Sir Thomas Hugh William Beadle CMG OBE PC was a Rhodesian lawyer, politician and judge. He served as Chief Justice of Southern Rhodesia from March 1961 to November 1965. He was also Chief Justice from November 1965 until April 1977. He provoked acrimony in British government circles by declaring Ian Smith’s post-UDI administration legal in 1968.
About Hugh Beadle in brief
Sir Thomas Hugh William Beadle CMG OBE PC was a Rhodesian lawyer, politician and judge. He served as Chief Justice of Southern Rhodesia from March 1961 to November 1965. He was also Chief Justice from November 1965 until April 1977. He came to international prominence against the backdrop of Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain. He provoked acrimony in British government circles by declaring Ian Smith’s post-UDI administration legal in 1968. He retired from politics in 1950 to become a judge of the Southern Rhodesian High Court. In 1961, he was knighted and appointed Chief Justice. He later became president of the High Court’s new Appellate Division and a member of the British Privy Council. He died in April 1977 and thereafter sat as an acting judge in special trials for terrorist offences. He is survived by his wife, Leonie Barry, a farmer’s daughter from Barrydale in the Cape of Good Hope; they had two daughters. The United Party, created from the former Rhodesia Party and the conservative faction of the Reform Party, won the 1934 general election. The party represented the commercial interests of the white minority in the colonial Legislative Assembly. The new party was decisively defeated by Harry Davies, the Labour leader, in the 1934 election. In 1934 he stood in Bulawayo in the South African general election, challenging the new Labour leader Harry Davies. He won by 458 votes to 430, but the new party won decisively elsewhere and formed the United Party. He also served as Minister of Internal Affairs and Justice until 1946, when he became Minister of Education and Health.
In 1940 he was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary for Godfrey Huggins’s ruling United Party in Rhodesia. In 1950 he was made Chief Justice, and in 1961 he became President of the high court’s Appellates Division. In 1970 he was almost removed from the Imperial Privy council, but kept his place following Wilson’s 1970 electoral defeat soon after. His true motives remain the subject of speculation. He held the Rhodesian Front, the governing party from 1962, in low regard, dismissing its Justice Minister Desmond Lardner-Burke as a “small time country solicitor”. He repeatedly attempted to arrange a compromise, and brought Harold Wilson and Ian Smith together for talks aboard HMS Tiger. He continued these efforts after UDI, but Wilson castigated him for not persuading Smith to settle. The family was politically conservative and favoured joining the Union of South Africa during the latter years of Company rule, sharing a firm consensus that Sir Charles Coghlan and his responsible government movement were, in his recollection, “a pretty wild bunch of jingoes”. Responsible government ultimately prevailed in the 1922 referendum of the mostly white electorate, andSouthern Rhodesia became a self-governing colony the following year. He attended Salisbury Boys’ School, Milton High School and Diocesan College, Rondebosch. He completed his Bachelor of Laws degree in 1928, then continued his studies in England as a Rhodes Scholar at The Queen’s College.
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