The Charmed life of Rufus Isaacs

The profession of politics seems to suit the lawyer, but few if any lawyers have so distinctly made their mark upon it as Sir Rufus Isaacs, first Marquess of Reading.

At times in his life, he held the offices of Solicitor-General, Attorney-General, Lord Chief Justice, ambassador to the USA, viceroy of India and foreign secretary.

Early life
Rufus Daniel Isaacs was born on 10 October 1860, the fourth child of Joseph Isaacs, a fruit merchant in the City of London.

He was a rebellious child, who both his parents and teachers found difficult to control.

He failed to distinguish himself at school, other than in the range and imagination of his escapades.

When he was 14 years of age he was removed by his despairing parents, with a view to his entering the world of commerce.
Isaacs was apprenticed to his father's firm in the City but predictably he found the discipline of work little to his liking.

His father, feeling that little would be achieved by attempting to fit a noticeably square peg into a round hole, decided that his character would benefit from the discipline and rigours of a long sea voyage, so on his 16th birthday, the future Lord Chief Justice of England found himself signed up as a ship's boy on the Blair Athole, a merchant ship owned by his father's agent, bound for South America.

By the time the ship reached Rio de Janeiro, afte a seven-week voyage, isaacs had decided that a 'life on the ocean wave' was not for him.

He deserted and after some days on the loose was spotted in a local seaman's mission, and was duly arrested.

He was returned to the Blair Athole and sailed on to India, a country with which he fell instantly in love.

It is said that as the s hip steamed away from the Indian shore, Rufus Isaacs vowed that some day he would return.

Whether the story is true or not, he would little have dreamed in what capacity he would indeeed eventualy return.
Little more than a year after he had set sail, Isaacs found himself back in London having obtained his release as a member of the crew of the Blair Athole.

He once more set about trying to make a career in the family business, but found it little to his liking.

His sister had recently married a stockbroker and at her suggestion Isaacs joined the firm of Keyser and Frederici in 1879, with a view to becoming an accredited member of the Stock Exchange.

The world of finance
Isaacs very quickly found his imbetier in the world of finance but one obstacle stood in the way of his becoming a member of the exchange: he was 19 years old, whereas the minimum age of entry to the Stock Exchange was 21.

The solution, at the time, seemed simple.

Isaacs signed a false declaration of his age in order to enter the Stock Exchange, an indiscretion which was to haunt him in later life.
The life of a stockbroker seemed to suit Isaacs, and he would probably have made it his career, but matters took a turn for the worse in the spring of 1884.

Isaacs had invested in some overseas securities, and when their price collapsed, he was unable to meet his obligations to his clients.

He was therefore 'hammered' on the Stock Exchange.

This meant that two Stock Exchange staff ahmmered the rostrum of the exchange before announcing publicly that Rufus Isaacs was unable to pay his debts.

To escape the scene of his financial disgrace Isaacs considered going to work abroad, and had made plans to do so, but he was dissuaded by his brother, who had followed him and literally had to pull him off the continental train.

Law and marriage
Isaacs now looked around for an alternative career where he could earn a living and the money to pay off his Stock Exchange debts.

He decided to try a career in the law, and was placed for a trial period with his family's solicitor.

Before the trial period finished, however, he decided that his future was more likely to lie in the life of a solicitor.

He therefore embarked upon the course of study for the Bar, working as he had never done before, and giving up a lifestyle that, to say the least, was not conductive to study.

He was called to the Bar in the Middle Temple on 17 November 1887, and his first brief, to represent the family firm, followed soon after.

Isaacs quite quickly established a flourishing practice in the newly formed Commercial Court, his Stock Exchange experience proving extremely useful.

At this time he married Alice Cohen, the daughter of a cotton merchant.

Mr Cohen had heard of Rufus Isaacs and knowing something of his reputation as a hellraiser, forbade his daughter to see Isaacs again.

Alice, however, became ill and declared that only Isaacs could assist in her recovery.

Mr Cohen relented, and the couple were duly married in 1888.

A child, Gerald, who was to be the Isaacs' only child was born in the following year.
Isaacs worked extremely hard at the Bar, as indeed he did for the rest of his life.

His work schedule was punishing and it was not long before he had gained a reputation as a hard worker with an amazing capacity for incisive logic, and a memory which was almost photographic.

Within ten years of his call to the Bar, he started to consider whether he should apply to 'take silk' and become a Queen's Counsel.

Few barristers of only ten years call had ever taken silk before and Isaacs was understandably, though uncharacteristically, cautious about making his application to the Lord Chancellor.

