Sir John Jeffries

(I wrote the following obituary for Sir John Jeffries for The Dominion Post, which published it yesterday. Inexplicably and inexcusably, I got the name of Sir John's father wrong. The error has been corrected in this version and in the one published on the Stuff website.)

SIR JOHN FRANCIS JEFFRIES

Judge and civil servant

Born Wellington March 28 1929; died January 25 2019

John Jeffries failed School Certificate three times and went on to become a High Court judge and a knight of the realm. There’s a message of hope there for academic under-achievers.

The rector of St Patrick’s College, Wellington, wrote a reference for the young Jeffries in which he advised prospective employers not to give him any job that required study. Jeffries rejoiced in that reference for the rest of his life, his brother Bill told mourners at his funeral.

Jeffries, who died last month aged 89, was also, at various times, deputy mayor of Wellington, chairman of Air New Zealand, head of the Police Complaints Authority, chairman of the Press Council and Commissioner of Security Warrants. Knighted in 1993 for services to the law, he was still working at 83 and proclaimed himself New Zealand’s oldest public servant.

Jeffries was no dry, ascetic careerist. Genial, witty and gregarious, he loved humour, literature, sport and music. And although he became a respected Establishment figure and stalwart of the Wellington Club, he retained a keen social conscience shaped by an upbringing that was anything but privileged.

He grew up in the no-frills Wellington suburb of Lyall Bay, the second in a family of five. His mother, Mary, was a schoolteacher and his father, Frank, was a joiner who had been unemployed during the Great Depression. Both parents had experienced prejudice in their lives: Mary due to her Irish Catholic background and Frank because he had been brought up by two spinster sisters known as “the aunts”.   

According to his son Trevor, Jeffries may have had no academic qualifications when he left school but he knew his way around a pool table, the result of hours spent in a Courtenay Place billiards parlour. 

His first job, as an insurance clerk, was cut short when he contracted tuberculosis. He was nursed in Wellington Hospital by Joan Patricia Christensen, known as Pat, who had been raised in India but emigrated to New Zealand as a teenager during World War II to escape the threat of Japanese occupation. The two were married in 1951 and would adopt two children, Trevor (named after a close friend of Jeffries who died in the Tangiwai disaster) and Julia.

Jeffries’ second stab at a career was as a teacher. It wasn’t until 1959 that he acquired a law degree, at what was then Victoria University College, and was admitted to the Bar.  

Along the way he enjoyed the company of an arty, left-wing Bohemian crowd that included the bibulous poet James K Baxter. Baxter once repaid a one-pound loan from Jeffries by writing him a poem entitled To John Jeffries – In Return for the Loan of a Quid To Drink With.

Jeffries became a partner (along with Michael Hardie Boys, who would serve decades later as Governor-General) in the firm of Scott, Hardie Boys, Morrison and Jeffries. Home was a modest two-bedroom bungalow in Wilton that Jeffries renovated and extended, in the time-honoured Kiwi manner, with help from his father and brothers.

In the very earliest days of New Zealand television, his sharp mind and quick wit led to appearances on a current affairs show chaired by the brash and irreverent political scientist Austin Mitchell, later to become a British Labour MP.

Politics soon beckoned. At 33, Jeffries became the youngest-ever (at that time) Wellington city councillor. Elected on the Labour Party ticket, he would remain on the council for 12 years and serve as deputy mayor, earning the label “Mr Fixit” from the Sunday News for making progress on issues that had defeated others.

On one occasion his friend Baxter, who worked as a postie, decided to do Jeffries a favour by dumping his conservative rivals’ election pamphlets, which he was supposed to deliver, at Jeffries’ front gate. He told Jeffries he thought the “Tory propaganda” would do less harm there.

Jeffries had mayoral aspirations, but they were thwarted by the reluctance of long-serving Labour incumbent Sir Francis Kitts to step aside. He was to be frustrated again in his bid to enter national politics. When the Labour Party offered him a shot at the National-held parliamentary seat of Miramar he declined, hoping instead to contest a Labour seat in the Hutt Valley.

The party bosses ruled that out, much to his chagrin. It would fall to his brother Bill, who was younger by 16 years, to serve three terms as MP for Heretaunga in the 1980s and as a Cabinet minister in the fourth Labour government.

