When Lord Mackay of Clashfern became Lord Chancellor in 1988, Charles Jauncey was an obvious choice to take his place as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary. A Court of Session judge since 1979, he had acquired a very wide span of legal experience over the previous 39 years. He combined an eye for processing data and seeing the nub of the issue with a cool temperament and a strong personality.

Charles Eliot Jauncey was born in Edinburgh in 1925. His father, John, was a captain who commanded destroyers and received the DSO. His mother, Muriel, was the daughter of Admiral Sir Charles Dundas.

After attending Radley, Jauncey joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. However, he was invalided out as a sub-lieutenant after falling ill in India and was destined to walk with a slight limp in later life.

Jauncey read law at Christ Church, Oxford, and the University of Glasgow. In 1948 he married Jean, the daughter of Admiral Sir Angus Cunninghame Graham. He was called to the Scottish Bar in 1949 and appointed Standing Junior Counsel to the Admiralty in 1954.

Shy by nature, Jauncey was not a natural advocate. Consequently, most of his work was on the advisory side. In the late 1950s he represented the Duchess of Argyll in the Duke’s suit for a divorce, a case that raised key issues in the law of confidentiality as a result of the Duke’s overt release of his wife’s private letters to him. For the most part, however, Jauncey specialised in what would be termed Chancery work in England, with a particular interest in wills and estates. After the 1961 Trusts Act entered the statute books, he found a stream of work in the variation of trusts on behalf of beneficiaries.

This line of activity led to his developing strong ties with Scottish landed families. He became deeply involved in conservation, especially of stately homes, and would later serve for many years on the Historic Buildings Council for Scotland. He also acquired a taste for heraldry and, as Kintyre Pursuivant of Arms, would test claims to titles and other genealogical issues in the Lyon Court for 16 years from 1955.

Jauncey was appointed a Member of the Royal Company of Archers (the Queen’s bodyguard in Scotland) in 1951. He retained that role for more than five decades.

Jauncey took silk in 1963 and in 1971 he received his first judicial appointment when he became Sheriff Principal of Fife and Kinross. In that post, which he held for three years, he heard appeals from the sheriffs within his jurisdiction, handled a number of first-instance criminal cases and discharged some civil duties. From 1972 he served seven years as a judge in the Courts of Appeal of Jersey and Guernsey, an occasional duty he greatly enjoyed.

Jauncey’s first marriage was dissolved in 1969, and he married Elizabeth, the widow of Major John Ballingal, MC, in 1973. However, that union lasted only until 1977. The same year, he married Camilla, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Cathcart.

In 1979 Jauncey became a Senator of the College of Justice (a judge of the Court of Session in Edinburgh). Four years later he presided over a 203-day trial of a test case relating to the presence of fluoride in the water supply. A Strathclyde woman who had lost her teeth argued that her regional council’s plan to increase the fluoride content of its water did not help her dentally and could cause cancer or speed up tumours.

In a 120,000-word, 400-page judgment, Jauncey granted a restraining order against the council, which, he said, did not have statutory power to manipulate the water on any wider health grounds than to supply liquid that, for drinking purposes, was safe, pleasant, and “wholesome” – the key word at issue. However, he also took the plaintiff to task, comprehensively rejecting her medical fears. He also attacked the decision to give her legal aid, which had enabled the plaintiff to pursue “a case of unprecedented length and expense”.

Jauncey’s decision to leave Scotland for the House of Lords was driven in part by his dislike of criminal trials. In the Lords, he was free to range over a broad range of fronts. Moreover, as a member of the highest court in the land, he was not bound by precedent. In his judgments, he displayed a skill for brevity of expression and for making an apt choice of words.

In the keynote case of Woolwich Equitable Building Society v Inland Revenue Commissioners (1992), he voted in the minority to oppose the return of a nine-figure sum paid in error to the tax authorities. It was, he declared, for Parliament to rectify the injustice.

When sitting as a law lord, Jauncey tended to add a socially, as well as legally, conservative slant to the panel. In R v Brown(1993), a case concerning group sex with violent overtones, he ruled, in the majority, against allowing the “intentional infliction of bodily harm during . . . homosexual sado-masochistic activities”.

In 1998 he was appointed by the Queen as a special commissioner and arbitrator to resolve the dispute between the dean and organist at Westminster Abbey, where he upheld the dismissal of the organist, Dr Martin Neary.

Though he retired from the House of Lords in 2000, Jauncey continued to sit from time to time in both the Lords and the Privy Council. In June 2001 he was named as chairman of a five-strong House of Lords committee established to reinvestigate the 1994 Mull of Kintyre Chinook helicopter crash that took the lives of 29 people, including 25 senior intelligence and security officers from Northern Ireland. Delivered in February 2002, the committee’s report dismissed the previous conclusions of two RAF air marshals and cleared the helicopter’s two pilots of gross negligence.

He was a countryman at heart, truly happiest fishing and enjoying his Perthshire home where for the last two years he lived incapacitated by a severe stroke, borne with an indomitable strength.

He is survived by his third wife, Camilla, two sons and one daughter from his first marriage and a daughter from his third marriage.

Lord Jauncey of Tullichettle, PC, a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, 1988-96, was born on May 8, 1925. He died on July 18, 2007, aged 82