At their trial in 1975, the fate of the Birmingham Six was effectively sealed from the moment when the judge dismissed the defendants' claims that their confessions had been gained by police beatings. Despite a substantial body of supporting evidence, Sir Nigel Bridge told the jury that those claims were “simply not credible”.

In 1992 - one year after the Birmingham Six's release by the Court of Appeal - the judge declared in a television interview that he felt unhappy, but not guilty, about his part in one of this country's most notorious miscarriages of justice. While accepting that the judiciary must bear “a share of responsibility” for the legal system's failures, he suggested that “it's easy to be wise after the event. The important question is: How do we prevent it happening in the future?”

Nigel Cyprian Bridge was born in 1917. His parents - a naval officer and the daughter of a wealthy Lancashire cotton manufacturer - separated shortly after his birth. As a result, Bridge never met his father. His elder brother, Antony, would become Dean of Guildford.

Bridge was educated at Marlborough College, where he was awarded a scholarship. However, the school's tough regime and worship of athleticism were not to his liking and, at 17, he quit Marlborough for Europe, where he became fluent in French and German.

After returning to this country, Bridge spent some time on the staff of two northern provincial newspapers. Taking advantage of an allowance from his grandfather, he then quit journalism to write a novel, though it was never published.

Forseeing the war, Bridge volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm, only to be rejected as colour blind. Disappointed, he determined not to volunteer again but to await conscription. In 1940 he was called up and spent a year in the ranks before receiving a commission in the King's Royal Rifle Corps. He went on to serve in Italy, north-west Europe and Germany and was demobilised in 1946, having married in 1944.

Thus, at the age of 30, Bridge was married and a father, but without professional qualifications or prospects of any kind. His small private income was diminishing both in amount and value. His abilities were obvious. The doubt was the use to which they might be put.

Shortly after being commissioned, Bridge had been detailed by his adjutant to defend a young soldier about to be court-martialled for desertion. The adjutant assured Bridge that the plea would be one of guilty and, as a result, his duties would amount to nothing more than making the best of what little mitigation was available. Nonetheless, Bridge obtained a copy of the manual Military Law, a work as strange to him as it was obscure to others more experienced in its contents than he, and, after working through the night, he perceived that the soldier had a complete defence. To the astonishment of everyone, an acquittal followed. The news spread and Bridge was in regular demand throughout the remainder of the war as a defending officer.

He thus learnt the elements of advocacy without training but in the hard school of experience. He, like his brother, had considerable histrionic ability coupled with a fine, tall presence and good looks. Those qualities, together with an outstanding brain, suggested where the future might lie.

Bridge was called to the Bar by Inner Temple in 1947, after taking first place in that year's examinations. He became a pupil of Martin Jukes, one of the founders of a new, young set of chambers that specialised in personal injury cases. Although this work did not hold much attraction for Bridge, it did provide a much-needed income.

After inflicting a brilliant but unexpected defeat on a member of the set, Bridge was invited to join the chambers of the future Lord Widgery at 3 Temple Gardens. The move, which he completed in 1950, allowed him to combine personal injury work with the local government work on which Widgery ultimately built his reputation.

In 1964 Bridge became the Junior Counsel to the Treasury on the Common Law side. Though it meant assuming an extremely heavy workload, he accepted the appointment in the knowledge that the post provided a direct path to the High Court Bench. Bridge's four-year tenure of the position was outstanding. A first-class advocate, with a first-class legal mind, he proved the ideal counsel to deal with the numerous planning disputes that were prevalent at this time.

Bridge joined the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court in 1968. Like many others, he took time to adjust to judicial life. In 1969 he attracted unwelcome media attention after he called an actor “a brazen liar” for claiming ownership of Arthur, the white cat that advertised catfood on television. His quickness of mind sometimes caused him to be short with less gifted advocates. He found the slowness of criminal trials particularly irksome and his attempts to speed them up did not find favour with the Bar. On at least one occasion, his impatience with counsel and his over-enthusiasm to demolish a specious defence led to a rebuke from the Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal.

