Sir
Edward Grimwood Mears
Chief justice of the High Court of Judicature at Allahabad, India
Personal details
Born21 January 1869
Died20 May 1963
SpouseMargaret Tempest
RelationsAlex Paton (grandson)
Alma materExeter College, University of Oxford

Sir Edward Grimwood Mears KCIE (21 January 1869 - 20 May 1963) was a British barrister, who gave up his practice at the bar to work on the Committee on Alleged German Outrages, which looked at the 1914-15 German atrocities in Belgium. He was appointed secretary of the Dardanelles Commission in return for a knighthood, worked on the reply to the The German White Book, and in 1916 was part of the Royal Commission on the Easter Rising in Ireland.

In 1919, Mears was appointed chief justice of the High Court of Judicature at Allahabad, India.

Early life and family

Edward Grimwood Mears was born on 21 January 1869,[1] the only son of William Mears of Winchester.[2] He graduated from Exeter College, University of Oxford, in 1893 and two years later was called to the bar at the Inner Temple.[2]

In 1896, he married Annie, daughter of G. P. Jacob of Bryngoleu, Shawford.[1] They had a son, Brigadier-General Gerald Grimwood Mears and a daughter, Isabel,[1] whose son was the noted gastroenterologist, Alex Paton.[3] After the death of his wife Annie in 1943, Mears in 1951 married her cousin, Margaret Tempest, an author and illustrator of children's books.[4]

First World War

At the request of the British government, Mears gave up his practice at the bar to work on the Bryce Commission, also known as the Committee on Alleged German Outrages, which looked at the 1914-15 German atrocities in Belgium.[5][6][7] He worked on the reply to The German White Book.[6][8] In 1915 he was appointed secretary of the Dardanelles Commission, in return for a knighthood.[9][10] The following year, he was appointed secretary to the Royal Commission on the Easter Rising in Ireland.[7][11] In 1918, he was Lord Reading's assistant on a trip to Washington,[7] when he represented Britain on the inter-allied cereal committee.[2]

High Court of Judicature at Allahabad

In 1919, Mears was appointed chief justice of the High Court of Judicature at Allahabad, India.[12] He despised Indian nationalism and during his time in Allahabad, he tried to persuade Jawaharlal Nehru to become education minister for the British government in India.[13][14][15]

In India, Mears acted as an intermediary between the then viceroy Edward Wood (later Lord Irwin) and key leaders in the Indian National Congress.[16][17] On 24 March 1929, Mears met with Motilal Nehru at the residence of Tej Bahadur Sapru.[16][17] There, he heard of the request for Dominion status of India.[16][17] It was subsequently at Mears' suggestion to Irwin that a round table conference was convened to discuss the request.[16][17]

Publications

Death

Mears died in 1963 in Ipswich.[7][18]

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Her husband | Margaret Mary Tempest". Retrieved 19 January 2020.
  2. 1 2 3 Walford, Edward (1860). The county families of the United Kingdom; or, Royal manual of the titled and untitled aristocracy of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Dalcassian Publishing Company. p. 921. GGKEY:LS5B277K36E.
  3. ↑ "Munks Roll details for Alexander Paton". munksroll.rcplondon.ac.uk. Retrieved 17 January 2020.
  4. ↑ "Suffolk Artists - Tempest, Margaret Mary". suffolkartists.co.uk. Retrieved 18 January 2020.
  5. ↑ Lipkes, Jeff (2007). "Appendix: the report of the British Committee on the alleged German outrages (RBC)". Rehearsals: The German Army in Belgium, August 1914. Leuven University Press. pp. 690–693. ISBN 978-90-5867-596-5.
  6. 1 2 Macleod, Jenny (2004). "1. The official response - the Dardanelles Commission". Reconsidering Gallipoli. Manchester University Press. p. 27. ISBN 0-7190-6742-1.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Gilbert, Martin (2015). Winston S. Churchill: The Challenge of War, 1914–1916. Hillsdale, Michigan: Rosetta Books. p. 1919. ISBN 978-0-7953-4451-0.
  8. ↑ "A reply to the German white book on the conduct of the German troops in Belgium". (1916)
  9. ↑ Shandler, Nina (2009). "21. Opening the Defense". The Strange Case of Hellish Nell: The Story of Helen Duncan and the Witch Trial of World War II. Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-81438-9.
  10. ↑ Bell, Christopher M. (2017). Churchill and the Dardanelles. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 225. ISBN 978-0-19-870254-2.
  11. ↑ Macleod, Jenny (2001). "General Sir Ian Hamilton and the Dardanelles Commission". War in History. 8 (4): 418–441. doi:10.1177/096834450100800403. ISSN 0968-3445. JSTOR 26013908. S2CID 159552637.
  12. ↑ "Chief Justices of the High Court of Judicature at Allahabad". www.allahabadhighcourt.in. Retrieved 18 January 2020.
  13. ↑ Chandrachud, Abhinav (2015). An Independent, Colonial Judiciary: A History of the Bombay High Court during the British Raj, 1862–1947. Oxford University Press. p. 210. ISBN 978-0-19-908948-2.
  14. ↑ Varma, Himendra Nath (2019). My Allahabad Story. New Delhi: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 163. ISBN 978-93-88038-02-7.
  15. ↑ Nehru, Jawaharlal (1936). Jawaharlal Nehru: An Autobiography. Delhi: Oxford University Press. pp. 100–102.
  16. 1 2 3 4 Bose, Mihir (2004). "8. The many fronted war". Raj, Secrets, Revolution: A Life of Subhas Chandra Bose. London: Grice Chapman Publishing. p. 92. ISBN 0-9545726-4-5.
  17. 1 2 3 4 Mukherjee, Rudrangshu (2015). Nehru and Bose: Parallel Lives. Penguin Books Limited. p. 64. ISBN 978-93-5118-849-0.
  18. ↑ "Sir Edward Grimwood Mears (1869-1963) | Soberton History". www.soberton.hol.es. Retrieved 8 July 2023.

Further reading

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