He did, however apply, encouraged by his colleagues at the Bar and by one Lord Justice who told him: 'Don't leave it until you are too old, like I did!'
Taking silk
Rufus isaacs QC donned his silk gown in 1897 at the age of only 37.

The increased fees which he was now able to command soon enabled him to pay off his old Stock Exchange debts.

He was as highly successful as a QC as he had been as a junior.

He was no passionate, histrionic advocate, like Marshall Hall or Carson, but pursued his case in court with a relentless logic, backed by an encyclopaedic knowledge of the facts, achieved through many hours of hard work.
For some time prior to his taking silk, Isaacs had displayed an interest in politics, becoming a Liberal member of the famous Hampstead Parliament, a debating society which groomed many members for the other parliament down the road.

In his professional life also, he entered the political world with some of the cases in which he appeared.

He led on behalf of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, in the famous Taff v Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants [1901] AC 426 trade union case which led, after the union lost the case, to the passage of the first Act of Parliament to grant immunity from civil action to a trade union in respect of acts done by its members during a dispute.

He also appeared for The Star newspaper, in an action against its proprietors by Arthur Chamberlain, brother of the colonial secretary at the time of the Boer war and uncle of a future prime minister, over allegations that political pressure had been brought to bear in respect of contracts for the supply of cordite to the armed forces by a company in which Chamberlain was interested.

He also established a close relationship with Lloyd George for whom he appeared in an action for libel against The People newspaper, which had run a rather lurid story concerning Lloyd George's sex life.

Isaacs won substantial damages for Lloyd George, a politician whose regard for Isaacs was to be of great assistance later in Isaacs' career.
Election to Parliament
Isaacs unsuccessfully contested the Kensington North seat for the Liberals at the 1900 election, but on 4 August 1904 was elected as Liberal member for Reading.

His majority decreased slightly in the Liberal landslide of 1906 but, politically, his rise was otherwise swift.

He became a friend and ally of both Lloyd George and Asquith during the premiership of Campbell-Bannerman.

When Asquith became prime minister in 1908, he didn ot immdiately reward Isaacs, but two years later Asquith made him his Solicitor-General and Isaacs left private practice at the Bar forever.

Solicitor-General
On taking up office, Isaacs found himself bequeathed a difficult case which had been boiling up for the past two years, the Archer-Shee v R case.

The case has since become famous, when its facts were used as the basis of the plot of Terence Rattigan's play The Winslow Boy, but it presented Isaacs at the time with something of a problem.

In 1908, George Archer-Shee was a cadet at Osborne Naval College on the Isle of Wight.

Although educated there as a schoolboy, he was technically serving under naval regulations, which permitted the Navy, as a Crown employer, to require his parent to remove him at any time.

One Saturday afternoon, a five shilling postal order was stolen from another cadet, whose signature was forged on it to enable it to b e cashed.

George was identified by the post office proprietor as the cadet who had cashed the postal order, and his handwriting appeared to match that of the forger.

George was discharged from Osborne.
George's father was furious when he discovered that his son had been expelled, and having questioned George closely, became convinced that he was innocent.

The Admiralty refused to reconsider the matter, so proceedings by way of a 'petition of right', were issued against the Crown.

Isaacs' problem as Solicitor-General, was whether to assert in the proceedings, as a preliminary issue, the special privilege of the Crown to appoint or dismiss whom it liked to or from its service.

The case did represent the attempt of a young boy to save his reputation and future career, but did Isaacs, as a law officer of the Crown, have the right to waive Crown privilege? Isaacs decided that he did not and he duly pleaded and won the point in the High Court.

An appeal to the Court of Appeal followed but that Court never actually decided the point since the Court suggested, and Isaacs agreed, that the facts should be tried first in the Court below! The case was duly heard over four days, with George Archer-Shee and all the main participants giving evidence.

On the fourth day Isaacs rose to his feet and declared that the Admiralty now accepted George.s version of events and would proceed no further.

It is not wholly clear why this happened, but the case ended there and the privilege point, which Isaacs had been much criticised for raising, was never decided.
Attorney-General
Rufus Isaacs had only been Solicitor-General for seven months when the Attorney-General was nominated to a vacant judicial appointment and Isaacs succeeded him.

The new office kept him well occupied, for politically it was a stormy time, with Asquith challenging the powers of the House of Lords, and Lloyd George putting forward his revolutionary National Insurance Bill.

Isaacs was, however, still a Crown advocate and appeared in some notable trials.

He appeared on behalf of George V, in an action against a magazine which alleged that the King had secretly married a commoner in 1890, and therefore became a bigamist when he married the future Queen May five years later.

