Sir Montague Shearman (7 April 1857 – 6 January 1930) was an English judge and athlete. He was a co-founder of the Amateur Athletics Association in 1880. The prejudice and contemporary misogyny he showed towards Edith Thompson, who was executed for conspiring to murder her husband, has been a source of controversy since her trial in 1922. Early life Shearman was the second son of Montagu Shearman, a solicitor, from Wimbledon, Surrey and his wife Mary, née Catty. He was educated at Merchant Taylors School in the City of London, where he played association football, captaining the first XV in 1874–1875. He received a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, taking a first in Classical Moderations and in Literae Humaniores. Amateur athletics He was a noted athlete, winning the one hundred yards race at the Oxford and Cambridge University Games in 1876, and was president of the Oxford University Athletics Club in 1878. He was also an accomplished rugby player, obtaining his "blue" as a forward and three-quarter in the university team from 1878 – 1880. Shearman was one of the founder members of the association, and served as the first honorary secretary from 1880 to 1883, then as vice-president until 1910. In that year he succeeded Lord Alverstone as president of the AAA. He was also a member of the Wanderers amateur football club. Career Legal Shearman entered the Inner Temple as a student in 1877, and was called to the bar in 1881. He practised on the Midland Circuit for twenty-two years before "taking silk" to become a king's counsel in 1903. He was a specialist in common law and commercial cases. Judicial In May 1914, just months before the outbreak of the First World War, Shearman was appointed a judge of the King's Bench Division on the nomination of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Haldane, and was knighted. Along with Lord Hardinge and Sir Mackenzie Chalmers he conducted an official inquiry into the origin and causes of the "Sinn Fein Rebellion" of 1916. Notable cases at which Shearman presided were the trial of Harold Greenwood at Carmarthen in 1920; of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters; of the murderers of General Henry Wilson at the Central Criminal Court in 1922; and of John Walter Knowles, also in 1922, for the "Tipton Catastrophe", a factory explosion which killed 19 teenaged girls, and which Shearman described as the worst case of