If you wanted to identify the ideal judge you just had to watch and listen to my friend Colin Mackay, a high court judge between 2001 and 2013, who has died aged 82.
His authority was cloaked in unassuming sympathy. He had no need to trumpet his undoubted intellect or forensic skills. He provided a forum where advocates and witnesses could give their best because they admired and respected the quiet assurance Colin displayed.
The son of Katherine (nee Hamilton) and Sir James Mackay, Colin was born in Elgin, Moray. His father had been a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, and Colin won a classics scholarship from Radley college, Oxfordshire, where he was head boy, to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, before taking up legal studies. But it was his lack of convention that made the man.
His twinkling humour was deployed to gentle but triumphant effect. The one time he could not suppress his pride was when he caught a sea trout. And woe to any colleague about to embark on some account of a day in court, Colin would raise his hand, saying: “I hope you’re not about to tell us a story to your own credit.”
There was so much of credit to say about Colin. As a barrister (called to the bar at Middle Temple in 1964) and QC (he took silk in 1989) he had the courage to pursue difficult cases: who else would have forecast success when he acted for the brain-damaged boxer Michael Watson against the British Boxing Board? Colin was knighted in 2001.
His sense of justice and perspective stemmed from his own happy confidence in life outside the law: on the Isle of Mull on holidays with his family and friends, watching the seals or climbing Ben More; his love of Scotland, of poetry (as reader he recited Robert Burns’s Tam O’Shanter at Middle Temple) and of opera.
How flattered I was when he asked to spend his last week in court with me. At the end of the day, a Jammie Dodger for tea in his room and memories of cases we fought against each other, as young barristers, more than 40 years before.
It was cruel that, in Colin’s last years, Alzheimer’s should take away the character for which he was admired. His family continued to care for him with love and determination.
He is survived by his wife Rosie (nee Collins), whom he married in 1969, their children, Polly, Alex and Archie, and four grandchildren.