Bridge was appointed Presiding Judge on the Western Circuit in 1972. At a time when the Crown Court system was evolving, he displayed considerable administrative as well as judicial gifts.

At the end of the trial of the Birmingham Six, Bridge was criticised in the press for his failure to recommend minimum terms of imprisonment for the six men. In a sharp break with tradition, he chose to explain his reasons in a letter to The Times in which he rejected the suggestion that he had colluded with members of the Government. After accusing a Sunday newspaper of “impertinence”, he declared: “I consulted no one. The decision was mine alone. If it was erroneous, the error was mine alone.” The men had received mandatory life sentences, he explained. Accordingly he saw little point in making any recommendations, because they carried little weight beyond being an expression of the trial judge's view.

Bridge was appointed to the Court of Appeal in 1975. He was an invaluable and hard-working member of an over-worked Court where, though with immense publicity a handful of cases were dealt with in Lord Denning's court, the real burden of work was quietly carried by the other Divisions. Though not greatly interested in criminal work, he fully and conscientiously did his share of the ever-increasing number of criminal appeals.

Five years later, upon his elevation to the House of Lords, he found himself the only Lord of Appeal in Ordinary with no university degree. He proved highly able in many fields, particularly excelling on questions of statutory construction and quickly justified his appointment.

Upon Lord Denning's retirement in 1982, Bridge was considered for the post of Master of the Rolls. However, the members of the Court of Appeal sought the appointment of one of their own number and, to Bridge's considerable disappointment, the Prime Minister's choice eventually fell upon Sir John Donaldson.

That same year Bridge was appointed chairman of the Security Commission and conducted an inquiry into the resignation of of the Queen's bodyguard, Commander Michael Trestrail, over his relationship with a male prostitute, Michael Rauch. The inquiry found that Trestrail had not been a security risk, even though he had “clearly laid himself open to blackmail”. It recommended that “all appropriate steps must be taken to ensure the complete reliablity and trustworthiness of officers engaged in royalty protection,” but suggested that there was no need for positive vetting of all officers in close assocation with the Royal Family. In 1985 Bridge delivered his report into allegations by Cathy Massiter, a former MI5 worker, that the telephones of trade union leaders and campaigners against nuclear disarmament had been illegally tapped. The report, which cleared all governments back to 1970 of improperly authorising MI5 to tap telephones, was later dismissed by the Labour Party as a “whitewash”.

Shortly afterwards Bridge headed an inquiry into how an MI5 spy, Michael Bettaney, had infiltrated British security to pass secrets to the Russians. On this occasion he produced much more scathing findings and recommended changes in positive vetting. Nonetheless the report was critcised as complacent.

In 1987, following the House of Lords' 3-2 decision to continue the ban on Peter Wright's Spycatcher memoirs, Bridge condemned the Government's behaviour in a dissenting judgment. In criticism unprecedented for a practising judge, he warned that, if the Government was determined to maintain its fight to the end, it would face “inevitable condemnation and humiliation by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg”. Freedom of speech was the first casualty under a totalitarian regime, he added. “The present attempt to insulate the public in this country from information which is freely available elsewhere is a significant step down that very dangerous road.”

Three years later, Bridge and his fellow lords allowed the appeals by two anti-nuclear protesters against a High Court ruling that they had been guilty of entering the Greenham Common missile base without authority or permission. The judgement, which concluded that certain Greenham Common bylaws had been too widely drafted and so were invalid, opened the door to thousands of convictions being quashed.

Upon his retirement in 1992, Bridge criticised proposals by the Lord Chancellor to reduce the judicial retirement age from 75 to 70. Were the proposal already in force, he said, it would have robbed the law of some of its finest brains. In 2003, at the age of 86, Bridge graduated with a degree in mathematics from the Open University, having taken up the subject when he was 78.

His wife predeceased him in 2006 and he is survived by two daughters and one son.

Lord Bridge of Harwich, Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, 1980–92, was born on February 26, 1917. He died on November 20, 2007 aged 90