Master Colin Mackay was Called to the Bar in 1967, took silk in 1989 and was appointed a High Court Judge in 2001. He was elected Bencher of the Inn in 1995. Master Mackay was Master of the House from 2000-2005 and Lent Reader in 2011.
The first message that I received about Colin after his death was announced was from a very close friend, a senior personal injury silk who knew him well. It stated as follows.
‘Colin – Just seen the news. He was so very special. I remember thinking once when in his presence that he was what I wanted to aspire to be like, both as a lawyer and a man. I had so much love and respect for him.’
Paul had nailed it in three sentences. Colin was all you would ever want in a barrister and in a judge. He had an absolutely first-rate legal mind. He was wise and kind. He was intelligent, calm, and modest. He listened. He was serious when he needed to be but always had a twinkle in his eye. He was readily approachable, very patient, and generous of spirit. And most of all he really cared.
But there was also much more to Colin than being a great barrister or a great judge. He never saw himself, or wanted others to see him, as a lawyer first and foremost. To use the modern parlance, that was not his identity. And in truth, he did not really respect those who saw themselves that way. His world was rather expressed for, and by, him through his relationships; primarily with Rosie, and with their children and their families, and with his home. But also, and nearly as importantly, with his friends, in chambers and outside, and with his country of origin. He was quietly (mostly) very proud of being Scots.
He was, and remains, one of the most loved people I have ever known. People loved him for those same qualities that made him a great lawyer: wisdom, kindness, and modesty; but also his warmth, his humour – he had a devastating wit – and his enormous and eclectic range of knowledge, motivated by a fascination with the world and with its culture.
Colin was a consummate barrister, as a junior and pupil-master (as the role was then known), then as a silk, and then as a Head of Chambers. He practised throughout at 2 Garden Court, thereafter 39 Essex Chambers. There have been many, many tributes to him in these roles. I set out a small but representative sample below.
Lord Dyson, former Justice of the Supreme Court and Master of the Rolls (as well as Treasurer of the Inn in 2017), had before this been Head of Chambers immediately prior to Colin. He describes how when he joined as Head in 1986 (at which time there were 17 members):
‘There was no chambers committee. Colin was my right-hand man. I turned to him for advice on any difficult issue. He was unfailingly wise and sensible and generous with his time and personally very kind to me. He also had great judgment. He was great company, amusing and occasionally wickedly witty. In short, a wonderful human being.’
Judith Ayling KC describes how she worked with him during pupillage, as he led Neil Block KC in Watson v British Boxing Board of Control, acting for Michael Watson, the success of which not only led to substantial damages, but also defined the duty of care owed by a sports governing body to participants in the sport. She says, ‘all you have read is true – he was incredibly clever, kind, irreverent and wickedly funny.’ Judith added ‘he is the genesis of the rule that pupils work 9am – 6pm – because he came in one Easter and there all the pupils were, on a bank holiday”. Judith and Emily Formby KC are together the current heads of the Civil Liability Group at 39 Essex, and as such, they together pay tribute to the steadfast support he gave. Emily says:
‘Colin was Head of Chambers when I was a pupil and I always respected and liked him hugely. He was approachable, kind and friendly to all and was never an out of touch, inaccessible leader of chambers. He was a true supporter of women at the Bar I think, in part, because he didn’t single anyone out because of appearance or outward demeanour, but just for who they were and how they behaved. As you know, he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and he definitely noticed when there were no female voices being heard.’
Emily and Judith added together ‘we are so proud and glad that he was able to come to our silk party. Thanks Colin, for everything.’
His judicial qualities were eloquently described by John Dyson in his valedictory speech in the RCJ upon Colin’s retirement:
‘Colin Mackay became a judge by the most traditional and for many years most conventional route possible. Radley College; Corpus Christi College, Oxford on an Open Classics Scholarship; a degree in Classical Mods and Greats; Called to the Bar in 1967; QC in 1989; Bencher of Middle Temple in 1995; and High Court Judge in 2001. Our Victorian ancestors would have approved. This looks like the career path of an ambitious and conservative man always destined for a life in the establishment. And in some respects, that is indeed the man.
But things are a little more complicated than that. Those who know Colin well are aware that there is a certain irreverence about him and a certain mischievous aspect to his character. He hates ‘can’t’. He loves pricking balloons of pomposity. He enjoys exposing the self-important for what they are. So he has always been a little schizophrenic about the idea of spending the whole of his life in what is perceived as the Establishment.
