South Australian chief justice Samuel Way the first Australian on UK privy council in 1897; made a baronet in 1899
Samuel Way was made a baronet of Montefiore, North Adelaide, and Kadlunga, Mintaro, acknowledging his city mansion and one of his rural properties, in 1899.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia
South Australian chief justice Samuel Way in 1897 became the first Australian to be appointed to the judicial committee of the privy council in Britain. The appointment, needing negotiated support from other Australasian colonies, was forwarded by Langdon Bonython, proprietor and editor of The Advertiser in Adelaide, and, more grudgingly, by premier Charles Cameron Kingston.
Sitting on the judicial committee in England, Way heard appeals from India, China, South Africa, Jamaica and New South Wales. But his time on the privy council in Britain in 1897 was only brief and he returned claiming it was because the British or the Australian colonial governments wouldn’t pay his salary and expenses. But there is also the suggestion he experienced icy and condescending attitudes from some quarters in Britain.
More honours did flow to Way. In 1899 he was created a baronet – of Montefiore, North Adelaide, and Kadlunga, Mintaro, both in the colony of South Australia. Though he'd several times refused a knighthood (perhaps because his senior puisne judge James Boucaut was a KCMG), Way quickly accepted the baronetcy. He said it would have been a little presumptuous to have “declined a dignity which was accepted by Sir Walter Scott” and he was proud to have become the first Methodist baronet in the British empire.
Way was awarded an honorary LL.D. by the University of Cambridge and an honorary doctorate of civil law at the University of Oxford in 1891. During his time in England, Way had visited his old school, Shebbear College in Devon, and presented it with a neighbouring farm.
