James Furber, golfer, clubman, writer and long-serving solicitor to the Duchy of Cornwall

Furber led the Farrer & Co team handling the legal needs of the Duchy of Cornwall as well as Oxbridge colleges, charities and golf clubs

James Furber, who has died aged 69, was a legal adviser to the Duchy of Cornwall and a bon vivant amateur golfer and clubman.
He was a partner for 35 years of the firm of Farrer & Co in Lincoln’s Inn, often referred to during the late monarch’s reign as “the Queen’s solicitors”. Expert in all aspects of property law, he held the formal appointment of solicitor to the Duchy of Cornwall for 26 of those years.
The Duchy was established in 1337 for the benefit of the then Prince of Wales – Edward, the Black Prince – as eldest son of Edward III; its revenues fund the official household of the current Prince of Wales (who is also Duke of Cornwall) to this day.
Comprising 135,000 acres of farmland, forestry and other property, chiefly in the south-west of England, it includes the Scilly Isles and the Poundbury new town development in Dorset. In London, south of the Thames, it owns a mixed residential and office estate and the Oval cricket ground.
Furber’s combination of professionalism, integrity and charm made him ideal to lead the Farrer team handling the Duchy’s multi-faceted legal needs. He also advised Oxbridge colleges, landed estates, charities and golf clubs.
Held in affection and respect by colleagues as well as clients, he joined the Farrer partnership in 1985 and rose to head its property department. He was appointed Duchy solicitor in 1994 and was senior partner – bringing unobtrusive modernisation to a very traditional firm – from 2008 to 2011. He retired as a partner in 2020.
William James Furber was born on September 1 1954, the third of four children of Robert Furber and his wife Anne, née McArthur. James’s elder brother John would also become (as a barrister and KC) a specialist in property law; their sister Canon Sarah Coakley is a professor of theology.
James Furber’s career and approach to life had many echoes of his father’s. Bobby Furber was a solicitor with the City firm of Clifford-Turner, a well-known amateur golfer who chaired the rules committee of the Royal and Ancient at St Andrews, and a man who enjoyed life to the full. James’s funeral tribute to Bobby in 2016 might in part have described himself: “When he entered a room, there was a feeling that the party, however much in full swing, was really about to start…”
James was educated at Westminster and, after a stint as a hospital porter, read English literature at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He joined Farrer & Co as an articled clerk in 1976.
In 2017-18 he was high sheriff of Greater London, a ceremonial role which chiefly involved lunching with judges – “the sort of thing he was good at,” one friend remarked. As a reader in the Church of England, he was noted for the wit of his sermons at All Saints, Blackheath, his family’s parish church.
He was a trustee of the Leonard Cheshire Foundation for the disabled; the Arvon Foundation, which supports creative writing; Trinity College of Music and Cambridge University Musical Society; and the Built Environment Trust. He was secretary of St Bartholomew’s Medical College charitable trust and the Art Workers Guild Trust.
On the golf course, Furber’s handicap was never better than 12 but he was a popular captain (as his father had been 35 years earlier) of Royal St George’s at Sandwich in 2016-17 and a member of numerous other golf clubs and societies; in the clubhouse he was celebrated as a sparkling conversationalist.
He also wrote regularly – with Wodehousian flourishes such as “the shot that dare not speak its name” – for Golf Quarterly and elsewhere. One of his most entertaining essays traced the evolution and social significance of club ties, a biographical footnote recording that he himself was eligible to wear at least 17 of them, though “he also enjoys the informality of an open-necked shirt”.
As well as his sporting affiliations, Furber’s neckwear collection included the salmon-and-cucumber of the Garrick Club, where a fellow member observed that “as Shakespeare (almost) said of Falstaff, he is not only convivial but the cause of conviviality in other men… the most clubbable man I know.”
Besides golf, Furber listed as his recreations literature, wine, cooking and “avoiding boring people”. He was also fascinated by language: three days before his death he was engaged in a social-media debate about phrases that had gone out of fashion, in which he favoured a comeback for “What in tarnation?”
He married first, in 1982, Rosemary Johnston; the marriage was dissolved in 2010 and he married secondly, in 2019, Amanda Pomeroy, with whom he established a consultancy firm after retiring from the Farrer partnership. Amanda survives him with two sons and a daughter of his first marriage.
James Furber, born September 1 1954, died August 21 2024