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82 Medico-Legal J. 130 (2014)
Obituary: HH Michael Brooke QC (1942-2014)

handle is hein.journals/medlgjr82 and id is 120 raw text is: Medico-Legal Obituary Journal Obituary: HH Michael Brooke QC (1942-2014) Michael Brooke was a long-standing member of the Society's council who would in due course have been elected President of the Society, but sadly he died in the summer of 2014. He completed his active and distin- guished legal career in 2004 sitting as a circuit judge for six years in Essex in what he called the front line violence, drugs and sex, laced with a little fraud. His conduct on this battlefield was good-humoured, calm, unruffled and humane, earning him the respect and affection of all who worked with him. Michael and three London-based fellow judges bound for Basildon regularly loaded their bicycles onto the early train at Fenchurch Street station. Dressed eccentrically in a garb that included items of yellow hi-vis gear, they were occasionally mistaken for a quartet of railway workers. Where are the First Class carriages? demanded a particularly superior lady solicitor on one occasion. (There were none.) It gave them wry pleasure when later she had to bow coming into their court. Michael Brooke would even bring out the best from those in the dock. Sentencing in drug cases often involves a rehabilitation order requiring the defendant to return to court once a month for a talk with (if possible) his sentencing judge so that his progress can be monitored and his rehabilitation encouraged. One youth, expecting to see Michael Brooke on his visit, almost broke down in tears when he learnt that he was not available and that he would be seeing some- one else. But crime had played a very small role in his career before his appointment as a judge. As a barrister, his speciality was medical negligence work, notably high value complex claims. He also developed a speciality in cases concerning blood. In the HIV haemophiliac litigation in the late eighties and early nineties, he was the lead junior counsel in the team presenting the case for over 1000 people who had been treated by the NHS with transfusions of blood infected with HIV. The alle- gations concerned alleged Government mismanage- ment of the National Blood Transfusion Service. The law was against the haemophiliacs but Michael Brooke's powerful presentation of the case had its effect. The judge, Sir Harry Ognall, took the unprece- dented step of writing an open, hand-written note for the attention of everyone involved recommending a Medico-Legal Journal 2014, Vol. 82(4) 130-131 @ The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uldjournalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10. 1177/0025817214560293 mlj.sagepub.corn *SAGE settlement. That the law must take its course, he wrote, is not an attractive principle in the context of this case. The government later made a £42 million grant to a trust set up for the benefit of the haemophil- iacs and their families. Even more significant was his handling of the Hepatitis C litigation in 2000, another case concerning contaminated blood transfusions. By then a QC (he took silk in 1994) the case was advanced based on European and comparative law, something that Michael Brooke was perhaps uniquely able to do, having studied law in Paris and been admitted to the Paris bar in 1987. Brussels had set out to harmonise consumer law throughout the European Union with the Product Liability Directive in 1985, which the UK implemented as the Consumer Protection Act of 1987. Michael Brooke championed the Directive, and the case was not- able for the comparative law analysis of how the Directive had been implemented in other European countries in order properly to understand how it should be applied in England. This was a ground-break- ing approach at the time, but Mr Justice Burton's judg- ment of the case endorsed the arguments and set the scene for other large multi-party cases that have adopted a similar legal approach, for example the oral contracep- tive claims, the MMR litigation and many others. Michael Brooke also sat on the Medical Health Review Tribunal and the Parole Board. In 2003, he was elected a Bencher of Gray's Inn. Michael Brooke's early life was colourful. He was born in London in 1942, the only son of a theatrical couple, Reginald and Beryl Brooke. His father was a war-time BBC announcer (calling himself Michael Brooke). His mother acted with the stage name of Beryl Riggs and is remembered for her part in Just William productions. Michael Brooke seemed to be fol- lowing the family calling, appearing on radio, television and in seven films as a boy actor. His role as Jack Hawkins's eight-year-old son in the Michael Balcon film The Long Arm still gets an occasional airing on television. His family had a riverside garden by the Thames at Datchet and it was here that he spent a Swallows and Amazons childhood, messing about in boats. The river garden continued to be the scene of yearly summer parties, and both France and boats remained important elements of his life.

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