Between January and May 2015 Professor Cornish was interviewed three times, to record his reminiscences of over forty years of research and teaching in Oxford, LSE and Cambridge. The interviewer is Lesley Dingle.
The interviews were recorded, and the audio version is available on this website with transcripts of those recordings:
– First Interview (12 January 2015): Early Years
– Second Interview (13 March 2015): Academic Career
– Third Interview (22 May 2015): Scholarly works
For more information, see the Squire website at https://www.squire.law.cam.ac.uk/eminent-scholars-archive
Professor Kish it is a great pleasure to interview you for the archive thank you you have an industrious career you were professor at London School of Economics uh English law for 20 years you retired yeah that’s that’s correct yes you retired from the achair at Cambridge and you have the reputation for
Introducing into the UK system the teaching of intellectual property yes could we start with your early life you were born in 1937 in Adel in South Australia M you are recording this I am oh that’s it okay that’s the main recorder ah over there that’s the that’s the good one need to just
Fine fine um well I thought we should perhaps get things going by by saying just a little about my family background gez and then to its relation to the state or colony of South Australia where eventually I grew grew up because it’s um quite an interesting and distinctive
History from the rest of the history of Australia yes um so should I start on that by say please but your your parents perhaps what you could start with your you know your family background sure my uh father was a a young and poorly paid solicitor when he married my mother in
1935 they both done degrees at ATL University um and uh were were settting down after the worst of the depression I guess is important to remember I was born 2 years after 1935 1937 and my sister was born in 1940 and that’s the family group we made and stayed
Together um one curiosity perhaps is that uh my mother and father were first cousins um two sisters Maring men outside that very close relationship and I always just wondered a bit about whether that affected who we were and what we went on to do um because although it’s been
Accepted since the 17th 18th century that marriage between first cousins is a necessary rule particularly for the landed aristocracy and G Genty in England as they were uh organizing the property Affairs of their next generation down which is very much part of marriage for them uh marriage between first cousins
They were called cousins German and I’ve never quite unod that that must be a derivation from Jan should think um they they were thoroughly permitted and and heavily relied on in some circumstances when there wasn’t a free flow of hes in a particular family but maybe just
A a girl who was inheriting the whole lot eventually so the lot turned on it anyway it became accepted and in our family there was a distinguished Doctor Who said it was perfectly all right so they didn’t married um but both I and my sister in in various ways had some mental
Instabilities much worse in her case than mine I’ve been able to cope uh but she had the other disadvantage of being a rubella baby I wonder if that will be understood uh a mother who is pregnant catches German musics during the pregnancy and it does quite a lot to the
Fetus uh and there was a whole burst of it in just around the beginning of the war in South Australia an epidemic of the actual German music um my poor sister had to have two lots of holes in the heart operated on and it was the most terrible strain on her and
Particularly after that poor woman she um had periods of serious gizoid disturbance times when she couldn’t actually form a statement that made any sense and also a lot of paranoia against people so she uh she B one um contacted cancer in her early 40s and died of it by the tou was
51 gosh so it was really a tragic history yes and my mother of course felt guilty about it always for having had the German mus yes did your sister remain in Australia yeah she toured overseas but yes essentially she she stayed in Australia course she had to live with my
Parents through this really bad time yes and that’s an important factor within the family very but there there it is yes um otherwise my parents were a very happy couple together and we lived a quiet day byday life in the atmosphere of South Australia which was essentially
A Placid kind of place with none too grave distinctions of class for instance right some serious religious differences to Catholics and Protestants but nothing like in for instance the state of Queensland where a third of the population was Catholic that was very unusual for any part of the Empire I think so
Um I would very much like to say something about how South Australia came to be founded and why it’s different so can we turn to that thank you um South Australia was formed as a colony by sending out a small Fleet of ships under the command of Governor Hein
Marsh to be the first representative of the crown in the place um in what was thought to be completely unoccupied and developed land except for whatever Aboriginal tribes used this as part of their their internal lives um so it was being founded on unknown territory which in fact was carved off
From the huge state of New South Wales now New South Wales and then Victoria and then Queensland and then particularly Tasmania had all really been founded to solve the problem of transported convicts from Britain including Ireland and uh South Australia was the only colony in uh Australia which was a free settlement
Entirely and it comes about in the 1830s very significantly I think because by then the idea that the Empire could be a large and continuing block of power used to be said that it can in the end it came to contain a quarter of the earth’s population in a quarter of its area
That’s huge isn’t it yes so how did how did it happen then in South Australia a group of liberal thinkers somewhat radical much influenced in general terms by Jeremy benam and his utilitarian model for judging all political questions of significance had got quite a grip on the public imagination through publishing
And and journals and so forth and some of them had got into positions in government at quite a high level by 1830 1832 is of course the first year where when there is any any real parliamentary reform uh in Britain of the House of Commons uh so it’s all happening at once
