Introduction
The Eminent Scholars Archive arose from LMD's association with the late Emeritus Professor Kurt Lipstein. For ten years she was privileged to share a room in the Squire Law Library with this remarkable nonagenarian, and one of the many pleasures of his company was hearing his memories and anecdotes of past and present colleagues from over seventy years in the Faculty. We realised that unless we archived this fascinating information for the Squire Law Library, it would be lost for ever. Sadly, Kurt died in 2006, but not before we had put many of his memories on record.Reference Dingle and Bates1 The significance of this historical material spurred us on to begin interviewing other emeritus academics from a Faculty that has been blessed with more than its fair share of eminent scholars over the decades.
The following is an appreciation of the career of Professor Sir Derek Bowett, supplemented by his own words from interviews Lesley conducted with him.2 We have also included a bibliography of his books, a list of his cases involving the International Court of Justice and some photographs.
Sir Derek's association with the Faculty of Law goes back over six decades to when he entered Downing College as an undergraduate (1948-51). He later became a University Lecturer (1960-76), then Reader in International Law (1976-81), and finally was appointed the Whewell Professor of International Law (1981-91). He was made CBE in 1983 and then knighted for his contributions to International Law in 1998.
School and the Royal Navy (1938-1948)
Derek William Bowett was born in Manchester on 20th April 1927, and started his academic life at The Choir School, Manchester, in 1938. Selected as one of only three from over 200 applicants, Derek fell briefly under the wing of the legendary organist Dr A. W. Wilson and his assistant (later the Cathedral Organist) Mr Norman Cocker.
Figure 1: Law of the Sea Convention, Geneva, 1958. Sir Derek (left) with Marjorie Whiteman, Assistant Legal Advisor, US Department of State. (Identity of seated figure is unknown)
At the outbreak of war in 1939 the boys were temporarily moved to safety in Little Thornton (near Poulton-le-Fylde, just inland from Blackpool), but later, when the precaution was deemed unnecessary because of enemy inaction, they returned to their homes. However, in December 1940, Manchester suffered the “Christmas Blitz” and bombs badly damaged the Cathedral of St Anne's, making the school unusable.
Derek was given a list of alternative schools to attend and, as a consequence, spent his youth, and remainder of the War (1941-45), at the gothic, red-brick pile of William Hulme's Grammar School on Spring Bridge Road, in south Manchester.3 Appropriately, William Hulme, whose life (1631-91) is celebrated in the charity which eventually established the grammar school in 1881, had read law at Brasenose College, Oxford.
Despite the damage in central Manchester, Derek continued to sing in the cathedral choir, and he volunteered for the Royal Navy while he was still a schoolboy. When he emerged from William Hulme's School in 1945 the world was still at war, but the situation rapidly changed.
“I joined the navy when I was at school because it was in ‘44 and I could see the war against Germany was coming to an end. I knew my war would be with the Japanese so I volunteered and was accepted. I thought the war in the Far East would be a naval war and pretty much in the air. So I volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm and I was accepted while still at school.
Finished my high school career in the summer and a fortnight later I was in the navy. But then the Japanese surrendered and so the war was over. It was very expensive training so the navy said “We won't train you unless you sign on for at least three years”. And I didn't want to sign on for three years with no war so I said “No, I won't.” So they said “We won't waste a lot of money training you.”
So I did radar training. I don't like machines. I was competent, but I didn't really like radar work. But I enjoyed the Navy. I was in the Home Fleet minesweeping. Then in the Mediterranean. And then finally I went out to the Far East – to the East Indies. It was three years before they let me out. I came out in December ‘47 and I missed Cambridge. I had to wait until ‘48 to come to Cambridge.”
While in the Far East, Derek served on HMS Norfolk 4, where she was the flagship of the Commander-in-Chief East Indies Station.
Downing College, Cambridge (1948-51)
His application to enter Downing College was made while still in the services, and was based on two pieces of misinformation.
