Family Law

McCardie was famous, both on and off the bench, for his observations, in terms which probably horrified many of his judicial brethren, on topics many of which in those days were not usually the subject of judicial concern let alone public discussion. It was probably with McCardie in mind that Mackinnon LJ – no admirer: he wrote that McCardie was not a great judge and that his appointment was ‘an unfortunate accident’ – famously observed (On Circuit, Cambridge University Press, 1940), that ‘He is the best judge whose name is known to the fewest readers of the Daily Mail’. At Christmas 1930 McCardie went so far as to hold a press conference in his room at the Royal Courts of Justice. 

McCardie’s private life would probably raise many eyebrows even today. Unmarried, and often referred to in the (no doubt well-informed) popular press as the ‘bachelor judge’, he had two long-term mistresses, neither of whom, apparently, was aware of the existence of the other. By one of them he had an illegitimate son, born in 1919, who knew him as Mr Hardie without being aware that he was in fact his father.

Debilitated by recurrent bouts of influenza,depressed, weighed down by gambling debts which he could not pay and perhaps, it has been suggested, prey to blackmailers, McCardie shot himself in April 1933. (Willes had also shot himself while still a serving judge.)

Now all this, I suspect little known to most of today’s generation, undoubtedly makes for a fascinating ‘read’ but what, if anything, is its relevance for the modern family lawyer? McCardie, after all,sat in the King’s Bench Division, not the Probate Divorce and Admiralty Division, as it then was.