Henry McCardie

McCardie was born on 19 July 1869 in Edgbaston to Joseph McCardie, an Irish merchant and button maker,[1] and his English wife Jane Hunt. His father died when McCardie was eight,[1] and as a result he and his six siblings were raised by their mother alone.[2] He was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham and was noted as intelligent but lazy.[2] He left the school when he was sixteen to get a job and for several years worked in an auctioneers office before being admitted to the Middle Temple in 1891. He was called to the bar on 18 April 1894 and almost immediately began work at the chambers of James Parfit (known as J.J. Parfit) in Birmingham.[1][2]

McCardie became well known on the Midlands and Oxford Circuit for his clear arguments and the amount of time he spent working on cases and studying the law as to present the best case for his client; he worked so late that his chamber became known as "the lighthouse" as there was always a light on in the windows.[2] He was frequently called upon by solicitors to present cases, whether alone or with a KC, and at the height of his career was earning over £20,000.[2] During his time at the bar McCardie represented large organisations such as railway companies and banks, and was a popular barrister. On one occasion he and the QC he was working with, Edward Marshall-Hall, walked out of court in the middle of a case; it was felt that such a popular and effective junior barrister McCardie must have been in the right in doing so .[2] McCardie applied to Robert Reid the Lord Chancellor to become a King's Counsel in 1910, but the delay while Reid considered the application harmed McCardie's business, and he withdrew it.[2] In 1916 on the promotion of Sir Thomas Scrutton to the Court of Appeal he was asked to become a judge in the High Court of Justice King's Bench division, something considered extraordinary as most High Court judges were KCs.[2]

As a judge McCardie used common language to make his judgements easier to understand, but at the same time he also made them very long and detailed.[2] He was noted for his tendency to rebel against the opinions held by the rest of the judiciary and much of society as a whole; as early as 1931 he was supportive of the legalisation of abortion, saying that "I cannot think it right that a woman should be forced to bear a child against her will".[3] He made several judgments in areas that previously had no case law; in Cohen v Sellar [1926] 1 KB 536 he decided that a fiancée who breaks off the engagement is not entitled to the return of the ring, and his ruling in Hartley v Hymans [1920] 3 KB 475 was one of the cases used by Lord Denning in his resurrection of promissory estoppel.[2] His decisions and his differing opinions from that of the judiciary as a whole led to criticism from the Lord Chancellor and Lord Chief Justice, as well as several members of the Court of Appeal,[2] particularly Scrutton, whose increasingly bitter attacks suggest that he cherished a personal antipathy, which became so extreme that the two men ended by shouting at each other in open court.

While on circuit in 1933 McCardie caught influenza, and the illness and lack of sleep that resulted from it drove him into a deep depression. On 26 April 1933 he shot himself in his flat; the coroner ruled that it was suicide. After his death it came out that he had massive gambling debts, and that he was being blackmailed as a result.[2] It was also suggested that his dabbling in the occult had given him a morbid premonition of death, and that he had come to believe that he was fated to die on a certain day. Several other causes have been suggested, including his quarrel with Scrutton, and it is possible that in his depressed condition a number of factors contributed to the act.

In 2003, McCardie was identified in the autobiography "Mr Hardie" by Henry Archer as his father; the kind but secretive gentleman known to him by his mother as Mr Hardie and who went on holiday with them turned out to be Sir Henry McCardie.

Henry Cecil Leon in his memoir Just Within the Law wrote that "I have only the happiest memories of appearing before him".