John Vinelott

Who was John Vinelott?

Sir John Evelyn Vincent Vinelott was a leading barrister at the Chancery bar and an English High Court judge in the Chancery Division from 1978 to 1994.

He was born in Gillingham, Kent, and studied at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Faversham. He started to read English at Goldsmiths, University of London, but his studies were interrupted by Second World War. He enlisted with the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve before he graduated: the master-at-arms told him that hyphenated surname were not used on the lower decks. He was later commissioned as a sub-lieutenant, but retained his new unhyphenated surname. He was sent to the School of Oriental and African Studies to learn Japanese, and served on destroyers in the Far East, reading Japanese signals. He bought a copy of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in Colombo, which made him determined to study philosophy after the war.

He returned to his studies at Queens' College, Cambridge, studying philosophy under Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell.