Lord Jauncey of Tullichettle
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...C-new_21072007
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 21/07/2007
The Lord Jauncey of Tullichettle, who died on Wednesday aged 82, was a highly regarded Lord of Appeal in Ordinary from 1988 until 1996, having earlier served as a Scottish advocate and Court of Session judge; his varied cases ranged from the extraordinary Duchess of Argyll divorce case to the widely reported appeal of Westminster Abbey's dismissed organist Martin Neary.
Charles Eliot Jauncey was born in Edinburgh on May 8 1925. His father was a naval captain who won a DSO after being brought out of retirement to command destroyers during the Second World War; his mother was the daughter of Admiral Sir Charles Dundas.
Young Charles grew up in Stirlingshire and was sent to Radley. On leaving school in 1943 he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, but was invalided out after contracting polio while serving in Ceylon; he walked with a slight limp for the rest of his life.
After reading Law at Christ Church, Oxford, and at Glasgow University, he was admitted in 1949 to the Faculty of Advocates, where he quickly established a reputation as an immensely diligent practitioner, while his family background made him particularly at home with maritime cases; in 1954 he was appointed Standing Junior Counsel to the Admiralty.
Jauncey also took a keen interest in genealogy, and as Kintyre Pursuivant of Arms for 16 years from 1955 he not only played a part in the great ceremonial occasions in Scotland, but appeared as advocate in numerous peerage cases before the Lord Lyon.
In the most notable of these he represented Viscountess Monckton of Brenchley's suit for the right to bear the arms and insignia of the Lordship of Ruthven, which would permit her a seat in the Lords.
Her claim was disputed because the patent had been lost, but Jauncey not only proved a model of lucidity, given neither to mutterings nor long pauses, but also came up with the idea of calling Sir Iain Moncrieffe of that Ilk, whose evidence proved decisive.
Lengthy divorce cases were also well-suited to Jauncey's patient temperament, and between 1959 and 1963 he acted as junior counsel in one of the longest and most sensational of them all, when the 11th Duke of Argyll, Chief of the Clan Campbell and Hereditary Master of the Royal Household in Scotland, sued his wife for divorce on the grounds of adultery.
The court case lasted 11 days, with evidence which included the theft of the Duchess's racy diary, in which she had nonchalantly listed the accoutrements of her various lovers, and a pair of photographs, showing the Duchess, naked but for three strings of pearls, engaged in a sexual act with an unidentified figure who passed into folklore as "the Headless Man".
The 50,000-word judgment, in which the Duke was granted a decree, was one of the longest in the Edinburgh court's history, and described the Duchess as "completely promiscuous" and "wholly immoral".
After serving as Sheriff Principal of Fife and Kinross from 1971 to 1974 and as Judge of the Courts of Appeal of Jersey and Guernsey from 1972, Jauncey became a Senator of the College of Justice in 1979.
He was destined to hear two of the longest cases in Scots legal history. One, which ran for 203 days, was the successful challenge by a toothless grandmother to Strathclyde Regional Council's right to add fluoride to the water supply. Santa Fe v Heerama, at 191 days, involved an alleged infringement of a patent in the construction of North Sea oil rigs.
When Lord Mackay of Clashfern became the first Scottish lawyer to serve as Lord Chancellor, Jauncey was seen as the ideal man to replace him as the Scottish representative among the law lords in the Upper House. On his arrival there he was sponsored by Lord Peyton, a fellow descendant of Pitt the Elder, and by his old adversary at the Scottish Bar, Lord Keith of Kinkel.
Quiet and thoughtful by nature, as well as very able, Jauncey quickly gained the trust of his colleagues and appeared in a variety of high-profile cases, including the long-running Spycatcher saga.
In 1992 he gave the main judgment in a case involving a father seeking custody of his four-year-old illegitimate daughter, dismissing his appeal against a ruling by the Court of Session that it was not in his daughter's best interests to be removed from the care of her mother.
Jauncey said it was absurd to suggest that any recognition of the normal mother's natural ability to look after a very young child amounted to sexual discrimination, adding: "Nature has endowed men and women with very different attributes and it so happens that mothers are generally better fitted than fathers to provide for the needs of very young children.
"This is no more discriminatory than the fact that only women can give birth."
The next year, in R v Brown, he ruled, in the majority, against allowing the intentional infliction of bodily harm during homosexual sado-masochistic activities.
When the House of Lords upheld, in 1995, the presumption that a child between 10 and 14 could not be found guilty of a criminal offence unless it could be shown that he was doing serious wrong, Jauncey declared: "It is almost an affront to common sense to presume that a boy of 12 or 13 who steals a high-powered motor car, damages other cars while driving it, knocks down a uniformed police officer and then runs away when stopped is unaware of doing wrong."
In 1998, two years after his retirement as a Law Lord, Jauncey was appointed by the Lord Chancellor to conduct the hearing of Dr Martin Neary, the Westminster Abbey organist who had been decorated by the Queen for his music at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. After his dismissal, Neary had been forced to appeal directly to the Queen.
Neary and his wife, Penny, the Abbey's concerts secretary, had been sacked by the Very Reverend Wesley Carr, Dean of Westminster, backed by the Chapter, for financial misconduct, after it emerged that they had set up a private business to handle concert fees without telling anybody at the Abbey what they were doing.
Jauncey's judgment upheld the Dean and Chapter's decisions - finding that the couple's conduct had "fatally undermined the relationship of trust which should have subsisted between them and the Abbey" - although he cleared the couple of any dishonest practice.
He also strongly criticised aspects of the Abbey's handling of the affair. Its attempts to hold a disciplinary hearing within days of the couple's suspension, and without having provided a detailed statement of the case against them, "must score gamma minus on the scale of natural justice", he said.
In 2002, Jauncey chaired a specially constituted House of Lords Committee which cleared the two pilots found guilty of "gross negligence" by the Ministry of Defence after the 1994 Mull of Kintyre Chinook helicopter crash.
The Mk 2 helicopter had been carrying 25 senior intelligence and security officers from Northern Ireland to a conference at Fort Campbell in north-east Scotland. Twenty-nine people died. An RAF board of inquiry, an air accident investigation board inquiry and a Scottish fatal accident inquiry all ruled that they could not determine what had led to the crash.
But two air marshals, reviewing the RAF board of inquiry, rejected its failure to accord blame and amended it to find the captain, Flight Lieutenant Jonathan Tapper, and his co-pilot, Flight Lieutenant Richard Cook, both of whom were experienced members of the RAF's special forces flight, guilty of "negligence in the gross degree".
The House of Lords committee, chaired by Jauncey, dismissed the air marshals' conclusions.
Jauncey took an active part in proceedings of the Upper House, taking a particular interest in the Committee for Privileges. He was a member of the Queen's Bodyguard for Scotland from 1951 and of the Historic Buildings Council for Scotland from 1971 to 1992.
Away from the law Jauncey was a very keen countryman, and was happiest fishing the rivers of Perthshire where he lived.
He married first, in 1948, Jean Cunninghame Graham; they had two sons and a daughter. The marriage was dissolved in 1969 and he married secondly, in 1973, Elizabeth Ballingal. That marriage was also disolved and he married thirdly, in 1977, Camilla Cathcart, with whom he had a daughter.