Early Years

They tell me that 1927 was a good year for claret. It was certainly a good year for me because it was in June 1927 that I made my appearance in this world. Those who deal in horoscopes and stars have consistently told me that I was born lucky and no matter whether they read my hand, study my face or calculate the aspect of the stars at the moment of my birth the results seem to be the same. Though I will admit there have been problems. My mother could not remember exactly when the moment was, at least when I got round to asking her, though she did remember that the doctor, an Oxford general practitioner whose name, I think, was Doctor Pate, on being summoned round about dinner time on the evening of the 22 June when things were beginning to happen, said that he would come when he had finished a rubber of bridge which was then in progress. In the event I arrived before he did, with no ill effects. It fell to a Hindu astrologer, many years later, armed with some of the key facts of my subsequent life, to establish that the time of my birth must have been 9.30pm. If you take into account that in those days people dined earlier than they do now, this seems to accord with Doctor Pate’s reported movements. My father at that time was the Governor of Oxford Prison. I was born in the Governor’s House, which abutted onto the walls of the 400-year-old structure which looked every bit as forbidding as was, I understand, the inside, though I never saw the inside of it. Father, who used to be the guest of some of the College high tables of Oxford, saw the prison as yet another of the many educational establishments which abounded in that City. 

Colonial Legal Service

I have often wondered how the Colonial Service managed to survive as long as it did. When I was interviewed in London they told me that the normal legal service career involved moving round from Colony to Colony as one moved up the promotion ladder with the ultimate goal of a Chief Justiceship and the inevitable knighthood that went with it, followed by a generous pension and a bicycle in Bloomsbury. The truth of the matter, as it emerged two years later, was vastly different. The colonies were fast disappearing, a process which began with Franklin Roosevelt’s aversion to the existence of the colonial empires generally and his express opposition to the Dutch position in Indonesia in particular. Indeed the only place of any consequence where I might aspire to be Chief Justice was clearly going to be Hong Kong, though the last British Chief Justice left Hong Kong some years ago. The present incumbent is Chinese. 

It amazed my departmental head, the Attorney-General, that I had been sent to Singapore at all at the age of 26, because, as I soon discovered on arrival, there was already in full flood a campaign by locally recruited civil servants to get rid of all their expatriate counterparts. John Davies, the Attorney-General, for whom I had a very high regard, gave me a maximum of four years and advised me to resign. This I could not do as I had to do at least three years’ service or refund the entire cost of my professional training and so he arranged for me to transfer from the pensionable establishment — as I was never likely to aspire to even the smallest pension — to a three year contract which provided me with a gratuity at its termination — the princely sum of £1,500 which was, then, not far short of a year’s salary. In any event it did not take me very long to conclude that my temperament was ill suited to being a civil servant and that my colleagues were not, on the whole, lawyers of the highest calibre. Waiting, at the tail end of such a queue, for dead men’s shoes would, I think, have been an extremely frustrating process. I took two important steps with a view to keeping future options open. I sought and obtained admission to the Singapore Bar (to which law officers of the Crown did not in those days have to belong). It was possible to be a Crown Counsel on the basis solely of one’s English qualification as a barrister and without being admitted to the Bar.  

And I also applied for and was granted Singapore citizenship, a new concept just at that time introduced, in 1955, and which could be held contemporaneously with full UK citizenship. Since that time I have held and still hold, a Singapore and not a UK passport, though I am still entitled to the latter any time I choose to ask for it on the strength of my birth in the UK. Both these steps were to prove of vital importance in the career that I ultimately decided upon.  

The Attorney-General’s department was not then very large. It consisted of John Davies, the Attorney-General whose main job was political. He was a member of the Governor’s Executive Council, the local equivalent of a Cabinet. I do not remember him ever going to court even on formal occasions. John Davies had his critics. I liked him and he was very good to me. What I liked most about him was that, unlike some of his colleagues, he would always stand behind his subordinates even if he thought they had made a mistake. He stuck up for me when I was attacked by Christopher Shawcross over my handling of the air crash inquiry to which I refer in a later part, even to the extent of threatening to report Shawcross to his Inn of Court for unprofessional conduct. Next in the batting order was Charles Butterfield, the Solicitor General, who succeeded John Davies when the latter moved on to become Chief Justice of Tanganyika. Senior Crown Counsel was a man called Ernest Shanks, later to become Attorney-General and for two glorious days, Officer Administering the Government, which was the somewhat grandiose title for whoever stood in for the Governor when he was out of the Colony. Then there was Victor Winslow who, despite his name, was the only genuine Singaporean in the Chambers, being in fact a Ceylonese Tamil, a fact which I only discovered on being sent round to introduce myself when first I arrived. I became very good friends with Victor in the years which followed. He was the only member of Chambers with a first class academic brain and he had done very well both at the University (Cambridge) and professionally in England. He was accused of being lazy, but that was probably the result of being constantly passed over by his intellectual inferiors for promotion on what seems to me to be on racial grounds. He was the only member of Chambers to whom a new and inexperienced arrival could go for help and that was something I often did. He gave it most readily. Later on he was able to escape from the Chambers and took a seat on the High Court bench where he acquitted himself well. Sadly he died before the time came to retire. 

