Christ College Hosts The 3rd Lord Atkin Lecture

On Tuesday 8th November the third annual Lord Atkin Memorial Lecture was delivered at Christ College, Brecon, by General Lord Ramsbotham, who after a long and distinguished career in the Army was in 1995 appointed HM Chief Inspector of Prisons. Lord Ramsbotham’s audience consisted of 130 Sixth Formers and a number of invited guests, including many eminent lawyers from South Wales, and his talk, entitled “What Price Imprisonment?”, pulled very few punches.

Lord Ramsbotham, left his audience in no doubt that were he in charge of the country’s penal system, and given a free hand, prisons would soon be very different places from what they are now. Here, too, the theme of human rights was central to a talk which discussed in some depth the human as well as financial cost of locking people up. Not that Lord Ramsbotham was uniformly critical of prisons: he spoke glowingly of one privately run institution he had inspected, and perhaps most movingly of all, recalled interviewing one young offender who told him that the first person in his life who had shown any interest in him as a human being was not any member of his family but the prison officer standing beside him.

Lord Atkin, in whose memory the lecture was given, was one of Christ College’s most distinguished pupils – some would say the most distinguished; but in a community where the population changes completely every seven years it is hardly surprising that a name which still resonates loudly among members of the legal profession should mean little to teenagers born fifty years after his death. Lord Atkin’s portrait hangs in the school dining hall, but in a gallery which includes a former Archbishop of Wales, several Headmasters and some nineteenth-century benefactors it is likely that only an “after-Holbein” painting of the school’s founder Henry VIII will strike even the vaguest of chords with the fast-eating clientele.

It was to counter this lack of awareness that Headmaster Phillip Jones, encouraged by two lawyers on the governing body, His Honour Michael Evans and Leolin Price QC, decided in 2003 to institute an annual Sixth Form lecture in Lord Atkin’s name. The school was fortunate to be able to persuade the Senior Law Lord and former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Bingham, to inaugurate the series. Lord Bingham took as his theme one of Lord Atkin’s most celebrated (though minority) judgements, that in Liversidge v Anderson in 1941, which centred on the freedom of the individual, and whether the then Home Secretary was justified in interning a man of foreign birth who was a volunteer pilot with the RAF. It was not, Lord Bingham pointed out, until 1980 that a leading member of the House of Lords was able to say, with the support of all his colleagues: for my part I think the time has come to acknowledge openly that the majority of this house in Liversidge v Anderson were expediently and, at that time perhaps, excusably wrong, and the dissenting speech of Lord Atkin was right.

In 2004 the school was equally fortunate in its second speaker, the former UK Foreign Secretary and EU Co-Chairman of the Steering Committee for the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, Lord Owen, whose long and close association with the conflict in Yugoslavia meant that his theme “Justice and Reconciliation, with particular reference to War Crimes Tribunals”, sat well into the whole issue of human rights so effectively championed by Lord Atkin. Lord Owen ranged widely over the methods used by countries in recent years to bring closure to often lengthy periods of internal conflict, discussing not only Yugoslavia but also South Africa, Sierra Leone, Chile and East Timor, and ending with the frank admission: we are still learning invaluable lessons about how to balance justice and reconciliation.

Next year’s speaker, on Friday 10th November, will be the Bishop of Bangor, the Rt Rev. Anthony Crockett, a self-confessed admirer of Lord Atkin, and once again Christ College Brecon will look forward to welcoming some of Wales’ most distinguished judges, barristers and solicitors to join the school community in paying homage to one of its most respected and influential former pupils.