Bertie Vigrass OBE (1921 – 2020) 11 January 2021 Bertie Vigrass OBE © Winpenny Photography, Yorkshire Today on what would have been his 100th birthday, it is with great sadness that we report that Bertie Vigrass OBE passed away in the early hours of Wednesday 9 December 2020. Bertie was a pioneer of the modern day LCIA, serving as the first Registrar of the newly independent LCIA established in 1986 and then continuing his leadership of the organisation as CEO through the eighties and nineties. We owe Bertie a debt of gratitude for his influential role in the international growth and success of the LCIA. His drive for adaptability to best support a changing world and his “…unshaken belief that there must be a way of resolving disputes in a no-nonsense way while retaining good humour..”* are characteristics perpetuated at the LCIA to this day. Our thoughts are with both Bertie's family and his many good friends. * As fondly remembered in A Tribute to Bertie Vigrass OBE, in the centenary edition 1992 of the LCIA’s journal Arbitration International (shared below in full) A Tribute to Bertie Vigrass OBE Jan Paulsson Arbitration International, Volume 8, Issue 4, 1 December 1992, Pages 313–316 The Editors are pleased to offer this Centenary Issue celebrating the London Court of International Arbitration. The occasion surely had to be remarked, but it gives no joy to commemorate an institution in the abstract. Who today really knows what the LCIA – or the ‘London Chamber of Arbitration’, as it then was known – was doing at the turn of the century? The LCIA has survived because it was made to adapt, to make itself useful in a changing world. So the fact that we remember the LCIA's centennial is not due to what its founders may have done five generations ago, but to the vision, initiative and perseverance of those who make the institution relevant today. Bertie Vigrass's contribution has been unique. The LCIA's Registrar and Chief Executive, he has been responsible for the Court's administration over the last two decades. We take this occasion to give special tribute to a remarkable man whose role in the rejuvenation and true internationalisation of the LCIA – and the development of this journal – has been crucial. Bertie seems to enjoy nothing more than to undertake difficult and sometimes tedious tasks, to make them seem easy and even enjoyable, and then, if at all possible, to have his achievements escape public notice. Those of us who have known him behind the scenes are not deceived by his informality and understatedness: we have ample evidence of the unbending determination with which he pursues the objectives of an institution to which he is profoundly attached. Bertie is by now a familiar figure in the arbitration community across the world. He has been on the scene long enough that many are doubtless surprised, given his youthful forward-looking enthusiasm, to learn that before coming to arbitration he had two full and rich careers, each of which would have been sufficient for most men. In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe vividly depicts the nervy business of landing on aircraft carriers, pilots plunging toward a barely visible, postage stampsized strip jounced by a heaving sea. The book is, however, set in modern days of jet aircraft and radar homing devices. When young Bertie Vigrass, after joining the Royal Navy at the age of 23, became the youngest Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy, he was flying single engine aircraft. The propeller obscured whatever forward vision remained, in the case of the Seafire, at the end of a 16 foot nose. The only solution was to make a banking approach in order to peer sideways at the flight deck. In the absence of electronic technology (this was in the days even before mirror sights) the only guide was the batsman, his chest and arms illuminated to allow him to give signals according to his assessment of approaching aircraft: higher, faster, straighten left; or vice versa. In combat, planes landed at 30 second intervals. As the carrier invariably had to be moving into the wind, it often had to move away from the fleet during the landing sequence. This obviously could not be tolerated for long. Speed and precision were of the essence. Once a pilot was committed to his approach, there was no time to pull up for a second fly around. (Even if there had been time, he would likely crash into the barrier raised after the preceding landing to protect the parked aircraft at the end of the deck; angled decks allowing free clearance on the far side are a more recent invention.) Nor could you, once aloft, have second thoughts and decide to land on terra firma; that option was not available. The job was not for the faint of heart. To know exactly what to do was indispensable, but not sufficient; the pilot also had to have the confidence to execute. It was exciting, Bertie has been heard to say, but always adding that one couldn't allow it to be too exciting – either extreme of slap-happiness or loss of nerve would be fatal. Bertie developed into a most reliable navy aviator, serving on HMS Illustrious in World War II, first in the Indian Ocean and then in the Mediterranean, finally covering the Salerno landing. His survival depended on a strict routine of check and double check, and on the reliability of all the members of a team. When working with foreigners, it might be necessary – indeed vital – to adjust to their ways of operating. (An English batsman would raise his arms to tell the pilot he should go up – with the obvious implication that he was too low. If an American batsman's arms were raised, its meant the pilot was too high, and should thus understand that he ought to come lower. Neither system is right or wrong, only – rather drastically – the way one understands them.) These skills and attitudes are not irrelevant to the effective administration of international arbitration -among other things. Bertie left the Royal Navy shortly after the War but remained in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, where he held the rank of Commander. He continued to fly in the new luxurious epoch of jet aircraft, mirror sights instead of batsmen, and reassuringly angled, open-ended decks. In 1956 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire. It was around that time he made his last landing at sea. In civilian life, before entering the field of arbitration Bertie spent 17 years with the British Institute of Management, a government-initiated but independent organisation devoted to management training and the enhancement of the commercial performance of British industry. He rose to the rank of Executive Director. The perspective of his years at the Institute has always impelled him to look at arbitration as nothing more nor less than a service to the international business community – a service that should respond to the needs of its commercial users rather than to the habits of lawyers seeking to turn every arbitration into a procedural carbon copy of cases in their home courts. Such was the conviction he brought with him as he began his long association with the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and the LCIA. Bertie has an unshaken belief that there must be a way of resolving disputes in a no-nonsense way while retaining good humour. Realising that this is a greater challenge in the international field than within domestic legal systems, he has responded by promoting the internationalisation of the LCIA. He was a firm supporter of the rule that ensured a three-fourths' majority of non-UK nationals on the Court, and he favoured with equal fervour the goals of clarity and universality sought in the 1985 Rules. Perhaps because he looks sympathetically at businessmen facing international arbitration as though they were timorous pilots peering sideways through rough weather at a puny bouncing flight deck, Bertie gets along best with those lawyers who direct arbitral operations in the way good batsmen directed incoming aviators: with clarity and consistency. We salute him with admiration and affection. © 1992 LCIA