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Sir John Roch
Lord justice of appeal who quashed the convictions of the Bridgewater Four and once survived a terrible storm in the Irish Sea
Roch was a formidable advocateJohn Roch was renowned as one of the
least clubbable practitioners at the Bar.
Singular, ultra-competitive and a little
ascetic, he would not partake of the cus-
tomary convivial lunch at the end of a
trial or settlement of a case — even
when he won.
“Relations were professionally sound
but never close and sometimes bor-
dered on the frosty. He was a formid-
able opponent,” said Malcolm Pill, who
followed Roch all the way to becoming
a lord justice of appeal. “Not only were
we in rival chambers, but I was per-
ceived as being next after him in the
pecking order and he was determined
that I should not overtake him or even
come near to catching him up.”
Above all, Roch was deeply respected
for the enormous lengths he would go
to for clients in what might have been
considered unimportant cases so far as
his career was concerned. When he was
appointed a High Court judge in the
Queen’s Bench division in 1985, it was
said that he greatly missed represent-
ing clients, many of whom he acted for
as a specialist in personal injury cases.
He would later show the same atten-
tion to detail in 1997 as a lord justice of
appeal re-examining the convictions of
the “Bridgewater Four” in 1997. Carl
Bridgewater, a 13-year-old paperboy,
was shot in the head at Yew Tree Farm
near the West Midlands town of Stour-
bridge in 1978. It is thought that he was
shot after witnessing a burglary while
delivering a paper to a farm. James Rob-
where Bridgewater was shot dead,
“there remains evidence on which a
reasonable jury properly directed could
convict”. However, the Crown Prosecu-
tion Service did not apply for a retrial
and the three surviving appellants were
released after nearly 20 years in prison
amid jubilant scenes.
John Ormond Roch was born in
Cardiff in 1934 to Frederick Ormond
Roch, who worked at Barclays Bank,
and Vera Elizabeth Roch, née Cham-
berlain. He was educated at Wrekin
College in Shropshire on a scholarship
from Barclays and studied law at Clare
College, Cambridge. After a year living
in Paris studying comparative law,
Roch was commissioned into the Royal
Welsh Fusiliers for his National Service
and was stationed in British Honduras
(present-day Belize).
Called to the Bar in 1961 at Gray’s Inn
at what then was the late age of 27, Roch
made up for lost time. Based at cham-
bers in Cardiff, he primarily worked in
personal injury cases, of which there
was no shortage arising from the min-
ing communities of the Welsh Valleys.
His track record in such cases was well
noted by the National Coal Board
(NCB), which appointed him to repre-
sent it at the Aberfan Inquiry into the
1966 collapse of a colliery spoil tip,
which killed 144 people, including 116
children. He went on to represent the
NCB at the Flixborough inquiry into an
explosion of a coal board-owned chem-
ical plant in Lincolnshire, which killed28 people. Roch became a recorder in
1975 and took silk in 1976. He moved to
Farrar’s building in the Temple and
broadened his practice by representing
the electronics conglomerate Sony,
necessitating frequent visits to Japan.
He was elected a Bencher at Gray’s Inn
in 1985 and a presiding judge from 1986
on the Wales and Chester Circuit. Roch
served as lord justice of appeal for seven
years from 1993. The same year he
joined the Privy Council.
Having joined the Bench in 1985,
Roch insisted that he would serve the 15
years necessary for a full pension and
then retire. Scrupulously fair to the end,
he sat for one day beyond the 15th anni-
versary of his appointment to prevent
any argument about timing.
He had married Anne Greaney in- She died after a long illness in 1994.
He is survived by their three daughters,
Joanna, Lucinda and Charlotte. In 1996
he married Susan Parry, a widow whose
late husband had been a friend of his.
She survives him along with his step-
children Richard, Helen and Nikki.
Roch found relief from the pressures
of the courtroom in sailing. In 1979 he
demonstrated his excellent seaman-
ship after he was caught up in the infa-
mous storm that devastated the Fastnet
yacht race. He was crossing on that day
to Ireland in a small yacht; on board
were his nephew and two friends. There
was nothing in the forecast to indicate a
storm and no radio or GPS equipment
that are now standard on small cruising
yachts. The storm hit about halfway
across the Irish Sea. Eighteen people
died that night. Roch navigated the bat-
tered yacht into port the next morning.
To mark his retirement in 2000 he
bought a Starlight 36 yacht and spent
summers circumnavigating the British
Isles and exploring the coast of France.
Friends would join Roch and his second
wife at different staging posts of his
voyages to serve as crew. Roch, who
also loved reading and classical music,
was still sailing last summer.
Those who got to know him in his re-
tirement would not have guessed that
Roch had once had a reputation as one
of the toughest advocates at the Bar.Sir John Roch, PC, was born on April 19,- He died of heart failure on
December 1, 2021, aged 87
“When we were kids living in Brooklyn,
my parents had Arthur take piano les-
sons. They couldn’t afford me taking
lessons too. One day Arthur’s piano
teacher was over and Arthur wasn’t. He
was probably out playing touch foot-ball. My mother said: ‘Well, we can’t
waste the money. Joanie, you take the
lesson.’ I began playing. I wanted to be
a concert pianist after that.
“I changed direction only when I re-
alised I would never be a great pianistand discovered that I loved the theatre.”
Nevertheless, she used her musical
talent during the Second World War.
