In his will of 1897 JCR made bequests of £20 each (around £1700 at 2008 prices using the RPI measure) to some of his friends. They included the 'great and the good' of the time:
John Heywood Johnstone was MP for Horsham (1893-1904) and lived at Bignor Park, Sussex and also at Trewithen, Cornwall, famous its gardens. He was usually known by his middle name of Heywood.1 He was a Justice of the Peace was a Deputy Lieutenant John Heywood Johnstone's son George Horace Johnstone (1882 -1960) took over Trewithen on his father's death heralding Trewithen's Golden Age of Gardening.
Sir Edward Fry GCB, GCMG, FRS (1827-1918), was a judge in the Court of Appeal (1883-1892) and also an arbitrator on the International Permanent Court of Arbitration. He was a Quaker, son of Joseph Fry (1795-1879) and Mary Ann Swaine.
He was called to the bar in 1854, took silk in 1869 and became a judge in Chancery in 1877 and was raised to the Court of Appeal in 1877 retiring in 1892.
In 1897 he accepted an offer to preside over the Royal Commission on the Irish Land Acts. He also acted as an arbitrator in the Welsh coal strike (1898), the Grimsby fishery dispute (1901) and between the London and North Western Railway Company and its employees (1906, 1907).
He was also involved in international law including acting as the British legal assessor on the commission to investigate the Dogger Bank incident where the Russian navy accidentally attacked a British herring fleet in the North Sea.
Besides law he was on the Council of University College London and was interested in Zoology (elected to the Royal Society in 1883).He wrote two books on bryophytes, British Mosses (1892) and, with his daughter Agnes, The Liverworts: British and Foreign (1911). Sir Edward lived at Failand House just outside Bristol.
Sir Fleetwood Isham Edwards (1842-1910) was educated at Harrow School and went to Sandhurst in 1861. He received a commission in the Royal Engineers in 1863. In the 1870s he was Inspector of Works at Woolwich Arsenal, then aide-de-camp to General Sir John Lintorn Simmons, inspector-general of fortifications. Following his contributions to the Berlin Congress, in 1878, he was appointed Assistant Privy Purse and Assistant Private Secretary to Queen Victoria. He later became head of the Queen's personal household, a privy councillor, and a close personal advisor. He was an executor of her will in 1901.
He was a member of the M.C.C. from 1870, and at Harrow, just failed to get into the Eleven. In his time he made some scores for the Royal Engineers, and in 1865 began to play for Gentlemen of Kent.
Aubrey St John Clerke, (1843-1923), had a brilliant career as a scholar and medallist in mathematics and science at Trinity College, Dublin and later became a Chancery barrister in London. Amon other books, he wrote
The law and practice under the Settled land acts, 1882-1890. With the statutes and the rules and forms issued under the Settled land act, 1882
Ernest E Lake (1844 -1917)
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Evidence that the problems of the North Wales Narrow Gauge Railways Company were troubling James C Russell even a year before his death, in this sworn affadavit to the Chancery divison of the High Court. Dated 31st May 1911 it asks the Court permission to release money held by the Court to pay for running expenses and to pay debenture interest. At the end he drops in that there are negotiations taking place to transfer the line to the London & North Western Railway which ultimately proved to be a pipe dream. Most of this is in copper plate script by one assumes a solictor's clerk but JCR has added a line in his own wavering hand writing at the end, perhaps demonstrating his fraility by this time.
