Arthur Hobhouse, 1st Baron Hobhouse

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This article is about the English judge. For the English politician, see Arthur Hobhouse.

Sir Arthur Hobhouse at 61

Arthur Hobhouse, 1st Baron Hobhouse,

CIE, PC, KC
(10 November 1819 – 6 December 1904) was an English lawyer and judge.

Background and education

Arthur Hobhouse at 35

Born at

M.A. in 1844. Entering at Lincoln's Inn on 22 April 1841, he was called to the bar on 6 May 1845, and soon acquired a large chancery and conveyancing practice.[1]

Early legal career

In 1862 he became a

charity commissioner. Hobhouse threw himself into the work with energy. He was not only active in administration but advocated a reform of the law governing charitable endowments. The Endowed Schools Act, 1869, was a first step in that direction, and under that act Lord Lyttelton, Hobhouse, and Canon H. G. Robinson were appointed commissioners with large powers of reorganising endowed schools. Much was accomplished in regard to endowed schools, but the efforts of Hobhouse and his fellow commissioners received a check in 1871, when the House of Lords rejected their scheme for remodelling the Emanuel Hospital, Westminster. There followed a controversy which was distasteful to Hobhouse, and with little regret he retired in 1872 in order to succeed Sir James Fitzjames Stephen as law member of the council of the Governor-General of India. Hobhouse had meanwhile served on the royal commission on the operation of the Land Transfer Act in 1869.[1]

India

Hobhouse, "on his departure for India received strong hints that it would be desirable for him to slacken the pace of the legislative machine", which had been quickened by the consolidating and codifying activities of Fitzjames Stephen and of Stephen's immediate predecessor,

Whitley Stokes, secretary in the legislative department, was mainly responsible for the measures passed during Hobhouse's term of office, with the important exception of the Specific Relief Act, 1877, in which Hobhouse as an equity lawyer took an especial interest, and a revision of the law relating to the transfer of property, which became a statute after he left India. Of strong liberal sentiment, Hobhouse had small sympathy with the general policy of the government of India during the opening of Lord Lytton's viceroyalty. The attitude to Afghanistan was especially repugnant. He served from 1875 to 1877 as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta. On the conclusion of his term of office in 1877 he was made a K.C.S.I.
, and returning to England soon engaged in party politics as a thoroughgoing opponent of the Afghan policy of the conservative government.

Parliamentary candidate

In 1880 he and

John Morley unsuccessfully contested Westminster in the liberal interest against Sir Charles Russell, and W. H. Smith. Hobhouse was at the bottom of the poll.[1]

Judicial Committee of the Privy Council

In 1878 Hobhouse was made arbitrator under the

Grahamstown, Hobhouse set forth fully the history of the relationship of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa with the Church of England, and decided that the South African Church is independent of it. In the consolidated appeals in 1887 by several Canadian banks (12 Appeal Cases, 575) against the decisions of the Court of Queen's Bench for Quebec, which involved the respective limits of the power of the dominion and provincial legislatures to regulate banks, Hobhouse's judgment upheld the right of the province to tax banks and insurance companies constituted by Act of the dominion legislature. In a case from India in 1899 (26 Indian Appeals, Law Reports 113) which necessitated the review of a number of conflicting decisions of the Indian courts, Hobhouse settled a long disputed point in Hindu law and decided, contrary to much tradition, that when an individual person was adopted as an only son, the also gave the judgment of the Privy Council in Grey v Manitoba Railway Co [1897] UKPC 1897_8
, [1897] AC 254.

House of Lords

Lord Hobhouse at 83.

In 1885 Hobhouse accepted a

Act of Parliament in regard to members of the Judicial Committee; but Hobhouse did not take up the work of a judge in the House of Lords. He only sat there to try three cases, in two of which, Russell v. Countess of Russell (1897 Appeal Cases 395) and the Kempton Park case (1899 Appeal Cases 143), he was in a dissenting minority. As a judge Hobhouse, who was always careful and painstaking, invariably stated the various arguments fully and fairly, but he was tenacious of his deliberately formed opinion.[1]

London government

While engaged on the Judicial Committee, Hobhouse devoted much energy to local government of London. From 1877 to 1899 he was a vestryman of St George's, Hanover Square. In 1880 he assisted to form and long worked for the London Municipal Reform League, which aimed at securing a single government for the metropolis. From 1882 to 1884 he was a member of the London School Board. Upon the creation of the London County Council in 1888 Hobhouse was one of the first aldermen.[1]

Personal life

Lord Hobhouse married, on 10 August 1848, the campaigner Mary Ferrer (died 1905), daughter of Thomas Farrer, solicitor, and sister of Thomas Farrer, 1st Baron Farrer, Sir William Farrer (died 1911), and Cecilia Frances (died 1910), wife of Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh. Advancing years and increasing deafness led him to retire from the Judicial Committee in 1901. He died at his London residence, 15 Bruton Street, Mayfair, on 6 December 1904, and was cremated at Golders Green. He left no issue, and the peerage became extinct on his death.[1]

He acted as guardian to his nephew Henry Hobhouse after the death of Henry's father in 1862.[3] Henry's grandson John Hobhouse, Baron Hobhouse of Woodborough was a judge and law lord.[4]

Appreciation and publications

To the last an advanced liberal and constructive legal reformer, Hobhouse, all of whose judicial work was done gratuitously, urged many legal changes, which won adoption very slowly. Much influence is assignable to an address by him before the

Social Science Congress at Birmingham in 1868 on the law relating to the property of married women (1869; new edition 1870), and to The Dead Hand (1880), a collection of addresses on endowments and settlements of property (reprinted from the Transactions of the Social Science Association).[1]

Arms

Coat of arms of Arthur Hobhouse, 1st Baron Hobhouse
Crest
Out of a mural crown per pale Azure and Gules an estoile Or.
Escutcheon
Per pale Azure and Gules three crescents Argent issuant therefrom as many estoiles irradiated Or.
Supporters
Two horses Sable each charged on the shoulder with an estoile Or.
Motto
Spero Meliora[5]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g  Bedwell, C. E. A. (1912). "Hobhouse, Arthur, first Baron Hobhouse of Hadspen". In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography (2nd supplement). Vol. 2. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 272–273. Retrieved 27 March 2011.
  2. ^ "No. 25486". The London Gazette. 3 July 1885. p. 3060.
  3. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/33904. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  4. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/33905. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  5. ^ Burke's Peerage. 704.

Notes

External links

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "Hobhouse, Arthur Hobhouse, 1st Baron".
Peerage of the United Kingdom
New creation Baron Hobhouse
1885–1904 		Extinct
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