Wright Robert Alderson

(Bearbeiten)

Biografie:
Robert Alderson Wright (1869 – 1964)
Lord Wright, a former Judge of the High Court, Master of the Rolls, and Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, died on June 27 last in his ninety-fifth year. He had been a member of the Alpine Club since 1910. He was educated privately and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1896 with First Class Honours in the Classical Tripos, and where he was a Fellow from 1899 to 1905.
He was called to the Bar (Inner Temple) in 1900, specialising in Commercial law, taking silk in 1917, and in 1925 being appointed to the Bench. Seven years later he was made a Lord of Appeal, but was induced to accept the Mastership of the Rolls in 1935, a position that he held at his own desire for only two years, when he was re-appointed Lord of Appeal, a position he finally resigned in 1947. Both in the House of Lords and on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council he made his presence felt, but he was probably not widely known to the public until, in 1945, he was elected Chairman of the United Nations War Crimes Committee, which had the heavy and disagreeable task of collecting the material that was later brought forward in the charges made at the Nuremberg trials. W right, on the invitation of the Australian Government,
also attended the similar trials in Japan. It was said that he never fully got over the shocks he sustained during these war crimes Investigations.
As a mountaineer Lord W right made no pretences to distinction; he took up the pursuit rather late in life, and qualified for the A. C. on the strength of four seasons, 1907 to 1910, involving a series of standard climbs in the Valais, Dauphine and Mont Blanc districts, his principal achievements being the Weisshorn, Matterhorn (traverse), Mont Blanc traverse from Courmayeur by the Dome route, Meije (traverse), and Charmoz and Grepon traverses. The First World War interfered with his mountaineering career, and it was not until 1920, when over fifty, that he climbed again; he embodied his account of an attempt on Mont Blanc with an American, Howard Townsend, a dozen years his senior, in August, 1920, in a privately printed pamphlet, A Little Known Ascent of Mont Blanc. A storrn drove them back on the Bosses ridge soon after leaving the Vallot hut.
He contributed to the A.J. (vol. 6r, p. 371) the obituary notice of his old friend Lord Schuster, but it must be long since he visited the Club and he was probably little if at all known to the majority of its members. But over half a century of membership is an achievement for which we may remain grateful, and in the world at large his death removes a figure of decided distinction.
T. S. Blakeney
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 69, 1964, Seite 330-331


Geboren am:
1869
Gestorben am:
27.06.1964