# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Parker, Robert John

​PARKER, ROBERT JOHN, Baron Parker, of Waddington (1857–1918), judge, the second son of the Rev. Richard Parker, rector of Claxby, Lincolnshire, by his wife, Elizabeth Coffin, was born at Claxby 25 February 1857. He was educated at Westminster, Eton, and King's College, Cambridge. At Eton he was Newcastle medallist; at King's a scholar in 1876 and a fellow in 1881. In 1878 he won the Browne's medal for the Greek ode and in 1880 was bracketed fifth in the first class of the classical tripos; he took his B.A. degree in the same year. He entered at Lincoln's Inn, read with Ingle Joyce, and, after being called in 1883, remained in Joyce's chambers and helped him in his work. Thus, though without professional connexions of his own, he soon got into practice, was highly esteemed for his pleadings, and had many pupils. In 1900, when Joyce was made a judge, Parker succeeded him, though only forty-three, as junior equity counsel to the Treasury. Thenceforward he had the most important junior practice of the day at the equity bar, and, content with this and its prospects, he never applied for silk.
This meagre account covers Parker's career to the age of forty-nine. A busy barrister's life is rarely eventful. Lord Finlay, who as attorney-general had selected him for the above-mentioned post of ‘devil’, as it is commonly called, said of him (15 July 1918) in the House of Lords: ‘the unanimous opinion of all who knew the profession and particularly that side of the profession, was that Mr. Parker was the man for the post’. To the public he was then unknown.
In 1906 Parker was made a chancery judge and rapidly gained a great judicial reputation. On several occasions he sat as an additional member of the Court of Appeal. He made his mark especially in trying patent cases and in settling the practice under the Patents and Designs Act (1907), and having delivered a masterly judgment in a case relating to the Marconi wireless telegraphy patents in 1913, he was appointed chairman of a technical committee to advise the postmaster-general as to the choice to be made among the five then competing systems. On 1 May 1913 the committee reported in favour of Marconi's. Meantime the death of Lord Macnaghten [q.v.] on 17 February of that year had made a vacancy for a lord of appeal, for which a leading equity lawyer was required, and on 4 March Parker was appointed to fill it. He was duly sworn of the Privy Council and took the title of Baron Parker, of Waddington in Yorkshire, from the younger branch of the Parkers of Browsholme, to which his family belonged. His promotion was unexampled in its rapidity; it is true that Lord Blackburn [q.v.] had only been a stuff gownsman and a puisne judge, but he had sat on the bench for many years. From the first the profession recognized Parker as a great addition of strength to the House of Lords. In the few years during which he sat there he gained a most authoritative position as a judge of final appeal. The very varied systems of law with which from time to time a lord of appeal is called upon to acquaint himself, presented to Parker no other difficulty than that of ascertaining the principle applicable to the particular case. The most striking instance of his power of assimilating new law and making it his own is the case of the prize appeals heard during the European War. From the beginning of the series until shortly before his death he sat on the board constituted to hear them, and, after Lord Mersey ceased to sit, he presided. The subject, novel even to a learned admiralty practitioner, was quite beyond the scope of chancery experience; Parker, however, not only familiarized himself with the decisions but mastered the intricate practice prevailing in the time of Sir William Scott (Lord Stowell) [q.v.], and was conspicuous in harmonizing the precedents of past wars with the very special exigencies and conditions of the War of 1914. Two judgments which he delivered on behalf of the board, those in the Zamora and the Roumanian cases, particularly bear the impress of his mind and style.
