John Laskey Woolcock was a barrister

Barrister

A barrister is a member of one of the two classes of lawyer found in many common law jurisdictions with split legal professions. Barristers specialise in courtroom advocacy, drafting legal pleadings and giving expert legal opinions...

 and Supreme Court

Supreme Court of Queensland

The Supreme Court of Queensland, which is based at the Law Courts Complex, is the superior court for the Australian State of Queensland and sits around the middle of the Australian court hierarchy...

 judge in Queensland

Queensland

Queensland is a state of Australia, occupying the north-eastern section of the mainland continent. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Australia and New South Wales to the west, south-west and south respectively. To the east, Queensland is bordered by the Coral Sea and Pacific Ocean...

, Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

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Early life

Woolcock was born in St Clement

St Clement, Cornwall

St Clement is a civil parish and village in Cornwall, United Kingdom. It is situated southeast of Truro in the valley of the Tresillian River. There is a smaller village at Malpas in the south of the parish...

, Cornwall

Cornwall

Cornwall is a unitary authority and ceremonial county of England, within the United Kingdom. It is bordered to the north and west by the Celtic Sea, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by the county of Devon, over the River Tamar. Cornwall has a population of , and covers an area of...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, the son of the Rev. William Woolcock, a Bible Christian missionary, and Elizabeth née White. John Woolcock came to Queensland with his family in 1866, and was educated at the Normal School and Brisbane Grammar School

Brisbane Grammar School

Brisbane Grammar School is an independent, non-denominational, day and boarding school for boys, located in Spring Hill, an inner suburb of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia...

. Having won a Queensland exhibition scholarship Woolcock attended the University of Sydney

University of Sydney

The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...

, graduating B.A. in 1883. Woolcock excelled in his course and won the gold medal for English verse, the Wentworth medal for an English essay, the George Allen and Renwick scholarships, and the Belmore medal for agricultural chemistry.

Career

Woolcock taught at Brisbane Grammar School

Brisbane Grammar School

Brisbane Grammar School is an independent, non-denominational, day and boarding school for boys, located in Spring Hill, an inner suburb of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia...

 and was later appointed private secretary to premier Sir Samuel Griffith

Samuel Griffith

Sir Samuel Walker Griffith GCMG QC, was an Australian politician, Premier of Queensland, Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia and a principal author of the Constitution of Australia.-Early life:...

; in that capacity Woolcock attended the colonial convention at Sydney in 1883, the federal council at Hobart in 1886, and the Imperial conference, London in 1887.
Woolcock qualified as a barrister and was called to the Queensland bar

Call to the bar

The Call to the Bar is a legal term of art in most common law jurisdictions where persons must be qualified to be allowed to argue in court on behalf of another party, and are then said to have been "called to the bar" or to have received a "call to the bar"...

 on 6 December 1887. In April 1899 Woolcock was appointed Queensland parliamentary counsel with the right to continue his large private practice. Woolcock published a six-volume consolidation of The Queensland Statutes with Marcus Hertzberg (1911). In December 1926, with the general approval of the profession, Woolcock was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court and began his duties on 1 February 1927, although his health was already in decline. Woolcock proved to be an able and hard-working judge, but died suddenly of endocarditis

Endocarditis

Endocarditis is an inflammation of the inner layer of the heart, the endocardium. It usually involves the heart valves . Other structures that may be involved include the interventricular septum, the chordae tendineae, the mural endocardium, or even on intracardiac devices...

 on 18 January 1929. Woolcock married twice; on 17 June 1891 to Miss Gertrude Mary Harper (d.1912) and subsequently on 27 May 1914 to Miss Ida Hague Withrington, who survived him with one son and one daughter of the first marriage and one son and one daughter of the second.

Legacy

Woolcock had high ideals, was studious, widely read, and was a hard worker. He wrote a good deal on legal questions such as the liquor act, the local authority act and Friendly Societies law, and was responsible for annotated issues of the justices' act and the health act. Woolcock also wrote detective stories and verse some of which appeared in the Queensland press; an example is included in A Book of Queensland Verse. He was a force in all educational matters and exercised much influence on them in Queensland. In 1895 with S. W. Brooks he initiated the movement for a public library at Brisbane, became a trustee when the library was established, and a member of the board of advice when it was taken over by the government. Woolcock was one of the original members of the University of Queensland senate (1910–16) and for some years was chairman of its education committee. He was especially interested in his old school, Brisbane Grammar School, of which he became a trustee in 1889, and chairman of trustees from 1906 until his death. Woolcock's will bequeathed £100 to the University of Queensland

University of Queensland

The University of Queensland, also known as UQ, is a public university located in state of Queensland, Australia. Founded in 1909, it is the oldest and largest university in Queensland and the fifth oldest in the nation...

 to found the Gertrude-Mary Woolcock memorial prize for proficiency in Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

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External links

• Woolcock John Laskey — Brisbane City Council Grave Location Search