Christmas Humphreys
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Travers Christmas Humphreys, QC (15 February 1901 – 13 April 1983) was a British barrister who prosecuted several controversial cases in the 1940s and 1950s and later became a High Court Judge. He was also the most noted convert to Buddhism in Britain and founded the Buddhist Society in London; he wrote books on Mahayana Buddhism. In his private life Humphreys was a noted Shakespearean scholar.
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[edit] Family and early career
Humphreys was the son of Travers Humphreys who had been a Barrister and Judge. Within the family and among friends he was sometimes known by an abbreviation 'Xmas', or as 'Toby'. He attended Malvern College, where he first became a theosophist and later a convert to Buddhism, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge; he was called to the bar by the Inner Temple in 1924.
The same year, Humphreys founded the London Buddhist Lodge, which later changed its name to the Buddhist Society. The impetus for founding the Lodge came from theosophists with whom Humphreys socialised. Both at his home and at the lodge, he played host for eminent spiritual authors such as Nicholas Roerich and Dr Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, and for prominent Theosophists like Alice Bailey and far Eastern Buddhist authorities like D.T. Suzuki. The Buddhist Society of London is now one of the largest and oldest Buddhist organisations outside of Asia.
[edit] Legal work
When he had first qualified, Humphreys tended to take criminal defence work which allowed his skills in cross-examination to be used. In 1934, he was appointed as Junior Treasury Counsel at the Central Criminal Court (more commonly known as "the Old Bailey"). This job, known unofficially as the 'Treasury devil', involved leading many prosecutions. Humphreys led the last prosecution of a member of the House of Lords who elected trial by his peers, that of Lord de Clifford in 1936.
Humphreys became Recorder (judge) of Deal in 1942, a part-time judicial post. In 1950 he became Senior Prosecuting Counsel. It was at this time that he led for the Crown in some of the causes célèbres of the era, including the Craig and Bentley case and Ruth Ellis. It was Humphreys who secured the conviction of Timothy Evans for a murder later found to have been carried out by John Christie. In 1955 he was made a Bencher of his Inn and the next year became Recorder of Guildford.
[edit] Judge
In 1962 Humphreys became a Commissioner at the Old Bailey. He became an Additional Judge there in 1968 and served on the bench until his retirement in 1976. Increasingly he became willing to court controversy by his judicial pronouncements; in 1975 he passed a suspended jail sentence on a man convicted of two counts of rape. The Lord Chancellor defended Humphreys in the face of a House of Commons motion to dismiss him, and he also received support from the National Association of Probation Officers.
[edit] Private life
Humphreys was President of the Shakespearean Authorship Society which advanced the theory that the plays generally attributed to Shakespeare were in fact the work of the Earl of Oxford. He also compiled an anthology of poetry entitled Poems I Remember, and published his autobiography Both Sides of the Circle in 1978.
