Sir Henry Brooke
Computer-savvy Court of Appeal judge who after retirement became an enthusiastic blogger
SIR HENRY BROOKE, who has died aged 81, was a Court of Appeal judge whose many lasting contributions to English law continued beyond retirement when he became an enthusiastic blogger and tweeter, dedicated to promoting access to justice for all.
Approachable, cheerful and humane, Brooke was highly respected throughout his career for his rigid self-discipline and lifelong belief in the importance of doing the right thing.
In 1983-85 he was counsel to the Sizewell “B” Nuclear Reactor public inquiry, which examined the proposal by the Central Electricity Generating Board to construct a nuclear power station at Sizewell, Suffolk. In order to understand the 16 million words of evidence – a record at the time – Brooke taught himself nuclear physics.
In September 2000 he sat as a Court of Appeal judge in one of the most complex and influential cases of recent legal history involving the separation of two newborn conjoined twins who shared an aorta. One twin was far weaker than the other and would inevitably die as soon as they were separated. But if not separated, neither twin would be able to survive the first year of life.
The case raised several legal, ethical and religious dilemmas; Brooke and his two fellow judges had to decide in a matter of days whether it was lawful to perform surgery with the purpose of saving one sister’s life at the cost of the other, going against the wishes of the parents, a Maltese couple who were devout Catholics and had refused to give consent to surgery, preferring to leave it “for God’s will to decide”. In 2015 Brooke revealed in his blog, Legal Cheek, that the case was one of the most difficult problems he had ever seen.
“It was,” he wrote, “emotionally draining to have to reach a decision which might go contrary to the clear wishes of the children’s parents.” The hearing lasted nine days, and the three judges eventually decided that the surgery could go ahead. Brooke deemed that the separation was lawful under the doctrine of necessity. The judgment, he later said, was “an unfinished symphony” but “we did our best, from a standing start, in the time available to us”. He also noted that in 2014 the surviving twin was doing well and wanted to become a doctor.
An early advocate of information technology at a time when the Bar seemed woefully uninterested in such matters, Brooke was appointed chairman of the Bar’s first committee on IT in 1985, when all chambers were contacted asking if they wanted help with its practical application. Fifty per cent did not reply and half of those who did said they did not see how IT could help them. The subsequent adoption of more sophisticated computer technology by barristers (ahead of solicitors) was due in no small measure to Brooke’s devotion to the cause.
On the Bench, Brooke, who was described by Legal Technology News as “one of the most computer literate judges … of any court on either side of the Atlantic today”, worked with the Lord Chancellor’s Department (later the Department of Constitutional Affairs) on the introduction of IT schemes into the court system. In 2001 he was appointed by Lord Woolf as the judge in charge of modernisation of the courts, although he would later describe his battles for funding in this area as “snakes and ladders”.
In late retirement Brooke started his blog in which he wrote extensively on subjects ranging from stories of injustice, the need for more funding for legal aid, his memories of Lord Denning and his recent reflections on the case of the severely ill baby, Charlie Gard, whose parents fought a legal battle with Great Ormond Street Hospital.
He also took to Twitter, acquiring almost 10,000 followers, many of them lawyers and students of the law, to whom, shortly before his death, he tweeted the news that he was having cardiac surgery.
He was born in London on July 19 1936, one of two sons and two daughters of the Conservative MP Henry Brooke, later Baron Brooke of Cumnor, and Barbara Brooke, who was also separately created Baroness Brooke of Ystradfellte.
His father was the younger son of the artist and writer Leonard Leslie Brooke and his wife Sybil Diana Brooke. His mother was the youngest of five children of a Welsh minister, the Reverend Alfred Augustus Mathews. Henry’s older brother, Peter Brooke, Baron Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, would also become a Conservative MP and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland under Margaret Thatcher and John Major.
After war broke out young Henry spent some time in Wales with his maternal grandparents, whose hard-working and public-spirited attitude to life he always admired, before the family moved away from wartime London to Bracknell, Berkshire.
Educated at Marlborough College, he then did his National Service in the Royal Engineers (1955-57) before going up to read Greats at Balliol College, Oxford, from where he graduated in 1961 with a double First.
He was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple in 1963, took Silk in 1981, and was a Recorder from 1983 to 1988. In 1985 he was one of the DTI inspectors into the takeover of Harrods by the Al Fayed brothers.
Brooke was appointed a High Court Judge assigned to the Queen’s Bench Division in 1988, and received a knighthood the same year. He was chairman of the Law Commission from 1993 to 1995, and was promoted to become a Lord Justice of Appeal in 1996. He was Vice-president of the Court of Appeal’s Civil Division from 2003 to 2006.
In 1991 Brooke persuaded Sir Igor Judge (later Lord Judge), who then chaired the Criminal Committee of the Judicial Studies Board, of the need to train judges in race awareness. This led to his appointment as the first chairman of the Ethnic Minorities Advisory Committee of the board. Brooke was also determined that the public should have free access to judgments as soon as they were approved by the court. In 1999 he chaired a meeting which led to the formation of the multi-disciplinary “Free the Law” movement and to his chairmanship of BAILII (the British and Irish Legal Information Institute).
He married Bridget (known as Biddy) Kalaugher in 1966. It was a very happy union. “For there is nothing better in this world,” wrote Brooke in 2016, quoting Homer’s Odyssey, on the occasion of their golden wedding anniversary, “than that a man and his wife should be of one mind in a house.”
She survives him with three sons and a daughter.
Sir Henry Brooke, born July 19 1936, died January 30 2018