David Calcutt
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Sir David Charles Calcutt QC (2 November 1930 – 11 August 2004) was an eminent barrister and public servant.
Born in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, where his father ran a chemist's shop, he was an only child. He became a chorister at Christ Church, Oxford, and after becoming a music scholar at Cranleigh, of which he was later chairman of the school board, he won a choral scholarship to King's College, Cambridge.
There he read not only law but music. He was a Harmsworth law scholar when called to the bar in 1955, joining Middle Temple and the Western Circuit. He supplemented his earnings by working for the Times law reports, of which he later became editor.
By the early 1960s, he was regularly in the Court of Appeal and the Divisional Court. In 1969, he successfully appeared in a then rare case of a man convicted of murder when the Court of Appeal admitted evidence to show the original pathologist might have erred.
Always maintaining his love of music, in 1970 he failed to convince the court that the revenue commissioners were wrong in claiming purchase tax from an invention known as the stylophone. He argued that it was a keyboard instrument and so exempt. The court found it was not.
He took silk in 1972 and went from strength to strength. In 1973, he prosecuted Maureen Bingham, the wife of the naval officer who had passed secrets to the Russians. She received two-and-a-half years and Calcutt, in the Court of Appeal, successfully argued that contacting a member of the Soviet Embassy was a sufficient preliminary step in the venture to justify her conviction.
In 1981, in one of his now relatively rare ventures into the criminal courts, he appeared for the Crown in a case where a German was charged with the murder of his wife. Her body had not been identified for five years. In the event the man was acquitted.
He was Head of Chambers, which he ruled in, some said, a benevolent dictatorship from 1976 to 1988.[citation needed]
He had become deputy chairman of Somerset quarter sessions in 1970 and now became a recorder of the Crown Court. He was chairman of the bar in 1984, often the final step to an appointment to the High Court bench.
Instead, he became master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he had been teaching law in the 1970s. He was an enormous success. He had married Barbara Walker, a psychiatric social worker, in 1969 at a service with the choirs of Edington Priory, Wiltshire, where he had founded a music festival. She became almost as popular in the college as him[citation needed]. Calcutt ensured women were admitted as undergraduates. In turn, she sported the college colours.
Calcutt retired as Master in 1994. Since 1989 he had been Chairman of the City Panel on Takeovers and Mergers; from 1987 he was President of the Lloyds of London Appeal Tribunal; since 1986 a member of the Interception of Communication Tribunal; since 1989 Assessor of Compensation for Miscarriages of Justice, Home Office (assessing the compensation for, among others, the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six); and he held numerous other arbitral and judicial appointments. He conducted government enquiries into a hospital fire in the Falkland Islands, in 1984, and into the Cyprus Service Police, 1985-86.
Calcutt was chancellor of the dioceses of Exeter and Bristol from 1971 and in Europe from 1983. Possessed of a fine bass voice[citation needed], he retained an interest in church music as well as the preservation of the countryside.
Knighted in 1991, he could genuinely be described, in the best meaning of the phrase, as a public servant. His friends ascribed the volume of work he undertook to his ability to get straight through to the core of the problem and by having as clear a mind as he did a desk.[citation needed]
David Calcutt was also chairman of two far-reaching inquiries into the workings of the press. In 1989 he was appointed chairman of the Committee on Privacy and Related Matters. It followed MPs' calls for curbs and a comment by David Mellor that journalists were "drinking in the Last Chance Saloon".
The next year, Calcutt recommended a Press Complaints Commission to replace the Press Council. If self-regulation did not work, then he recommended a statutory body be created. Nearly 15 years later Calcutt was still being referred to as the keeper of that saloon.
His 1993 Review of Press Self Regulation reiterated the potential need for a statutory press tribunal, as well as sterner laws to protect privacy. The latter was not a measure that appealed to the Conservative government of the time. When, that year, pictures of Princess Diana leaving a gymnasium caused another furore, bringing suggestions that after all there might be a press ombudsman, Calcutt was an outsider for such an appointment, but nothing came of it.