“When I was in the navy in the Far East, I wrote to someone, a former chaplain of Christ's College. I said I wanted to go to Cambridge. He advised Downing because he knew I wanted to do Law. He thought the Master of Downing was an admiral and that there was the Downing Professor in Law. So he thought Downing was a good law college. He was wrong on both counts.”
Despite these hiccups, Derek was accepted and entered the college in 1948.
“But anyway Downing admitted me and off I went. There were two Fellows at Downing. One was a legal historian, Whalley-Tooker. He never taught me. He was a very idle man. He wrote nothing.”
“And there was Clive Parry. He was a good lawyer but not a good teacher…… He was a very funny man but you couldn't take notes. Just funny stories. We had one exam one year I sat for the LLB. The examination bore no relation to the lectures. I met Clive Parry on King's Parade and he said “How did you like the paper?” and I said “It had nothing to do with your lectures.” He said “No, I know. I set it like that”. He was a strange man.”
Derek Bowett was an industrious and strongly principled student who fitted comfortably into a system that had retained most of its pre-War characteristics.
“Cambridge was the old Cambridge of many rules and regulations which I didn't mind. And the law faculty was not as good as it is now. People who held chairs were not as good as they now are”.
Despite this frank judgment, there were two professors for whom he had a very high opinion. One was Professor Sir Hersch Lauterpacht who was then Whewell Professor of International Law:
“He was the best. He was very, very good… He was very able. McNair spotted him and thought he was an up and coming man and he was right”. Nevertheless, apropos Lauterpacht's weekly seminars “Hersch didn't suffer fools gladly. He was rather impatient. But he was a kind man and very good. He loved international law and he was a good teacher.”
The other was McNair himself, who had been the Whewell Professor (1935-7) and was at the time a judge on the International Court of Justice. When asked if he had met McNair, Sir Derek replied
“Many times. When he was a judge, and later when he was in the House of Lords. When he wanted to make a speech in the Lords he would come and talk to me about it first. I liked old McNair. He was a good man. He was a very kind man. A great man”.
Derek Bowett had won a Whewell Scholarship in 1951 (he said that his closest rival was Stephen Schwebel, Judge and later President of the International Court of Justice), but despite his academic success, Derek's ambition was to enter legal practice. In the end he was influenced by Sir Hersch Lauterpacht.
“He [Lauterpacht] asked me what I was going to do after Cambridge and I said “go to the bar”. He said “what will you live on?” I said “my ex-service grant which was £270 per year”. He said “why don't you teach?” Lauterpacht told me Manchester wanted a young lecturer and they paid £450 a year. So I applied for the job. I went to Manchester because of money. So I went back to teach, and the job was very good too.”
Manchester University and the United Nations (1951-59)
Derek Bowett returned to his native city in 1951 as a lecturer in law, and immersed himself in an ocean of commitment: he registered for a PhD, studied for his bar exams, taught undergraduates, and married Betty Northall. Significantly, although Lauterpacht may have deflected him away from a career solely based on legal practice, he did not abandon this avenue, merely incorporating it into his plans, and was called to the Bar (Middle Temple) in 1953.
In retrospect, his years at Manchester can be seen as pivotal for his illustrious career. The world into which Derek was entering, armed with his LLB, was one where international legal regimes and priorities were in a state of flux. Three crucial factors influenced him: the United Nations (founded in 1945) was breaking new ground in the formulation of international law; the establishment of the State of Israel (1948) had led to a political/social crisis in the Middle East; and the political/military Cold War between the USSR and the West was beginning to dominate international relations. Each of these developments proved fertile ground for Derek Bowett's legal talents, and during much of the last half century he has made major contributions in all three.
Figure 2: Taking Silk, 1978
Having seen the effects of war at first hand, and with international military instability appearing to have become endemic on a global scale, Bowett's PhD topic clearly reflected the world as he saw it, and was an inspired choice: “Self Defence in International Law” (1958). This was even more so, since it was, more or less, self-supervised. Apropos his supervisor,
“Technically he was Professor Ben Wortley of Manchester. But I did my thesis on my own…. He spoke fluent French. He was a very nice man, Wortley, very kind, but not in my view a good lawyer. When we met he always wanted to talk about his problems not mine. So he wasted my time. I had to do my PhD. So I did it. Got on with it”.
