A story from the Heywood Advertiser, 4 January 1901, about Lord Morris, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench for Ireland (1887-1889) and Lord of Appeal in Ordinary in the House of Lords (1889-1900).

Even after his elevation to the House of Lords, Lord Morris continued to be referred to in Ireland as ‘Mickey,’ just as Sir Peter O’Brien, his successor as Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, was generally referred to by all concerned as ‘Pether’.

“AN IRISH JUDGE.

A good story is told of Lord Morris, the distinguished Judge, who has never lost the rich brogue he picked up in the West of Ireland. He was once engaged in hearing a horse-poisoning case, and there was a question as to the number of grains of a drug which could be safely administered to the animal. “Tell me this,” said his Lordship to a doctor: “wouldn’t the twelve grains kill the divil himself if he swallowed them?” The doctor was annoyed, and pompously replied, “I don’t know, my Lord; I never had him for a patient.” From the bench came the answer: “Ah, no, dochter, ye niver had, more’s the pity! The old bhoy’s still aloive.”

The last few decades of the 19th century saw an influx of Irish lawyers to London who saw no reason to change their accent, being of the view that English was spoken better in Ireland than anywhere else in the world. The brogue, as it was known, was not confined to Catholic lawyers. Sir Edward Carson, a Protestant, likewise possessed a discernable Irish lilt, though with a cadence belonging to Dublin rather than Galway.

Image above of ‘An Irish Lawyer,’ (Lord Morris himself, as depicted by Leslie Matthew Ward in Vanity Fair) via Artvee.

A biography of Lord Morris by Patrick Geoghegan, from the Dictionary of Irish Biography, is available here.