Friends of Hastings Cemetery


Gerald Austin Gardiner, p.2

Labour’s return to Government later in 1964 led to Gerald Gardiner being made Lord Chancellor.  His years in office were notable for a pursuit of progress, in areas such as women’s rights, divorce reform, and legal training.  He appointed the first woman High Court Judge (Elizabeth Lane in 1965), and set up the Parliamentary Ombudsman system.  Achievements such as abolishing the assizes system and setting up the Family Division of the High Court helped secure his reputation as a great reforming Lord Chancellor.  

After leaving office he was elected to the International Commission of Jurists and lent them his considerable expertise.  As Chancellor of the Open University, also in the 1970s, he showed support for it by working for and taking a degree in social sciences.  In 1981 he survived an IRA assassination attempt.  

Gardiner's standing as one of the great reforming lord chancellors of the twentieth century remains secure.  Probably only Lord Birkenhead (with whom Gardiner has otherwise nothing at all in common) would be a plausible rival for the accolade of the greatest.


Gardiner was a tall, thin man, of upright bearing, with finely chiselled features.  His shy courtesy and painful inability to engage in small talk could be taken for coldness, but on closer acquaintance he soon revealed his warm spirit.  He supported a very large number of liberal, humanitarian, and charitable causes.  When he accepted the chancellorship of the Open University (1973–8) he himself enrolled for, and successfully completed, a three-year degree course in the social sciences (1977).


On 3 December 1925 Gardiner married Doris (Lesly; d. 1966) , daughter of Edwin Trounson, company director and later mayor of Southport; they had one daughter, Carol (b. 1929).


On 28 August 1970 he married Mrs Muriel Violette Box (1905–1991), a distinguished film producer and writer, who survived him.  She was the daughter of Charles Baker, railway clerk, and divorced wife of Sydney Box, of J. Arthur Rank. Gardiner died on 7 January 1990 at his home, Mote End, Nan Clark's Lane, Mill Hill, London.

More at
https://archive.org/stream/dictionaryofnati19861990lees/dictionaryofnati19861990lees_djvu.txt.