As for his grounding in international affairs, this was gained at the coal face by an arduous stint in 1957-9 at the United Nations in New York, where the young man faced daunting legal tasks.
“I was given two years leave of absence from Manchester to go to New York…We were preparing for the Law of the Sea Conference. Most of my work was on that…The UN had a policy of recruiting an English academic lawyer on a temporary basis. The person who told me about it was David Johnson…a teacher at the London School of Economics… It was there [New York] I did most of my work on the Law of the Sea conventions for the first Law of the Sea Conference, which was the biggest thing we'd done. We held the conference in Geneva in 1958. I went over. I was Secretary of the Fourth Committee, and I was on the secretariat. Stavropolos was Legal Counsel. He was a Greek. Bad lawyer, but a very smooth man.”
It was also hard on his young family (their son was two): “We lived on Long Island and we were married so Betty was there too. It was tough. Climate was awful. Terrible climate in New York. Betty hated it”.
The result was the 1958 Convention when four treaties were signed, and one of the photographs reproduced here is of Derek at the signing ceremony, along with Marjorie Whiteman, who was the US Department of State representative.Reference Whiteman5
Return to Cambridge (1960)
On his return to Manchester he had expected to be appointed to a readership but, when this failed to materialise, Bowett was invited to apply to Cambridge, and his academic career burgeoned. He was given a fellowship at Queens' College, and a university Lectureship in Law in 1960, and for the next twenty years he established a formidable reputation as a teacher, scholar, international lawyer and authority on global institutions. His efforts were rewarded in the Faulty by a Readership (1976) and in 1981 he replaced his friend Robbie Jennings (who had resigned to become a judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague), as the Whewell Professor of International Law.
Derek Bowett's tenure spanned the whole of the post-War period to the 90s, and his opinions on improvements in the overall standards of the Faculty over this time are worth recording. They can be summed up in his reply to a question we put about his memories of Professor Peter Stein6:
“He was very good. A very good Roman Lawyer. Came to Queens'. I knew him well. Much better than Duff. He also taught some comparative law. He'd been at school in Liverpool but he'd been professor at Aberdeen. His generation of lawyers was much better than the ones I found when I came up in 1948. The Faculty had improved enormously. People like Sir Hersch Lauterpacht were outstanding. But others were very poor”.
Queens' College
Sir Derek's association with Queens' College has been long and eventful. He was made a Fellow of Queens' in 1969, and shortly after returning from Beirut was elected to succeed Arthur ArmitageReference Armitage7 as President of the College. This was a period of national student upheaval, but he appeared to tackle this in his straightforward and compassionate, manner:
“We dealt with student unrest. Late 60s and 70s. Not very nice. They wanted to do away with the bedders. It was a matter of principle. They didn't want people waiting on them. But it was their job. They wanted friends to be able to sleep in their rooms”.
If readers are interested, they can read Derek Bowett's memories of Queens' a series of six amusing and elegantly written articles in the Queens' College Record (20048, 20059, 200610, and 2007-911). On retiring from the presidency, he was made a Professorial Fellow (1982-91), and since 1991 he has been an Honorary Fellow. Sir Derek has provided our Squire Law Library archive with some splendid photographs of himself during this period, one of which we reproduce here.12
More on international institutions
Throughout his career at Cambridge, Sir Derek vigorously pursued the themes in international law that he had taken up as a young man at Manchester. His hallmark was the way he interwove them to explore the legality and efficacy of force in the international arena, and its corollary of solving certain disputes legally through boundary resolutions. His early exposure to the workings of the United Nations resulted in two major books (Law of International Institutions, 1963, and United Nations Forces, 1964). The first was on the legal aspects of the historical and modern development of international institutions, and the second was an account of the successes and shortcomings of international (i.e. UN) intervention in global trouble spots. His legal activities in connection with the initial Law of the Sea Conference was followed by a 1967 book (Law of the Sea), and it was a theme he returned to in 1978 (Legal Regime of Islands). It was also one with which he was professionally involved as counsel in several cases that were the subject of international arbitration or litigation before the International Court of Justice (see the list of his important cases at the end of this article).
