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Mr. W. S. Carter
I am very sorry that my reply to your minute of last Friday the 11th April is being sent almost at the time of your closing date but I have been severely handicapped by the absence of ready information of the sort you require and the difficulty in tracing relevant papers. Our Registry and Pensions Branch records and indices are not in a form conducive to producing quickly information about the service practices of fragmented classes of officers. A further impediment is that an officer's personal file is not normally in itself of any value for the purpose of ascertaining the conditions appertaining to his selection for promotion or the ramifications flowing from that selection; these considerations and repercussions were more normally discussed on other files such as those in Appointments, Recruitment and Geographical Departments and are not readily traceable.
2. What papers I have been able to obtain and my discussions with others here in the O.D.M. would certainly indicate that appointments from local Bars to the Benches have taken place in a variety of oversea countries. These appointments would however seem to have been a very infrequent states in any particular country and to have been of comparitively small numbers overall. As you know judicial appointments were of a career service nature and the filling of judgeships from sources other than the 6olonial Legal Service were abnormal. We do however have recollections of appointments being made, for example Sir Arthur Grattan-Bellew has indicated to me that an Indian member of the local Bar was appointed to a Kenya judgeship. On my part, from a closer look at the Colonial Office List for 1959 I have been able to deduce that Judge L. N. Benafo was appointed directly as puisne judge Nigeria in 1952 not having previously been in the colonial service. We also have the impression that from time to time appointments to superior courts such as courts of appeal were made on ad hoc bases but we are not able to quote instances at this time. So far as Mr. Justice Rhodes to whom you have refered is concerned I have not yet been able to secure papers concerning him which are of value but as I have already indicated these may not be very easily obtained.
} As regards the question of any appointments from the local Bar giving cause for claims for compensation for loss of career prospects, I have not been able to trace any records or indications that show that compensation has been paid in the past for this reason. If, as it would appear, local Bar appointments have been of occasional frequency and have not been made in pursuance of a policy of giving preference to members of the local Bar serving staff would in the past have had considerable difficulty in substantiating any claim for compensation. Elevation to a judgeship was not confined to the Colonial Legal Service officers of the country in which the judgeship was to be made but could be drawn from members of the Colonial legal Service in any part of the colonial empire and therefore individual officers would have found it extremely difficult to have proven that their career prospects had been impaired by such selections. The current position is however somewhat different and therefore past precedent is not particularly helpful. So far as the appointment of judges in Hong Kong is concerned, as I understand it, selection in real terms must be confined to those in Hong Kong; there are few members of the colonial legal service outside Hong Kong having any effective claim. Nevertheless in so far as compensation payable according to the philosoph6 of Colonial 306 or Command 1193 is concerned is, restricted to circumstances where the officer retires as a result of loss of office on constitutional change of the loss of the Secretary of State's protection would not normally expect compensation to be payable moreover if appointments from the local Bar are considered to be desirable but are made very infrequently and are prudently timed for example, take the form of one of a number of elevations to the Bench it would still seem reasonable to expect that serving officers would not be able to make any realistic and defensible claim for compensation.
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