Lord Edmund-Davies

Herbert Edmund Edmund-Davies, Baron Edmund-Davies of Aberpennar, PC (15 July 1906 – 26 December 1992) was a British judge.

Born Herbert Edmund Davies at Mountain Ash (Welsh: Aberpennar), Glamorgan (now in Rhondda Cynon Taf), Wales, he was the third son of Morgan John Davies and Elizabeth Maud Edmunds. Davies was educated at Mountain Ash Grammar School, King's College London and Exeter College, Oxford, where he received the Vinerian Scholarship. Called to the Bar at Gray's Inn in 1929, he worked as examiner and lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1930 and 1931. During the Second World War, he served in the Army Officers' Emergency Reserve and in the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

He was Recorder of Merthyr Tydfil from 1942 to 1944, of Swansea from 1944 to 1953 and of Cardiff from 1953 to 1958. Between 1953 and 1964, Davies was chairman of the Denbighshire Quarter Sessions. He was knighted in 1958 (becoming Sir Edmund Davies) when the Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir appointed him a High Court Judge of the Queen's Bench Division (as Mr Justice Edmund Davies), a post he held until 1966. Davies's name almost immediately attracted public attention when it fell to him to try a German named Guenther Podola, who had shot and killed a police sergeant; Podola was convicted of capital murder and hanged in November 1959. In 1964 he was sent to Aylesbury to try the notorious Great Train Robbery (1963) case. The severity of the sentences he passed became and has remained controversial.

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