The World's Greatest Minstrel

House of Commons circa 1790

Wilberforce aged 29 in 1790

Lord Wilberforce, 95, Keeper of an Antislavery Tradition, Is Dead

By WOLFGANG SAXON

Richard Orme Wilberforce, a retired member of Britain's highest court and keeper of his family's antislavery tradition, died on Saturday at a hospital in London. He was 95.

He was a prominent judge in postwar Britain, known for handling both criminal and civil matters with a keen intellect, clarity and patient civility. Knighted in 1961, he was created a life peer and law lord three years later, when he became Lord Wilberforce, Baron of the City and County of Kingston-upon-Hull.

Lord Wilberforce was a great-great-grandson of William Wilberforce (1759-1833), an English statesman associated with William Pitt the Younger, the great British prime minister. William Wilberforce was a religiously inspired antislavery politician who helped pave the way for the Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833.

Three years ago his descendant, Lord Wilberforce, warned Parliament of a modern kind of "bonded labor." This, he declared, had taken the place of slavery that William Wilberforce had denounced in the House of Commons as early as the 1780's.
He said that whereas people may be freed from chattel servitude by breaking their chains, modern bonded labor enmeshes them in a whole skein of complex economic and political circumstances.

"You have to provide a system of good employment, schools for the children, and some system of land reform so that people can earn a living," he told Parliament. "Bonded labor certainly is servitude, and in many ways it is worse."
Richard Orme Wilberforce was raised in India, the son of a judge of the high court in Lahore under the Raj. He graduated from Oxford University and was called to the bar in 1932.

His career as a barrister was interrupted by six years in the army in World War II. He served in Norway, France and Germany, earning the rank of brigadier and decorations that included a United States Bronze Star. He ended the war in the army's legal branch and was under secretary of the Control Office for Germany and Austria in 1945-46, helping to repeal Nazi-era legislation and set up a new legal framework.

He started his judicial career in 1961 as an appointed High Court, or Chancery, judge. He was promoted directly to the House of Lords as a lord appeal in ordinary. Historically the House of Lords served as Britain's court of final resort but delegated that function to a committee of law lords, making it the country's highest tribunal.
He contributed especially in the fields of international law, and administrative and commercial law. He was also remembered for issuing the judicial report ending the coal miners' strike that crippled Britain in the winter of 1971-72.
After he retired from the law committee in 1982, Lord Wilberforce advocated human rights, legal reforms and a simpler legislative process. He also sought to inspire the judiciary to become more aware of social needs and imperatives when applying the law.
His survivors include his wife of 55 years, Yvette Marie Lenoan, daughter of a French judge; a daughter, Anne Catherine Burn; and a son, Samuel Herbert.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company