It’s a disturbed time in in in Britain to some extent uh in the middle of this there is coming to be considerable concentration on how colonies should develop for the future within the Empire and a young man called Edward gibon Wakefield wrote a letter from Sydney
Where he’d never been but it was being reported on all the time by that that stage and the letter from Sydney had a simple economic plan for free settled uh colonies it was that land would be so sold at 12 and6 an acre at least a high figure for people with some
Capital uh and nothing below and so uh a corporation was formed the South Australia company to go through this unknown piece of territory and set up a free Colony um in which investors would be placing their money through buying land as the main funding of this whole operation to begin with British
Government being represented by a governor and those essential administrators to run any sort of political system but as little as possible so it was very liberal in that sense it was to be the investors who went and the whole point was to reproduce British Country Life Society
The land owners on the one hand and a larger laboring population who would never amass the capital resort to invade the territory of the the upper class so straightforward but with the 12 and six an acre uh there was a formal regulation being imposed by government and really
Whitefield’s thinking was so simple and uh unappreciative of how ful human beings can be well as purposeful and decent and so forth that almost immediately the economy went completely Haywire because at least the British investors sat there buying and selling land in a bull market
And none of the work being done in this patch of scrub there was nothing there um to turn the land to good use whether it was public utility like roads or food production which is very crucial and indeed within 5 years a group of German immigrates who were sort of driven out of
Um the the bit of pressure that was beyond Berlin not very nice territory so they came and they went up into the hills behind avade and began producing food very tough they had to clear the L um it was a better climate because it was somewhat higher not so parching in
The summit not like the the fir have been last freaking um and so they helped to get it going but then people with some intentions to to do things with their land soon enough found that they could um begin to make quite substantial profits particularly in sheep for w wool
To some extent for me much more full wool so to be exported and copper which was found there because a sheep a sheep kicked a piece of rock and it turned out to be copper colored um so the place did show within a decade that it had real economic
Potential and it got going on a broadly private ownership uh employment of cheap labor basis and some somehow survived through that but you I have given some sense of the risk that was involved of the stupidity of thinking you could just say well sell it to you would so much
Yes but it but it got going and there just h a very fascinating history in many ways we can’t begin on it but there are two areas that have something to do with my later career and so I think worth emphasizing the first is that because uh land was being bought and
Sold so rapidly and there were very few lawyers coming out in these first ships if they were coming they probably do some something like running the custom service um and and so titles to the land very soon got mixed up they weren’t properly surveyed so there could be mistakes and
Overlaps and it was very unclear what responsibilities to collaborate in load making and so forth were being imposed on these people so the whole system was pretty much hated by those who wanted to make money out of it and the lawyers were deeply distrusted for a lot of prop it wasn’t directly their
Fault that led uh by the 1850s to a strong movement to take conveyancing of land away from the private lawyers uh and away from it being secret because nobody else could see what the title Deeds were until they B the land or whatever and replace it with a public system of
Registration in which crucially in the argument the government would guarantee and therefore pay compensation to weed out mistakes and get things settled on a pretty straightforward grid pattern it wasn’t little winding Country Roads at all uh so it was certainly possible it with much debated the lawyers kept on saying
That you couldn’t possibly run a conveyancing system except on the one that they knew and loved but public opinion in this small community was so strongly hostile to what had been done between 1836 and 1856 uh that it looked as though there would have to be political moves to
Introduce this public land registry with a government backing um of the of of the exactness of the titles at the same and and this was largely managed may I say by Sir Robert Richard torren who had gone out there to be the person who formed the customs of operation in the early
1840s it’s a bit muddling because his father was Colonel Robert torren and Colonel torren had played a major part in setting up the South Australian company um and giving it its directions uh in various ways because um he was quite a central figure writing in the um Politico
Economic uh world of the times and it connected with the the the larger names like mallik and lassle Senior and so forth who who are the generation after David Ricardo in the political economy movement so the Elder Torrance was all very much part of that and had sent his
Son out because they were all the family was interested in what would happen in this Colony that they helped to create so it was the younger torren the man who becomes Sir Robert Richard torren after afterwards an MP for Cambridge would you believe yes when he came back to England in
1860s but before that he’d gone ahead with a will and seen the registered title would be set up but he did one other vital thing to respond to political strain was to create a second professional body alongside the lawyers who were both barristers and solicitors a second body of land agents
Who were just knowledgeable in how to transfer title on this new register which is going to take up all the land and the col and uh he got his act through in 1858 and for a short while he became the the premier the leading politician of the colony but because 2 years before
That in 1856 it had been granted limited independence with a two two chamber legislature so things were moving strongly towards something like a more formed political Community as well as all land stuff yes and the effect of course was since the land agents could charge a good deal less than didn’t have
