Sir John Ross, 1st Baronet

Sir John Ross, 1st Baronet PC, QC (1853–1935) Lord Chancellor of Ireland, was born in Derry, Ireland, on 11 December 1853. He was the eldest son of the Reverend Robert Ross DD, Presbyterian Minister and, at one time, Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. He was educated at the model school and at Foyle College, Derry, where the songwriter Percy French was one of his schoolfriends. In 1873 he entered Trinity College, Dublin. He became president of the university Philosophical Society in 1877 and graduated BA in the same year; in 1878 he was auditor of the Trinity College Historical Society, where his contemporaries included the politician and judge Edward Carson (later Lord Carson) and James Campbell (the future Lord Glenavy, lord chancellor of Ireland). He graduated LLB in 1879.

Ross had entered Gray's Inn, London, in 1878 and was called to the Irish bar in 1879. He became a Queen's Counsel in 1889. He was Conservative member of parliament for Londonderry City from 1892 until his defeat in 1895. In 1896 Ross was elevated to the bench as land judge in the Chancery Division of the High Court of Justice in Ireland. When appointed, he was the youngest judge in the United Kingdom and he was the first Presbyterian judge of the High Court.

Ross was sworn of the Irish privy council in 1902. In 1919 he was created a baronet. In 1921, in succession to Sir James Campbell, Ross was appointed Lord Chancellor of Ireland. He was to be the last holder of that office, which was abolished in December 1922. Ross retired to London, but later he returned to live in Northern Ireland.

He was president of the St John Ambulance Brigade in Ireland and during the First World War was in control of all Red Cross activities in southern Ireland. In 1914 he was made a Knight of Grace of the Grand Priory of the order of St John of Jerusalem. During the war he was also chairman of the Irish board for the selection of candidates for commissions in the British army.

In 1882 Ross had married Katherine Mary Jeffcock (d. 1932), only daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Deane Mann, of Dunmoyle and Corvey Lodge, co. Tyrone. They had one son, Major Ronald Deane Ross MC MP, and two daughters, the younger of whom predeceased her father. Ross died, of bronchial pneumonia, at his home, Dunmoyle Lodge, Sixmilecross, co. Tyrone, on 17 August 1935, and was succeeded as second baronet by his son.^[1]

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