Obituary: Lord Shawcross

HARTLEY SHAWCROSS was the chief British prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War and Attorney General in the historic post-war Labour government. A lawyer of multiple talents, and chairman later of many commissions, companies and committees, he was offered the highest offices in the judiciary and was once mooted as a leader of the Labour Party. But he consistently rejected the "glittering prizes" proffered him.

He was born in Giessen, Germany, in 1902, the son of John and Hilda Shawcross. His father was a professor at the university there and the author of a metrical translation of Goethe's Faust. His mother was an early and ardent suffragette. It was a committed political household - one of his aunts married a son of John Bright.

Of Northern stock, Shawcross was brought up in Sussex and bicycled seven miles in the early morning to catch the train to take him to Dulwich College, in south-east London. It was there at the age of 16, while still a schoolboy, that he first displayed his political inclinations by being the Labour candidate's agent in the Tory stronghold of Wandsworth Central.

He had originally intended to become a doctor but in 1919, whilst in Geneva, improving his French before attending St Bartholomew's Hospital, he met J.H. Thomas, who, with Herbert Morrison and Ramsay MacDonald, was attending the Second Socialist International. Shawcross offered his services as interpreter and, in return, on a steamer trip around the lake, Thomas gave him the advice that if he wished to enter politics he should first be called to the Bar.

Shawcross cabled his parents with his decision, and went on to obtain the Certificate of Honour for first place (out of an entry of 220) in the Bar finals. He joined Gray's Inn and the Northern Circuit. Without adequate private means, he found his first years at the Bar in London difficult, but in 1927 he was offered two academic posts: the first as an Oxford don and the second at Liverpool University. He chose the latter and was Senior Lecturer in Law there from 1927 to 1934.

The year of his appointment he joined the chambers of Mr Justice Lynskey, of which Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe was head, in Harrington Street, Liverpool, and established the leading junior practice on the Northern Circuit. He obtained an acquittal in his first murder case and local popularity when he appeared successfully for a maidservant. She had named the father of her child as the son of a canon noted for his crusades against immorality. He represented the owners in the inquiry into the Gresford colliery disaster, earning his first substantial fee (Sir Stafford Cripps appeared without a fee for the miners), and he was junior counsel for the Crown in the 1936 Buck Ruxton murder trial.

A man of some elan, with wavy dark hair, Shawcross would appear in chambers on a Saturday morning wearing tweeds, a canary-coloured pullover and (for that time and in the provinces especially) socially daring suede shoes. In tow was a vast St Bernard. In 1939, the same year that he was appointed a Bencher of Gray's Inn, he took silk, some seven years earlier than was usual in those days.

During his studies for his Bar finals he had worked as agent for Lewis Silkin and was a prospective Labour candidate for a Birmingham division but abandoned this when he found himself unable to afford the nursing of the constituency. For a time he was the secretary of the Howard League for Penal Reform. "From 1924 until the end of the war I wasn't interested in politics," he told one interviewer. By the beginning of the war he was being compared favourably with F.E. Smith.

He was appointed Chairman of the Enemy Aliens Tribunal for two years from 1939 until he left for his war service. He had already enrolled on the Emergency Reserve of Officers and had hoped for a commission in the Navy; now he was rejected on the medical grounds of a spinal injury, the result of a climbing accident in his youth. Nevertheless, he did not return to the Bar for the duration of the war. In 1940 he became legal adviser to the vital south-eastern Civil Defence region and two years later was appointed Regional Commissioner for the north-west following the resignation of Lord Geddes, who was going blind.

He was appointed Assistant Chairman of East Sussex Quarter Sessions in 1941 and, the same year, Recorder of Salford, a position he held until 1945. The next year he was appointed Recorder of Kingston-upon-Thames.

Shawcross became the MP for St Helens in the 1945 Labour landslide victory. His brother, Christopher, who won Widnes in the same election, campaigned with Hartley as "the Shawcross Express". (At school they had produced a magazine, the Shawcross Journal, sold to friends and particularly relatives for twopence a copy.) Shawcross was appointed Attorney General, succeeding his friend Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, and knighted.

The same year he was offered the post of Lord Chief Justice in succession to Lord Caldecote. He declined it on two grounds. The first that he was on record that the idea of the Attorney's having a "right" of succession to the position of Lord Chief Justice was wrong. Secondly, he was, by now, far more interested in politics than the law. Shawcross recommended Rayner Goddard for the post. Later in his career Shawcross was offered the positions of Master of the Rolls and of Lord Chancellor. He declined both.