John Wellington Gwynne, who was recently appointed one of the puisne Judges of the Supreme Court of the Dominion, is a native of Ireland, and was born in 1817, being a son of the Rev. Dr. Gwynne, minister of the Church of England, of Castle Knock, Dublin. Judge Gwynne came to Canada in 1832, the year that the cholera first visited this continent; subsequently returned to his native country, and was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He read law with Thomas Kirkpatrick, barrister, of Kingston, and was called to the Bar, Trinity term, in 1837. He was elected a Bencher of the Law Society in 1849, and created a Queen’s Counsel the next year.
At the general election in 1848, Judge Gwynne was an unsuccessful candidate for Huron, in the Canadian Assembly, and was appointed to the Bench, to succeed Hon. Adam Wilson, in the Court of Common Pleas, on the 12th of November, 1868.
He was a member of the Law Reform Commission in 1871; was appointed a member of the Senate of the University of Toronto in April, 1873, and to the supreme Bench of the Dominion, in January, 1879. For the data for this sketch we are indebted to the Canadian Legal Directory, edited by Henry J. Morgan, barrister-at-law, Ottawa. The wife of Judge Gwynne was a daughter of Surgeon Durie