A seminal experience that affected Derek Bowett's views on the role international law can play in mitigating disputes, were the two years (1966-68) that he spent in Beirut in charge of a team of legal and political advisors to the General Council of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA13). In fact, Beirut had not been his original posting:
“First we were asked to go to New York. And Betty hates New York. Betty finally agreed to go to Beirut, and they arranged for the man in Beirut to go to New York.
I was the Legal Counsel. Legal and Political adviser. I was seconded from Cambridge, given leave of absence and we went to Beirut. We were based in Beirut for two years. The family came with me. We had two boys then.
The job there was fascinating. Not just as a legal adviser but it combined political and legal adviser. They had about seven lawyers working for me. Legal staff. Two in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Gaza. Work was enormously varied. I dealt with big international claims. One claim against the UN brought by the Syrians was over rail charges… [we were] big importers, chartering ships. I liked the work.
We traveled by car originally and then when the war came we couldn't go by car so the government of Canada gave us a small plane. I'm not sure whether the pilot realised the reason he'd left the Canadian Royal Air Force was because he was an alcoholic and he was permanently soused. We flew down to Israel and the pilot had never been there before. He flew low down and he said “Where's that”? I enjoyed those two years.”
It was a time of great tension, and “the war” referred to by Sir Derek was the Six Day (June 1967) War between Israel and the Arab states, that sent the region into turmoil. Betty and the children had the traumatic experience of temporary evacuation back to the UK when it broke out.
Four years after he returned from the Middle East, Bowett wrote his short, non-legal book aimed at the lay public in which he emphasised the importance of dispute resolution by non-military means (The Search for Peace, 1972).
While still a lecturer at Cambridge, Derek Bowett's interest in the legal implications of environmental issues led to his being invited to become a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution14 (1973-77), and he recounted to me his enjoyment at visiting coal mines and oil rigs during the course of the onsite investigations the commissioners were obliged to carry out.
Such work epitomised his legal scholarship, which was a complex amalgam of esoteric legal issues of the type traditionally associated with academia (for example his publications on states' responsibilities, crimes and relations with private entities), and the application of legal principles to solving the practical problems thrown up in the hurly burly of international affairs. In the latter, which were based on his personal experience within international institutions, Sir Derek deeply involved himself with issues where state politics and commercial interests clash and need to be resolved by legally-grounded pragmatism. Good examples of the latter were his engagement in solving boundary disputes, international use of force, and the whole issue of how to best gain access to the mineral resources on the deep-sea floor of the world's oceans. His legal mind was thus often applied to foreseeing international problems and attempting to pre-empt them.
International Court of Justice
Sir Derek's involvement with the International Court of Justice began in 1973 when he acted as counsel for the United Kingdom in the UK/France Channel Arbitration. Over the next twenty years he was involved in a further eleven cases, during which time he represented the following states: Dubai, Libya (twice), Canada (twice), Honduras, Egypt, Denmark (twice), Australia and Slovakia. He also served on the International Law Commission for the General Assembly of the United Nations (1991-98).
As result of three decades of such international activities, J. P. Gardner (Director of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law) could write, in the Introduction to Derek Bowett's book International Court of Justice (1997), that his “….experience of international litigation is unrivalled…”
International recognition of his expertise followed, and he received honours from Denmark (Order of Dannebrog 1993), Honduras (Grand Cross, Civil Order, Jose Cecilio del Valle 1993), and Slovakia (Order of the 3rd Class White Double Cross 2000). In one amusing anecdote, Sir Derek recounted that things did not always go as they were expected. We had asked him about the Taba Case (Egypt-Israel,1988), and he said:
“The case was won by the Egyptians, who said that we would get an award from Egypt - myself and Sinclair (who was a British legal advisor in the Foreign Office). The case was handled by Europeans, but we were told we had to somehow use three Egyptian lawyers. The Egyptian agent asked me to pick out bits which they could do – what bits it didn't matter. We won the case. The Egyptians became national heroes and we, the Europeans, were forgotten!”
