Remembering Sir John Blofeld: The Judge Who Met The Rolling Stones

“During the case Michael and Dad went to the Metropolitan Police commissioner’s office to look at hashish,” said Blofeld’s son, Tom. “It was decided that, in order to know what the effects were like, and thus the social consequences involved, they should all have a smoke — in a borrowed pipe as they couldn’t roll a cigarette. Dad claimed he didn’t like it but Havers thought it rather good. The police gave no viewpoint either way.” The upshot was that Jagger was fined £200 and Faithfull (obituary, January 30, 2025) , whom Blofeld came to like, was acquitted. Blofeld was considerably more accustomed to such exotic individuals than to aberrant drug-taking. He had attended the same prep school, Sunningdale in Berkshire, as a Scaramanga, whose name appealed to Ian Fleming, another old boy, for a villainous character in his James Bond books. Like Blofeld’s father and both his sons, Fleming became a member of Boodle’s in St James’s. Henry Blofeld, John’s younger brother, is of the view that the author alighted on the family name for another villain when leafing through the membership list. “Ian gave a yelp of delight, had a glass of champagne and never looked back,” he said. In adult life John Blofeld had no interest in 007 and was not a filmgoer. He tended to converse primarily about subjects that interested him and preferred PG Wodehouse. There are competing stories for the Bond link, but few doubt that Ernst Stavro Blofeld derived from the Blofeld family. John Christopher Calthorpe Blofeld was the son of Thomas Blofeld and Grizel (née Turner) and was born on the family’s estate, Hoveton House, Norfolk, in 1932. After Sunningdale, where he was captain of the 1st X1 cricket team, he was educated at Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge, where he read ancient history and classics for two years, followed by law for a year. He shared rooms with Tam Dalyell, his fellow Etonian and a future MP, and canvassed with him for the Labour Party. Henry Blofeld, seven years younger than John, became a leading cricket commentator and writer. “‘Blowers’ was more jolly and a better cricketer than my father, but my father was more serious-minded and had more gravitas,” said Tom. According to Henry, John could have played regular minor counties cricket had he chosen to do so. “John was a left-handed batsman who played one game for Norfolk but he was very clever — you don’t become a High Court judge if you are not — and totally obsessed in his early life by the Bar. He would have been a very good player.” Before going up to Cambridge, Blofeld undertook his National Service in the army, serving in the Grenadier Guards. A knee ligament injury he sustained on an assault course resulted in him being sent to a military hospital in Colchester, where he became an acting medical corporal. Told he could never be a soldier, he was offered a commission in the Catering Corps. He turned this down and was discharged. The troublesome knee affected him all his life. He was called to the Bar in 1956, joining chambers at 5 King’s Bench Walk in the Inner Temple, which specialised in crime and common law. His father had been high sheriff of Norfolk in 1953 and became friends with Cecil Havers, an eminent judge whose son, Michael, took Blofeld on as a pupil. Shedding his student political views, Blofeld became a Conservative councillor in Marylebone, London. In this capacity he went to Germany to look at a machine developed for crushing bones in crematoriums. It was bought. “Many years later Dad found, to his horror, that this style of machine had been used in the Holocaust,” said his son. “By this time it was obsolete.” After Blofeld’s marriage in 1960 he gave up politics at his wife’s request, even though he had been earmarked as a Conservative parliamentary candidate. By now a “wet” Tory, he counted among his friends Robert Rhodes James and Ken Clarke, both of whom became prominent Conservatives. Blofeld took silk in 1975. In the hot summer of 1976 he was involved in a pornography prosecution of a firm specialising in rubber accoutrements that had been seized by police. The smell of the rubber, accentuated by the heat, remained with him all his life as a particular detestation. He became a circuit judge, firstly at St Albans and then at Norwich. Owing to his wife being unwell, he did not wish to be based away from Norfolk. In 1990 he was offered a position as a High Court judge, which was unusual at the time for a circuit judge. In one trial in 1993 of a man accused, and later convicted, of spying, Blofeld told the jury that they would have to spend the night in a hotel and so he would allow “supervised viewing” of England’s World Cup qualifying match against San Marino. “But,” he added (and he was no football fan himself) “do not feel you have to watch.” He remained in this role until 2001, often appearing at the Court of Appeal, but never became a law lord. He found that working in the Court of Appeal was more arduous than anything else in his career. In addition, he chaired a lengthy commission for the Home Office on schizophrenia. One of the solicitors involved was Sadiq Khan, a future mayor of London. “John was an extraordinarily good judge, always relaxed with a whimsical sense of humour,” said Peter Beaumont, who became recorder of London. “And he was very good company away from court.” Blofeld chaired a report in 2004 into the death of David “Rocky” Bennett in a unit for mental health patients. He found unacceptably high levels of detention, medication and restraint and called for wholesale changes, including the creation of a black and ethnic minority mental health tsar, three-minute limits on prone restraint and better training in managing violence and aggression. His report stated that it would take at least ten years to introduce training that ensured black and ethnic minority patients were not mistreated. John Reid, the health secretary, agreed there was no place for discrimination in the NHS but refused to accept all of his recommendations. Upon retirement Blofeld joined the Court of Appeal in Botswana for three years, travelling there for six-week periods. Its legal system was based on the English model. Elected to the court of the Mercers’ Company in London, he became master in 2006 and sat on their wine committee and property committee for 15 years. He was chancellor of St Edmundsbury from 1973 to 2009 and chancellor of the diocese of Norwich from 1998 to 2007. He was treasurer of Hoveton church from 1982 to 2011, succeeding his father. A collector of rare books and a voracious reader, especially of metaphysical poetry, he could speak in both Greek and Latin and particularly enjoyed browsing in antique shops. An MCC member, he played real tennis at Lord’s. Conservation, including extensive tree planting and forestry at Hoveton, was another interest. He also sat on Lincoln’s Inn’s wine committee and, as a senior member of Boodle’s as well as a lawyer, was consulted over a gin company that had taken its name from that of the club in 1845 (although without the apostrophe and the market primarily in the United States and Japan). When it came to be released in England in 2013, the club’s committee took exception to this, not least because their Boodle’s had been founded in 1762, so Blofeld proposed that they should be given 200 cases gratis. The company acceded to this. Blofeld’s wife, Judith Ann (née Mitchell) predeceased him in 2013 and he is survived by his partner, Candia Gladstone, and the children from his marriage: Charlotte is a Jungian psychotherapist; Tom created a children’s adventure park called Bewilderwood and writes children’s books; and Piers is a literary agent. Blofeld was born in the night nursery and died in the day nursery at Hoveton House with his sister, Anthea, 96, and Henry, 86, by his side. His knighthood, awarded after he became a High Court judge, was featured on television as by chance a documentary was being made about the duties of the Queen. After being tapped by Her Majesty’s sword, the discourse was heard on air. “Is there a lot of crime about these days?” the Queen asked him. To which Blofeld replied with more tact than Ernst Stavro might have done: “I’m rather afraid there is, ma’am.”