Edward Ridley

Sir Edward Ridley, PC, KC ( August 1843 - 14 October 1928) was a British barrister, judge and Conservative Politician, MP for South Northumberland from 1878–80.

He was the son of Sir Matthew White Ridley, 4th Baronet, and his wife Cecilia Ann, eldest daughter of Sir James Parke, afterwards Baron Wensleydale. His brother was Matthew White Ridley, 1st Viscount Ridley.

He was educated at Harrow and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, 1866–1882.

He married Alice Davenport, daughter of William Bromley Davenport, of Cheshire. They had two sons, the younger was Guy Ridley.

He was a barrister 1868, QC 1892 and knighted (Knight Bachelor) in 1897.

Giving the Plymouth Law Society’s Annual Pilgrim Fathers Lecture in December 2009, Lord Justice Toulson recounted that Ridley’s appointment to the High Court bench in 1897 had been “greeted with horror” and that The Law Times had written “no-one will believe that he would have been appointed to the High Court Bench but for his connections. […] Such an innovation, we repeat, was only possible where the hard-working official, the bearer of so many heavy burdens of the High Court judges, was highly connected. This is Ridleyism. Let it be known hereafter as Ridleyism […]”. Toulson further noted that Ridley’s appointment had been described by The Solicitors’ Journal as “a grave mistake” and that on Ridley’s death Sir Frederick Pollock had written: “Sir E. Ridley, good scholar, Fellow of All Souls, successful, sicut dicunt [so they say], as an Official Referee, and by general opinion of the Bar the worst High Court judge of our time, ill-tempered and grossly unfair: which is rather a mystery”. Lord Justice MacKinnon called Ridley “the worst judge I have appeared before”, saying that “he had a perverse instinct for unfairness”.