Lord Bingham at Christ
College
130 Sixth Formers at Christ College were privileged
last term to hear the senior Law Lord, Lord Bingham
of Cornhill, deliver the first in a new series of
annual lectures commemorating one of the school’s
most illustrious former pupils, Lord Atkin of
Aberdovery, who died in 1944.
In front of an audience which included not only
invited guests from Brecon but also a number of
eminent judges, barristers and solicitors from all
over Wales, several of them Old Breconians, Lord
Bingham took as his main theme the courage and
independence of Lord Atkin when, in 1941, in the
celebrated case of Liversedge v. Anderson in the
Court of Appeal, he dissented from his four
colleagues in criticising the then Home Secretary,
Sir John Anderson, for interning an individual (Liversedge)
without being prepared to publish his reasons for so
doing – this, stressed Lord Bingham, in spite of the
parlous state of the country at the time, when it
was far from clear that Britain would win the war
and fear of possible fifth columnists was at its
height. Even then, he said, Lord Atkin felt it
imperative to uphold a man’s right to freedom unless
he was shown to be a danger to the country. For this
judgement he was virtually ostracised by both
politicians and fellow Law Lords – yet in time his
view would be come generally accepted.
Lord Bingham, who was first Master of the Rolls and
then Lord Chief Justice in the 1990s, kept his
audience spellbound for fifty minutes as he set the
case in the context both of Lord Atkin’s career as a
whole and of the country’s wartime predicament.
After fielding a number of questions Lord Bingham
later chatted with both Sixth Formers and fellow
guests at a reception in the Clive Richards Room.
A L
Price Esq. QC, Head of School - Laura Allen-Clarke,
Lord Bingham
of Cornhill and Phillip Jones, Headmaster of Christ
College
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