Gerald Gardiner, Baron Gardiner

His father was Robert Septimus Gardiner (died 16 November 1939)[2] and his mother was Alice von Ziegesar (died 31 January 1953[3]), daughter of Count von Ziegesar and granddaughter of Dionysius Lardner.[4] Gardiner was born in Chelsea, London[5] and attended Harrow School.

While Gardiner was at Magdalen College, Oxford in the 1920s, he became president of the Oxford Union and of the Oxford University Dramatic Society. He was rusticated (suspended) in 1921, and was again threatened with rustication in November 1922, for publishing a pamphlet attacking restrictions on women undergraduates. A woman undergraduate had suffered the same fate a few days previously for climbing into a men's college after a dance. Gardiner rushed to her defence and the Vice-Chancellor, Lewis Richard Farnell, notoriously out of touch with the post-war generation, asked Gardiner to leave at 06:00; any later, Farnell knew, would have meant a sympathetic funeral procession several hundred strong. The girl to whose defence Gardiner had come was Dilys Powell, who later became a film critic. Gardiner graduated with a fourth-class degree in jurisprudence in 1923.

While occupying the position of Chancellor of the Open University, he took a degree in the Social Sciences, at the age of 76.[6]

Gerald Gardiner served in the Coldstream Guards in 1918 and was commissioned in 1919,[7] but in the 1930s he joined the Peace Pledge Union. During World War II Gardiner volunteered to join the Friends' Ambulance Unit, as an alternative to military service, although he was actually just over conscription age, and served 1943 to 1945; as someone relatively mature, he was usefully able to lead a 55-strong team assisting refugees in the turmoil of North-West Europe in the last year of the war.

Gardiner was called to the Bar in 1925 and was made King's Counsel in 1948. As a lawyer, he fought for the abolition of capital punishment. He represented The Daily Mirror and its columnist 'Cassandra' (William Connor) in a notable libel trial in 1959 when the pianist Liberace claimed that a newspaper article imputed that he was homosexual.[8] More successfully, he was the Counsel for the Defence in R v Penguin Books Ltd, the trial for obscenity of the publishers of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960. He played an active role in various reform movements and held numerous professional positions. He was a member of the Committee on Supreme Court Practice and Procedure, 1947–53 chaired by Raymond Evershed, 1st Baron Evershed.[9] He was a member of the Lord Chancellor's Law Reform Committee, 1952–63. He was a Master of the Bench of the Inner Temple in 1955, Chairman of the General Council of the Bar in 1958 and 1959.[10] He was a member of the International Commission of Jurists in 1971. He was Joint Chairman of the National Campaign for Abolition of Capital Punishment.

Gardiner stood for election as the Labour Party's candidate in the 1951 General Election in Croydon West. He lost to the Conservative, Richard Thompson. In the 1964 New Year Honours he was made a life peer as Baron Gardiner, of Kittisford in the County of Somerset.[11] On the Labour Party's General Election victory in 1964, he was appointed Lord Chancellor and to the Privy Council of the United Kingdom in 1964 by Harold Wilson. In 1970, the Labour Party was defeated in the General Election and Lord Gardiner resigned as Lord Chancellor. In that role, he was responsible for the creation of the Ombudsman. He also did much to advance women's rights.

In 1925 he married Lesly Trounson (died 1966). They had one daughter. In 1970, Gardiner married Muriel Box, writer, producer and director who had won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Seventh Veil. She published his biography in 1983.[17] He died in Hendon, London[18] on 7 January 1990, aged 89.

Gardiner's archives are held by two institutions, the Churchill Archive Centre in Cambridge[21] and the British Library.[22] The latter collection chiefly concerns the abolition of capital punishment in Great Britain.

• Capital Punishment as a Deterrent: and the alternative, London, Victor Gollancz (1956).
• Law Reform Now (Edited with Andrew Martin), London, Victor Gollancz (1963).
• Justice (INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION OF JURISTS) Living it down. The problem of old convictions. The report of a Committee set up by Justice, The Howard League for Penal Reform, The National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders. Chairman of Committee, the Rt. Hon. Lord Gardiner. London: Stevens & Sons, 1972. ISBN 0-420-43910-2
• UK Government, Northern Ireland Office. Report of a Committee to consider, in the context of civil liberties and human rights, measures to deal with terrorism in Northern Ireland, etc. (1975) (Parliamentary papers. Cmnd. 5847) ISBN 0-10-158470-9, Chair: Lord Gardiner.