Stafford Crossman
Sir Charles Stafford Crossman was an English barrister and High Court judge. He was the father of Labour politician Richard Crossman.
The third son of Dr Edward Crossman, Crossman was educated at Winchester, where he was a scholar, and New College, Oxford, where he took first-class honours in honour moderations and literae humaniores, in addition of winning the Hertford scholarship in 1890. After Oxford, he returned to Winchester as an assistant master for a year. He was called the bar by Lincoln's Inn in 1897.
Crossman was junior counsel to the Board of Inland Revenue in 1926–27, junior equity counsel to the Treasury in 1927–34, and counsel to the Royal College of Physicians in 1927–34. In 1934, while still at the junior bar, he was appointed to the High Court of Justice in succession to Mr Justice Maugham. He was assigned to the Chancery Division and received the customary knighthood. He sat on the High Court until his death in 1941. The Labour politician Tam Dalyell wrote that Crossman was "perhaps the most distinguished, if driest, Chancery Judge of his generation".
Although a Conservative politically, Crossman was a close friend of future Labour prime minister Clement Attlee. Richard Crossman was later apt to ascribe Attlee's suspicion of him to the fact that he caused his father distress by becoming a socialist.
Crossman married Helen Elizabeth Howard, the daughter of chemicals manufacturer David Howard DL, in 1902; they had three sons and three daughters. The Labour politician Richard Crossman was his son.
