Lord Denning was Master of the Rolls from 1962 to 1982 and, in all, held high judicial office for a remarkable 38 years. Towards the end of this long period it often happened that experienced counsel appeared before him who had not been born when he first went on the Bench. He lived to become the most widely known member of the English judiciary and in retirement he remained in the public eye for his forthright pronouncements on a wide range of legal issues.

His qualities were many and varied, for his great intellectual gifts were matched by simplicity of character and charm of manner. His passion for justice often led him into the realms of controversy, especially on the issue of whether it was the function of the courts to change, rather than to interpret, the law. Many lawyers disagreed with him on these questions but they nevertheless held him in admiration, affection and esteem.

Denning was widely regarded as a radical, and even as revolutionary, but it would be an over-simplification to leave this assessment without qualification, for in many ways he was conventional, "square" and even, in some sense of that much-abused word, "reactionary". He maintained that retribution had an essential place in the penal system, saying that the ultimate justification of any punishment "is not that it is a deterrent, but that it is the emphatic denunciation by the community of a crime".

He was, therefore, in the eyes of many criminologists and penologists, guilty of the ultimate heresy. In 1965 he voted against the suspension of hanging. In sexual matters he was firmly on the side of orthodox morality. In a case concerned with the expulsion of a girl student from a teacher training college, for sleeping with her boyfriend at her hall of residence, he shocked some of his admirers by his forthright denunciation of her conduct ("she would never make a teacher; no parent would knowingly entrust their child to her care").

He was even more explicit in his condemnation of homosexuality. In the Lords debate on the Wolfenden Report in 1957 he argued that, while natural sin was deplorable, unnatural vice was worse. Regretting that "Hell fire and damnation hold no terrors nowadays", he advocated that the law should continue to punish homosexual conduct, though "discreetly". He was against the supersession of the religious oath in court by a simple promise to tell the truth, although a large and informed body of opinion held that to bring the name of the Almighty into every trumpery dispute was offensive to believers and embarrassing to everybody else. In his ordinary daily life Denning was conventional; he once surprised a fellow-Bencher by gently rebuking him for strolling through the gardens of Lincoln's Inn on a summer evening in his shirt-sleeves. The solution of the apparent paradox of the "revolutionary" and the "establishment" figure is that what Denning cared for, deeply and passionately, were fundamental and traditional values - religion, the Christian orthodox morality, the rule of law, an ordered society, and fair play.

He had a romantic belief in English law as one of the supreme creations of man; if he laid what some thought were sacrilegious hands upon the sacred scrolls, it was not because he loved law less but because he loved justice more. He felt that when the law ceased to be sensible, flexible and fair it was failing in its vital and historic mission; if it needed a shaking-up in order to ensure that it adopted a modern and relevant posture, he was ready and willing to administer the necessary and salutary shock.

Alfred Thompson Denning was born at Whitchurch, then still a small place deep in rural Hampshire (he never lost his attractive regional burr). His father was the village draper. The Dennings were a remarkable family. An elder and a younger brother became, respectively, a general and an admiral; the promise of two other brothers remained unfulfilled, as they were killed in the First World War.

Alfred (or "Tom", as in due course he came to be called by his friends) went to Andover Grammar School, from where he won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. The First World War interrupted his university career and he served from 1917 to 1919 with the Royal Engineers. After demobilisation, he obtained a double first in mathematics, and became a schoolmaster at Winchester for a year. He was an inspired teacher, but he soon decided that his life's work did not lie in this sphere, so he went back to Oxford again, and in a remarkably short time secured his third first, this time in law.

Denning was called to the Bar by Lincoln's Inn in 1923. There were giants in the profession in those days: the great criminal advocate Marshall Hall had reached the summit of his tempestuous career, while Norman Birkett and Patrick Hastings were fast coming to the front. Denning did not set out to become a passion-tearing rhetorician, a spellbinding orator or a pitiless cross-examiner. He was fascinated by what Pollock had called "our Lady the Common Law" (though he later became critical of the blemishes which marred the lady's beauty and did much to remove them by judicial surgery).

He revelled in hard work, with the result that every time he went into court he had at his command a complete knowledge of the facts and law appertaining to the case. With this important advantage (not always shared by his opponents) he was able to present his arguments cogently, courteously and comprehensively. He was a straightforward advocate, and was contemptuous of the forensic fripperies and parlour-tricks which were dear to one school of advocates unhappily still flourishing at that time.

Denning soon acquired a good and widely-ranging practice. In London he was much in demand in cases involving intricate questions of commercial law. On the Western Circuit (to which he naturally gravitated) he appeared in many criminal trials. He somehow found time to act as joint editor of new editions of two indispensable text-books: Smith's Leading Cases (1929) and Bullen and Leake's Precedents (1935). As he was a devout and assiduous member of the Church of England, it was predictable that he should have been made Chancellor of the important dioceses of Southwark and London.

In 1938 he took silk and was an immediate success in the front row. He was clearly in line for promotion, for in 1943 he was sent on the North Eastern Circuit as a Commissioner of Assize. In 1944 he became Recorder of Plymouth, but he had no opportunity of cutting his judicial teeth in this approved fashion, and he was almost immediately elevated to the High Court Bench. He was 45, well below the usual age at which High Court judges were appointed in those days. In accordance with tradition he was knighted, and also elected a Bencher of his Inn.