To to find a long period of training and so forth they just learned about how you’d run the titles register and they became a large and successful profession because their fees were cheaper than the lawyers and the consequence of that was that in South Australia the legal profession was very
Much reduced in its importance and size compared for instance with the uh Eastern Seaboard colonies of Australia and it was still essentially like that certainly when my father trained in the 1920s as a solicitor and when we our group of law students were going through in the second half of the
1950s that is very interesting that would have been the career that the prospect that awaited you had you remained there it would indeed yes uh certainly um the state overall state from 1901 onwards as part of the Commonwealth so they turned from being colonies into States the state of South
Australia by the 1970s is producing more commercial demands on the lawyers agreement because there was grow growth of mining uh a growth in the car industry which was conducted in South Australia was wages were cheaper than in the eastern states economics dominates so much of this uh early early early
History and that really brings me to the second special point I’d like to make which is that of course any decent reasonably liberal Society is going to breed moral ideas and want them inculcated particularly for Education all the Direct Services of religions and South Australia had to do
A bit of learning about that it had for instance been sent up with no government official to form a South Australian police that had to be done by about 1844 years because convicts started to come from the eastern states when they were released they would have big
Fear but on beyond that and on much wider perspective colon colonization throughout the empire was deeply affected by Christian movements of one kind or another to establish higher moral virtues of one kind or another as well and by 1850 14 years of operation uh the Church of England was
Certainly in a prominent position and from Britain was putting a lot of money into building its position up but numbers of nonconformist sects were moving out as well where the workers came from for instance Cornwall tin mining needed in South Australia so many came um and and many other Nam
Scarcely scarcely heard of in Britain at that stage were also positioning themselves so un fascinating thing that happens very early in South Australia because it doesn’t have so many problems from the convict State States is uh that the Church of England responsibly LED decided not to continue as the state religion it had
Been assumed to be the established church um the Anan Church they asked to surrender and disestablish themselves in response to some pressure from the other sexs of course but this establishment came in 1851 you know long before Welsh disestablishment or Irish disestablishment not in the ethos there
Too in in many ways these Australian colonies were becoming melting pots for new ideas was 10,000 miles away you didn’t have to worry government in in London could only reach by letter or ship transfer of some kind the telegraph doesn’t come until 1870 and that of course makes a huge difference in the
Strength of British interest and all this that’s not till 187 um so the religions were left to get on with it disestablished as far as the Church of England is concerned but interestingly well Le and I I just mentioned the name of the First bishop of Adelaide whose name was Augustus
Schw came out after a successful academic career of Christ Church Oxford um he actually shed gladston would you believe uh he arrived with a goodplay of free and open ideas about education and is very influential he gets there in 1847 and immediately sets up a church school
Intended for the sons of the successful farmers and so forth and it was called the Collegiate School of St Peter this grandiose title College of course reflecting his Oxford experience and just wanting to draw on it um and so that became St peters’s college and I went there and it
Uh it’s also abbreviated in lingo there to Saints I read to Saints yeah and it continues to this day as such it’s been highly successful it isn’t even um it’s it’s unisex it’s a male College still it’s so so much in demand and that’s true of one or two of
The other schools to staby the methodists and the Presbyterians and so forth so uh Bishop short arrives sets up his school straight away the government give him land and he found finds um people Rich enough then mainly in the colony to start putting putting money in a charitable sense so it does
Blossom uh at least to a reasonable extent but that’s not the end of Bishop Short’s interest in the welfare of the community as distinct from worship and and and understanding of complex doct TR he worked purposefully for 20 years to get a university of avalite established and he achieves that in the mid
1870s he still has 5 years to run before he retires and goes back to England so he’s there for 30 years and in many ways the university is probably his most interesting achievement because he was deeply imbued with the ideas that for all the glories of Oxford and Cambridge their syllabuses
Particularly the oxfords which he knew was amazingly 18th century in that it was a training in the classics starting at school and going going on there and not much else modern subjects like any history later than Rome and even mathematics wasn’t stressed as much in
Oxford as it was come to be in Cambridge part of the scientific turn that is such a prominent distinction between the two universities even today um were not regularly taught it was a sort of finishing school for the aristocracy and gentry and the big middle class it began to get more power
And influence particularly after the First Reform Act of 1832 so change was in the air Oxford and Cambridge were batting about the question of how far they could possibly change um Bishop short was quite clear that in a New Colony you had to be teaching the Young Generation what they
Could do for the economy as well and so insists on a a major place for the U the new Sciences like botony like GE geology uh both of which would prove to be directly important engineering and modern languages and some history so that all along it was going
To open on quite a wide purview and when people appeared with money to donate to it who wanted to turn it into their University sit on the council dictate what was going to happen put for rather limited conservative views of what should happen short was just short
