Bill Dovey

Wilfred Robert 'Bill' Dovey KC (10 April 1894 – 12 December 1969) was a judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales in Australia from 1953 to 1964. He was described as colourful, slightly eccentric and irascible, although he had a brilliant legal mind and a Shakespearean vocabulary. His daughter Margaret married the future Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam.

Wilfred Robert Dovey was born in Bathurst, New South Wales in 1894. His father Robert Dovey had been an assistant to William Farrer (Dovey's son William Griffith Dovey later married a relative of Farrer's wife, Nina De Salis). His mother Winifred Isabel Agnes, née Adams, was born in China. He studied at the Sydney Grammar School and the University of Sydney. He served in World War I in New Guinea. He married Mary Dorothy Duncan four days before leaving for Rabaul with the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force in August 1914. After discharge in 1915, he taught at Brisbane Grammar School and studied law at the University of Queensland. He was admitted to the New South Wales Bar in 1922.

He was a keen rugby league player. In 1928 he and some football-playing friends, in post-match liquor-fuelled high spirits, were reputed to have jumped across the then-unfinished spans of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, 134 metres above the water.

He was appointed King's Counsel in 1935. He was an alderman on the Waverley Municipal Council in 1935-36. He was involved in a number of royal commissions and inquiries, such as those on doctors' remuneration for national insurance (1938), the detention of members of the Australia First Movement (1944) and Illegal Activities in the New South Wales Liquor Industry (1951–52); in the latter case he engaged his son-in-law Gough Whitlam as his junior (Whitlam had married Dovey's daughter Margaret in 1942). Dovey represented many criminals in high profile court cases of the day, including the gangland figure, John Frederick "Chow" Hayes and the notorious Sydney identity, Kate Leigh.

...
Wikipedia