Professor Stephen Cretney
‘Father’ of family law who questioned the Prince of Wales’s civil wedding to Camilla Parker Bowles
PROFESSOR STEPHEN CRETNEY, who has died aged 83, has been described as the “father” of modern English family law, a field that when he began his career as a solicitor was barely acknowledged as worthy of study.
Cretney’s textbook Principles of Family Law, first published in 1974 after his move into the academic sphere, and now in its 8th edition, put family law firmly on the undergraduate curriculum (it is now one of the most popular courses for Law students), though many regarded his greatest achievement as his magisterial Family Law in the Twentieth Century: A History (2005).
It was described by a leading family law judge as “a staggering and triumphant achievement”, while for The Times Literary Supplement it was “the book of the century”. It was runner-up in the British Academy Book Prize in 2004, pipped at the post by Diarmaid Macculloch’s Cranmer.
Cretney loved the complexity of human lives, though never in a prurient or judgmental way, and his writing was enlivened by footnotes highlighting the more amusing and idiosyncratic details of cases discussed in the text. His somewhat deadpan delivery made the dry witticisms he slipped into his lectures all the funnier, and he would reward those in his audience who “got” the joke with a twinkle in his eye and a cheeky grin.
A shy, modest man, Cretney none the less caught the attention of the media in the run-up to the marriage of the Prince of Wales to Camilla Parker Bowles, when he gave an interview to Panorama throwing doubt on whether the couple could marry in a civil ceremony, as the Royal family was specifically excluded from laws which instituted civil marriages in England, a ban which had been confirmed over the years by the law officers.
His claims were, however, dismissed by Clarence House on the advice of four unnamed legal experts, and by the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, who issued a statement saying that the implementation of the Human Rights Act meant that the relevant statute could be interpreted more generously.
But Cretney stuck to his guns, and in a lecture to the Family Law section of the Society of Legal Scholars in September 2006, more than a year after the marriage, he warned that it could be open to legal challenge by people trying to prevent the Duchess of Cornwall becoming Queen or inheriting from the Royal Family because of the Lord Chancellor’s blundering. He had not, Cretney said, “found anybody who [would] categorically say” that the Government’s advice was correct.
Cretney was personally somewhat scarred by this episode, observing in a private note that “unhappily the fact that one points out difficulties which any competent legal adviser should have had in mind seems to be taken as evidence that one is opposed to the institution of the monarchy in general and to the marriage of the Prince of Wales in particular: in fact, in my case the contrary is true.”
The younger of two brothers, Stephen Michael Cretney was born on February 25 1936 in Whitney, Oxfordshire, and brought up in Cheadle Hulme, Manchester. His father Fred had left school at 13 and risen to become managing director of the mail order business Oxendales; his mother was named Winifred.
From Cheadle Hulme School, and after National Service with the Cheshire Regiment and the Intelligence Corps, Cretney took up a scholarship to read Law at Magdalen College, Oxford. After graduation he became a solicitor, rising to the status of partner in the City firm Macfarlanes in 1962.
In 1965, however, his career took a dramatic turn when he accepted an appointment as a lecturer in the Kenya School of Law in Nairobi. Returning to England two years later, he was briefly a lecturer at Southampton University before returning to Oxford as Fellow and Tutor at Exeter College, where he remained until 1978, by which time he was established him as one of the country’s leading family lawyers.
In 1978 he took up the role of Law Commissioner, with responsibility for the commission’s programme on the reform of family law, a field in which he preferred to exercise caution, once observing that “almost every piece of ‘family’ legislation … in the past century has actually worked out in a way radically different from the policy presented to the legislature as justifying the legislation in question, and has often had results quite different from those which the initiators intended.”
In 1983 he accepted a chair at the University of Bristol, where he served as dean of the Law faculty for four years. In 1993 he returned to Oxford as a senior research fellow at All Souls, a position he continued to hold as an Emeritus after his official retirement in 2001.
As well as hundreds of articles, chapters and case notes, his other books included Simple Quarrels (with G Davis, 1994); Law, Law Reform and the Family (1998) and Same Sex Relationships: from ‘Odious Crime’ to ‘Gay Marriage’ (2006). He served on numerous academic, legal and government bodies, and from 1992 to 1995 he was president of the National Council for the Divorced and Separated.
Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985, he served on its council in the mid-1990s, and in 1992 was appointed an honorary QC.
Cretney was always modest about his achievements and, though capable of shutting down an argument with a witty or cutting remark, he was unfailingly kind and supportive to his students. Reading was his great pleasure; he never really saw the point of country walks, but would walk miles in London to visit an art gallery, theatre or cinema.
In 1973 he married Antonia Vanrenen, who survives him with their two sons.
Stephen Cretney, born February 25 1936, died August 30 2019