RARE "English Barrister" Edward Ridley Signed 2.25X3.25 Card For Sale

Up for sale a RARE! "English Barrister" Edward Ridley Hand Signed 2.25X3.25 Card. 

ES-2591C

Sir Edward Ridley QC (20 August 1843 – 14 October 1928)

was an English barrister, judge and Conservative politician,

MP for South Northumberland from 1878–80.  He was born younger son of Sir Matthew White Ridley, 4th Baronet, and his wife, Hon.

Cecilia Ann, eldest daughter of Sir James Parke,

afterwards Baron Wensleydale. His eldest brother Matthew succeeded

as fifth baronet and was created a viscount in 1900 after serving as Home

Secretary.  Ridley was educated at Harrow and Corpus Christi College,

Oxford. He was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford,

1866–1882. Ridley

was called to the bar in 1868, took silk in 1892, and was knighted in 1897.  Giving

the Plymouth Law Society's Annual Pilgrim Fathers Lecture in December

2009, Lord Justice Toulson recounted

that Ridley's appointment to the High Court bench in 1897 had been

"greeted with horror" and that The Law Times had

written "no-one will believe that he would have been appointed to the High

Court Bench but for his connections. […] Such an innovation, we repeat, was

only possible where the hard-working official, the bearer of so many heavy

burdens of the High Court judges, was highly connected. This is Ridleyism. Let

it be known hereafter as Ridleyism […]". Toulson further noted that

Ridley's appointment had been described by The Solicitors' Journal as

"a grave mistake" and that on Ridley's death Sir Frederick Pollock had

written: "Sir E. Ridley, good scholar, Fellow of All Souls,

successful, sicut dicunt [so they say], as an Official

Referee, and by general opinion of the Bar the worst High Court judge of our

time, ill-tempered and grossly unfair: which is rather a mystery". Lord

Justice MacKinnon called Ridley "the worst judge I have appeared

before", saying that "he had a perverse instinct for unfairness"

Ridley married Alice Davenport, daughter of William Bromley-Davenport of Cheshire. They had two sons,

Edward Davenport Ridley MC (1883–1934) and Cecil Guy Ridley CBE (1885–1947).