Gerald Gardiner, Baron Gardiner
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The Right Honourable The Lord Gardiner CH PC QC |
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Lord Gardiner in 1977.
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| Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain | |
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In office 16 October 1964 – 19 June 1970 |
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| Monarch | Elizabeth II |
| Prime Minister | Harold Wilson |
| Preceded by | The Lord Dilhorne |
| Succeeded by | The Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 30 May 1900 |
| Died | 7 January 1990 (aged 89) |
| Nationality | British |
| Political party | Labour |
| Spouse(s) | (1) Lesly Trounson (d. 1966) (2) Muriel Box (1905–1991) |
| Alma mater | Magdalen College, Oxford |
Gerald Austin Gardiner, Baron Gardiner, CH PC QC (30 May 1900 – 7 January 1990) was a British Labour politician, who served as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain from 1964 to 1970 and during that time he introduced into British law as many reforms as any Lord Chancellor had done before or since. In that position he embarked on a great programme of reform, most importantly setting up the Law Commission in 1965.
His father was Robert Septimus Gardiner (died 16 November 1939) and his mother was Alice von Ziegesar (died 31 January 1953), daughter of Count von Ziegesar and granddaughter of Dionysius Lardner. Gardiner was born in Chelsea, London and attended Harrow School. When his father visited him at Harrow he noticed a copy of the Nation, later incorporated into the New Statesman, lying around and yelled that no other son of his would attend a school where such publications were openly displayed. He was as good as his word, and Gerald's two brothers were sent to Eton.
When Gardiner was at Magdalen College, Oxford in the 1920s, he published a pamphlet on pink paper which resulted in his being . A woman undergraduate had suffered the same fate a few days previously for climbing into a men's college after a dance. Gardiner, characteristically, rushed to her defence and the Vice-Chancellor, Lewis Richard Farnell, notoriously out of touch with the post-war generation, asked Gardiner to leave at the intolerable hour of six in the morning; any later hour, Farnell knew, would have meant a sympathetic funeral procession several hundred strong. The girl to whose defence Gardiner had so gallantly flown was later a film critic, Dilys Powell.
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