Ronald Waterhouse

Sir Ronald Gough Waterhouse, GBE (8 May 1926 – 8 May 2011) was a judge of the High Court of England and Wales between 1978 and 1996. As a judge his highest profile case was when he presided over the acquittal of comedian Ken Dodd on charges of tax evasion. Immediately upon his retirement he led a three-year inquiry into the North Wales child abuse scandal, which reported in 2000.

Ronald Gough Waterhouse was born in Holywell, Flintshire, North Wales, one of five children of a textile mill manager who was also a prominent local Liberal politician. He studied at Holywell Grammar School, trained as a pilot with the RAF Volunteer Reserve, and began studying law at St John's College, Cambridge. Returning to university after the Second World War, he became President of the Cambridge Union in 1950, and was called to the bar in 1952.

He established a common law practice in London and on the Wales and Chester Circuit, and, in 1959, stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as the Labour candidate for West Flintshire. He was junior counsel at the Aberfan Inquiry in 1966, and junior prosecuting counsel at the trial of the Moors murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. He took Silk to become Queen's Counsel in 1969. In 1970-71, he chaired an inquiry into government policy on rabies prevention, which recommended stringent controls on the import of cats and dogs into Britain. He became a High Court judge in 1978, and was knighted the same year. He sat initially in the Family Division and later, from 1988, in the Queen’s Bench Division where he presided over Ken Dodd's trial in 1989.