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Richard Shaw at Southampton University
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My old friend Richard Shaw died peacefully on 16th October 2013, having suffered from a brain tumour since March. A warm and kindly man, he was one of the City's finest maritime lawyers and a specialist in Admiralty cases. He was a scholar at Bancrofts and read law at Oxford before signing on as an AB on a cargo ship for a voyage to Australia. After a stint of teaching in Adelaide, he began his City career with
Richards Butler and became a well-known admiralty specialist at
Elborne Mitchell before leaving in 1979 to start his own firm, Shaw and Croft, with Roger Croft in 1980. He was especially useful dealing with cases that involved French, as he was fluent, his father having been the manager of Barclays in Bordeaux. His first case at Shaw & Croft was one of the world's largest collisions - the VLCCs
Atlantic Empress and Aegean Captain which collided fully laden in a tropical rainstorm off Tobago, leading to a spillage of oil that is still listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest from ships. We handled the Atlantic Empress side of the case together and I learned a great deal from him. Later he was involved with the Piper Alpha oil rig explosion, the Aegean Sea oil spill, the Tricolor collision and sinking and in advising underwriters and the police in tracing the proceeds of the Brinks Mat robbery.
Richard retired from Shaw and Croft in 1995 and went on to teach maritime law at the
Southampton Institute of Maritime Law, specialising in marine insurance and salvage (he was the editor of Kennedy on Salvage). He was also active in the
British Maritime Law Association and the
Comite Internationale Maritime, where he was elected Member Honoris Causa in 2012.
Richard loved sailing, keeping a boat at Lymington near his country home and hill walking, in the company of his fellow lawyers Stuart Beare and
Patrick Griggs. Richard leaves his wife Avril, who supported him throughout his long career and looked after him wonderfully during his illness, two sons and a daughter. His ashes have been scatted at Newtown Creek, on the north coast of the Isle of Wight, a place he loved.
