People Australia

Walter Bevan, 1914

Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 4 November 1914, p 11

Walter Bevan (1856-1938) surveyor, barrister and judge

Birth: 29 December 1856 at Neuilly Isle-de-Paris, Paris, France, son of George Edward Bevan (1825-1866), iron merchant and mine owner, born at Crickhowell, Wales, and Emily, late Foaker, née Roe (1824-1889), born at ‘Wellcresdea’, Dublin, Ireland. Marriage: 21 January 1891 at St Andrew’s church, Newcastle, New South Wales, to Violet Katherine Amanda Ross (1869-1949), born in Newcastle. Death: 13 April 1938 in his home at Hunters Hill, Sydney. Religion: Anglican. 

• His father having died when Walter was aged nine, he was educated at Finchley Hall school (Christ’s College), Church End, London, England.
• Following his older brother, Edward Bevan (1854-1898), an artist and printmaker, later surveyor, who migrated to Queensland in 1873, Walter arrived in Adelaide aboard the Lucitania on 8 July 1879.
• After working as a surveyor in north Queensland, he settled in Sydney, New South Wales. He was an associate to Justice Sir George Long Innes for five years then spent a year with Sir Henry Stephen before reading in the chambers of Judge Rogers, and was called to the Bar on 16 December 1887.
• Bevan practised his profession in Sydney until 1894 when he became a crown prosecutor. For many years he worked in the north-western district of the State. He was also for sometime an acting District Court judge.
• In March 1911 he was appointed Solicitor General for four months. He explained that “the appointment was not a political one, and was to relieve Mr Holman of . . . portion of his work during the time the latter will be Acting Premier during Mr McGowen’s absence in London and he would also have to advise the government in legal matters”. Holman commented “Mr Bevan has the judicial temperament in a very high degree, and I regard him as a particularly able man”.
• The Labor government appointed him royal commissioner to inquire into the Kentia palm-seed industry in Lord Howe Island in August 1912.
• In November 1912, as assistant Crown Law Officer, he provided a legal opinion on ownership of the land upon which Government House stood, which supported Holman’s claim that the land was not “imperial property”, and under which he had “evicted” the Governor-General from the premises. The finding was disputed by other legal authorities and overturned by the State Supreme Court. However, in June 1913 the High Court of Australia upheld the opinion which was subsequently confirmed by the Privy Council in January 1915 allowing the government to proceed with its scheme for converting part of the property into a Conservatorium of Music.
• Bevan was appointed judge of the District Court, south-western circuit of NSW, on 3 November 1914. He was more liberal in his judgements on Labour activists during World War I than others on the bench. In April 1918, for example, he upheld an appeal of an already imprisoned Industrial Workers of the World member [Edward Victor Cogan] despite the prosecutor’s urging.
• On another occasion he was reported to have commented that he could not avoid being influenced to some extent by his class associations. He also advocated for the abolition of court docks, asserting that “he did not believe that accused persons should be treated like caged animals”.
• In July 1925 it was reported that, since he had been appointed, he had travelled 220,000 miles over NSW railways to dispense justice in the State’s outback.
• He took a great interest in the welfare of prisoners and in the improvement of their conditions and was “a staunch advocate of penal reform”, supporting the appointment of specially trained psychologists with medical knowledge as prison administrators. He retired from the bench in December 1926. The following year he spoke at a meeting of the Howard League for Prison Reform together with Mick Sawtell, one of the IWW members he had sentenced to gaol in 1917.
• In 1927 he assisted Justice Walter Edmunds on the Rural Wage Commission, and chaired a tribunal to settle a dispute at Katooomba.
• Cause of death: syncope (several years), chronic myocarditis (several years) arteriosclerosis (several years) and chronic bronchitis (several years). 

Sources
Appeal of E. V. Cogan, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 12 April 1918, p 4: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/45449933; eviction of governor-general, Christopher Cunneen, Kings’ Men; Australia’s Governors General from Hopetoun to Isaacs, (Sydney, 1983), pp 99-102.