Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Evans, Samuel Thomas
EVANS, Sir SAMUEL THOMAS (1859–1918), politician and judge, was born at Skewen, near Neath, Glamorganshire, in May 1859, the only son of John Evans, grocer, of that place. After attending school in Swansea, and taking the LL.B. degree of London University, he was admitted as a solicitor in 1883, and began to practise in Neath. In 1890 he was elected member of parliament for mid-Glamorganshire, and he sat for that constituency without a break until his promotion to the bench twenty years later. Indeed, throughout his career the support of his Welsh friends never failed him either in politics or in his profession, and Evans himself always remained the most loyal of Welshmen. In 1891 he was called to the bar and soon became one of the busiest juniors of the South Wales circuit. This meant that he was attempting to combine a large practice at the local bar with parliamentary work in London; and in 1901, although he had then been less than ten years at the bar, he applied for appointment as Queen’s counsel in the hope of reducing the strain upon his energies. The application was successful, but the change brought him little relief, as his practice long continued to be dependent on his Welsh connexions. In fact, while he was practising at the bar Evans never succeeded in establishing any large connexion among London solicitors, with the result that, until he obtained office, his parliamentary work always suffered from the necessity of his frequent absences from Westminster. In spite of this serious handicap he had soon made his mark as one of the more promising members of the radical wing of the liberal party. Both in politics and in private life he was by temperament impetuous and combative, and not always conciliatory to those with whom he disagreed. He was a ready and humorous debater, with a rapid delivery, and a keen fighter for his party, whether in power or in opposition. He took a particularly active part as a critic of Mr. Balfour’s Education Bill of 1902, as a supporter of the Licensing Bill of 1908, and as an opponent of the movement for women’s suffrage. It seemed likely that he was destined for political rather than forensic success. He was a nonconformist, and a bitter and often unfair critic of the Church of England. He was recorder of Swansea from 1906 to 1908; became a bencher of the Middle Temple in 1908; and in the same year was appointed solicitor-general in the ministry of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and retained that office in the ministry of Mr. Asquith.
In 1910 Evans definitely, but most reluctantly, abandoned his political ambitions by accepting the appointment of president of the probate, divorce, and admiralty division of the High Court in succession to Sir John Bigham. He had few apparent qualifications for his new post. The work of the division, especially on its admiralty side, is highly specialized, and Evans’s work had lain largely in workmen’s compensation and trade union cases. His appointment was, therefore, not popular at the bar, and he himself at first did little to remove the prejudice; for he allowed his indifference to the traditions of the court to be too apparent, and he showed a certain brusqueness and some faults of judicial manner which gave unnecessary offence. But he threw himself into the work of the court with the utmost keenness, even spending his vacations at sea for the purpose of studying the technique of admiralty work. His decision in 1911 of the dispute arising out of the collision in Cowes Roads between the liner Olympic and H.M.S. Hawke already showed that capacity of mastering technical details and of patiently reconstructing the story of an event out of a tangled mass of conflicting evidence which makes some of his later judgments so remarkable. He had already proved himself a competent, if not a particularly distinguished, judge, when the outbreak of the European War in 1914 brought him a great and unexpected opportunity.
Evans’s reputation as a judge of the first rank will always rest on the series of judgments in prize which he delivered during the War. For the first time in England since the Crimean War a prize court began to sit, under his presidency, on 4 September 1914. The law which it found itself called on to administer consisted, with the exception of a few decisions of the period of the Crimean War, almost entirely of the principles which Lord Stowell [q.v.] had laid down to meet the relatively simple conditions of international commerce and maritime warfare during the Napoleonic wars. It was not possible, nor would it have been just to the naval belligerents, to apply those principles without at the same time adapting them to the vastly more complicated conditions of modern warfare. Yet it was certain that the process of adaptation must adversely affect the interests of neutral traders; and it was highly probable that diplomatic controversies would ensue. Hence it was important that the judge presiding over the prize court should be bold enough to develop the law to meet the new conditions, while preserving an even balance between the interests of his own country and those of neutrals, and at the same time should be able to express the reasons for his decisions in a form which, if it did not convince a disappointed litigant, would at least demonstrate to the world the determination of the English courts to render impartial justice.
