Abstract
We will miss Alec Samuels. Before Covid struck he was a regular attendee at meetings and during Covid he attended on Zoom. He was well informed and could be counted on to make a positive and useful contribution to the discussions that followed any talk given to the Society. He was the President of the Medico-Legal Society from 1998–2000.
As Alec looked and acted younger than his real age and we were in regular email correspondence, I was shocked to learn he had turned 92 when he died last November. I knew him only as a lawyer, which was deliberate on his part; he was a man who made a point, apparently, of compartmentalising his life into different spheres of interest. One of these was Law (and medico-legal matters in particular), which began in 1949 when he went to Magdalene Cambridge to read Law and his enthusiasm and passion for this subject continued until his death. After qualifying first as a barrister he turned to academia and became a reader in law at Southampton University in the 1950s, never leaving the city where he later married and brought up his family. Always describing himself simply as a “lawyer” he later became a magistrate (a JP), was elected (as a Conservative) to the city council, then became its leader, retiring from this post at the age of 80. At his funeral, an erstwhile council colleague commented that Alec had been a very keen writer of notes and letters!
I first met Alec at the Medico-Legal Society in the late 1970 s by which time he was already a grandee and on the Society's council (probably one of the younger members then). I recognised his name because I had read some of his topical legal articles. He had, by then, mastered the skill of the short article that keeps the reader engaged to the end; that informs, debates and poses questions not easy to answer (that indeed Alec often didn't answer himself). I'm guessing that this punchy brief writing style evolved while he was lecturing law students whose concentration spans no doubt varied and whose attention levels waned during a long session.
Alec's legal interests were, as I have since discovered, wide ranging. In addition to his role in the Medico-Legal Society, he was also heavily involved in the Statute Law Society, the British Academy of Forensic Science, and the Consumers' Association, and he wrote extensively on Planning Law in a writing career that spanned some 70 years (during which he wrote many hundreds of articles), overcoming in his last years (with help from his son, Martin) the tiresome and complex technical demands made by modern online publishers. I'm glad that he did so; his articles for the Medico-Legal Journal were valued by the Editors and popular with our readers and we shall miss them in the future along with his presence and pithy comments at the Society's meetings.
We send our sympathy to Alec's widow, Jenny, to his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
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