Nationally for his services to international law, Derek Bowett was made CBE (1983) and knighted (1998). When we asked him what The Queen had said to him at the presentation, Sir Derek replied: “I could walk then, but I had a stick. She asked me “What do you do?” I said “I'm retired”. She said “What did you do?” I said, “I'm an international lawyer”. That was the end of the conversation. She didn't know anything about law”.
Figure 3: Sir Derek in his study, 24 April 2007
Acknowledgements
All the conversations with Sir Derek were undertaken at his home in Hills Road, Cambridge, during the period December 2006 to April 2007 by Lesley Dingle. Despite being in poor health, the physical effort did not dim his spirit or enthusiasm, while his wife, Lady Bowett, in her gracious way added her own comments and encouragement. It was an honour and a humbling experience, and we thank them both for allowing us to gain a first-hand account of the career of a remarkably prescient legal scholar who has made a major contribution to international law both in the UK and worldwide.
We are very grateful to Sir Derek and Lady Bowett for lending the Squire Law Library a selection of original photographs which have been copied for our archive, and some of which are reproduced here. The pictures taken during one of our visits to their home were made by Andrew Gerard, Head of the Computing Section in the Faculty of Law.
We also gratefully acknowledge the help of Matt Martin who compiled the gallery of photographs on Sir Derek, and designed the Eminent Scholars Archive, on the Squire Law Library website.
Additional highlights of Sir Derek's career
• Called to the Bar, Middle Temple 1953
• Honorary Bencher 1975
• Queen's Counsel 1978
• Visiting Professor, Virginia Law School 1978
• Visiting Professor, Institut des Hautes Etudes, Geneva 1988
• Elected Fellow of the British Academy 1983
Sir Derek's major publications15
Bowett, D. W. 1958. Self-defence in International Law. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Manchester.
Bowett, D. W. 1963. Law of International Institutions. 1st-3rd Edit. London, Stevens & Sons. 4th Edit. 1982, London, Sweet & Maxwell, 431pp.
Bowett, D. W. 1964. United Nations Forces: A Legal Study of United Nations Practice. London, Stevens & Sons, 576pp.
Bowett, D. W. 1967. Law of the Sea. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 117pp.
Bowett, D. W. 1972. Search for Peace. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 236pp.
Bowett, D. W. 1978. Legal Regime of Islands in International Law. Dobbs Ferry, Oceana Publications, 337pp.
Bowett, D. W. (Edit.) 1997. The International Court of Justice: Process, Practice and Procedure. London, The British Institute of International and Comparative Law, 190pp.
Important international cases in which Sir Derek appeared as Counsel16
• 1977 Counsel for UK in UK/France Channel Arbitration
• 1981 Counsel for Dubai in Sharjah/Dubai Arbitration
• 1982 Counsel for Libya in Libya/Tunisia case, I.C.J.
• 1984 Counsel for Canada in Gulf of Maine case, I.C.J.
• 1985 Counsel for Libya in Libya/Malta case, I.C.J.
• 1988-91 Counsel for Honduras in Honduras/El Salvador Lands, Islands and Maritime Boundary case, I.C.J.
• 1988 Counsel for Egypt in Israel/Egypt Taba Arbitration
• 1991 Counsel for Denmark in the case Concerning Passage Through the Great Belt (Finland v. Denmark)
• 1992 Counsel for Canada in St Pierre et Miquelon Maritime Boundary Arbitration
• 1993 Counsel for Denmark in Jan Mayen case, I.C.J.
• 1994 Counsel for Australia in East Timor case, I.C.J.
• 1997 Counsel for Slovakia in the Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros Project, I.C.J.
Biography
Lesley Dingle is the Foreign and International Law Librarian at the Squire Law Library, University of Cambridge and Daniel Bates is Freshfields Legal IT Teaching and Development Officer, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge.
