Hugh Beadle
Sir Thomas Hugh William Beadle, was a Rhodesian lawyer, politician and judge who served as Chief Justice of Southern Rhodesia from March 1961 to November 1965, and as Chief Justice of Rhodesia from November 1965 until April 1977. He came to international prominence against the backdrop of Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain in November 1965, upon which he initially stood by the British Governor Sir Humphrey Gibbs as an adviser; he then provoked acrimony in British government circles by declaring Ian Smith's post-UDI administration legal in 1968.
Born and raised in the Southern Rhodesian capital Salisbury, Beadle read law in the Union of South Africa and in Great Britain before commencing practice in Bulawayo in 1931. He became a member of the Southern Rhodesian Legislative Assembly for Godfrey Huggins's ruling United Party in 1939. Appointed Huggins's Parliamentary Private Secretary in 1940, he retained that role until 1946, when he became Minister of Internal Affairs and Justice; the Education and Health portfolios were added two years later. He retired from politics in 1950 to become a Judge of the High Court of Southern Rhodesia. In 1961, he was knighted and appointed Chief Justice of Southern Rhodesia; three years later he became president of the High Court's new Appellate Division and a member of the British Privy Council.
Beadle held the Rhodesian Front, the governing party from 1962, in low regard, dismissing its Justice Minister Desmond Lardner-Burke as a "small time country solicitor". As independence talks between Britain and Southern Rhodesia gravitated towards stalemate, Beadle repeatedly attempted to arrange a compromise. He continued these efforts after UDI, and brought Harold Wilson and Smith together for talks aboard. The summit failed; Wilson afterwards castigated Beadle for not persuading Smith to settle.
Beadle's de jure recognition of the post-UDI government in Rhodesia in 1968 outraged the Wilson government and drew accusations from the British Prime Minister and others that he had furtively supported UDI all along. His true motives remain the subject of speculation. After Smith declared a republic in 1970, Beadle continued as Chief Justice; he was almost removed from the Imperial Privy Council, but kept his place following Wilson's 1970 electoral defeat soon after. Beadle retired in April 1977 and thereafter sat as an acting judge in special trials for terrorist offences.
Early life and education
Thomas Hugh William Beadle was born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, on 6 February 1905, the only son and eldest child of Arthur William Beadle and his wife Christiana Maria. He had two sisters. The family was politically conservative and favoured joining the Union of South Africa during the latter years of Company rule, sharing a firm consensus that Sir Charles Coghlan and his responsible government movement were, in Beadle's recollection, "a pretty wild bunch of jingoes". Responsible government ultimately prevailed in the 1922 referendum of the mostly white electorate, and Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing colony the following year.After attending Salisbury Boys' School, Milton High School in Bulawayo and Diocesan College, Rondebosch, Beadle studied law at the University of Cape Town. He completed his Bachelor of Laws degree in 1928, then continued his studies in England as a Rhodes Scholar at The Queen's College, Oxford. There he played rugby and tennis for the college, boxed for the university and qualified as a pilot with the Oxford University Air Squadron. On 16 July 1928, Beadle received his commission as a Pilot Officer in the Reserve of Air Force Officers, Royal Air Force. On 16 January 1930, he was promoted to the rank of Flying Officer, was transferred to Class C in 1931 and completed his service with the RAF on 16 July 1933. He graduated with a second-class Bachelor of Civil Law degree in 1930, and soon after was called to the English bar. He briefly read in London chambers before commencing practice in Bulawayo in 1931.
In 1934, he married Leonie Barry, a farmer's daughter from Barrydale in the Cape of Good Hope; they had two daughters.
Political and judicial career
MP and Cabinet minister
After returning to Southern Rhodesia, Beadle took an interest in politics; he joined the United Party, created from the former Rhodesia Party and the conservative faction of the Reform Party to contest the 1934 general election. He was attracted to the United Party not so much by its policies but by his admiration for its leading figures—he considered the Prime Minister Godfrey Huggins "a man of the calibre I think of Rhodes". The Southern Rhodesian electoral system allowed only those who met certain financial and educational qualifications to vote. The criteria were applied equally to all regardless of race, but since most black citizens did not meet the set standards, the electoral roll and the colonial Legislative Assembly were overwhelmingly from the white minority. The United Party broadly represented commercial interests, civil servants and the professional classes.Beadle stood in Bulawayo South in the 1934 election, challenging Harry Davies, the Labour Party leader. Davies defeated Beadle by 458 votes to 430, but the United Party won decisively elsewhere and formed a new government with 24 out of the 30 parliament seats. Huggins, who remained prime minister, held Beadle in high regard and made him a close associate. In the 1939 election, Beadle won a three-way contest in Bulawayo North with 461 votes out of 869, and became a United Party MP. Beadle was seconded to the Gold Coast Regiment with the rank of temporary captain following the outbreak of the Second World War, but was released from military service at the request of the Southern Rhodesian government to serve as Huggins's Parliamentary Secretary, "with access to all ministers and top-ranking officials on the PM's business to speed up affairs". He held this post from 1940 to 1946, during which time he was also Deputy Advocate General for the Southern Rhodesian armed forces. In the 1945 New Year Honours, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. For his service during the war, Beadle was also honoured by the King of the Hellenes with the rank of Officer of the Order of the Phoenix.