He also appeared as prosecutor in the R v Seddon poisoning case where his skilful cross-examination did much to secure a conviction in a case where the evicence was, to say the least, highly circumstantial.

He faced much criticism for his handling of this case after its conclusion.

It was said, somewhat unfairly, that he conducted his case more with 'the vengeance of a destroying angel' than with the traditional fairness and restraint of the British prosecutor.
In 1912, the same year as the Sneddon case, Isaacs faced the greatest threat to his political career, when it was alleged that he, Lloyd George (who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer) and two other Liberal ministers had speculated in Marconi shares, using advantageous price sensitive information not yet available to the general public.

Isaacs' brother Gerald was managing director of the Marconi company in England, and when the company was awarded a series of lucrative government contracts, but before the fact was published, he sold shares in the company to the ministers.

A political storm erupted, and Isaacs was at the centre of it.

Asquith, however, backed his ministers who, after a Commons select committee inquired into the matter and had had a split vote on the guilt or innocence of the ministers, were able to continue in offic e.

Isaacs however, had to face his probity being questioned, and the old matter of the false declaration to the Stock Exchange authorities being aired.

He twice offered his resignation to Asquith, and twice it was refused.
Lord Chief Justice
The dust had not long settled on the Marconi affair when the old Lord Chief Justice, Lord Alverstone, announced his retirement.

In those days, it was the convention that the office of Lord Chief Justice fell vacant, it was filled by the Attorney-General.

Before the end of 1913 therefore, Isaacs found himself appointed to the post, with the title of Lord Reading.

It was a strange end to a year which had begung with the Marconi controversy as its height!
Isaacs was not fond of judicial life and, strange as it may seem, was bored and unfulfilled as Lord Chief Justice.

It must have been with some relief, therefore, that in 1916 he accepted the task of going to America to negotiate war loans for the British government with the banker J P Morgan.

The negotations were highly successful and the contacts Isaacs made in America enabled him to liaise on several occasions during the first world war between President Wilson, and the governments first of Asquith, then Lloyd George.

It was probably in recognition of these achievements that in 1918 he was asked to become British ambassador to Washington, temporarily relinquishing his judicial duties.

He had a successful tenure of office, acting with the Americans to co-ordinate the allied war effort and being involved in the eventual peace process.

he was recalled in 1919, and joined the War Office, to act as adviser to the government at the Paris peace conference.
The peace negotiations over, Isaacs returned to being Lord Chief Justice.

He hated it and at one time, even seriously wondered whether it would be possible for him to return to the Bar! His friendship with Lloyd George, however, came to his aid once more, and on 6 January 1921 a public announcement was made that Lord Reading was to be the new viceroy of India.

Viceroy of India
Isaacs served the standard five-year tour of duty as viceroy and inherited the multitudinous problems of the India of the day.

These included Mahatma Gandhi, and his policy of peaceful non co-operation with the Raj.

In March 1922, Isaacs had Gandhi arrested and prosecuted for sedition.

Gandhi was sentenced to six years in prison but was released on grounds of ill health in May 1924.

Isaacs returned to Britain in 1926 and was made a marquess, the first commoner to bear the title since Wellington.
Marquess though he now might be, Isaacs did not now have a job, but that situation did not last long.

He was invited to sit on the boards of both ICI and the National Provincial Bank.

He also returned to a depleted and demoralised Liberal party, with a parliamentary presence reduced to only 40 seats and split into two warring factions, led by Asquith and Lloyd George.

Isaacs was totally unable to reconcile these factions, try as he might, but he continued to act as an elder statesman within the party, with a sustained interest in foreign affairs.

The Final Years
In 1930, he suffered a serious blow when his wife of 42 happy years died of cancer aat the end of a protracted illness.

He was inconsolable for a while, but as was so often the case with him, his fortunes changed.

In 1931 he remarried, and around the same time he was asked by the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, to become Foreign Secretary in the all-party national government of 1931.

He remained as Foreign Secretary for a year, resi gning in 1932 in view of the impending restructuring of the national government by Macdonald.
This was Isaacs' last great office of state, although in 1934 he was made warden of the Cinque Ports, an office later held by Sir Winston Churchill.

He died on the night of 29 December 1935, of cardiac asthma, at the age of 75.

Rufus Isaacs held more office of state than almost any other politican.

he was also a brilliant lawyer and tireless worker, being heard to say on his deathbed in December 1935: 'These attacks are a horrid bore: I am afraid that when I am fit again, I shall have to give up some work, instead of taking on anything new!'