usual and in substance extremely effective education was not calculated to promote success, and in 1845 he took a fourth class in literae humaniores—a long-remembered disappointment.
On coming down from Oxford Giffard assisted his father for some years in the production of the Standard newspaper, of which Lees Giffard was editor for the first twenty-five years of its existence. Father and son were excellent friends, and were both, throughout their lives, the most uncompromising of tories upon every issue of party politics. As soon as he felt that he could afford it, Giffard was called to the bar at the Inner Temple (1850), of which he became a bencher in due course (1865). He shared the chambers in Chancery Lane of his eldest brother, John, and joined the Western circuit; but a year later (1851), by the advice of one of his father’s friends, he migrated to the South Wales circuit, where he at once acquired a steady practice. About the same time he joined (Sir) Harry Bodkin Poland in chambers at 7 King’s Bench Walk. They afterwards moved to 5 Paper Buildings, where Poland remained as long as he continued to practise. From this time Giffard obtained a steady and increasing practice at the Old Bailey and at the Middlesex sessions at Clerkenwell. He was also one of the founders of the Hardwicke Debating Society.
In 1859 (Sir) William Henry Bodkin was appointed assistant judge of the Middlesex sessions, and Giffard succeeded him as junior prosecuting counsel at the Central Criminal Court. In this capacity he appeared for the Crown in all important prosecutions at police courts, and in many of the consequent trials, until 1865, when he took silk, being one of the last barristers to receive that honour from Lord Westbury. Two years later he distinguished himself greatly as leading counsel for Governor Edward John Eyre [q.v.], when the latter was prosecuted for murder before the magistrates at Market Drayton and again at Bow Street in 1868 for alleged offences against the Colonial Governors Act. From the time of his taking silk, Giffard’s practice at nisi prius increased largely. He was second counsel with Serjeant William Ballantine for the Tichborne claimant, Arthur Orton [q.v.], in the ejectment case before Chief Justice Sir William Bovill, which lasted 102 days (1871–1872). He obtained a very large general practice and a well-deserved reputation as pre-eminent in any case which required hard fighting and inextinguishable courage. His extraordinary memory enabled him to remember everything in a brief that he had once read, and he had a singular ability of discerning at once what were the essential points of a case, and of concentrating resolutely upon them.
At the general elections of 1868 and 1874 Giffard stood as a conservative candidate for Cardiff, and was defeated. In November 1875, when Sir John Holker succeeded Sir John Burgess Karslake as attorney-general, Mr. Disraeli appointed Giffard solicitor-general, and he was knighted in the usual course. He stood unsuccessfully for Horsham in the following year, but in February 1877 he was elected member for Launceston and retained the seat at the general election of 1880. His work as solicitor-general was sound but not especially conspicuous, Holker also being a common law barrister and an attorney-general of peculiar efficiency and eminence. As solicitor-general Giffard led for the Crown in the Franconia case (R. v. Keyn, 1876), wherein the master of a German ship was convicted of the manslaughter by negligence of persons drowned in a collision between his vessel and an emigrant ship, the Strathclyde. The conviction was quashed by the Court for Crown Cases Reserved, which held by a majority that the English court had no jurisdiction over a crime committed by a foreigner on board a foreign ship on the high seas. This decision was overruled by the Territorial Waters Jurisdiction Act of 1878, which not merely enacted that the jurisdiction covered the sea to a distance of one marine league from the coast, but declared, in a preamble suggested by Giffard, that the law had always been to that effect.
After the defeat of the conservatives in 1880, Giffard became more prominent in the House of Commons as a pugnacious and useful member of the opposition. When Charles Bradlaugh [q.v.] began his controversy with the House of Commons, Giffard moved (22 June 1880) the first amendment to the effect that Bradlaugh should neither affirm nor take the oath, and carried it against the government; he took an active part both in parliament and in the law courts in the prolonged struggle which followed. He also had the better of an animated controversy with Mr. Chamberlain concerning the alleged responsibility of the political parties for rioting at a political meeting at Aston, near Birmingham. Throughout the duration of this parliament his practice at the bar continued to increase.
210