In the first post-war election in 1946, Beadle defeated Labour's Cecil Maurice Baker in Bulawayo North by 666 votes to 196. He was appointed Minister of Justice and Minister of Internal Affairs. The same year he was made a King's Counsel. Two years later, after retaining his seat in the 1948 election with a large majority, he was assigned two more portfolios, those of Education and Health. Around this time he turned down an approach from a group of Liberal and rebel United Party MPs to challenge Huggins's premiership. Beadle had entered the Cabinet at a time when relations between the United Party and the British Labour Party were warming. He formed a good relationship with Aneurin Bevan, the UK Minister of Health, and put considerable work into attempting to create a Southern Rhodesian system similar to National Insurance in Britain. These efforts were largely unsuccessful, but did lead to a maternity grant for white mothers, nicknamed the "Beadle baby scheme". Beadle retired from politics in 1950 to accept a seat on the Southern Rhodesian High Court. This decision surprised many of his contemporaries; Beadle would explain later that he left politics as he did not feel he would work well under his United Party colleague Edgar Whitehead, whose subsequent rise to the premiership he correctly predicted. Having served for more than three years as a member of the Executive Council of Southern Rhodesia, he was granted the right in August 1950 to retain the title "The Honourable" for life.
Judicial career
Beadle filled the seat on the High Court bench vacated by Sir Robert Tredgold, who had just been appointed Chief Justice of Southern Rhodesia. Despite his close relationship with Huggins, Beadle had strong misgivings regarding Federation with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which became Huggins's flagship project. Beadle argued that since the British government would never devolve indigenous African affairs to Federal responsibility, native policy in the three territories would never be co-ordinated, meaning "the thing was bound to crash". Nevertheless, Huggins sent him to London in 1949 to discuss the legal problems of the proposed Federation with the British government. Beadle later expressed regrets that he had not played a bigger role in drawing up the constitution for the Federation, which was inaugurated as an indissoluble entity in 1953, following a mostly white referendum in Southern Rhodesia. Huggins spent three years as Federal Prime Minister before retiring in 1956. Whitehead became Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia in 1958.After Leonie's death in 1953, Beadle married Olive Jackson, of Salisbury, in 1954. He later said that he was repeatedly asked to resign from the bench to become the Federal Minister of Law or stand for Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, but "didn't regard any of the issues as crucial enough to warrant my going back". Beadle's biographer Claire Palley describes him as "a learned, fair but also adventurous judge". He was appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in the 1957 New Year Honours. In August 1959, amid rising black nationalism and opposition to the Federation, particularly in the two northern territories, Beadle chaired a three-man tribunal on the Southern Rhodesian government's preventive detention of black nationalist leaders without trial during the disturbances. He upheld the government's actions, reporting that the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress had disseminated "subversive propaganda", encouraged racial hatred, intimidated people into joining and undermined the authority of tribal chiefs, government officials and police.
In 1960, Beadle was a member of the Monckton Commission on the Federation's future. According to Aidan Crawley, a British member of the commission, Beadle began the process "as a radical advocate of white supremacy" but later expressed markedly different views. The commissioners "hardly agreed on anything", in Beadle's recollection. While not recommending dissolution, the Monckton report was strongly critical of the Federation. It advocated a wide range of reforms, rejected any further advance towards Federal independence until these were implemented, and called for the territories to be permitted to secede if opposition continued. Beadle was knighted in the 1961 New Year Honours and the same year appointed Chief Justice of the High Court of Southern Rhodesia. A primary school in Bulawayo was named after him. In Mehta v. City of Salisbury, a case challenging the racial segregation of a public swimming pool, Beadle decided that apartheid made precedents in South African case law invalid, ruled that the plaintiff's dignity had been unlawfully affronted, and awarded him damages. Following continued black nationalist opposition to the Federation, particularly in Nyasaland, the British government announced in 1962 that Nyasaland would be allowed to secede. This was soon extended to Northern Rhodesia as well, and at the end of 1963 the Federation was dismantled.
Whitehead's United Federal Party was defeated in the 1962 Southern Rhodesian general election by the Rhodesian Front, an all-white, firmly conservative party led by Winston Field whose declared goal was independence for Southern Rhodesia without major constitutional changes and without commitment to any set timetable regarding black majority rule. RF proponents downplayed black nationalist grievances regarding land ownership and segregation, and argued that despite the racial imbalance in domestic politics—whites made up 5% of the population, but over 90% of registered voters—the electoral system was not racist as the franchise was based on financial and educational qualifications rather than ethnicity. Beadle expressed an extremely low opinion of the RF. Ian Smith, who replaced Field as prime minister in 1964, was in Beadle's eyes an unconvincing leader; Desmond Lardner-Burke, the Justice Minister, was a "fascist" and a "small time country solicitor ... incapable of producing correct documents for an undefended divorce action". The same year Smith took over, Beadle became a member of the Privy Council in London and president of the new Appellate Division of the Southern Rhodesian High Court. In this latter role, he blocked a Legislative Assembly act to extend periods of preventive restriction outside times of emergency, ruling it against the declaration of rights contained in Southern Rhodesia's 1961 constitution.