Filed: 20/05/2004
The 28th Lord Dunboyne, who died yesterday aged 87, was a circuit judge whose most passionate legal interest was the cause of the Irish peers denied their right to sit in the House of Lords.
Under the Union with Ireland Act which abolished the Dublin Parliament in 1800, members of the Irish peerage were entitled to elect 28 of their number to represent them in the upper house at Westminster. This had been allowed to lapse when the Irish Free State was created in 1921, although those elected before then were allowed to stay; the last survivor, the Earl of Kilmorey, died in 1961.
When reform of the Lords came on the agenda again in 1963, the Macmillan government refused to restore the right, saying it would damage relations with the Republic; the Dublin government primly disclaimed any interest in the matter.
Dunboyne was the moving spirit in a group of Irish peers who petitioned the House's committee for privileges in 1965. It was rebuffed on the grounds that the Irish peers had been elected to serve "on the part of Ireland" but Ireland, as a whole, was no longer part of the United Kingdom.
An unsatisfactory feature of the case was that the committee had never had put to it the argument that the Irish representative peers might sit on the part of Northern Ireland. F H Maugham, the future Lord Chancellor, and Wilfrid Green, the future Master of the Rolls, had advised back in 1924 that this was the ground on which their right subsisted.
Dunboyne was bitter about the outcome, and maintained his rigid conviction that the representative peers sat on behalf of the peerage of Ireland and could not be affected by the changed status of the island; his attitude may also have owed something to the distaste for Northern Ireland that he had shown as an undergraduate in the Cambridge Union.
Patrick Theobald Tower Butler was born on January 27 1917 into an Anglo-Norman Irish family descended from the 1st Lord of Dunboyne, who received a writ of summons to the Irish Parliament in 1324. Succeeding generations were periodically summoned to Parliament until the 11th baron was granted letters patent in 1541.
The family were strong Roman Catholics until 1786, when the 22nd Lord Dunboyne resigned as Bishop of Cork to marry in the hope of having an heir. But he died without issue after returning to the Church; the peerage passed to a Protestant branch of the family, from which "Paddy" Dunboyne was descended.
His great-great-grandfather and grandfather sat at Westminster as representative peers. He was educated at Winchester and Trinity, Cambridge, where he won a tennis Blue and became President of the Union.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Butler was commissioned in the Irish Guards Supplementary Reserve. He was wounded at Boulogne before the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940 and taken prisoner. Unheard of for a year, he was eventually traced to a German prisoner-of-war camp from where, due to the loss of a lung, he was repatriated in 1943.
For a time he was on the list of suitable escorts to accompany the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret to dances and theatre parties. After succeeding his father, a captain in the Royal Navy, in 1945, Dunboyne joined the Foreign Office before deciding to study Law. He was called to the Bar by Middle Temple in 1949 and practised on the South Eastern Circuit, doing mainly criminal work, though he was also consulted on peerage law.
He was Recorder of Hastings from 1961 until 1971; deputy chairman of Middlesex Quarter Sessions from 1963 until 1965; of Kent Sessions from 1963 to 1971, and then of Inner London Sessions for a year. In 1972 he was appointed a circuit judge.
Charming and self-effacing in private, Dunboyne was a meticulous and conscientious man who could seem somewhat testy on the bench, with a penchant for interrupting counsel. More often than not, he appeared inclined to take the side of the police, and he did not flinch from handing down prison sentences to those convicted of violent offences against them.
In 1983 he presided at the trial of a ballet teacher accused of biting a policeman who had dragged her naked and handcuffed from her Chelsea flat. Sentencing the woman to a month in prison, Dunboyne observed that biting police officers was an offence "far too prevalent in the Metropolitan area of London".
The woman later had her conviction quashed by the Court of Appeal, who observed that Dunboyne had "poured a great deal of cold water" on her only possible defence.
When trying another case in which a policeman was bitten (during the Brixton Riots), Dunboyne clashed frequently with the defence counsel, complaining that he could not understand the barrister's Indian accent. The defendant was eventually acquitted by the jury on the basis that he was acting in self-defence, but was convicted of carrying a brick as an offensive weapon.
Sentencing the man to three months in prison, Dunboyne praised the "discipline, devotion to duty and manly restraint" displayed by the police. The defence counsel, who was chairman of the Society of Black Lawyers, asked the Lord Chancellor to remove Dunboyne from the bench, but to no avail.
In 1986 Dunboyne was glad to retire from the Bench to devote himself to the genealogy of the Butler family, the passion of his later life - he wrote a history of the family in 1966. He was active in the Butler Society from its foundation in 1968, although he had an imperfect sympathy with its founder, the Irish liberal essayist Hubert Butler, and ceased to attend gatherings at its Kilkenny headquarters after the outbreak of the Troubles.
He was tireless in following up the most obscure inquiries. Nothing was too arcane or unpromising to engage his attention. A man above snobbery, he longed to welcome as many as possible to the ranks of his kinsmen. He was a fellow and one-time President of the Irish Genealogical Research Society.
He produced a volume about the acid bath murderer John George Haigh for the "Notable British Trials" series in 1953, and contributed to a book about the Cambridge Union. In the latter he recalled how, as president in 1939, he had "enlarged to the entire House the prerogative of interruption. . . The consequence was that dignified and restrained heckling was not merely permitted but encouraged".
In addition to managing the Irish peers' petition, Dunboyne took very seriously his duties as Commissary General of the Diocese of Canterbury from 1959 to 1971.
Lord Dunboyne started the Bar Lawn Tennis Society, was president of the Forty Five Lawn Tennis Club, and enjoyed rowing and chess.
In 1950 he married Anne Marie Mallett, daughter of Sir Victor Mallett, British Ambassador in Rome. They had three daughters, and a son, John Fitzwalter Butler, born in 1951, who succeeds to the peerage.