US Edition Lord Donaldson of Lymington, who died on Wednesday aged 84, was Master of the Rolls from 1982 to 1992 and the most open and approachable senior judge of his day.
Before his appointment as head of the civil judiciary, Donaldson had gained extensive experience on the ill-defined borderline between the law and politics. In the early 1970s he was in the spotlight as president of the controversial Industrial Relations Tribunal, when he coolly parried criticisms from trades unionists and Labour MPs. In 1976 he presided over the trial of the Maguires, whose convictions were quashed years later, leading to criticism of Donaldson in an inquiry.
The popular myth grew that Donaldson was biased in favour of the establishment. Yet many Conservative lawyers found him too brash, and his approach to civil liberties led one radical lawyer to observe in 1982 that "he has a passion for justice". His brisk and confident courtroom manner annoyed some barristers who thought him too quick on the uptake, but his demeanour stemmed from a deeply-felt commitment to sweep away delays in the justice system. He would deal directly with the press, which he skilfully used in his campaign for more judges.
His attitude towards politics was, he said, "much the same as a monk towards sex; nostalgic memories of youthful indiscretion, a frank acknowledgement of its attractions, an unshakeable conviction that I could do better than those currently engaged in it, but an acceptance that it will never be for me until I go to a far better world".
The son of a Hampshire gynaecologist, John Francis Donaldson was born on October 6 1920. He was educated at Charterhouse and Trinity, Cambridge, where he immersed himself in student union politics.
He was chairman of the Federation of University Conservative and Unionist Associations, and Secretary of the Cambridge Union two years after Ted Heath. "If I had been asked at that stage about my future career," Donaldson later admitted, "I would have said I wanted to become a Conservative politician and then Prime Minister." It was partly with that aim in mind that he became a nominally Independent, though in fact Conservative, member of Croydon Borough Council, a role highlighted by opponents during the NIRC era to portray him as a Tory party hack.
Donaldson's 2.2 may have reflected his extra-mural activities, but he was never thought of as a brilliant legal thinker. He was acute rather than profound, given to efficiency rather than contemplation, and his judgments were more down-to-earth than elegant.
After Cambridge in 1941 he was commissioned into the Guards Armoured Divisional Signals, serving with them after D-Day and then with the military government of Schleswig-Holstein before leaving the Army as a 25-year-old lieutenant-colonel.
He met his wife-to-be, Mary Warwick, at the Middlesex Hospital where he was visiting a relative and she was working as a nurse, and they married soon after the war. After thinking of accountancy, he read for the Bar and was called by the Middle Temple as a Harmsworth scholar in 1946.
Cases arising from accidents in the London Docks kept Donaldson busy during his early years in practice, and from there he moved into the more esoteric field of commercial law, quickly acquiring all the attributes of a high-flier. As junior counsel to the Registrar of Restrictive Trading, he edited the eighth edition of Lowndes and Rudolf on General Average and the York-Antwerp Rules - a key text for practitioners, if not a page-turner. During the tribunal on the Admiralty spy John Vassall, at which he assisted the Attorney General, he uttered the arresting remark: "It is a very different piece of information that a man was wearing women's clothes in the West End."
He served on the General Council of the Bar in his thirties (a reliable barometer for future success), took Silk in 1961 and became the youngest High Court judge in 1966 while still in his mid-forties.
Yet he was still largely unknown outside the legal profession until he was hoisted aboard the Heath government's controversial and ill-fated Industrial Relations Tribunal (NIRC) in 1971. As its first and last president, Donaldson became the most written-about judge in the country, but he proved remarkably comfortable in the public eye and calm under fire.
To trades unionists, he was Heath's judicial union-bashing stick. They nicknamed him "Black Jack" and said he had "the fastest gun in the west". Michael Foot, who, as employment secretary, shut the court when Labour returned to power in 1974, spoke of Donaldson's "trigger-happy judicial finger".
Lawyers, however, found him a fair-minded judge trying to apply the law laid down by parliament. Donaldson wanted recognition for this impartiality. He often went out of his way to give unions a fair crack of the whip, and tried to be as informal as possible, wearing plain clothes instead of a wig and robes. But the legislation was fatally flawed, and the unions not ripe for reform.
One hundred and eighty-one Labour MPs signed a motion for his dismissal after he ordered the sequestration of £75,000 from the engineering workers' union funds to pay a fine for contempt of court. Donaldson took the unusual step of publicly defending himself against their accusations of political bias.
"It may or may not be a good thing to inject the law into industrial relations," he said. "That is a political matter and not for us."
When the court was abolished in 1974, Donaldson remarked that it was "the fate of neutrals to be abused and wounded - sometimes mortally - by both parties to the hostilities".
On his return to the Bench Donaldson sat in the commercial court, from where he watched less able colleagues gaining promotion to the Court of Appeal - knowing all along that elevation for him was unlikely so long as Labour remained in power. Lord Elwyn Jones, the Lord Chancellor, admitted in private that Donaldson deserved promotion, but that it would be more trouble than it was worth. During his time in judicial Siberia, Donaldson did a lot of sailing and built a lot of cupboards and shelves.