Alfred Simpson, a Scottish lawyer, was the Chambers draftsman, responsible for every piece of legislation that went through the Legislative Council. A likeable man who was always prepared to help, I last heard of him in Ghana where he was a High Court judge in what was by then an independent country — not, I would think, a very easy task.  

Next on the list was Tom Mahoney, a barrister from Eire endowed with all the charm that one would expect of an Irishman. He had fought with the British army all through World War Two and was badly disfigured as a result of being burnt in a tank. His face had been reconstructed by plastic surgery. His marriage, possibly as a result, had floundered and he was on his own, slowly but surely drinking himself into oblivion. He died while I was still in the Chambers. It was he who came to meet us as the Chambers representative at the boat. ‘The milk’s not dry on me lips’ was his answer to any question I might ask about how things were done. He had a keen mind and we became good friends, sharing many thoughts on the world in general and our colleagues in Chambers in particular. Had it not been for other things Tom would, I am sure, have had a very successful career. But it was not to be. Finally, there was Livingstone. He had been there two or three years. I never really got to know him. He spent his entire time dealing with the daily round of criminal cases in the Assizes which were in constant session. I never discovered what became of him. 

I was fortunate in the allocation of work in the Chambers, possibly as a result of John Davies’ estimate — possibly exaggerated — of my potential. My experience was virtually nil. I managed to avoid the boring work of prosecuting in the assizes. Tom Mahoney and Livingstone between them did most of that, though I came very close to doing a spell at one stage. But I did do magistrates’ appeals before the Chief Justice each Wednesday morning. That I very much enjoyed. Well do I remember one such appeal where David Marshall, subsequently to become Chief Minister on independence and later Singapore Ambassador to Paris, was acting for the appellant. I spent hours trying to work out the basis for his appeal, as the whole thing seemed disposed of by one short statutory provision about which there could be no argument. It turned out that David was unaware of the provision in question and that was the end of his appeal. To give him his due he was very affable about it.  

There were three matters given to me to deal with which were both lengthy and interesting. The first was a claim by Shell against the British Government (not the Colonial Government) to be compensated for the requisition of oil stocks left in Shell’s installations in Indonesia when the war ended. The British Government maintained that these stocks, having been seized by the Japanese when they invaded Indonesia, had, according to the International Law of War, become Japanese property and therefore, at the end of the war, vested in the British Government. Shell, however, contended that the Japanese never obtained title and therefore the oil remained throughout the property of Shell. We succeeded at first instance. It was a fascinating hearing at which Lord Denning’s brother, General Sir Reginald Denning and a retired Japanese Admiral both gave evidence as to what the purpose of the Japanese invasion of Indonesia had been and two rival experts on Dutch and Indonesian law gave expert evidence on title to oil while in the ground. Kenneth Diplock led me at this hearing and maintained very strongly that the Nuremberg decision on this topic was wrong. Shell took the case to appeal by which time Diplock had become a judge and was replaced by Geoffrey Cross who took a totally different view from Diplock. Shell by this time had enlisted the aid of Sir Hartley Shawcross who led for the claimants. It was the only time, they say, that Shawcross was silenced in court. Whitton J, who was a delightful man but not a bear of any great brain, decided to ask Shawcross a question which made it very apparent that he had understood nothing of Shawcross’s argument for the last hour or so of the hearing. Shawcross could not think of a riposte! Sadly they won on appeal. When judgment was delivered I walked round to Shell’s solicitors’ offices bearing a cheque for Singapore $5m in those days a sizeable sum.  

We were going to appeal to the Privy Council but it was vetoed in London on the grounds that it would have involved calling in question the validity of the Nuremburg trials and that was considered to be politically unwise. I would very much like to know what the result of this fascinating case have been had Kenneth Diplock still been available throughout the later stages of the litigation. He was devoted to hunting and used to disappear on a Friday afternoon for the weekend leaving his clerk with instructions to tell anyone who needed him that he was out on Assize — which was the name of his horse! 

Then there was the inquiry into the crash at Kallang airport (since replaced by Paya Lebar and now Changi) involving a Constellation of British Overseas Airways (‘BOAC’) as it then was in which all the passengers were killed. The flight crew survived. I was assigned the job of preparing the case for the tribunal of inquiry which included taking statements from all potential witnesses. The whole thing, including the actual sittings which continued over a period of three months, took up six months of my time to the exclusion of everything else and had the result of removing me altogether from the prospect of dealing with assize prosecutions. The accident was caused by the aircraft coming in too low over the sea. One leg of the undercarriage struck the seawall at the end of the runway and broke with the result that on final touchdown on the runway, it collapsed, and the aircraft ended up upside down on the runway with all the escape exits blocked. The passengers were either burnt or asphyxiated. The basic cause of the accident was clearly pilot error, and the tribunal of inquiry so found.  