Evans’s task was, therefore, difficult and delicate, and even his friends had hardly foreseen that he possessed just that combination of qualities—courage, industry, acuteness, tact—which was needed for success in it. A more timid and conventional judge might have been content to shelter himself under the great prestige of Stowell; but Evans wisely relied on the principle that in international law ‘there is room for the extension of old doctrines or the development of new principles, where there is, or is even likely to be, a general acceptance of such by civilized nations. Precedents handed down from earlier days should be treated as guides to lead and not as shackles to bind. But the guides must not be lightly deserted’ (case of the Odessa). ‘He brought to the work no special acquaintance with the laws of naval warfare; yet in a remarkably short time he was delivering judgments which were not only models of lucid and cogent reasoning, but notable for the admirable way in which they marshalled the results of exhaustive research into the relevant authorities. No cases illustrate this combination of qualities better than (i) the case of the Kim, in which Evans applied, for the first time in an English court, and basing himself mainly on the precedents of the American Civil War, the doctrine of ‘continuous voyage’ to the carriage of contraband goods; he held that although the immediate and ostensible destination of such goods may be neutral, they will none the less be liable to condemnation if they have an ultimate destination to the enemy; and (ii) that of the Leonora, in which he held that the so-called ‘reprisals’ Order in Council of 16 February 1917 was not inconsistent with established principles of international law. These two cases raised fundamental questions affecting the legality of almost the whole of the naval policy of the allies, and illustrate the magnitude of the political issues which were at stake in the cases that came before Evans for decision. Yet his judgment in the Kim case has already met with general acceptance; and, if his decision in the Leonora case is still sometimes controverted, it will not be easy to refute the arguments by which he demonstrated the inevitable legality of reprisals in naval warfare within such limits as his judgment laid down.
Other notable decisions of Evans were those given in the cases of the Möwe, in which he greatly relaxed the traditional rule denying to an enemy subject the right to appear and argue his claim before the court; of the Roumanian, in which he had occasion to consider the extent of the jurisdiction of a court of prize; of the Hamborn, in which he held that the national character of a ship for prize purposes is not necessarily that of the flag which she is entitled to fly, nor that of the country in which the owning company is incorporated, but rather that of the country from which the effective control over the ship’s movements is exercised; and of the Zamora, in which he considered the obligation of an English prize court to follow an Order in Council. The last is one of the few cases in which his judgment was reversed on appeal; but it is probable that his opinion, which was that the court cannot declare an order of the king in council to be repugnant to international law and therefore not binding-on itself, is, historically at least, better founded than the contrary opinion adopted by the Privy Council.
The quality of a judge’s work is shown quite as much by his skill in dealing with the intricacies of facts, as by the logical development of principles of law and their application to new conditions. Some few of Evans’s recorded judgments, notably that in the Kim case, show how he could reduce to orderly sequence a confused mass of facts; but it was even more in the ordinary unreported business of the court that he was continually called upon to unravel the most complicated commercial transactions, and often, too, to expose the highly ingenious subterfuges which were employed in order to deceive the court. He has been charged with being somewhat too ready to condemn, and he was certainly acute to detect and stern in dealing with a fraud attempted on the court; on the other hand if such a criticism is tested by inquiring whether his severity led him on any single occasion to condemn an innocent ship or cargo, it will easily be seen to be unfounded. Those who found in Evans a stalwart obstacle to the carrying on of an illicit but lucrative trade naturally resented his vigilance; but the honest trader had no grievance against him.
Evans was created G.C.B. in 1916, and he was offered, but for private reasons declined, a peerage. He was twice married: first, in 1887 to Rachel (died 1889), daughter of William Thomas, of Skewen, Glamorganshire, by whom he had a son; secondly, in 1905 to Blanche, daughter of Charles Rule, of Cincinnati, U.S.A., by whom he had a daughter. Evans died 13 September 1918.
There is a portrait of Evans in the hall of the Middle Temple, and a bust, by Sir G. Frampton, R.A., in the Royal Courts of Justice.
[The Times, 14 September and 19 October 1918; Earl of Birkenhead, Points of View, vol. ii, c. 13, 1922; private information. Evans's judgments in prize are reported in the ordinary series of Law Reports, and are, also collected in British and Colonial Prize Cases and in Lloyds's Prize Cases.]