Slaughter, Sir William Capel (1857-1917)

Slaughter, Sir William Capel (1857-1917), lawyer, was born at 9 Langton Place, Vassall Road, Kennington, London, on 1i May 1857 and was the sixth and youngest child, and second son, of Mihill Slaughter (d.1880), the secretary of the railways' department of the stock exchange, and his wife, Ann Erskine, nee Capel. Little is known about the kind of education the Slaughter children received; the biographical notes that survive suggest that he was educated privately, a euphemism of the period suggesting education at home by a governess or tutor. He did not attend university and his legal training, common at the time, was a five-year period as an articled clerk to a solicitor. Slaughter was articled to the firm of Benjamin Gay Wilkinson and George Bernard Harvey Drew in Bermondsey Street. Although he learned the fundamentals of law with this firm, it did no commercial work, and Slaughter's first professional exposure to the field of work in which he would make his name occurred in 1879 when he joined the leading firm of solicitors Ashurst Morris Crisp & Co.Here John Morris, a highly respected commercial lawyer, became his mentor.