Henry Curtis-Bennett

Sir Henry Honywood "Harry" Curtis-Bennett, Kt, KC (31 July 1879 – 2 November 1936) was a British barrister and politician.

Curtis-Bennett was born at Brentwood, Essex, the son of Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett (1846–1913), Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, and his wife, Emily Jane, née Hughes-Hallett (1855–1942), daughter of a Kent solicitor. He was educated at Radley College and Trinity College, Cambridge.

Curtis-Bennett was called to the bar by the Middle Temple in 1902 and appointed a KC in 1919 and a bencher in 1926. On 4 April 1903, he married Eleanor Dangar, daughter of Albert Augustus Dangar, a landowner of Baroona, New South Wales. During the First World War, he first was briefed for the defence in several spy cases, then from 1917 to 1919, was engaged by the War Office's counter espionage department to cross-examine suspected spies (including Mata Hari). His knighthood in 1922 was conferred for his work in the secret service. He represented Chelmsford as a Conservative from 1924 to 1926. When his wife sought to divorce him, he resigned from the Commons in 1926. After the divorce, on 15 August 1929 he married his mistress, (Lilian) Mary Jeffries.

Curtis-Bennett appeared for the defence in some of the most celebrated trials of the age, in particular for Edith Thompson in the Thompson and Bywaters murder case of 1922, and for Lord de Clifford in a vehicular manslaughter case in 1935, the last occasion on which a peer was tried by his fellows in the House of Lords. In 1922 he unsuccessfully defended Herbert Armstrong, a solicitor, hanged for the murder of his wife. He held part-time judicial appointments as Deputy Chairman (1923–35) and Chairman (1935–6) of the Essex quarter sessions and Recorder of Chelmsford from 1929 to 1935.

In 1936, Curtis-Bennett accepted the full-time judicial appointment of Chairman of the County of London sessions, with his eye on the more senior post of Recorder of London. Like his father and brother, he suffered from heart trouble; and like theirs, his death was a public one. He was replying to the toast of the guests at a dinner of the National Greyhound Racing Society at the Dorchester Hotel on 2 November 1936, when he collapsed and died. He was buried in the churchyard at Kelvedon, Essex.

ource

*Michael Beloff, "Bennett, Sir Henry Honywood Curtis- (1879–1936)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/67120, accessed 25 August 2008]