As instances of Parker's method of reasoning applied to cases of very various types, both when he was a judge of first instance and when he was a lord of appeal, the following reported cases may usefully be consulted. They are given in chronological order: Johnson v. Clark (a local custom of Kendal); Fitzhardinge v. Purcell (sporting rights on the foreshore of the Severn); Jones v. Pritchard (rights and obligations as to party-walls); Monks v. Whiteley (equitable doctrine of merger); Barry v. Minturn (an early House of Lords judgment which Parker's colleagues were satisfied to adopt without additions); Attorney-General for the Commonwealth v. Adelaide Steamship Co. (combinations in restraint of trade); Kreglinger v. New Patagonian Co. (clogging the equity of redemption); Trim School v. Kelly (murder as an accident arising out ​of and in the course of a schoolmaster's employment); Stickney v. Keeble (of what contracts time is of the essence); Tamplin Steamship Co. v. Anglo-Mexican Co. (frustration of a commercial adventure); Continental Tyre Co. v. Daimler Co. (the doctrine of enemy character as applied to British incorporated companies during war); Admiralty Commissioners v. S.S. America (the right to sue in respect of another person's loss of life); Bowman v. the Secular Society (illegality of anti-Christian associations); and Banbury v. the Bank of Montreal (authority of agents to bind principals by representations to third parties).
The most striking characteristic of Parker's judgments was their intellectual compactness. He instinctively avoided any parade of authorities. What mattered most to his mind was to state a general legal principle comprehensively and then to bring the case in hand logically within it. Having made a judgment clear, he attached little importance to its form. In the same spirit he was relatively indifferent to the particular part he himself played in a discussion, provided a conclusion could be arrived at that was correct in law and would sustain the credit of the tribunal. On one occasion it so chanced, in a case which concerned the interests of workmen, that the House was divided as four to three, the four being of one political party and the three of the other. Parker was one of the minority and felt that this result hardly looked well. He pointed it out to a colleague on the other side and said, ‘If you will read my judgment, I will read yours.’ The offer was not accepted.
When the European War broke out, Parker was one of the first to see the danger of allowing prices and the cost of living to increase rapidly and unreasonably; and, at the time of the ‘business as usual’ cry, he took steps to urge his views upon ministers privately. He met with no success. During 1915 he gave much thought to after-war problems, and brought the subject before the House of Lords in an elaborate and characteristically condensed address on 14 December 1915. During the passage of the Representation of the People Bill, 1918, he took up the cause of those women who had passed the examinations which qualified men for a university degree, and, speaking as an old Cambridge man and as deputy high steward of the university (which he had been since 1915), he pressed on the House of Lords the right of such women to vote for the representation of their university in parliament. In this he was successful. His most noteworthy contribution, however, to debate on public affairs was made in 1918, a few months before he died. His old friend, the Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, had often pressed him to take part in discussions in the House, and, on the occasion of a motion by Lord Parmoor on 19 March 1918 in favour of a League of Nations, Lord Parker brought before the House a detailed scheme, which went far beyond the nebulous ideas of the day in definiteness, in logical construction, and in practical detail. To those who recall it, the occasion was a moving one. It was doubly a dark day, for it was the eve of the final German advance. The light had almost failed, and Parker, then no longer able to see handwriting without strong illumination, went to the table to read out the twenty articles of his scheme, so that his fine head stood out against the gloom by the light of the lamp which he was using. His most important idea was that, for the peace of the world, it was necessary to revive the Greek principle that every man and every nation must learn to take a side. Neutrality among modern states was a temptation to aggressors and an embarrassment to those prepared to defend public rights. Only by collecting an overwhelming and united force against wrongdoers could war, as the instrument alike of the commission and the suppression of wrong, be superseded. The debate, as was natural at the time, ended inconclusively, but the impression produced was profound. To say that the scheme itself was premature or idealist is merely to say that Lord Parker's was the mind of a statesman rather than of a politician. Other counsels prevailed in Paris a year afterwards, but had he lived there can be no doubt that he would have greatly developed the scheme.
Parker's health was already beginning to fail. He continued at work until the summer of 1918, and then, after an illness of no long duration, died on 12 July at Aldworth, in Surrey, the first Lord Tennyson's old home, where he had lived since 1914. He had married in 1884 Constance, only child of John Trevor Barkley, civil engineer, who, with three sons and two daughters, survived him. His name is second to none among the judges of the first two decades of the twentieth century, and will live among the most eminent in the history of English law.
[Public records; private information; personal knowledge.]
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