This was a sad conclusion to the long and until then incident free, flying career of Captain Hoyle, one of BOAC’s most experienced pilots, who was not allowed to leave Singapore until the inquiry was concluded. But there were also a number of side issues. Was it right that a captain and a very inexperienced young second officer should be the only qualified pilots aboard and that they should be on duty for over twenty three continuous hours immediately prior to the accident. No pilot was keen to give evidence on pilot fatigue because the outcome of any recommendations could cause problems for other airlines. I interviewed a number of pilots passing through Singapore before I finally met up with the then Chief Pilot of Qantas, the Australian national airline. He made no bones about his views and eventually agreed to give evidence at the hearing as a direct result of which the tribunal recommended a complement of three pilots, adequate rest facilities and limited duty hours, all of which were later adopted.  

Were the fire services adequate? No, said the tribunal very firmly. But the dominating personality at the hearing was undoubtedly Christopher Shawcross QC, younger brother of Sir Hartley, who was briefed by BOAC. We were all in awe of him as he had an excellent reputation and was the joint author of the current edition of Shawcross and Beaumont on Air Law which is still the definitive work on the subject. What none of us knew was that he was an advanced alcoholic and his instructing solicitor, Philip Kinsey (a delightful and very experienced lawyer) of Donaldson and Burkinshaw, cannot have anticipated that one of his most important duties throughout the hearing was to attend daily at Raffles Hotel and sober Shawcross up sufficiently to enable him to appear with some semblance of decorum when the hearings began at 10am. He was not always entirely successful. 

The inquiry lasted twice as long as it should have done largely because of a series of red herrings which Shawcross sought to introduce to draw attention away from the true cause of the accident, namely, pilot error, the most dramatic of these being the theory of a sudden down draught of air which caused the aircraft to drop suddenly at the sea wall. There was not a shred of evidence for this and Captain Hoyle himself, to his great credit, said it was nonsense, but Shawcross insisted on attempting to perpetuate the myth. Kenneth Staple, then secretary of BOAC, would have terminated Shawcross’s retainer half way through had it not been for the possibility that the very fact of doing so might damage BOAC’s case. As it was, Shawcross, who was due to represent the airline in two other inquiries, never represented them again and disappeared into obscurity. While inflation has now destroyed much of its dramatic effect, Shawcross’s drink bill at Raffles for the 12 weeks he was there was some £850. 

There were two sadly bizarre events incidental to this inquiry. A visit was arranged one weekend at Shawcross’s request for him to see round a rubber estate in Johor, the Malay state just across the causeway to the north of Singapore.  

It was at the height of the emergency and the communists must have got wind of the visit. The party was ambushed. The estate manager who was acting as the tour guide was killed in the attack, and Shawcross was wounded, superficially as it turned out, having received some buckshot in his backside. He became quite hysterical about the whole thing and insisted on being driven straight to Admiralty House where he put himself under the protection of the naval Commander-in-Chief. Admiral Sir Charles Lambe was not himself in the house at the time and the unfortunate Lady Lambe had to turn to and staunch the Shawcross wounds using up a large part of the towel stocks of Admiralty House in the process. It took several days to persuade Shawcross to venture abroad and return to normal and the inquiry had to wait the great man’s presence.  

The other sequel to the accident, which had nothing to do with Shawcross, was the mixing up by the police of the cremated remains of two of the passengers, with the result that a devout Hindu was given a Christian burial in Sweden and a wealthy Swedish shipowner was scattered on the Ganges. How the mix-up came to light I cannot now recall, but legal proceedings were commenced and only settled when it was discovered that a wise police officer, possibly not too sure whose ashes were which, retained a small portion of both with which the correct rituals could ultimately be observed for both victims of the accident. 

The third major field of experience in which I received my basic training in the Chambers was revenue law. No one else would look at it and, as the junior member, once I received a set of papers there was no one to pass it to and so perforce I had to deal with it. There was nowhere else for it to go. As a result of this I became interested in revenue work and during my entire time in Singapore there were very few revenue appeals in which I did not appear on one side or the other. I shall refer to my relations with the Inland Revenue department elsewhere. Most revenue cases are not of general interest, but one in particular remains in my memory which I think is. The taxpayer was, not to put too fine a point on it, the mistress of a wealthy Dutchman. He settled a house on her where, no doubt, dalliance occurred. The revenue sought to tax her on the value of the house. She argued that she could not be taxed on the proceeds of an illegal trade or business. I, for the revenue, argued that the legality or otherwise of the source of income was irrelevant if in fact what was received was income in nature. There had been earlier authority to this effect in England. The assessment was upheld and a similar case, on the facts, was reported in the English courts as recently as 1990 with the identical result.  

History goes on to relate, possibly apocryphally, that having unsuccessfully tried to claim a wear and tear allowance, when the time came for the lady to pay, she offered the only asset she had left in settlement. A very pedestrian Comptroller of Income Tax declined this offer and she was made bankrupt. 

In the next issue, Graham talks about private practice and gives his take on some fellow members of the Bar.

Friends of Graham who would like to get in touch with him may write to him at gshill@bigfoot.com