Sir Joseph Child Priestley (11 January 1862 – 9 June 1941) was an English barrister and magistrate, active in public life in Hertfordshire.
31, Somerset Street, Portman Square, Marylebone on 11 January 1862, the son of Sir William Overend Priestley and his wife, Lady Eliza (the daughter of Robert Chambers, the well known publisher, of Edinburgh).
[citation needed] Having decided to train as a barrister, he dissolved his partnership with Hooper and Campbell on 15 December 1885, and was admitted as a student of law at the Inner Temple on 9 January 1886.
[3] Having successfully sat the Council of Legal Education's General Examination, held in Lincoln's Inn Hall in March 1888, he resigned his commission in the Volunteer Force with effect from 19 May 1888, and was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple on 13 June 1888.
"[5] Priestley was appointed by Letters Patent under the Great Seal to be one of His Majesty's Counsel learned in the Law on 26 February 1903 and was called within the Bar on 3 March 1903.
Hollins & Co., Ltd., worsted spinners of Mansfield, and disaffected members of its workforce, he was appointed by the Board of Trade in 1911 to serve as Chairman of the Court of Referees for the Cambridge district, London and South Eastern Division, under the National Insurance Act 1911.
[14] In March 1916, at the height of the First World War, he joined the Appeal Tribunal for the County of Hertford, under the Second Schedule to the Military Service Act 1916.
[17] In February 1925 he was appointed by the Secretary of State for the Home Department to chair the Departmental Committee on Sexual Offences Against Young Persons, in succession to the late Sir Ryland Adkins.
[citation needed] In the meanwhile, in November 1925, Priestley had also been appointed a member of the Government Committee on Schemes of Assistance to Necessitous Areas representing the County Councils Association.
Having been commissioned as a Deputy Lieutenant for the County of Hertford on 22 December 1924,[22] he was made a Knight Bachelor in the 1927 New Year Honours, being described as "Chairman of the Herts Quarter Sessions.
[24] His obituary in The Times stated that his death had broken 'a link with the generation of practitioners in the Probate and Divorce Division at the end of the last [19th] and beginning of the present [20th] centuries, among whom he was for many years an outstanding figure.'