With very very dignified of course but he was not standing for that and he set ad University up on a really remarkable path for the number of people who were in this still very small Colony compared with the grow growing New South Wales in Sydney and the growing Victoria in
Melbour they were the other two places that had a University at this stage and there were distinct marks of non suuccess about the university in Sydney in particular that tiny number PS it’s fascinating so it actually was it led the way in terms of many way yes it it established this attitude to
Modern education that you must be able to take a tertiary step and learn what was really tough when you think that you know you as an outsider I look at um South Australia on the map and it seems to me well Adelaide South Australia it’s their faor
It’s a large state in a very very large country but it all seems very remote yes from everything and yet there was this flowering at the the right people in the right time I think we’ now look back on it to say just see um you certainly
Characterized how remote it was and how remote people felt they were they were interested only in the concerns of the colony not the whole of Australia where competition was in the air um where the cities that had big labor populations and therefore the growth of trade unions and rather rather
Belligerent uh way in both Sydney and Melton were a new cause for unrest ad didn’t have much of that um it was a a Placid rather complacent Community uh no great social distinctions people you their place all right um and and that short short had a
Lot to do with that I mentioned this because the University of Adelaide has which is having its 140th anniversary uh has just published a new biography of him in relation to the university and for me at least it’s very interesting very um as you were growing up did you
Feel a sense of remess as you when you were particularly after you sort of got gone through your childhood and you went into Boyhood did you did you feel that you felt isolated at all no I didn’t didn’t know how isolated we were way and
As I was say in a minute I had a chance to come to England for every year when I was 17 and that’s when I realized how cut off we were no newspapers that have any anything much other than idle gossip and content in them um pretty poor well the reg
Facilities were somewhat better because there was a government institution the Australian broadcasting commission sort of on Wan lines to the BBC that there were private commercial uh stations which out were very much more popular um but that that was part of the the educational conspectus people had of
The country that you should have perfect things available to you um and cut off we undoubtedly were you see it now in what is left of the old dominions more in New Zealand because they were poorer than Australia was through the latter half of the the 20th
Century but they two are catching up now and doing more industrial things not so dependent on on sheep and and cattle uh so it’s it’s important to get an imp impression of this because I did some whole other part of through going overseas so young acquire a very strong will to get
To European society and to be part of it I wonder because it has you a bit of experience of it at the right time yes when your mind is completely open yes so before you had that wonderful opportunity that Gap here you had a very happy and a productive fruitful School
Career at Saints so should I say something about Saints please I don’t think there’s a great deal to say any teachers that you recall BS yes uh it had of course only had head Masters who were ordained Priests of the Church of England until about the time that I got
There which was in 1945 uh but it had a full conspectus of Education from a pre prep through a prep to a SE school as we call it and that would lead to doing the compulsory State exams which are set at three levels then
Um and that set a pattern by the law of the state as to what would happen but then complicated arguments about um State funding and the religions particularly as the Catholic Community had grown and it did tend to provide schools for C Catholic boys to some extent girls um which were quite good
Um and so the the Catholics demanded of the state that they would be very substantial subsidies for running what was still their school and as you can imagine some of the orders were they running the school sit christian mothers and so forth um so what did Saints give us over
Time needs to say it was streamed in in intellectual ability terms so by the time you got to the top school top of school there were four classes um and they did adapting things uh I was in the top stream that was all very encouraging what what did
We get we got English literature well taught on the uh languages we had to do two Latin and French in my case very sorry not to have done German because of what happened to me afterwards can’t get all these things right nothing else no Asian languages then they would come within 20
Years after that need to be able to talk to our nearest neighbors um I mean the idea the idea of teating Japanese in Australia in 1945 the end of a war beond Beyond can and just wouldn’t forget to get off the ground so languages maths these are the good old
Days of the slide and the logarithm tables and so forth all gone now completely um in our case I think reasonbly well taught on oldfashioned lines um Divinity of course which mostly meant reading Dorothy El Sayers the man born to be king the whole English speaking world did
That uh and then a sort of science uh track and a sort of Arts track um science was just um physics and chemistry and the the artst track was uh history geography in the main some good teachers particularly those who had either come back from fighting or didn’t
Go but continued to run the school they were old hands but finding by the 1950s finding good new teachers as as they were being brought out from some part of Europe or um Britain Britain and Ireland of course was very difficult it was cly just a huge shortage of man some had
Joined up some had gone to all perhaps oh clearly yeah yes yes if you think of the huge losses yeah all the fractured personalities who came back out of Japanese prisoners camps in unel yeah um but we did then have a particular Headmaster called Colin Gordon who was not ordained perfectly acceptable of
Anglican Christianity but determined to do something to broaden uh quite a clear educative sense our understanding of the world so he brought out people who had um Jews who had had to um escape to Britain mainly a few and uh so he himself was having um a considerable influence on where the