Two months after winning the 1979 election, Margaret Thatcher sent Donaldson to the Court of Appeal. In various cases, he ruled that police had no automatic right to remove bras, braces, belts and shoelaces when searching prisoners; warned them not to bend the rules concerning custody time limits; and upheld the principle that "an Englishman's home is his castle" by denying police the right to enter a house to seize evidence without first obtaining a warrant.
In 1982 several of the judges whom Lord Hailsham sounded out were strongly opposed to Donaldson's appointment as Master of the Rolls, particularly in the Chancery Division, where they wanted an intellectual heavyweight. Mrs Thatcher was reputed to have said: "Fortunately, Lord Chancellor, your judges do not appoint the Master of the Rolls. I do."
As head of the civil division of the Court of Appeal, Donaldson became the country's most politically important judge. He could, in theory, choose which cases he heard and who sat with him.
Lord Denning was a hard act to follow, and Donaldson aspired to a lower profile, reflected in his desire to keep wigs and gowns, so that a juror who saw him "shopping in Woolworths in plain clothes had not the slightest idea".
Donaldson's efficiency drive was perhaps his major achievement, as he set to implementing the findings of the Scarman Committee, although his zeal raised a few eyebrows in the dustier recesses of the appeal court.
His innovations, which stopped short of tampering with the procedure of unlimited oral advocacy, included skeleton arguments in appeal cases; "handed down" judgments given to litigants and press; employing a barrister in the civil appeals office to assist with case management and listing; and an annual review of the Court of Appeal's performance.
Within six months he had all but eliminated the backlog of more than 600 cases, although in later years they mounted up again due to a shortage of judges.
Donaldson's tendency to interrupt barristers if he detected waffle was not always to the liking of counsel. But he reasoned that "to allow the unarguable to be argued is unfair to others waiting to have their cases heard".
One of his earliest decisions as Master of the Rolls was that the barrister Ann (now Baroness) Mallalieu was entitled to tax relief on her "dull and dowdy" working clothes, though he was later overruled by the House of Lords.
In 1988 he declined to grant a permanent injunction against three newspapers to prevent them publishing material from Spycatcher, the memoirs of the former MI5 officer Peter Wright, saying that the public interest in a free press outweighed national security considerations.
In a landmark case in 1991, Donaldson ruled that the Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker, was in contempt of court - the first serving minister to be found guilty of contempt - for defying a court order and deporting a man from Zaire while proceedings were pending. "It would be a black day for the rule of law and the liberty of the subject," he said, "if ministers were not accountable to the courts for their personal actions."
The following year he ruled that a 16-year-old anorexic girl who was starving to death could be fed against her wishes.
The unearthing of a miscarriage of justice cast a shadow over Donaldson's career. Sir John May's report in 1990, with its conclusion that Donaldson had misunderstood and mishandled critical evidence at the original Maguire trial in 1976, came as a severe blow. As a public relations disaster, it was worsened by the fact that the Master of the Rolls - who had sentenced the Guildford Four a year before the Maguires - had declined to give evidence at May's inquiry.
Like his friend and colleague Lord Lane, Donaldson held to the maxim that judges should "never answer back, never complain, never explain".
Donaldson's old enemies on the Left renewed their assault. To them he had always been a blinkered reactionary, determined to do down honest working men and Irish patriots.
In fact, Donaldson was relatively progressive for his time. He took the side of Private Eye in its battle with Sir James Goldsmith, and had liberal views on, for example, the extension of Legal Aid.
Nevertheless, the Maguire trial was unfair, and Donaldson was partially responsible for that. In common with other judges trying terrorism cases during the 1970s, Donaldson had been less open than he ought to the possibility that police might have lied. And he was probably over-credulous of scientific evidence. The net result was what one Maguire campaigner dubbed "an unconscious prejudice in favour of the prosecution".
Donaldson was in favour of allowing solicitors rights of audience in the higher courts - calling the Bar's monopoly an indefensible "sacred cow".
More than 6 ft tall, bespectacled, and described by one admiring journalist as "lean, dark and sleek", Donaldson was invariably suntanned from skiing or sailing, and was seldom without his yachtsman's pipe. In court he liked sucking boiled sweets.
In retirement he continued to take an active interest in public affairs. Recently he was among a number of senior judicial figures who expressed misgivings about new anti-terrorism proposals; and, as a crossbencher in the Lords, he supported campaigners who argued that the way in which the Hunting Bill was railroaded on to the statute books was unlawful.
Donaldson lived and sailed on the Solent with his wife, who in 1983 became the first woman to be elected Lord Mayor of London.
His other great love was DIY. "He's a dreadful embarrassment in people's houses," said Lady Donaldson. "He fishes out his penknife and tightens loose screws."
Lady Donaldson died in 2003. They had two daughters and a son.