Like Reginald Bray a decade before him, Arthur Clavell Salter emerged from a general common law background at the Bar to become a successful and well-thought of Judge of the specialist Commercial Court.
Salter was born in London in 1859, the eldest son of successful Harley Street consultant Henry Salter and his wife Henrietta, a Dorsetshire vicar’s daughter. Henry died when Arthur was twelve, and Henrietta left London with the children to live with her family in Dorset, where Arthur went to grammar school. He then studied arts, followed by law, at King's College London. Salter was called to the Bar by Middle Temple in 1885, and joined the Western Circuit, appearing in the Courts of Bristol, Exeter, Taunton, Winchester, and other towns in the South and Southwest of England. He appears to have been a fairly rapid success, and he was making recurrent appearances in the Law Reports by the end of the 1880's.It was general common-law work, mostly before juries, and Salter established a good mixed practice in fields as diverse as consumer contracts, crime, defamation, employment and industrial accidents, landlord and tenant, licensing, and local government. He was led (in local government cases) by future Commercial Judges Reginald Bray and Joseph Walton, and once appeared with Robert Reid KC (the future Lord Chancellor Loreburn) and T.E. Scrutton KC in a Privy Council appeal about the obligation of seaworthiness under a voyage charter (The Master & Owners of SS 'City of Lincoln' v Smith [1904] AC 250). But Salter never had a significant commercial practice.
Salter was appointed King's Counsel in 1904. He was also made a Recorder that year, which gave him part-time judicial experience.
Salter adopted a rather clinical style of advocacy, coldly precise, without flourish or recourse to humour. A contemporary later recalled that he "always gave the impression of extreme neatness, clearness, method and industry - an acquired rather than a natural capacity". But his cases were always thoroughly prepared, and he presented his arguments with a remorseless logic which made his advocacy highly effective, even if it was rather colourless.
Salter stood as a Conservative candidate for Southwark at the 1906 general election. He lost, but was elected MP for Basingstoke at a bye-election later that year. He spoke in debates about trade disputes and licensing litigation, adopting in the House of Commons the same focussed but austere demeanour which was his hallmark in Court. This earned him the nickname "the dry-Salter". His obituarists thought that he did in fact have a good sense of humour, but that he did not feel the need to demonstrate it in public. To judge from the dearth of surviving photographs of him, Salter did not attract much press attention either as a barrister or as an MP. But, although low-profile, he retained his seat at both of the two general elections in 1910. Under ordinary conditions, the next election should have been held by 1916 at the latest. But it was postponed for the duration of the Great War, and so Salter kept his seat in the Commons until he was made a King's Bench Judge in October 1917. Another Commercial Court Judge, Adair Roche, was appointed at the same time: Salter and Roche were into office by Lord Chancellor Finlay at the start of the 1917-1918 legal year, and immediately afterwards attended the Judges' service in Westminster Abbey.The government of the day was a wartime coalition of Liberals and Conservatives/Liberal Unionists, and it is difficult to know what role, if any, political factors played in Salter's appointment to the Bench. But the legal press was satisfied that his selection was justifiable on his professional merits. The only real criticism was the view expressed in parts of the national press that no new King’s Bench Judges should be appointed for the duration of the War, in the interests of national economy.
As a Judge, Arthur Salter made a striking contrast with his contemporary Henry McCardie. Whereas McCardie was inclined to express his personal opinions about anything which entered his head and liked to fill his judgments with authorities, Salter said almost nothing in Court and was not a great one for citation of cases. He had the reputation of seldom intervening during counsel's submissions, but it was said that, if he did ask a question, it was sure to straight to the point and show that he perfectly understood the issues of the case. A patient, pleasant, and calm Judge, his judicial personality was described as "serene", and his style as “slow, but deadly sure”. The manner of Salter’s judgments mirrored that of his advocacy: clear, precise, and direct, without any suggestion of show or ornament. His judgments also tended to be concise. Salter liked to consider the arguments, make up his mind, state his conclusion, and leave it at that. He did not feel compelled to set out at length facts which were already well-known to those who were involved in the case and of no interest to anyone outside it, or to explain the steps of his reasoning in painstaking detail. Having spent his professional career in common-law fields where cases usually depended upon factual rather than legal issues, he felt no incentive to try to develop or re-state principles of law. But if Salter lacked the attributes of a great jurist, his methods did make him a good trial Judge, and he was highly regarded. And if the government had hoped that a Judge with a political background would tend to support draconian executive measures during wartime, then it was to be disappointed. In Newcastle Breweries v The King [1920] 1 KB 854, Salter held that regulations which permitted the authorities to requisition provisions without paying a fair value were invalid and unlawful.
This was apparently the sole judicial portrait which the press could find to illustrate the news of Salter’s death in 1928, although it appears to date from his appointment to the Bench, a decade before.
Much of Salter's judicial career was spent in crime, and his most prominent cases were criminal. In 1919, he presided over the trial for murder of Colonel Norman Rutherford, a Great War medical corps veteran who had sensationally shot fellow medic Major Miles Seton fourteen times at the Seton family's London home. There was evidence that Rutherford's mind had been affected by his wartime experiences, and he was found "guilty but insane", which meant that he went to Broadmoor rather than the gallows. In 1922, Salter was the Judge at the trial of Horatio Bottomley, a prominent journalist, newspaper proprietor, MP, and crook. Bottomley had launched a bond scheme which was supposed to raise funds to support government finances. In fact, he spent much of the money propping up his own businesses. The jury took less than half an hour to convict Bottomley. Salter sentenced him to seven years hard labour.
Salter started making reported appearances in the Commercial Court in 1919. Although he had little experience of commercial litigation, he must have been considered a success because, unlike some other King's Bench generalists who lent a hand in the Commercial Court during the busy period after the Great War (such as A.T. Lawrence and Montague Shearman), Salter continued to hear commercial cases from time to time for the rest of his career. His unfussy but decisive judicial methods were well suited to commercial cases. The fact that his commercial decisions were seldom overturned on appeal (and, indeed, seldom appealed in the first place) indicates that he was a good enough lawyer to grasp legal principles which were largely unfamiliar to him.
Salter married twice, and was apparently attracted to daughters of army officers. He married Mary Lloyd, daughter of an artillery Major, in 1894. They had a son, who was killed in the Great War, and a daughter. Mary died in 1917. Salter’s second wife was Nora Ouhcterlony, whose father was a Lieutenant-Colonel. They married in 1920.
In his spare time, Salter was a keen golfer, and often played against T.E. Scrutton, the Commercial Court's first great golfing enthusiast. Cultured as well as sporting, he was a lover of literature and poetry: he wrote his own verses, and was for a time a book reviewer for The 'Manchester Guardian'. Salter also had a rather inventive turn of mind, once coming up with a concept for a coin-operated machine for dispensing stamps. But the Post Office rejected his design, and a generation passed before automatic stamp dispensers became commonplace.
The son of a heart specialist, Arthur Clavell Salter died suddenly from heart failure in 1928, after a day spent presiding over the Railway & Canal Commission. Nora survived him for nearly half a century, dying at the age of ninety-four in 1976. Two years later, she made a minor contribution of her own to English law when the Court of Appeal ruled that a man who had lived with her and cared for her during her later years had not become part of her family within the meaning of the Rent Acts, and so could not inherit the statutory tenancy of her flat.