Sir Colin Pearson

Thatcher’s campaign manager when she defeated Heath, and died when he was blown up by an IRA bomb just before the 1979 election.44 It was not until 1946 that Colin Pearson himself joined 1 Brick Court. He had become Recorder of Hythe in 1937 and worked in the Treasury Solicitor’s department during the war, only returning to the bar thereafter. A review of Pearson’s reported cases shows his early ones being mostly rating cases, often led by Jowitt, and then a broad practice largely involving government work, with some of his Privy Council appearances involving cases from Canada. He was in Reading v Sir Colin Pearson Attorney General, 45 as to whether the army sergeant’s bribe involved a duty to account. Strikingly, almost all Pearson’s appearances in the law reports are led, in particular during his relatively short period in silk, which suggests that he either did not enjoy, or was not particularly good at, advocacy.

Devlin went to the High Court bench in October 1948 at forty-two. At the same time Denning was promoted to the Court of Appeal at forty-nine. Colin Pearson became Head of Chambers, taking silk in the following year.

Before Devlin departed however, one event had occurred which proved momentous. Cheeseman had ceased to clerk chambers and a new and competent senior clerk, Lionel Hawkins, had been employed. He in turn found a new junior clerk to cope with the growing work, in the person of a young man recently de-mobbed from the RAF. By that time chambers occupied the whole of the ground floor of 1 Brick Court.

44 There is a suggestion Neave may have briefly been a tenant but he was never so credited in the law list and the position is unclear. 45 [1948] 2KB 268