Obituary: William Rose, Sharpe Pritchard

At Sharpe Pritchard we are shocked and saddened by the unexpected death of our beloved colleague and partner William Rose.

William spent the whole of his career at Sharpe Pritchard, training with the firm and qualifying in 1990. After qualifying he was a litigator throughout, and the majority of his work was in the higher courts. Latterly a great deal of his work was in obtaining planning injunctions, where he mastered the inside track. Many people have commented on how Court 37 in the RCJ will not be the same without him. William was also a true expert in judicial review, planning appeals and Supreme Court and Privy Council work (he was a Privy Council agent). He was a mine of legal and procedural knowledge for his clients and for the barristers he worked with, commanding fierce loyalty and respect from them all.

William was an enthusiastic reader (he attempted and we think completed reading through the Telegraph’s list of top 100 novels one after the other) and a keen walker. He was in the process, most weekends, of walking as much of the coast of England as he could. Just a week before his death he had completed the stretch to Great Yarmouth to the north and had also got as far as Dorset to the west, having covered everything in between. Before he sustained an injury, William was a talented sportsman, in particular cricket and rugby and in his younger days an elite middle-distance runner. He was a reluctant IT user, with many of the emails that he typed himself saying simply ‘Please call me’.

We know William, and those emails, will be very sorely missed by all those clients, barristers, other professionals and regular opponents who knew him. More so, he will be missed desperately by the Sharpe Pritchard family as a consistently reliable professional colleague, an institution and most importantly a true kind-hearted and engaging friend. We send our deepest condolences to his family and other friends.