School was going one of the previous head Masters had made sport compulsory and that consisted of PE in the morning between subjects and either compulsory Cricket Run tennis or football was all football in the in the winter and that was Australian woles football a variety of Irish football a very broad
Sense um and sorry this is very sport was very much part of the ethos of of the whole school I’m not a sportsman on TR to I start a good deal on that um but there was a cultural life as well and we also did a school play and I
Appeared in various of those that was fun there was a bit of music but nothing like teaching instruments on a a regular basis to large proportion of the at least people under under the said 12 so nothing to carry through there was no Orchestra and that I was sorry about
Because I’ve always had a strong Keen interest in classical music and hasn’t really shifted so that started in your in your primary years and you were in my primary years I took private lessons I see from teachers who were at the University’s uh conservatorium the Elder conservatorium
Um which had started right at the beginning of the University I could never take to physics I found chemistry much more colorful and has also been quite used to me later life um exra murals Professor Cornish extra murals play that you took part in perhaps did you take part in you know
Dramatic Productions not much whil I was still at school University then filled in and there were various things we did we did reviews and all those things after all that was Dame Edler appearing for the first time in Australian life we all listen to her all
Right strong that has gone on as long as it has sometimes rather embarrassing uh so yes the were things be done I did quite a lot of Music at University as well and that’s a lifelong Pursuit and yes yes it’s been been a good hobby for
Me yes I’m no great performer when it comes to going on the concert platform but uh I’ve always enjoyed it immensely and we did do some good touring around the country districts in Australia when I was when I was a law student so that was excellent as
Well now where have we got to this the university no no my Gap year your Gap Year yes I I wondered about that because I assumed that you went straight from University to Oxford but you obviously had this wonderful introduction I gu it comes after my school career and before
I start my undergraduate degree right so I really was pretty young yes and to contemplate going to England by oneself well of course there went the kind of modern fears that are now about children being let out on their own uh but uh yes my mother went and consulted the
Good Headmaster about me this would be appropriate and he thought I was fidgeting to to get away and do other things I could have stayed on at school for another boring year of directing younger boys how to behave and like that thing um so he backed
It and the opportunity was to go and work with the Reverend tubby Clayton I don’t know whether he’s a name now who means anything to you but should I say just a word about him he was a an army chaplain at the outbreak of the first World War
And you’ll know how terrible northern France and the eum were the Flanders uh for battle conditions trench warfare and gas frightful things happened and Tabby Clayton um set up a house for sort of not so much Recreation as recovery ability to get out and the from the battlefield and Lead something
Like a human existence even if only temporary and in its smallish way it was a great success it was badly badly needed and he had the open strong personality to turn it his way so there was a chapel upstairs and places that people could stay and evening entertainment and so forth
Um and this became known as to H because those are signalers terms for t uh and the actual name for the premises was toet house after a man called tolet who had been killed sometime in 1915 I think was and after the war tuby and many Associates who’ve been involved in
This turned it into a peace movement thinking primary of young men to begin with and those who had survived but with with t acquired a a woman’s women’s go and women’s movement as well the same kinds of concern about uh Christian good communal living finding ways of getting jobs realizing your full
Potential uh out in the workplace essentially and so they started setting up separate houses around London and then in a few provincial cities and it grew as a movement very considerably between the two World Wars which after all that was only 21 years I need to remind
Myself um with the depression in the middle of it so it was one of those movements it’s to died around 1970 and with his great personality disappearing as a figurehead it has gradually W wound down into being a local branch organization where people have the enthusiasm to keep it going but
It’s like rotary and um lions and so forth various encouraging people to do really useful things as a way of forming their own own personalities mostly at a young stage so it certainly had its time it’s it was a great movement and when you
Went across did you go by sea yes yes Dr Southampton perhaps Tilbury which of course was the first big shock shock that I think personally I had because Tilbury is a train into Liverpool Street and in 1955 it was still just bomb Devastation where every looked all of
The East End more or less of gar just living here and there still 10 years after the war yes after your sedate existance yes I never saw anything like that there were very few bits of invasion anywhere in Australia more fighting of course in the terrible conditions of New Guinea but not on
Australia um so Tony Clayton liked to have young men at command who would organize parts of his day and get him where he needed to go exercise a dog um all all this and he had you know an accountant or secretary who stayed up all night writing taking
Dictation all these things and he was also by then Vicor of All Hallows by the Tower a well established church then uh right next the entrance of the Tower of London and so he worked through that Parish which was largely offices and uh made major authorities like the port
Of London Authority was was there it’s a very exciting place to be he had a house and and my PO of that close to where there was a strip of the Roman wall around the city of London which he had done a lot to sort have preserved and
Built it built up again after the war but that’s strongly strongly historical interests yes and doing something about them but all H was very sadly bombed extremely badly and so by the time I got there 55 he was deep in the middle of a campaign to raise from around to H
