CHRISTMAS HUMPHREYS, 1901—83, lived, and memorably moved, in several distinct walks of life. His profession was the Law, which he considered to be a high and honourable one, and he was proud to follow so closely in the footsteps of his eminent father that he rose to be a QC and eventually an Old Bailey Judge. As Crown Prosecutor he was involved in several notonously sensational cases. The Towpath murders, the Craig and Bentley case, the trial of Donald Hume, ‘who murdered Stanley Setty, cut up his body and dumped it in parcels from his plane into the Thames’, ensured that his name hit the headlines forty years ago with a panache hardly possible today when such cnmes are a daily occurrence.

By conviction he was a Buddhist. As an undergraduate at Cambridge he had first discovered the Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky, and then Buddhism. The two together seemed to give him the answer to the nagging question, ‘What's it all about?’ Here was his path, and for the rest of his life he continued to tread it, and to promote its truth by every means in his power.

Nor were his powers inconsiderable. He founded the Buddhist Society of London in 1922, and remained its President for the rest of his life. He was a dramatic and persuasive speaker, a gift which stood him in good stead both at the Bar and at Buddhist gatherings all over the country. He radiated and communicated a masterful energy and vitality. Problems which seemed daunting to everyone else were solved as soon as he entered the room. He was a natural leader. During the short term that I served on the Council of the Buddhist Society in the 1950s, I recall that it was only Miss I.B. Homer, the Pali scholar, who in her tart Cambndge voice dared to contradict him.

He was no mean poet. He had strong views on the authorship of Shakespeare. And he was a prolific writer. When he surveyed his life from the autobiography he wrote in 1978, he could claim to have wntten three books on law, five on poetry, one account of Buddhist travel and some fifteen on Buddhism and Oriental philosophy.