All the while, John Jeffries was building a reputation as one of Wellington’s leading lawyers. He practised criminal law as well as handling personal injury cases – a lucrative field in the pre-ACC era – and serving as counsel for the National Council of the Licensed Trade, the liquor industry lobby group. Socially he was upwardly mobile, moving his family to Khandallah.

In 1975, the Labour government appointed him chairman of Air New Zealand. It was a short-lived appointment, his tenure being terminated by incoming National prime minister Robert Muldoon after Jeffries and other high-profile citizens, including Sir Edmund Hillary and Anglican archbishop Paul Reeves, had signed up to the Citizens for Rowling campaign that urged voters to support Labour in the 1975 election.

Only months later, the same National government that refused to accept Jeffries as head of the national airline made him a judge of what was then the Supreme Court (now the High Court). Muldoon’s justification for this apparent change of heart – namely, that Jeffries was “a very fine lawyer and an honourable man” – didn’t allay suspicions that the purpose of the appointment was to keep him out of politics.

He remained on the Bench until 1992 and delivered several significant judgments. In one, he found against an Australian wine company that asserted the right to use the term “champagne” for its sparkling wine. Jeffries ruled that the French makers of champagne were entitled to exclusive use of the name.

In another decision of lasting consequence, he set out to clarify what had previously been an unsatisfactorily vague definition of the crucial word “welfare” in child custody cases.

A third judgment, a significant victory for Whanganui River Maori, upheld a Planning Tribunal decision that restricted state power company Electricorp’s right to extract water from the river for the Tongariro hydro scheme.

Bill Jeffries said his brother’s judgments reflected a concern for “the outsider, the people beyond the mainstream”, which he had inherited from his parents.

Retirement from the High Court in 1992 brought only the briefest respite before Jeffries accepted an appointment as Police Complaints Authority. He spent five years in that post and regretted on his departure that he had been unable to reduce the number of people dying in high-speed police pursuits – still a contentious issue more than 20 years later.

Jeffries also had to fight a misconception that he was part of the police and therefore not independent. He argued for a name change and would have felt vindicated when the authority was reconstituted as the Independent Police Conduct Authority in 2007.

Similar concerns troubled Jeffries when he became chairman of the Press Council, the industry-funded regulator of the print media. Determined to distance the council from the newspaper industry and thus rid it of the suspicion that it was partisan in its decisions, he arranged for it to move out of the building it shared with the Newspaper Publishers’ Association and employ its own staff.

He regarded it as an important part of his job to encourage newspapers to adopt more professional standards and he took a dim view of intrusions on individual privacy by journalists. But he was a committed champion of press freedom and took a noticeably more pro-active approach than some of his predecessors.

On one occasion he staunchly defended the right of journalists to keep their sources confidential - a right that had been challenged by the Privacy Commissioner. On another, he was scathingly critical of "reprehensible" suppression orders imposed by courts. Under Jeffries, the council also spoke out against a proposed criminal libel law that was seen as protecting politicians at the expense of free speech.

When he stepped down from the Press Council in 2005, then prime minister Helen Clark paid tribute to him for his clear thinking and ability to get to the heart of complex issues. Clark knew him well from having worked with him since 1999 in his other capacity as Commissioner of Security Warrants, which involved jointly determining with the prime minister whether to allow the Security Intelligence Service to intercept people’s private communications. Jeffries remained in that job until 2013.

Away from the demands of office, Jeffries enjoyed his family, golf, The Goon Show, rugby, James Joyce, cricket, The New Yorker, Circa Theatre and occasional lunches with his former fellow judges. His close friends included the late Robin Cooke, aka Baron Cooke of Thorndon, the only New Zealand judge to have sat in the House of Lords.

He shared the last years of his life with Betty Knight, his wife Pat having died in 2001. (Betty’s husband Lindsay, a former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank, died in 2002.)

Jeffries suffered from severe osteo-arthritis but remained mentally sharp till the end. He died in the apartment he shared with Betty at Oriental Bay, “looking across the harbour at the city he loved”, in the words of his son Trevor. 

Sources: Bill Jeffries, Trevor Jeffries, Julia Jeffries, Betty Knight, Mary Major, Wikipedia.