Effectively throughout the British Empire the money is needed to restore the church and to find the architects who are a good form of firm a good firm of architectural restorers adding where they had to to whatever the building had been but essentially interested in putting back the churches as they had
Been so that was going on and then all these top H branches we visited from L length and depth of of England we went to lend and we went to the ory wonderful yes did you drive to the ory uh we drove to in vess and there was a little plane
And we could take the we landed we had we had to land in Weck first before we went ster flow and you know so much of the war was still very approximate there and tuby himself had spent time as a Chaplain on the orans in the second world
War so he knew a lot of the people and the Navy was much installed in the orle islands um so it was fascinating meeting them and discovering that they were not Scots yes their loyalties were to Norway of if if anything that’s where many of
Them had come from and they’d been a big seafaring group um but certainly from the beginnings of steam onward so separate people we saw them and my father came over from Australia for the first Pho he’d ever had from his dogged solicor in Adel and I think thally
Enjoyed going around with tubby on some of his work including the trip to the or it’s just that was most marvelous opportunity yes it was and in a way sort of the die was cost through that experience sure and tuby seemed to have taken to having St Peter college boys that been a
Couple before me and several afterwards um whil whil he still needed that kind kind of assistance and he was he was pretty hail more or less up to his own which was pretty ELD must have looked to be nearly 90 so yes it was just a great experience
And I met he he didn’t think in class class terms what he did at cour and he was very careful to keep his visiting going to those who might have power and influence over what happened to the movement so we did meet Grand people who lived on H Park all
Right but uh he would go anywhere talk to anybody about their their problems so I learned a lot about humanity and how how you manage it with skill while still being a in his case a very prominent personality if he came into the room everybody talked to him and he talked to
Everybody so yes it was a great experience he found me a trip back I came on one of those old don’t know whether you know Peninsula and orian boats mostly starting with Scottish sounding names and our was the Strath MAV it was was so ancient after 30 years
Use of something that it was one class that’s the first time that the end is n um and uh on the way back found me a a birth CL were usually a few going in a in a in a cgo ship which is going out to St and
That was also an experience ate with the officers learned about the life a lot of gin was drug so absolutely super yes yes it was the thing I I’ve not yet mentioned about the uh the time in England was that tubby Clayton had established a well-funded American funded scheme
For mostly University students to come over particularly from the eastern states of the United States as wiant volunteers W had been the um US ambassador to Britain after Joe Kennedy had to return home um and was was much involved so they came for three months the money was
Found for them and they went and worked in the various settlements and parishes particularly in the East End of London including its Southeast end and in in among of the pictures I’ll show you in a minute there is a picture of the group as a whole and you’ll get
Some impression of just how large it was to organize for gosh they met o for 5 days at the beginning to be briefed really on what they what was going to hit them when they got into these places very different FL and we also together did a large
Trip SE SE and SE and buses I think it was to the war fields of the um of the flers uh that was west of the city of e and and Brussels so the West End of of course terribly battered Belgium much of it still first world war
Battering Still Still seen so it was a tour of the first world war sites that he had known and worked for and yes we walked along lots of remains of trenches we went to passionale and we we saw a lot of the cemeteries which the British in particular had done so beautifully after
The first world war really I just Str still and of course A lot of people are visiting this this year it seem to become a tourist tribe it must have been very moving Professor yes yes it was in a kind of un unstressed manner we we knew what we were looking at
Right and it was great to meet these Young Americans I very few Americans before that and certainly haven’t really kept in touch with most of them we all went off and did our own things you get over overtaken by student life don’t you yes um so that was in the in the summer
That I I was written I also got in three three weeks with the French family to do something about my French in which I bicycles for four days from the a little little plane to me and my bike and my uh suitcase over over to where the S comes
Out into the sea in Normandy and I bicycled up the S really camping at night a tiny tent that I had on your own yes absolutely on my own extraordinary yeah yeah and so it gave me if nothing else the smell of old France because they smoke the
Most humous black tomacco and everywhere you went there was just this smell in the towns and Villages and they were pretty poor still many of them and this uh Journey that you undertook by bik was was this planned by yourself you uh yes we found I can’t
Remember how we found the basic Link in the family except that there was a lady called Miss mcferson who did did this kind of finding for people to place them as French families and she got some small cut something tiny H so I I paid them to have me and I
Guess my parents funded that and you sure it was yes yeah in tried to say the least yeah yeah it’s just so sad to see parison ruin ruined condition suddenly with the Dr FL events last week extraordinary the way they’ve sort of galvanized this response they seem to
Know exactly how they feel about things there’s no ambivalence no it’s what and not going to stand for it whether that lesson is going to be learned so that it all Cals down or just makes it worse so that’s about everything up to uh going to University in what you returned
And you enrolled at Adel and as I understand you did an LLB you didn’t do a pre degree no because that was not the system the system it was simply a law degree right and that all changed in a Australia as you know uh about by about
