his death: a remarkable story.

A natural candidate for appointment to the High Court bench, Richard preferred to maintain the flexibility that life at the Bar gave him to exercise his judicial skills in a variety of ways while simultaneously pursuing the extensive portfolio of voluntary sector interests.

He was a member of the Courts of Appeal of Jersey and Guernsey for eleven years (for the last five, as President of the Court), President of the Lloyd’s (Disciplinary) Appeal Tribunal for a similar period, a Deputy High Court Judge and an arbitrator. Of these, it was unquestionably the first that gave him greatest pleasure – sometimes sitting as many as a dozen times a year, first in one island then the other; and the regard in which he was held in those jurisdictions – notwithstanding, as you would expect, the occasional controversial decision – may be judged from the tributes paid to him on his retirement and the presence here today of a former Bailiff of Jersey who knew him well and, possibly, I believe of a former Bailiff of Guernsey too.

Yet, Richard was never too busy to take on one more role, though – truth be told – he was seldom content to be anywhere other than in, or close to, the driving seat of whatever organisation or enterprise was fortunate enough to become the object of his incisive mind and restless energy.

If he was prone to self-doubt it rarely showed. He could be trenchantly critical of those whom he judged incompetent, and he was never afraid of ruffling feathers where he thought ruffling was called for. “I do what I’m told”, a favourite dictum – invariably accompanied by a chuckle – may have been true in a family context but does not, perhaps, reflect a characteristic for which he will be remembered. And faced with robust counter-argument he was always good-humouredly ready, like the good sailor that he was, to adjust course – without necessarily changing destination. He also had an infuriating habit of being right.

Above all, Richard was never too preoccupied with weightier matters to be interrupted in order to give generously of his time to younger members of the Bar and others, to offer advice and encouragement and to pass on the wisdom of his own heroes and mentors whose industry, moral authority, or intellect he in turn admired.

We remember him as a loyal colleague, a figure of great distinction in the law and a wise and generous servant of his profession. And one who – always up-beat and enthusiastic – loved every minute of it.

Howard Page KC

Serle Court Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn