IN 1984, as the IRA’s campaign of violence in Northern Ireland and mainland Britain was gathering momentum, Brian Hutton faced an agonising decision. As a senior judge in Belfast, presiding over terrorist trials so dangerous that no jury could be involved, he had become, inevitably, a target, constantly under police guard. He was used to it, as was every judge in Ulster. But he had reason to believe that his family might also be under threat.
Evidence had been passed to him and his wife, Mary, that the car in which their daughters were taken to school was being watched.
This was no idle threat. Two years earlier his close friend, Robbie Lowry, the Lord Chief Justice, had been ambushed by IRA gunmen, and although he survived police later intercepted a gang waiting to kidnap his wife and daughter.
Reluctantly, Hutton decided that his daughters should be sent out of the Province to be educated. Reluctantly, because he was not a man who believed in bowing to terrorist threats, or indeed to pressure from anyone. As a judge he had been chosen to hear some of the most notorious cases, including that of Dominic “Mad Dog” McGlinchey, the most wanted terrorist in Ireland, whom he sentenced to life imprisonment, and the “supergrass” trials that led to the conviction of a series of IRA killers. He believed it was the duty of a judge to be inflexible in the administration of justice: the Latin phrase Fiat Justitia, ruat caelum (Let justice be done even though the sky falls down) might have been invented for him. When it came to his own family, however, he had a very different duty of care.
After much deliberation, he and his wife took the difficult decision to send their daughters to St George’s School, in Edinburgh, and for the next five years she lived with them during term-time and he joined them at weekends. Someone who got to know him at the time remembers sitting with him at the Glenogle baths, in Stockbridge, watching their young ones ploughing up and down the pool. “He would arrive for the regular Saturday morning swimming lesson as relaxed and understated as if he had spent the week selling widgets, instead of sitting in judgment on IRA men,” she said. “But if I never quite forgot his job, he never mentioned it. Clearly, for him, it was the weekend and he was just another dad.”
It was a rare glimpse of a very private man. The image that Lord Hutton presents to the outside world is the more familiar one we grew accustomed to during his inquiry into the death of the government scientist David Kelly: stiff, formal, correctly dressed, infinitely courteous, but razor-sharp on detail and intolerant of evasiveness, a judge of the old school who believes that the very remoteness of the bench is its greatest strength, ensuring that he and it remain beholden to no one.
Those qualities have been the hallmark of his career. In Belfast, a city still divided by sectarianism, where no score is ever too old to be settled, I could find no one, Protestant or Roman Catholic, who questioned his integrity or fairness. Sir Anthony Campbell, a Northern Ireland judge who has known him all his life, describes him thus: “He is about the straightest person I have ever met. He has been through some very tough times but he remains entirely his own man, and he would always stand up for what he thought was right.”
Another lawyer friend, a Belfast QC who has appeared before him on many occasions, made the point that, while some of his judgments were overturned on appeal — McGlinchey was acquitted on a technicality, and the “supergrass” convictions thrown out on the ground of tainted evidence — Hutton always conducted his trials purely on the basis of the facts as presented to him, without fear or favour. “Some judges are apprehensive about seeing their decisions overturned and try to make their judgments appeal-proof,” he said. “Brian would simply focus on the merits of the case. He would always have sufficient confidence in his own judgment.”
That confidence will certainly be on show when he presents his eagerly awaited report on the Kelly affair next Wednesday. But there are other clues about the likely conclusions to be found in the remarkable background of a man who is far less predictable than his conventional appearance suggests. One London barrister described him as “a charming, good-humoured, bowler-hatted Ulsterman of the traditional kind”. That view, as it turns out, is very wide of the mark.
BRIAN HUTTON was born into a Protestant family in 1931 and brought up in North Belfast in an area notable at the time for its mixed population of Roman Catholics and Protestants. There was even a strong Jewish component, now largely vanished. His father, James, who had fought in the First World War, was chief traffic manager of the Ulster Transport Authority, which ran the railways in Northern Ireland. His mother, Mabel, was a daughter of the manse and both were members of the congregation at Fort William Park, a church founded on the strong radical traditions of the Presbyterian faith, with its emphasis on the freedom of the individual, the democratic principle and the importance of the community. All of these values young Brian and his sister, Brenda, absorbed, and they remain an important key to his character.
His education, however, broke with tradition. Instead of Campbell College, or the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (known simply as “Inst"), followed by Queen’s University, Hutton was sent to Shrewsbury and then to Balliol College, Oxford. He disliked Shrewsbury and found himself isolated, both by background and accent. Recently, when asked to go back to his old school to give a talk, he felt obliged to warn them that he would not be able to recall his schooldays with any enthusiasm.
Although he had been a boxer at prep school, he was never a great games player and suffered from a shyness that remains with him — carefully concealed — to this day. Balliol suited him better. The Master at the time was Sir David Lindsay-Keir, a former Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s University, and by the time he left, with a first-class law degree, he had made many Oxford friends, with whom he stays in touch. He completed his legal training at Queen’s and was called to the Northern Ireland Bar. One contemporary wonders why he did not go to the more lucrative English Bar, referring to him as “an Englishman in Ireland”.
That, however, was to misunderstand Hutton, who is devoted to his native country. For all that he never fitted easily into the closed circle of the Northern Irish legal fraternity, being partial neither to social drinking nor to the golf course, he has always been a confirmed patriot, his judgments informed by a deep love of his homeland. Stepping off the aircraft at Belfast airport one day, he turned to a colleague and remarked: “It’s good to smell the air, isn’t it?” Finding legal work in Belfast in the early 1960s was hard. Judges were appointed on sectarian lines (there were only two Catholic judges at the time) and Protestant solicitors briefed only Protestant counsel (a situation that has changed out of all recognition today), but it was still a struggle to find employment. Hutton took on chancery work and, in 1969, was appointed junior counsel to the Attorney-General. “His practice at the Bar was rarefied, ” a contemporary said. “He specialised in Crown cases — judicial review and so on.” Another colleague agreed, but added: “He managed to be pretty streetwise. Nobody made a fool of him.”
