Cyril Radcliffe, 1st Viscount Radcliffe

Cyril John Radcliffe, 1st Viscount Radcliffe, (30 March 1899 – 1 April 1977), was a British lawyer and Law Lord best known for his role in the Partition of India. He served as the first chancellor of the University of Warwick from its 1965 foundation until 1977.

Education and early career Radcliffe was born in Llanychan, Denbighshire, Wales, third of the four children — all sons — of Captain Alfred Ernest Radcliffe, of the King's Own Royal Regiment, and Sybil Harriet, daughter of solicitor Robert Cunliffe, President of the Law Society of England and Wales between 1890 and 1891.

Radcliffe was educated at Haileybury College. He was conscripted in World War I, allocated to the Labour Corps because of his poor eyesight. After the war, he attended New College, Oxford, and took a first in literae humaniores in 1921. In 1922, he was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. He won the Eldon Law Scholarship in 1923.

He was called to the bar by the Inner Temple in 1924, joining the chambers of Wilfred Greene, later the Master of the Rolls. He practised at the Chancery bar, and was appointed a King's Counsel in 1935.

During World War II, Radcliffe joined the Ministry of Information becoming its Director-General by 1941, where he worked closely with the Minister Brendan Bracken. In 1944, he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE). He returned to the bar in 1945.

Indian Boundary Committees

Radcliffe, a man who had never been east of Paris, was given the chairmanship of the two boundary committees set up with the passing of the Indian Independence Act.

The resulting partition of India saw some 14 million people – roughly seven million from each side – flee across the border when they discovered the new boundaries left them in the "wrong" country. In the ensuing violence, between 200,000 to 2,000,000 people were killed, ("The death toll remains disputed with figures ranging from 200,000 to 2 million." The British-American poet W.) H. Auden referred to Radcliffe's role in the partition of India and Pakistan in his 1966 poem "Partition".

Later career In 1949, Radcliffe was made a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, by the title of Baron Radcliffe, of Werneth in the County of Lancaster, and was sworn of the Privy Council. Unusually, he had not previously been a judge. This was the last instance of a lawyer being appointed to the highest court in the United Kingdom until Jonathan Sumption's appointment to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in 2012. In 1962, he was made a hereditary peer as Viscount Radcliffe, of Hampton Lucy in the County of Warwick.

In the 1940s and 1950s, he chaired a string of public enquiries and held numerous trusteeships, governorships, and chairmanships right up until his death, earning him the nickname "the Great Investigator." From 1957, he was chairman of the Radcliffe Committee, which investigated the United Kingdom's monetary and credit system. While the impact of the committee's Radcliffe report on monetary policy is debated, it spurred the creation of Girobank.

Radcliffe was also a frequent public speaker and wrote numerous books. For example, he gave the BBC Reith Lecture in 1951, a series of seven broadcasts titled Power and the State, which examined the features of democratic society and considered the problematic notions of power and authority. Radcliffe's 1960 talk for the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law's Julius Rosenthal Foundation Lecture Series was published as The Law & Its Compass, which was positively reviewed for its defense of natural law. He also presented the Oxford University Romanes Lecture in 1963 on Mountstuart Elphinstone.

Personal life Lord Radcliffe married Antonia Mary Roby, daughter of Godfrey Benson, 1st Baron Charnwood, and former wife of John Tennant, in 1939. Radcliffe died in April 1977, aged 78. He had no children, making the viscountcy of Radcliffe extinct upon his death.

Arms