Judge Ward

History from New Zealand's early colonial days is traversed in this "triple biography." Prize-winning investigative journalist and now retired newspaper editor, Geoff Adams. explores three intertwined characters: Judge Dudley Ward, his wife Anne, and his mistress Thorpe Talbot. All three were celebrities in the 19th century. After two decades of research in New Zealand, England and Australia, the author has located many facts about this fascinating but at present largely forgotten trio. Dudley came from a rich and powerful English family, progressing from Rugby School, Oxford and the Inner Temple (London) to be an MP, magistrate and finally judge in NZ courts. He bought much land, presided over some trials that were national sensations, and successfully quarrelled publicly with the Chief Justice and other judges, who soon retired. Anne was the first national president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in New Zealand and a suffragist campaigner. (New Zealand women won the vote in 1893, the first in the world.) Thorpe was a writer and poet, winning an Australian newspaper's valuable first prize in a novel competition; the book "Philiberta" was then published in London, New York and Sydney and featured on a select list with works by Dickens, Thackeray and Mark Twain, Anne died in 1896 and the judge remarried in 1902 - to Thorpe Talbot, with whom he had enjoyed a long romantic link. Dudley had been called (by another judge) a "man of infamous private character, and has not the decency to conceal it." He publicly espoused the Arab phrase "Praise Allah for beautiful women." Judge Ward had powerful friends, was a giant of a man in every sense, and a hero on the beach at a shipwreck scene in Timaru in 1878. As well as hearing murder trials and other court sensations, he featured in a bank's action against him personally for a guarantee (arguing his defence right up to the Privy Council in London) and was named as the "ghost writer" of an editorial that was the subject of a remarkable libel case against a newspaper, His resolute actions, in court and out of it, over the bankruptcy of a mayor led to the resignation of a Colonial Secretary and a parliamentary by-election. The judge's father was a former diplomat, Secretary for the Admiralty, and colonial Governor of Ceylon and Madras. When he died in India, his widow Lady Ward returned to London, where Queen Victoria installed her in a large "grace and favour" apartment in Hampton Court Palace for the rest of her years. Swinburne, the poet, was Dudley's cousin and his siblings were well connected with the British aristocracy. The Judge purchased land in various parts of New Zealand and was an MP in New Zealand's second Parliament in 1855, just 13 months after he landed in the country. One of the appendices to this book is a full reprint of Thorpe Talbot's epic poem "Guinevere of the South," which had previously been considered to be a "lost novel" by the author. It was located, after much searching, in a short-lived early newspaper the "Geraldine County Chronicle."