Sir Richard Kindersley
(1792-1879)
7 August 1861

Volume 4, page 324, sitting number 5368. 

Born at Madras in India on 2 October 1792, Richard Torin Kindersley was the eldest son of Nathaniel Edward Kindersley, who was in the civil service of the Honourable East India Company, and his wife Hannah née Butterworth.

He was educated at Haileybury and at Trinity College, Cambridge, becoming a fellow in 1815 and MA in 1817. He was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1818 and developed a Chancery practice.

On 4 August 1824 he married Mary Anne Bennett, only daughter of the Rev. James Leigh Bennett of Thorpe Place, Surrey. Their marriage produced four children.

In 1848 he was appointed Master in Chancery, followed by an appointment as Vice-Chancellor in 1851. He had a reputation as a sound equity judge.

When the census was taken in 1861 he, his family and their six servants were living at 7 Hyde Park Gardens, Bayswater.

He retired from the bench in 1866, receiving a pension of £3500 per annum, but continued to sit on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

The Right Honourable Sir Richard Torin Kindersley died, aged 87, on 22 October 1879 at his residence, Clyffe, near Dorchester. He left an estate valued at £70,000.

According to an obituary in a regional newspaper, 'In 1851 he was selected one of the Vice-Chancellors, when he obtained the honour of a Knighthood, and for fifteen years filled the post of Vice-Chancellor, earning in the profession the highest character as one of the most painstaking, conscientious, and learned Judges of his time' (Bury and Norwich Post, 28 October 1879).