Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/310

 the bench. A well-grounded lawyer and pleasant speaker, he was an admirable leader in routine chancery cases, and the care with which he got up his briefs and the pertinacity with which he plied his arguments made him an especial favourite among clients professional and lay. He was essentially the advocate for a court of first instance, and his appearances in the higher tribunals were rare, except when following to the court of appeal cases in which he had appeared at the former hearing. In July 1892 he successfully contested the Walthamstow division of Essex as a conservative. The Finance Act of 1894 and the abortive employers' liability bill of the following year provided ample opportunity for a fluent and careful lawyer's intervention in debate. Byrne surprised his friends by the facility with which he acquired the parliamentary manner, and he was bracketed by the ministerial press with Mr. J. G. Butcher, K.C., and Mr. T. Gibson Bowles as 'the busy bees.' In July 1895 he was again returned for Walthamstow by a largely increased majority, and on 18 Jan. 1897, on the promotion of Chitty to a lord-justiceship, the vacant judgeship in the chancery division was given to Byrne. He was knighted in due course. On the bench he was accurate, painstaking, courteous, and patient to all comers, and his judgments, which included an unusual number of patent cases, were, with hardly an exception, affirmed upon appeal. On the other hand he was morbidly conscientious, apt to be too dependent on authority, and extremely slow; arrears accumulated in his court and in his chambers. He died after a very short illness on 4 April 1904, at his house, 33 Lancaster Gate, Hyde Park. He was buried at Brookwood cemetery.

Byrne married on 13 Aug. 1874 Henrietta Johnstone, daughter of James Gulland of Newton, of Wemyss, Fifeshire, by whom he left a family. A portrait by Edmund Brock is in the possession of Lady Byrne.

 C

CAINE, WILLIAM SPROSTON (1842–1903), politician and temperance advocate, born at Egremont, Wallasey, Cheshire, on 26 March 1842, was eldest surviving son of Nathaniel Caine, J.P. (d. 1877), metal merchant, by his wife Hannah (d. 1861), daughter of William Eushton of Liverpool. Educated privately at Gibson's school, Egremont, and the Rev. Richard Wall's school at Birkenhead, Caine in 1861 entered his father's business at Egremont, and in 1864 he was taken into partnership. He removed to Liverpool in 1871. Public affairs soon occupied much of his attention, and he retired from the firm in 1878. He retained, however, the directorship of the Hodbarrow Mining Co., Ltd., Millom, and he secured the controlling interest in the Shaw's Brow Iron Co., Liverpool, leaving the management of the concern in the hands of his partner, Arthur S. Cox. The collapse of this business in 1893 involved Caine in heavy liabilities, which he honourably discharged. Thenceforth his resources were largely devoted to paying off the mortgage which he raised to meet the firm's losses.

Brought up as a baptist under the influence of [q. v. Suppl. I], he developed early a bent for and philanthropic work. In later life in London he was from 1884 to 1903 the unprofessional pastor of a mission church known as the Wheatsheaf in Stockwell, S.W. But the temperance movement mainly absorbed him, and at Liverpool he found his first scope for propagandist zeal. As president of the Liverpool Temperance and Band of Hope Union, he formed and became chairman of a 'Popular Control and License Reform Association,' with a monthly organ, the 'Liverpool Social Reformer.' In 1873 he was elected vice-president of the United Kingdom Alliance. He was also president of the Baptist Total Abstinence Society, of the Congregational Temperance Society, of the British Temperance League, and of the National Temperance Federation.

In 1873 Caine first sought election to parliament, mainly with a view to enforcing his temperance views. He was in general agreement with the radical wing of the liberal party, and unsuccessfully contested Liverpool in the liberal interest in both that and the next year. In 1880 he was returned as radical member for Scarborough, and without delay he urged on the House of Commons his advanced temperance opinions. In a maiden speech on 18 June 1880 he