Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Williams, Roland Bowdler Vaughan
WILLIAMS, Sir ROLAND BOWDLER VAUGHAN (1838–1916), judge, who on his marriage assumed the name of Lomax in place of Bowdler, was born in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, 31 December 1838, being the fifth son of Sir Edward Vaughan Williams [q.v.] (justice of the court of common pleas from 1846 to 1865) by his wife, Jane Margaret Bagot, and the grandson of Serjeant John Williams [q.v.], author of the well-known commentary on Saunders's Reports. This Welsh family thus furnishes a remarkable illustration of the inheritance of legal genius. In numbers its record has been equalled and surpassed by other legal families; but in sustaining through three successive generations the highest level of erudition and the ability to apply it in practice, it can claim a pre-eminent position in the annals of English law.
Vaughan Williams was educated at Westminster School, whence he was elected to a junior studentship at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1856. He graduated with second-class honours in the school of jurisprudence and modern history in 1860. He then proceeded to read in chambers with Mr. Dodgson, the special pleader, and was called to the bar by Lincoln's Inn in 1864, joining the South Eastern circuit. In 1870 he published The Law and Practice of Bankruptcy, a work which reached its thirteenth edition in 1925 and is still the standard authority on the subject. He eventually obtained a large common law practice; but his reputation at the bar was one of learning rather than of advocacy, and it was not until 1889, when he was over fifty, that he became a Queen's counsel. He practised within the bar for less than a year; for in 1890, on the death of Sir Henry Manisty, Lord Halsbury, for whom, when solicitor-general, Vaughan Williams had acted as ‘devil’, appointed him to be a judge of the Queen's bench division. In 1891 the bankruptcy jurisdiction of the High Court was assigned to him; and during the next seven years he rendered conspicuous service in applying from the bench his wide experience to the problems of bankruptcy and liquidation, subjects in which the law was then still in a stage of development. Amongst the few causes célèbres that came before him was that of the New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Agency, of which Anthony John Mundella [q.v.], president of the Board of Trade, was a director. The case was one with political complications of peculiar difficulty, and Vaughan Williams conducted it with rigid independence and impartiality (1894).
In 1897, upon the resignation of Lord Justice Lopes (Baron Ludlow), Vaughan Williams was promoted to be a lord justice of appeal, with the dignity of a privy councillor, and he sat as a member of the Court of Appeal for no less than seventeen years. During this long period of service he was naturally called upon to deal with every kind of civil litigation; and, apart from the common law and bankruptcy, upon which he was clearly a recognized authority, he showed a thorough grasp of such subjects as local government and revenue law; while for several years it fell to his lot to preside over and to give the leading judgment in the equity side of the court. The work of an appellate court is not of a nature that attracts the notice of the public; and it would be too long a task to attempt to enumerate all the decisions of importance and interest to the profession in which he took part.
Vaughan Williams's judgments have met with the criticism that his mind was too subtle, too prone to be side-tracked by logical niceties and to allow the main issue to be obscured by a minor point. But he was never guilty of the much commoner judicial fault of failing to get to the bottom of a difficult case. His investigation of every problem was attentive and essentially thorough; and this fact, together with his old-world courtesy to counsel, helped to make him one of the most popular judges of his time. By ancestry and by training he was imbued with the best traditions of the bench; and, without ever lapsing into pedantry, he maintained throughout his long career the high standard of accuracy and refinement of the old common law judges at a time when there was some danger of the relaxation of their old and well-tried principles at the hands of a generation of lawyers less thorough in their methods. Even in his personal appearance, Vaughan Williams, on the bench, looked a strikingly picturesque survival from a bygone age.
Almost the only occasion upon which Vaughan Williams undertook external work was in connexion with the royal commission on the disestablishment of the Welsh Church, of which he was appointed chairman in 1906. This was a difficult rôle in view of the contentious nature of the subject under inquiry, but he handled the commission effectively and with a complete freedom from political bias; and the quick solution of the difficulties attending Welsh disestablishment and disendowment may largely be attributed to him. He retired from the bench in 1914, and died 8 December 1916 at High Ashes Farm, Abinger, near Dorking, where he had spent his leisure time in farming and other country pursuits during the whole of his professional career.
Vaughan Williams married in 1865 Laura Susanna, daughter of Edmund Lomax, of Netley, Shere, Surrey, and their mutual devotion was proverbial in legal circles of that generation. His eldest son, Roland Edmund Lomax, became King's counsel in 1913, and was appointed recorder of Carmarthen in 1919 and of Swansea in 1923; he was also British representative on the Anglo-German Mixed Arbitral Tribunal under the Treaty of Versailles (1920). Two other sons died in childhood.
A portrait of Vaughan Williams by Robert Brough is in the possession of his elder daughter, Mrs. W. T. Barkworth.
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