Lancelot Curran
Major Sir Lancelot Ernest Curran (8 March 1899 – 20 October 1984[1]) was a Northern Ireland High Court judge and parliamentarian.
He was elected as Ulster Unionist Member of Parliament for Carrick in the Stormont Parliament serving from 1945 till 1949,[2] and was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance (Chief Whip) (17 July 1945 - 12 June 1947).[2][3] Curran was Attorney General for Northern Ireland (6 June 1947 – 4 November 1949), the youngest in the history of that parliament.[2][4] He was a member of the Orange Order and became a member of the Privy Council of Northern Ireland.[1][5]
Curran had three children, Michael, Patricia and Desmond, a barrister and latterly a Roman Catholic convert and missionary.[2][5] On 12 November 1952, Patricia was murdered; her body was found in the driveway of the Curran home, Glen House, Whiteabbey, County Antrim. She had been stabbed thirty-seven times. She was nineteen and a student at the Queen's University, Belfast.[6] In 2000, Iain Hay Gordon, the man convicted of her murder, had his sentence overturned after the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal found it to be unsafe.[7] Scapegoat, a BBC Northern Ireland drama about the conviction of Iain Hay Gordon, was broadcast in 2009.[8]
Curran presided over the trial of Robert McGladdery for the murder of 19-year-old Pearl Gamble, near Newry, in 1961. McGladdery protested his innocence but was found guilty and hanged at Crumlin Road jail in Belfast on 20 December 1961; it was the last hanging in Ireland. A fictionalized account of the trial and execution of McGladdery - Orchid Blue - was written by Eoin McNamee and published in 2010 (McNamee had previously written a Booker Prize-nominated novel, Blue Tango, about the murder of Patricia Curran). Another McNamee novel, Blue Is The Night (published in 2014), deals with Curran's involvement in a murder trial in the Northern Ireland of the late 1940s.
Curran's first wife, Doris, died on 29 May 1975. He married Margaret Pearce a year later. He died in Sussex in 1984.
References
| Parliament of Northern Ireland | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by John Dermot Campbell |
Member of Parliament for Carrick 1945–1950 |
Succeeded by Alexander Hunter |
| Party political offices | ||
| Preceded by Sir Wilson Hungerford |
Unionist Chief Whip 1945–1947 |
Succeeded by Walter Topping |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by Sir Wilson Hungerford |
Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Finance 1945–1947 |
Succeeded by Walter Topping |
| Preceded by William Lowry |
Attorney General for Northern Ireland 1947–1949 |
Succeeded by Edmond Warnock |