20 years later when so many more people were going to University there were more universities still in South Australia there was just the University of Adelaide in 1956 when we started so that was where the law degree was and anybody who wanted to become a practicing lawyer
Or eventually a judge would have to go through that channel and had you always planned to do law because of your father no I hadn’t I didn’t have much idea about what I wanted to do at University so in the end I just slipped into doing a law degree
Somehow I had very little impression of what it would be again we had some good teachers um particularly those who were full-time University staff but they were in short supply the uh Law School adade had a professor the benan professor of the law after the donor Who provided it and it
Was occupied by a distinguished man who’d been the road scholar wats dick Blackburn um but he was wanting to move on into practice and did in the end become a federal judge uh and did a fine fine job I think there was a New Zealand Catholic called Daniel Patrick o
Colell who was taking up almost for the first time in Australia public international law he came to Cambridge and came to Cambridge and did yes yes car everywhere on the L of the sea and and all the things he did in his All Too Short career cuz he died in his mid-50s
I didn’t know that did he teach you Professor Kish yes yes he taught us jurist Prudence uh he was certainly a self-willed man so our Juris Prudence of course got as far as the last great Saints as it were catholic W Catholic writings and this kind um in other words the mid 17th
Century and after that it was all Ben just missed out but we learned quite a lot from Dan um and the brothers who came because the the law schools of Australia were beginning to fill up with people from all around the Empire who Could Teach
The common law in some in some sense and some of them were very good some of them were even second generation Australians from immigrants from Europe were able to take a broader look at civil law backgrounds and so forth so it was beginning to change but some of particularly more practical subjects
Uh were simply taught by practitioners and the little adlay legal Community some of them just came and read out somebody else’s notes you know bad as that that’s how we looked land off terrible uh but it was all Darkness some very ear people who talk
To us and there was one Leo Blair who taught us Roman law he had come out with his very young family of three boys or whatever it is including Tony number two uh to the political science department because he was a Scots lawyer trained in in
Edinburgh so he didn’t mind in a year when most of the poent staff are overseas collecting themselves either Dees or Wives um he didn’t mind coming over and teaching Roman law of course it’s part of the Scot’s tradition but particularly when his wife went back with the children to England and he stayed on to finish the year he became a a great social figure in our little little circle of law students
Because we were very small only something just over 20 in it a whole year in the 1950s and that of course all follows from what I said earlier about the legal profession as a whole being tiny in the place because of the the land register
And all that that come in with land age yes challenging the lawyers so uh Leo Blair was great fun he really was tremendous and I hope still stays that way he’s pretty sick I don’t think he’s died but hasn’t hasn’t been easy he’s over in Rex uh I can’t report on
Tony he didn’t come our way i’ have have met him a couple times since um so we got through a respectable uh set of legal subjects yes um much influenced by particularly by those who had been to an English law school such as those who went over on
Road scholarships uh to Oxford and people like Dan O who went to Cambridge because it was the place to do International order then as now yes mcir and L pack big names like that we’re all here right so he got he got the right spot and
Then there was a question of what to do next and most of my group only thought in Australian terms hadn’t been overseas and uh I had and I think that’s where it made all the difference I really couldn’t wait to get to a better a better law school more in the center of
Change on the front of legal legal education and by incredible luck I was in the first year of the British colonal scholarship scheme which is being started between mainly the the at that stage the dominions and and and Britain um and and I was lucky enough to get one of the
Scholarships this was a huge expansion there used to be two two two scholarships a year to get to Britain out of the whole state of South Australia well we W want to be and that’s for all subjects go so it shows you how remote and Pritt it all was comparatively
Speaking it would change quite soon afterwards in much the same Spirit as the robins report induced a vast expansion of University places and so forth in the early 60s uh in this country but on nothing up the scale of course so uh that was the chance to do
To go through Oxford and do the BCL degree uh which is CH are described as the the best law degree in the world I think he was talking just of common lawyers but he didn’t mean such so you arrived probably at the start of the term in the Gloom of us an Oxford
Autum spring absolutely abely not quite the cultural jum Le F that it would have been had you not had that wonderful Gap Year yes that’s why I found it easy but long longing to get back see what had happened to the country in in in four
Years how much had been repaired in the later 50s bringing it back to something more like the civilization it had been um and of course they were exciting years the 60s uh worldwide student student up rest yes well I hit that but I don’t hit that
Until 1968 so we’ll leave that to the next s right course the LSC where I was teaching my then was a a hot bed of radicalism and everybody who piles in on those occasions would be seen on the Battleground right um so Oxford uh Oxford R’s degree then quite
Sensibly in my view so that those who were coming from outside Oxford hadn’t done an undergraduate degree there who were required to do two years study those who’ve been at Oxford did only one year they did just the specialized courses we would have had a year of being trained up to their level
So that we could be with them as it were in in in the second year very nice and of course they’ve changed things now so that most people do it in one years still I right not actually up to date on um so there we were in Oxford and
