Sir Murray Stuart-Smith, Court of Appeal judge who re-examined the 1989 Hillsborough report

Yahoo

11-02-2025

Sir Murray Stuart-Smith, who has died aged 97, was a Court of Appeal judge renowned for the logic and lucidity of his judgments, all of which reflected his profound knowledge and understanding of the English common law.
His judgment on medical causation in Loveday v Renton (1989) during the whooping cough vaccine litigation provided a template that has often been followed and never questioned. In the asbestosis case of Holtby v Brigham (2000) he delivered what came to be a much-cited judgment on the difference between divisible and indivisible diseases. And his definitive formulation on the liability of public authorities in Capital & Counties (1997) was fully upheld last year by the Supreme Court in Tindall v Chief Constable of Thames Valley.
As a barrister, Stuart-Smith had been one of the leading personal injury and general common law practitioners of his time, yet few of his cases at the Bar or on the Bench attracted headlines. He thus remained largely unknown outside legal circles until he was asked by the new Labour government in 1997 to re-examine Lord Taylor's 1989 inquiry into the Hillsborough football stadium disaster, which had blamed not the fans but the arrangements made by senior police officers and the conditions prevailing at the ground (the report led to all-seater stadiums).
Stuart-Smith's task was to review any evidence that may have been withheld from the Taylor inquiry together with the wider question of whether the inquest process had been satisfactory.
The investigation got off to a bad start when Stuart-Smith caused offence with an uncharacteristically clumsy off-the-cuff quip during a meeting with families affected by the tragedy: 'Have you got a few of your people or are they like the Liverpool fans, turn up at the last minute?'
His prompt apology was accepted by the Hillsborough Family Support Group 'without reservation', although others called for the judge to stand down, arguing that the remark indicated that he had a predetermined view.
In the course of his investigation, Stuart-Smith saw statements that had clearly been doctored by the police, but concluded that the new evidence did not invalidate the Taylor Report. The Home Secretary Jack Straw endorsed his findings, saying: 'I do not believe that a further inquiry could or would uncover significant new evidence or provide any relief for the distress of those who have been bereaved.'
But 13 years later, on the BBC programme Law in Action, Lord Falconer described the acceptance of Stuart-Smith's report as a 'disastrous and wrong-headed decision' that had 'made the families in the Hillsborough disaster feel that after one establishment cover-up, here was another'.
Falconer had been Solicitor General at the time of Stuart-Smith's investigation and he acknowledged that the government might have withheld information that Stuart-Smith needed. But he was nevertheless critical of the judge, arguing that 'he should have realised, I believe, that the inquiries and inquests had not given the public confidence that a proper inquiry had been undertaken.'
Stuart-Smith did not comment publicly on Falconer's remarks but privately regarded them as unfair, given the amount of information that had been withheld and how circumscribed he had felt by his terms of reference.
Murray Stuart-Smith was born on November 18 1927 and grew up in Hadley Wood, Hertfordshire, the younger of two children. His father Edward had been an aspiring architect who reluctantly went into the family business, which included a laundry in Wood Green and a clothing shop in Farnham.
Murray's father was also a gifted violinist, while his mother Doris, née Laughland, taught the piano after studying at the Royal Academy of Music. Murray took up the cello at an early age to complete the family trio.
At Moffats prep school he rose to head boy, but during his tenure spent several weeks in hospital after falling into a recently cut bamboo clump, one of whose sharp spikes went right through his thigh; he later caught measles.
'During my confinement,' Stuart-Smith recalled, 'I wrote what I thought was a brilliant satire on Mrs Engleheart, the headmaster's mother. She was the most frightful old bag, with dyed orange hair. Anyhow, I entrusted this missive to Simpson [who worked in the school kitchens and acted as courier for uncensored mail] for onward transmission to my parents. I don't know what went wrong but they never got it.
'When I rose from my sick bed, I was summoned to the HM's study. I was told that I was being relieved of my duties as head boy. The only explanation I was given, which was so manifestly bogus, was that Ian Latham had been acting head boy while I was in bed, and he had done it so much better than me.
'Since the duties of head boy were not onerous, it was difficult to see why I had done them badly, no previous complaint having been made, nor why Ian had performed them so conspicuously better. And Simpson was no longer employed in the kitchen. So, poor man, I suppose I was instrumental in his sacking.'
Stuart-Smith regarded the incident at the time as 'a gross miscarriage of justice' and remembered it having a 'profound influence' on him.
After Radley, he joined the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards and won the belt of honour for the best officer-cadet of his intake at Bovington, before being posted to Germany.
After completing his National Service in 1948, he went up to Corpus Christi, Cambridge. The first member of his family to go to university, he graduated with a starred First in the law tripos, followed by another starred First in the LLM.
Awarded the Atkin Scholarship by Gray's Inn, he was called to the Bar in 1952 and joined chambers at 2 Temple Gardens, whose tenants numbered several other future senior judges – John Stephenson, John May, John Stocker, Michael Turner and Stephen Chapman. Stuart-Smith was calm and restrained on his feet in court, with all the precision and persuasion of a brilliant intellect in reserve.
He took Silk in 1970 and was appointed a Recorder of the Crown Court in 1972. In 1981 he was appointed to the High Court Bench, Queen's Bench Division. Between 1983 and 1987 he was Presiding Judge on the Western Circuit.
As a judge he was fair and humane but could be intimidating to ill-prepared counsel or those he felt were wasting the court's time. He made very plain his dislike of the tendency of some practitioners to take every point, good or bad, simply because there were large amounts of money at stake.
In 1988 he was promoted to the Court of Appeal, where he was among those who upheld the refusal of a summons against Salman Rushdie on the grounds that the common law offence of blasphemy was restricted to a scurrilous vilification of Christianity.
He was Commissioner for the Security and Intelligence Services from 1989 to 2000, when he also retired from the English bench. He continued to sit in the Court of Appeal of Gibraltar, however, serving as president from 2007, a time that coincided with the suspension and eventual removal from office of the former Chief Justice in 2009.
He also sat as a Justice of the Court of Appeal of Bermuda from 2004. He held both these appointments until suffering a serious stroke in 2010. Having been knighted on his elevation to the bench in 1981, he was appointed KCMG in 2012.
Stuart-Smith listed 'building' among his recreations in Who's Who and usually had a project or two on the go at his home at Serge Hill in Hertfordshire, building everything from treehouses and donkey sheds to the barn where his son Tom, the garden designer, now lives.
The photograph he provided for Gray's Inn magazine on his appointment there as Treasurer in 1998 showed him trowel in hand, laying bricks, completely happy. His children's school holidays were spent planting, felling trees, clearing brambles, demolishing, hoeing and building.
He was also passionate about music and about Shakespeare. For about 25 years the Stuart-Smiths put on an annual family Shakespeare play with Murray always in the lead role; he also cast the other parts, edited the script and built the props. To his last days he was apt to launch suddenly into a chunk of King Lear.
Murray Stuart-Smith married, in 1953, Joan Motion; she died in 2015. Their marriage produced three sons and three daughters – variously now a Court of Appeal judge, gardener, writer and artist, landscape architect, solicitor and shoe-designer-turned-chef, all of whom survive him.
Sir Murray Stuart-Smith, born November 18 1927, died January 21 2025
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.