Geoffrey Bindman QC recalls an era of social & ethnic discrimination
It is often hard to recognise change while it is taking place. Yet I wonder how different the firms I knew in the 1950s and 1960s would seem to those at a similar stage in their careers today. Of course, there have been vast technological and organisational developments. Less obvious are changes in the social and ethnic backgrounds of those who work in the law and in the attitudes and prejudices of those with power and influence over the profession.
A legal family tree
There were several solicitors in my family, which stemmed from the wave of Jewish immigrants who fled persecution in Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century. My forebears landed in Scotland and the North East of England. The old joke was that they were trying to get to America and they thought they had arrived there. My uncle, Leo Gillis, was articled to a solicitor in his home town of Sunderland. After qualifying in 1927 he went to Manchester to join Rowley Ashworth, a firm founded in 1829, one of whose early partners, Edmund Butler Rowley, was the first captain of Lancashire County Cricket Club.
The firm had acted for the Electrical Trades Union since its formation in the 1880s and continued to do so for nearly a century. It has now become part of Thompsons, the dominant trade union firm. My uncle devoted his career to Rowleys, becoming its senior partner. I was articled at their London office in Chancery Lane from 1956 to 1959.
I never discovered how Uncle Leo gained access to such a firm. His background would have denied him employment at many firms at the time because anti-semitism and class prejudice were rife. That is why other solicitor relatives mostly joined other members of their community or started their own practices in Middlesbrough, Sunderland, and Hartlepool. Like Leo, they did not go to university and served the required five years articles straight from school. Their parents, who arrived in Britain penniless, had worked hard to earn enough to give their children—the males at least—the security and status of professional careers. Until the 1950s articles had to be bought—the “premium” was at least £500—and the trainees received little or no salary.
A staple diet
These firms remained small—two or three partners and a handful of assistants, mostly unqualified. Conveyancing and probate, divorce, crime and accident claims were the staples.
Much of the work was carried out by clerks with no formal legal training. This was also true at Rowleys. The managing clerks were men and women (though a very small minority of the latter) of outstanding ability who were the mainstays of the firm. Paradoxically, they seemed to do most of the real legal work. The partners cultivated the clients and ran the business.
Ron was the “outdoor” clerk. He knew every nook and cranny of legal London, particularly the warren of offices and corridors in the Royal Courts of Justice. His main responsibility was in the “bear garden”—a crowded space surrounded by the chambers of the Queen’s Bench masters. Ron was advocate for the firm’s clients in the procedural mini-hearings which preceded every High Court trial—resolving differences over disclosure of documents, further and better particulars of the respective allegations, how many expert witnesses could be called, time estimates, and preparations for trial. There seemed to be no restriction on rights of audience at these hearings. Ron was a skilful advocate, a match for any solicitor or barrister he might find opposing him.
Stanley was the conveyancing king. Though nominally he merely assisted a partner, in reality he ran the department with minimal supervision. Like the other senior clerks it was the accident of impoverished parentage and lack of educational opportunity that denied him the professional status his ability easily merited.
The main business of Rowleys was settling accident claims and the partners I knew best seemed to spend most of their time negotiating with insurance representatives (none of whom, as far as I could tell, was legally qualified). If negotiations failed, litigation was considered and often pursued. At that point, the file would be handed to the clerk to initiate and continue the process. One managing clerk, known as Coop, stands out in my memory as a wizard at civil procedure.
While it could be argued that class discrimination, denying equal educational opportunity, was the source of the solicitor–clerk divide, ethnic and religious prejudice remained a significant feature of the profession in the 1950s. Immigrants and their children entering the legal profession (and the medical profession) had an uphill struggle. A study by John Cooper—“Pride versus Prejudice: Jewish Doctors and Lawyers in England 1890–1990” (Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation, 2003)—documents the careers of many individuals who achieved satisfactory careers, and often eminence, in both professions in this period. But it also records the hostility of established practitioners to newcomers and discriminatory practices shocking in their crudity.
Cooper records that even in the late 1950s, the leading firms in the City of London excluded Jews from partnership. In 1956, my switch to Rowley Ashworth was hurriedly arranged after I was informed by my principal-to-be at Dees and Thompson, the old established firm in my home town of Newcastle where I had accepted an offer of articles, that his firm imposed a similar ban.
I am sure that Dickinson Dees, the firm in which Dees and Thompson subsequently merged, has no such restriction today. Do they exist anywhere, against Jews or any ethnic or religious minorities? I would like to believe that better educational opportunity, equality legislation, professional regulation and growing recognition of the sheer insanity of racial and religious discrimination, have lifted the burden of such injustices.
Sir Geoffrey Bindman QC, consultant, Bindmans