Suddenly I was amongst a high a cohort of Highly committed legal students the ADL crowd hadn’t been quite like that three or four of us when were uh struggling to do something serious academically there but this was totally different and there were great teachers around did you encounter people like
Heart for example heart I heard deliver the concept of law as he had written it out in his bed in pencil that morning and and gave tourist and I do remember the room being full of strident Americans listening to him because they always had something to say boy they
They crashed in with their own theories and so for so that made it more exciting as well and Herbert har also took was one of a bunch of people who were building up a course on criminology for the first time in Oxford and it was great to have him and some other
Very uh interesting people including rert cross the BL famous blind lawyer of Morgan College Oxford whose real subject was the law of evidence cross on evidence um and a number number of other really significant teachers probably doing better than anything much that had gone on the Oxford before the second
World war and the arrival of the Jewish im immigrates looking for academic posts that of course made such a difference to academic life here as we all learned from the great book by beat and ziman and of course the work of Court Li time you had two entries in the
Book indeed indeed but also kept the whole connection with civil law as a major preoccupation in Cambridge as opposed to the school which believed in particular we should never be joining a European community and the Constitutional changes that were being made at that stage to the idea of parliamentary sovereignty would wreck Us
In the end yes very prominent they represented in Cambridge not only from by people from this country but also people coming from countries like South Africa really cin toy right was very suspicious of what was happening yes and I guess I think Tony we was obviously but I just remember
Reading a book review which used as a to carve somebody Out yes um so in some some respects penage is slow and all that surprisingly given its building reputation in public international law and the difference that someone like h l park was making to the place in that yes a really distinguished scholar so uh in my BCL second year when we were
Doing subject new motions and there was this highly competitive atmosphere going on um in particular learned a lot from the best Scholars my tutor at I was at Wen College the law tutor there was the rable Peter Carter his two subjects were evidence and private international law so we had to opt for
Them as the subjects and we could go off and do criminology Juris prudence and so forth as well and that was that was a really stimulating experience was so I started to look around towards the end of that about how I could stay in Europe and one thing was to go to the
English bar and I did do my V finals at the same time I noticed that no not quite but in the year when I first started teaching I I did that with with a few PS to stay in that um and uh there were other things going on as
Well there was some interesting civil law teaching run by two rival institutes one in Luxembourg I think it was Luxembourg the other in Strasburg in the at Easter year 3 weeks or something but you know it was contact with yeah uh other Traditions uh very likable
People I did go and teach on it myself a bit later on and enjoyed doing that where the money came from it was undisclosed this was people trying to get their own act into position so that they could be some influence like what we would do in warfa 30 years
Later um and it was a chance to do it all in French because French was the long language so yes interesting so it’s sort of this experience must began the sort of germination of some of the ideas which you developed later with um so then there was the possibility of
Teaching in England and uh Mr Carter went down to was a a very Grand friend a bra human autocar FR was at the LC then and and Alo said we haven’t an assistant leadership go uh got need to got anybody to apply so I applied immediately and amazingly after a terrible interview I
Thought got the job so that really fixed things yes f a major event yes your from which from which I yes never didn’t look back no no it was clear I wanted to be a teacher and mother not have a life of dealing with clients and putting Arguments for them and
Trying to think out what the other side was going to say and all that stuff which would have been a career at the bar but I’ll say a word about that when we get on into my career as it developed I think because I did go and
Do a pupilage in order to become a sort of competent intellectual property lawyer yes while teaching at the LSC and that’s looking back you know how are you found time for always yeah I just went in and did them amazing and it was everything was easier what was expected of you was more
Limited there were tests like the re and I couldn’t have had a career like mine doing a lot of little things on a pretty broad scale in the present generation unless there was some magic subject there that no one had ever looked at or was being important for the first
Time look look worth making a career of that’s what Young youngsters face today yes so when we finally come to your scholarly work we’ll be fascinating to hear how you you know you you came from Adelaide you came to this Mia strange foreign milar and you basically picked
Up W that had actually been unnoticed by others and you you ran with it yes it’s very very fascinating that perhaps having come from a strange Mia it gave you some insight into what could be done I I think it did and I found a lot
Of likeminded people at the LSC it was really led by great figures like cro and and G of TR company law they were well ahead of uh much of what was going on in what then regarded as the FR subjects yes things we wouldn’t dream of send kids out out without these days
Yes so well Professor Cornish um in our second interview we could we can hopefully start with your time at LSC take that through until your retirement in Cambridge Okay the third interview will look at the schol work so if you think that there’s anything there’s nothing more
That you can add at this point all I can do is thank you very very much for a truly fascinating account which I’m very very grateful thank you so much yeah well I’ve quite enjoyed having to think back through it all wonder what I should stress so I think I’ve covered what I
Wanted to say thank you