He later attended Trinity College, Oxford and graduated with an upper second-class degree in jurisprudence in 1898, and gained a Blue in athletics.

Goddard built a strong reputation in commercial cases on the Western Circuit and was appointed as Recorder of Poole (a part-time Judgeship) in 1917.

In the general election of 1929, Goddard agreed, against his better judgement, to contest the Kensington South constituency as an unofficial Conservative candidate.

The sitting Conservative MP, Sir William Davison, had been a defendant in a divorce case, and a local committee thought the newly enfranchised young women voters would refuse to support him.

On 5 April 1932 Goddard was appointed a Justice of the High Court and assigned to the King's Bench Division, receiving the customary knighthood later that year.

Viscount Caldecote, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, suffered a stroke in 1945 and suddenly resigned, creating a vacancy at an inopportune moment.

Despite his appointment as a stop-gap, Goddard served twelve and a half years as Lord Chief Justice before stepping down in September 1958.

In December 1952 Goddard presided over the trial of Christopher Craig and Derek Bentley, accused of the murder of PC Sidney Miles at a Croydon warehouse on 2 November 1952.

After reading Home Office psychiatric reports and a petition signed by 200 MPs, he rejected the request and Bentley was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint on 28 January 1953.

Goddard chose to continue his involvement with trials on the front line, and opted to judge ordinary High Court cases as he was entitled to do.

[7][8] In 1948 backbench pressure in the House of Commons forced through an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill to the effect that capital punishment should be suspended for five years and all death sentences automatically commuted to life imprisonment.

Goddard attacked the Bill in the House of Lords, making his maiden speech, saying he agreed with the abolition of the "cat" but not birching, which he regarded as an effective punishment for young offenders.

The suspension of capital punishment was reversed by 181 to 28, and a further amendment to retain the birch was also passed (though the Lords were later forced to give way on this issue).

He held a strong belief that punishment had to be punitive in order to be effective, a view also shared at the time by Lord Denning.

During the committal hearing of John Bodkin Adams on a charge of murder in January 1957, Goddard was seen dining with Sir Roland Gwynne (Mayor of Eastbourne from 1929 to 1931) and chairman of the local panel of magistrates, and ex-Attorney-General Hartley Shawcross at an hotel in Lewes: the subject of their conversation is unreported and unknown.

Devlin was at first surprised since a person accused of murder had never been given bail before in British legal history, but on consideration saw its merit,[10] but this move has been plausibly suggested as a warning to the prosecution of strong judicial displeasure over the Attorney-General's plan to proceed with the second indictment.

Adams was acquitted on the first count of murder, and the second charge was controversially dropped via a nolle prosequi—an act by the prosecution that was later called by Devlin an "abuse of process", saying: "The use of nolle prosequi to conceal the deficiencies of the prosecution was an abuse of process, which left an innocent man under the suspicion that there might have been something in the talk of mass murder after all".

[12] The pathologist Francis Camps considered the deaths of up to of 163 of Adams' patients might be suspicious,[9] but he only conducted post-mortem examinations on two of these which produced nothing of significance.

[9] After his retirement as Lord Chief Justice, Goddard was appointed a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GCB) on 30 September 1958.

[15] In the final interview he gave, in August 1970, Goddard told David Yallop that being Lord Chief Justice was not an easy job.

[19] Goddard went on to criticise David Maxwell Fyfe in the two-hour interview, saying that he made the recommendation to mercy to Maxwell-Fyfe and that "Bentley's execution was an act of supreme illogicality.

However, despite stating his opposition to Bentley's execution, Goddard still expressed his strong support for the death penalty and asserted that the law was biased in favour of the criminal.

Parris, who died in September 1996, was Craig's barrister at the 1952 trial, and wrote that Goddard told Maxwell Fyfe to ignore the jury's recommendation for mercy, and that Bentley must be hanged.

After Goddard's death, he was attacked in the columns of The Times by Bernard Levin, who described him as "a calamity" and accused him of vindictiveness and of being a malign influence on penal reform.

According to his clerk, Goddard ejaculated when passing a death sentence on such a regular basis, that a fresh pair of trousers had to be brought to court on those occasions.