PARKER, ROBERT JOHN, Baron Parker, of Waddington (1857–1918), judge, the second son of the Rev. Richard Parker, rector of Claxby, Lincolnshire, by his wife, Elizabeth Coffin, was born at Claxby 25 February 1857. He was educated at Westminster, Eton, and King's College, Cambridge. At Eton he was Newcastle medallist; at King's a scholar in 1876 and a fellow in 1881. In 1878 he won the Browne's medal for the Greek ode and in 1880 was bracketed fifth in the first class of the classical tripos; he took his B.A. degree in the same year. He entered at Lincoln's Inn, read with Ingle Joyce, and, after being called in 1883, remained in Joyce's chambers and helped him in his work. Thus, though without professional connexions of his own, he soon got into practice, was highly esteemed for his pleadings, and had many pupils. In 1900, when Joyce was made a judge, Parker succeeded him, though only forty-three, as junior equity counsel to the Treasury. Thenceforward he had the most important junior practice of the day at the equity bar, and, content with this and its prospects, he never applied for silk.
This meagre account covers Parker's career to the age of forty-nine. A busy barrister's life is rarely eventful. Lord Finlay, who as attorney-general had selected him for the above-mentioned post of ‘devil’, as it is commonly called, said of him (15 July 1918) in the House of Lords: ‘the unanimous opinion of all who knew the profession and particularly that side of the profession, was that Mr. Parker was the man for the post’. To the public he was then unknown.
In 1906 Parker was made a chancery judge and rapidly gained a great judicial reputation. On several occasions he sat as an additional member of the Court of Appeal. He made his mark especially in trying patent cases and in settling the practice under the Patents and Designs Act (1907), and having delivered a masterly judgment in a case relating to the Marconi wireless telegraphy patents in 1913, he was appointed chairman of a technical committee to advise the postmaster-general as to the choice to be made among the five then competing systems. On 1 May 1913 the committee reported in favour of Marconi's. Meantime the death of Lord Macnaghten [q.v.] on 17 February of that year had made a vacancy for a lord of appeal, for which a leading equity lawyer was required, and on 4 March Parker was appointed to fill it. He was duly sworn of the Privy Council and took the title of Baron Parker, of Waddington in Yorkshire, from the younger branch of the Parkers of Browsholme, to which his family belonged. His promotion was unexampled in its rapidity; it is true that Lord Blackburn [q.v.] had only been a stuff gownsman and a puisne judge, but he had sat on the bench for many years. From the first the profession recognized Parker as a great addition of strength to the House of Lords. In the few years during which he sat there he gained a most authoritative position as a judge of final appeal. The very varied systems of law with which from time to time a lord of appeal is called upon to acquaint himself, presented to Parker no other difficulty than that of ascertaining the principle applicable to the particular case. The most striking instance of his power of assimilating new law and making it his own is the case of the prize appeals heard during the European War. From the beginning of the series until shortly before his death he sat on the board constituted to hear them, and, after Lord Mersey ceased to sit, he presided. The subject, novel even to a learned admiralty practitioner, was quite beyond the scope of chancery experience; Parker, however, not only familiarized himself with the decisions but mastered the intricate practice prevailing in the time of Sir William Scott (Lord Stowell) [q.v.], and was conspicuous in harmonizing the precedents of past wars with the very special exigencies and conditions of the War of 1914. Two judgments which he delivered on behalf of the board, those in the Zamora and the Roumanian cases, particularly bear the impress of his mind and style.
As instances of Parker's method of reasoning applied to cases of very various types, both when he was a judge of first instance and when he was a lord of appeal, the following reported cases may usefully be consulted. They are given in chronological order: Johnson v. Clark (a local custom of Kendal); Fitzhardinge v. Purcell (sporting rights on the foreshore of the Severn); Jones v. Pritchard (rights and obligations as to party-walls); Monks v. Whiteley (equitable doctrine of merger); Barry v. Minturn (an early House of Lords judgment which Parker's colleagues were satisfied to adopt without additions); Attorney-General for the Commonwealth v. Adelaide Steamship Co. (combinations in restraint of trade); Kreglinger v. New Patagonian Co. (clogging the equity of redemption); Trim School v. Kelly (murder as an accident arising out
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