When asked whether he would like to be a High Court Judge. “Me, a High Court Judge?” That was a very doubtful proposition. After all, he had spent his whole professional life appearing in front of High Court Judges, and they were, to say the least, a fairly mixed bunch. He had strong views about some of them, and was not afraid to express them, often with devastating wit and a twinkle of the eye. But after the predictable doubts and concerns about becoming even more mired in the Establishment, he said yes.
And what a superb High Court Judge he has been. He is a natural. And how he has loved it too. From the start, he displayed all the qualities needed. A strong sense of fair play; an unerring sense of where the justice of the case lay; bags of common sense; and a refusal to get bogged down in the niceties and complexities of unintelligible decisions of the House of Lords. How many times have I heard it said that he is a ‘safe pair of hands.’ So often when a judge has been needed for a particularly sensitive and difficult trial, the cry has gone out ‘call for Mackay’. And so it is that he has tried many high profile and tricky cases such as the Potters Bar rail crash case and the Glasgow bomb case, to name but two. So far as I am aware, he has never come to grief.
Despite his very English education and career, his Scottish roots mean a great deal to him. When he delivered the Reader’s Feast address in the Middle Temple, he did not read a learned lecture on some aspect of English law or about the exploits and achievements of one of our forebears whose portraits adorn the walls of the Inn. Instead, he recited Tam O’Shanter in a wonderful Scottish accent that was so strong that I fear some of his audience thought he was speaking a foreign language; and, of course, he was. Every year, together with his dear wife Rosie and friends, he goes to the Isle of Mull for a few days’ walking at the end of May. The midges recognise a good judge when they meet one and seem to treat him with respect. Sadly, the same cannot be said for Rosie.’
On a rather more personal note, I would like to pass on some of my own memories of Colin. He was my first pupil-master. My relationship with him was really the first grown-up one I had ever had. In those days the skills of being a barrister were passed on just by the pupil listening and watching; and I learnt more in in those six months than I have ever done before or since; not just about the practice of law, but also about how to navigate life.
The first lesson I learnt, in my first week, was delivered with humour but emphasis: that fluorescent pink socks and winklepickers were probably not to be worn in a barristers’ chambers, however forward-thinking it might see itself to be.
The second, more important, lesson – which has taken me slightly longer to take on board, and which I fear I may never be able fully to embrace – is to avoid the barristers’ elephant-trap that Colin described as ‘the anxious display of knowledge’. So easy to spot in others; so hard to detect in oneself.
But the most important of the lot was that there are many ways to be a good barrister. Colin and Walter Aylen shared a room in 2 Garden Court. Wally’s desk was opposite Colin’s, by the window but facing the door (although he did seem to spend a lot of time with his back to us gazing out of the window across Middle Temple Gardens as he ruminated on strategies for his cases). My desk was between the two. Wally was by this time just in silk; Colin was a very successful junior. They could not have been more different. Even given my inexperience of law and of life, seeing each of them in action made it plain to me that these were two very different ways of dealing well with the same job: Colin with his rigorous Scots economy of language, and indeed thought and expression; Wally with his byzantine way of expressing in five sub-clauses what might have been stated in one phrase. Each of these (as I realised when I saw them in action) was a perfectly valid way of doing our job. This had not struck me until then, but I have never forgotten it since – how much we can choose our identity as a barrister just as we can choose it in other ways.
When I was his pupil Colin was still expressing his own identity by riding his motorcycle (which once got stolen from outside court), by playing hockey, and by smoking a pipe. He had apparently, shortly before my arrival, shaved off his Zapata moustache…
Finally, something slightly whimsical; I hope none the worse for that. I joined chambers in the early days of desktop computers: many will recall that, before we were offered photographic screensavers, we could choose a short bit of text scrolling repeatedly across the screen. Colin had one such. It simply read ‘Where can we live but days?’
Colin knew his poetry. And the very short poem from which that line comes, Days, by Philip Larkin, seems to me to say much about Colin and his view of the world. It is, I hope, a fitting way to conclude this statement of our collective memory of him.
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields
In summary, in one short sentence: we all loved Colin. And we all send our love now to Rosie, and to Polly, Alex and Archie, and to their children Maya, Ava, Summer and Ella, doing so in memory of a truly great man.
Obituary kindly written by Master Charles Cory-Wright.
