Bing, Geoffrey Henry Cecil (1909–77), barrister and politician, was born 24 July 1909 at Rockport, Craigavad, Co. Down, son of Geoffrey Bing (an anglican clergyman who had founded a preparatory school there) and Irene Bing (née Duke). The family spent some time in China, and Bing was educated at Tunbridge Grammar School. He graduated in 1931 from Lincoln College, Oxford, with a second-class degree in history, and in 1932–3 was a visiting fellow at Princeton University. In 1934 he became a barrister; he was increasingly involved with left-wing politics, and in the late 1930s met Christian Frances Blois, daughter of a baronet, and previously married to Edward Harding; her involvement with a left-wing newspaper, the Week, provided a stimulus for Bing's investigation of human-rights abuses in fascist countries. He supported prisoners there and joined the International Brigade during the Spanish civil war. In 1940 he and Christian Blois were married. From 1941 he served in the Royal Corps of Signals; he was commissioned in 1943. His war service included a stint on testing experimental parachutes; he was a signals officer in North Africa, served as major with the British liberation forces in Europe, and was mentioned in despatches. In 1945 he was elected Labour MP for Hornchurch, and was briefly an assistant whip in Attlee's government; he was a member of the Labour party Friends of Ireland group, supported Irish unity and the rights of nationalists in Northern Ireland, and unsuccessfully tried to have legislation enacted to prevent discrimination and gerrymandering there. His pamphlet John Bull's other island (1950), strongly critical of the unionist position, was well known. He became a KC in 1950, and returned full-time to his legal career in 1955 when, despite having earned some recognition as a skilful parliamentarian, he lost his parliamentary seat.
In 1956 Bing became constitutional adviser to Kwame Nkrumah, who led the Gold Coast during its transition to independence, and during 1957–61 Bing was attorney general of the new state of Ghana. He drafted much of Nkrumah's legislation, and was retained as his adviser (1961–6) while Ghana became an increasingly repressive one-party state, but in February 1966 he had to surrender to opposition authorities during a coup d'état against Nkrumah. After a short time in prison he was expelled from Ghana on 24 March 1966 and returned to England. In 1967 he published Reap the whirlwind: an account of Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana 1950–66. From 1970 he was unofficially advising the newly founded SDLP in Northern Ireland on constitutional matters; from 1970 to 1974 he was consultant to Irish Academic Press, providing advice on publishing parliamentary papers. He edited The family lawyer, a book that had a second edition in 1970. Bing revisited Ghana a few weeks before his death in London on 24 April 1977.
His first marriage ended in divorce in 1955, and in 1956 he married Eileen Mary Cullen, daughter of the parliamentary agent for Hornchurch. There were two sons of the first marriage and an adopted daughter of the second.