Aged 21, she married George Kupchik,
who was serving in the US army but
went on to become a professor of envi-
ronmental science. While he was sta-
tioned at a base in Texas, she worked at
a local radio station as a pianist.
A diminutive strawberry blonde, she
first trod the boards professionally in
1945 and made her Broadway debut in
Sundown Beach three years later. In 1951
she gave birth to her only child, Eric,
who survives her. As a baby he was diag-
nosed with cerebral palsy and, when
Monroe married into the family, she
doted on him. Once, when Eric was in
hospital, she brought an enormous tele-
vision set in for the children’s ward. “She
stayed there and played with them until
they had to close up. She kissed them all.
It was hard for her to leave them.”
Copeland worked steadily on both
television and on Broadway, though she
was frequently cast as a standby for
such leading ladies as Vivien Leigh in
Tovarich (1963) and Katharine Hep-
burn in the musical Coco (1969).inson and his cousins Michael and Vin-
cent Hickey were convicted of murder
while Patrick Molloy was convicted of
manslaughter. After a long campaign to
reopen the case, championed by the
journalist Paul Foot among others, the
appeal judges ruled that the West Mid-
lands serious crime squad fabricated
evidence to manipulate a confession
from Molloy (who died of a heart attack
two years into his sentence).
Roch and his fellow judges, Mr Jus-
tice Hidden and Mr Justice Mitchell,
took two months to come to a decisionafter a 22-day hearing. At the end of
July 1997 Roch read the 397-page judg-
ment. It found that Detective Consta-
ble John Perkins had been “prepared to
resort to deceit to obtain evidence”
from Molloy. Roch added that the offi-
cer’s account of Molloy’s confession
was “most improbable, if not impossi-
ble”. He went on to stress that there was
no evidence implicating more senior
members of Staffordshire police of any
misconduct in relation to the handling
and interviewing of Molloy and that no
physical violence had been used.
Roch and his fellow judges found that
in relation to Vincent Hickey, who had
confessed to being present at the farmOn the night 18 people
died, he navigated his
battered yacht into port
Email: [email protected]Joan Copeland
Diminutive Broadway actress and younger sister of Arthur Miller, who warned her about the pain of working in the theatre
As the younger sister of Arthur Miller,
Joan Copeland might have expected an
easy ride when she became a jobbing
actress on Broadway. Instead, Miller
actively discouraged her from treading
the boards “He wanted to protect me
from the pain that goes with being in the
theatre,” she said.
It was not until she was in her late
fifties that they worked together. He cast
her as her own mother in The American
Clock. “In fact, when he called and said
‘I’d like you to do a part in my new play,’
I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s written a
walk-on for me’ — because I’d audi-
tioned a number of times for him for
other plays and never gotten the roles.”
He explained that for years he could on-
ly see her as his sister, not as an actress.
In their private lives they always
made time for one another. Copeland,
who took her stage name to avoid accu-
sations of attempting to cash in on her
brother’s success, got on well with her
one-time sister-in-law, Marilyn Mon-
roe, to whom Miller was married
for five years and with whom she shared
a birthday.
“My father had the same birthday
too,” she said, “so we would celebrate it
together.” She had met Monroe at the
Actors Studio, of which Copeland was a
charter member, before she even knew
that her brother was dating her.
“Marilyn was already a Hollywood
star but she wanted to be a complete
actress and came to study at the Actors
Studio. She was rather shy, and after a
while began sometimes to nod at me
and smile... She didn’t think of herself
as a fully-qualified actress. She felt out
of her depth at the Actors Studio,
though she shouldn’t have.”
Joan Maxine Miller was born in New
York City in 1922. Her father, Isidore
Miller, was a clothes manufacturer who
had been born in Austria, and her
mother, Augusta (née Barnett), was a
housewife. They had two sons, Kermit
and Arthur, before Joan was born.
“One of my most memorable experi-
ences was working with Danny Kaye in
the musical Two by Two. For most of
the run we were on very good terms, but
then he started doing strange things
like totally breaking out of character,
and he could be adorable one night and
unlovable the next. As the run went on
we didn’t know which Danny would
show up on any given night.”
In 1975 she heard about a new Broad-
way production of Pal Joey. Initially re-
fused an audition on the grounds that
she was not a big enough name, she was
eventually assigned the role of standby
for the leading lady, Eleanor Parker.
Shortly before opening night Parker
quit; Copeland was in.
“Copeland seems to sing with her
loins and if Western Union ever puts
out a Lustogram, it should hire her to
deliver it,” declared one rave review in
Time magazine. The Village Voice said:
“Listening to her sing is like making
love on a good night.”
In an interview in 2012 she revealed
that she had just turned up a particular-
ly pleasing appraisal, in a letter written
by her brother to Noël Coward, asking
if he would permit Copeland to revive
his musical Conversation Piece.
“You know, as I know, as any writer
knows, that what really matters is
what’s on the stage, not how close or dis-
tant you are from the work,” ran Miller’s
letter. “I’m writing this because I think
my sister is perfect for your material.”
Copeland reflected, “It was very cut
and dried: Arthur believed that as an
actress I could do the Coward play. That
meant a great deal to me. It’s been said
that blood is thicker than water, but
whoever said it was not a writer.”Joan Copeland, actress, was born on
June 1, 1922. She died on January 4,
2022, aged 99Copeland and Miller at the
opening night of his play
The American Clock on
Broadway in 1980. Right:
with Marilyn Monroe, her
one-time sister-in-lawKEYSTONE PRESS AGENCY/AVALON