in which he had taken personal interest. On 14 December 1922 a portrait-bust of Elwes, the work of Malvina Hoffman and the gift of herself and other American admirers, was unveiled at Queen’s Hall, the scene of most of Elwes’s important London concerts.
For many years Elwes held a position of special prominence in the English musical world. A man of a personality both lofty and winning, he was in touch with an unusually large circle: a singer of great accomplishment and high artistic conscience, he always refused to compromise with unworthy music. His tenor voice was not in itself exceptional in power or sensuous charm, but it was more than adequate for all purposes of artistry; and his singing was marked by rare intellectual insight and, so to speak, spiritual dignity and feeling. He was especially at home with Bach and Brahms and in the title-rôle of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius (a work with which he had the most intimate sympathy): but he was by no means a narrow specialist and was always active in the encouragement of young composers.
[Private information; personal knowledge]
EVANS, Sir SAMUEL THOMAS (1859–1918), politician and judge, was born at Skewen, near Neath, Glamorganshire, in May 1859, the only son of John Evans, grocer, of that place. After attending school in Swansea, and taking the LL.B. degree of London University, he was admitted as a solicitor in 1883, and began to practise in Neath. In 1890 he was elected member of parliament for mid-Glamorganshire, and he sat for that constituency without a break until his promotion to the bench twenty years later. Indeed, throughout his career the support of his Welsh friends never failed him either in politics or in his profession, and Evans himself always remained the most loyal of Welshmen. In 1891 he was called to the bar and soon became one of the busiest juniors of the South Wales circuit. This meant that he was attempting to combine a large practice at the local bar with parliamentary work in London; and in 1901, although he had then been less than ten years at the bar, he applied for appointment as Queen’s counsel in the hope of reducing the strain upon his energies. The application was successful, but the change brought him little relief, as his practice long continued to be dependent on his Welsh connexions. In fact, while he was practising at the bar Evans never succeeded in establishing any large connexion among London solicitors, with the result that, until he obtained office, his parliamentary work always suffered from the necessity of his frequent absences from Westminster. In spite of this serious handicap he had soon made his mark as one of the more promising members of the radical wing of the liberal party. Both in politics and in private life he was by temperament impetuous and combative, and not always conciliatory to those with whom he disagreed. He was a ready and humorous debater, with a rapid delivery, and a keen fighter for his party, whether in power or in opposition. He took a particularly active part as a critic of Mr. Balfour’s Education Bill of 1902, as a supporter of the Licensing Bill of 1908, and as an opponent of the movement for women’s suffrage. It seemed likely that he was destined for political rather than forensic success. He was a nonconformist, and a bitter and often unfair critic of the Church of England. He was recorder of Swansea from 1906 to 1908; became a bencher of the Middle Temple in 1908; and in the same year was appointed solicitor-general in the ministry of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and retained that office in the ministry of Mr. Asquith.
In 1910 Evans definitely, but most reluctantly, abandoned his political ambitions by accepting the appointment of president of the probate, divorce, and admiralty division of the High Court in succession to Sir John Bigham. He had few apparent qualifications for his new post. The work of the division, especially on its admiralty side, is highly specialized, and Evans’s work had lain largely in workmen’s compensation and trade union cases. His appointment was, therefore, not popular at the bar, and he himself at first did little to remove the prejudice; for he allowed his indifference to the traditions of the court to be too apparent, and he showed a certain brusqueness and some faults of judicial manner which gave unnecessary offence. But he threw himself into the work of the court with the utmost keenness, even spending his vacations at sea for the purpose of studying the technique of admiralty work. His decision in 1911 of the dispute arising out of the collision in Cowes Roads between the liner Olympic and H.M.S. Hawke already showed that capacity of mastering technical details and of patiently reconstructing the story of an event out of a tangled mass of conflicting evidence which makes some of his later judgments so remarkable. He had
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