My friend and colleague, Quintin Barry, who has died aged 88, was for many years one of the UK’s leading employment lawyers.
Although instinctively on the side of employees, his reputation meant that he was also in demand to represent employers, and over the years he was retained by a number of big organisations.
In the 1970s he acted for Sussex cricket club in cases brought by the Test and County Cricket Board against two Sussex players, John Snow and Imran Khan, and he was also involved in a high court case challenging a ban imposed on England cricketers who had signed up to Kerry Packer’s renegade World Series competition.
Outside the legal sphere he had an avid interest in politics, standing as a Labour parliamentary candidate on four occasions in his native Sussex, though each time unsuccessfully. He also became a prolific author on military history, writing 19 books on the subject.
Quintin was born in Worthing, West Sussex, to Garrett, an insurance manager, and Elizabeth (nee Ash). Educated at Eastbourne college, in 1953 he left school to train as an articled clerk at a Brighton law firm, Johnson, Mileham & Scatliff, qualifying in 1958. Afterwards he spent two years as an assistant solicitor at Cronin & Son, in London, until returning to his original firm in 1960.
He became a partner there in 1962 and in 1970 played a leading role in the creation of Donne Mileham & Haddock (later DMH Stallard), one of the largest provincial English law firms. In 1988 he helped to set up Law South, an association of the major law firms in the south and south-east of England.
On stepping down as DMH Stallard’s managing partner in 1988, Quintin became the firm’s chair, but continued as an employment lawyer and also chaired industrial tribunals. Later he also worked as a consultant with the Eastbourne firm Lawson Lewis until a year before his death.
A member of the Labour party for most of his adult life, he was happy enough to stand as an MP even though he had little chance of being elected – in 1970 in Lewes; in the two 1974 elections in Shoreham, and then in 1979 in Brighton Kemptown.
A man of remarkably diverse talent and achievement, his later writing career blossomed and he mainly focused on 18th- and 19th-century military history. Two exceptions were The War in the North Sea (2016), a detailed account of the 1914-18 naval war, and Command of the Sea (2019), covering the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1904-05. He also drew on his love of racing to write Lord Derby and his Horses, published in 2014.
Quintin’s 1959 marriage to Ann Willcox ended in divorce in 1974. He is survived by his second wife, Diana Hoad (nee Pelling), whom he married in 1975, the children from his first marriage, Sarah, Josephine and Quintin, and Diana’s children from a previous relationship, Clara and Kate. A stepson, Oliver, died in 2013.
