publication of reports of divorce cases. The majority report was signed 30 January 1912 and the commission came to an end in the following November. Lord Gorell’s health was then rapidly breaking. He died at Mentone 22 April 1913 and was buried at Brampton beside his grandfather, John Gorell Barnes.
The broad characteristics of Lord Gorell’s character and work are exemplified by his brief, rapid, and smoothly successful career at the bar; by his many reported arguments and reported judgments in the court of first instance, the Court of Appeal, the Privy Council, and the House of Lords; by his extrajudicial work and his speeches in the House of Lords. As a judge of first instance his judgments were very rarely reversed, and all of them are models of industry, insight, and common sense. The foundation of a commercial court was the joint idea of Sir James Charles Mathew and himself. Barnes, soon after his appointment to the probate, divorce, and admiralty division, announced that he was prepared to deal with cases raising points of insurance law, and his court was therefore largely resorted to by commercial solicitors. The establishment of the commercial court from 1 March 1895 under Mathew was a successful development of Barnes’s experiment [see Weekly Notes, 2 March 1895].
Barnes combined a great enthusiasm for any work that he undertook with an unusual capacity for mastering complicated facts. His keen and profound intelligence was never satisfied until the broad principle governing any particular set of circumstances had been fully exposed. In field after field of law he showed these qualities, with the result that many of his judgments are distinct contributions to the growth of English law. His work on the divorce commission revealed his passionate desire to see justice made available for all classes of the community. He was no politician, but he represented the best thinking of the old school of liberal thought. Like his paternal grandfather, he was a reformer. From the Gorells he inherited an almost gloomy mysticism that seemed at times to dominate his outlook on life. Yet normally he was a very cheerful man who loved the pleasant things of life. As a friend and a judge he was kindly, genial, enthusiastic, full of praise for all good work, considerate to the bar, penetrating, intensely human.
Barnes married in 1881 Mary Humpston, eldest daughter of Thomas Mitchell, of West Arthurlee, Renfrewshire, who also was of Derbyshire descent; they had two sons and one daughter. He was succeeded by his elder son, Henry Gorell Barnes, second Baron Gorell, a barrister of considerable promise, who in May 1914 introduced in the House of Lords a Bill incorporating the common elements of the two reports of the divorce commission. He was killed in action at Ypres in January 1917, and was succeeded as third baron by his younger brother, Ronald Gorell Barnes.
[J. E. G. de Montmorency, John Gorell Barnes, first Lord Gorell: a Memoir, 1920; personal knowledge. Portrait, Royal Academy Pictures, 1896.]
BARNETT, SAMUEL AUGUSTUS (1844-1913), divine and social reformer, the elder son of Francis Augustus Barnett, of Bristol, was born at 5 Portland Square, Bristol, 8 February 1844. His father was a man of wealth, the first manufacturer of iron bedsteads; his mother, Mary Gilmore, came of an old merchant family in Bristol. Educated at home, he went in June 1862 to Wadham College, Oxford, which was chosen because of the tory and protestant prejudices of the warden, Benjamin Parsons Symons. These did not appeal to young Barnett, and he never felt that he had got the best out of Oxford; ‘I made the mistake of using my time to grind at books rather than to know men.’ But he remained devotedly attached to Oxford and to Wadham, and not the least of his claims to be remembered is that he, as much as any man of his generation, brought his university into living relation with the social and moral life of England.
He took a second class in law and modern history in 1865, and then, after two years of teaching, travelled in America, a visit which ‘knocked all the toryism out of me’. In December 1867 he became curate at St. Mary’s, Bryanston Square, London, to William Henry Fremantle (afterwards dean of Ripon). He was at once introduced to his life’s work, the problems of a great city. Here in 1869 was founded the Charity Organization Society, through which he made the acquaintance of Miss Octavia Hill [q. v.] and through her met his future wife, Henrietta Octavia, daughter of Alexander Rowland, of Champion Hall, Kent, who shared and inspired his work for forty years. They were married in January 1873, and went to St. Jude’s, Whitechapel, a parish, in the words of its bishop, ‘the worst in the diocese, inhabited mainly by a criminal
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