Rosemary Polack

Rosemary Polack interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 13th May 2013

0:05:07 Born 1932 in the house of maternal grandparents in Stamford Hill, London; my parents and my three elder sisters lived with my grandparents in a rather big house in a terrace near the top of Stamford Hill; I did not know my grandparents well because I was evacuated on 1st September 1939; they were presences, and I can remember them, but I don't remember much about them; my grandmother was the boss of the place where my father worked - all my grandparents were immigrants - and she wore long dresses, was very short, and if in the right mood, and particularly after we were evacuated, she would gather up her skirt and give you a little bit of money from a purse hanging between her skirt and petticoat; my grandfather was intellectual, and loved having friends from the Synagogue; we had a big dining room and I can remember seeing this room full of men gabbling away at each other; all my grandparents came here from Eastern Europe; my grandmother went to a matchmaker having seen my grandfather, who must have been a rather rakish man, and said that she wanted to marry him and had the money to do so; they came to England and my mother was born here in 1894; it is unclear exactly where they came from but possibly from Romania; my father's parents came from Poland; my maternal grandfather started a business here, became bankrupt for £5, and my grandmother, triumphantly, took over the business herself; all I remember of him was that he went regularly to the Shul, though I don't think he was particularly religious, but he liked talking and bringing friends to the house; that tradition went on a bit because my mother, fairly shy, with a younger brother, used to go on holiday together; she was quite happy as she did not want to leave home; she had won a scholarship to the Central Foundation School, but left at sixteen and went to Toynbee Hall for evening classes; her brother then decided to marry but I am not sure that it changed her attitude; my father's parents had come from Poland at the time of the Pogroms; my grandfather had been a carpenter, and came with three brothers who all intended to go to America - one went to Canada, another to Chicago and the other to Washington D.C.; my grandfather did not go because he had met his wife-to-be; she had had either measles or meningitis as a young child and was completely deaf; she had never been to school and never learnt language, so did not speak; they were unable to go on to America because Ellis Island officials were sending back anyone with a disability; they stayed in Liverpool; her sister had married another immigrant, and went to live in Shrewsbury where they ran a shop selling women's clothes; my father left school at twelve and had five younger siblings; his father had got a job as a joiner working on ships being built in Liverpool; my father went down to his aunt's and worked in her shop; my maternal grandmother by that time had a factory in London making cheap clothes from where my great-aunt bought stock; they made a match between my mother and father, although I don't think my mother knew much about it; so there she was a twenty-eight being married to a man four years her junior; their marriage lasted more than fifty years, so it worked

11:09:22 My mother was always reading and brought us up to do so too; my father had had a very basic education; he was quite good with his hands, unlike the rest of the family; I pause because I know that one of my sisters had a totally different view of our parents than I did - she was number two and I was the youngest of four girls; my mother was very anxious to avoid confrontation; she was fairly passive and didn't enjoy cooking or sewing, but loved music and reading; she had learnt to read (but not to speak) languages by buying the Bible in various languages and working her way through them; they were all Jewish but my mother had stopped going to the Synagogue because she couldn't bear the way the women in the galleries just gossiped, and if she wanted to do so she could just read the prayer book or the Bible; my father could be irritable but was terribly proud of the fact that we all got to university

14:49:15 The War started when I was six, and before that I can remember the house that we lived in; it was really four storeys as there was a basement; my grandparents had a maid and perhaps a cook in the basement where we children sometimes had meals; I can remember having a party with children from the kindergarten and one of my eldest sister's friends coming to help; I was very close to my sister Brenda, the third daughter, who was much the same size as I was because she had been fragile at birth; there was a service hatch to bring up food from the basement and I remember at a party when we were playing hide-and-seek all round the house, that Brenda hid in the hatch; I remember sliding down the bannisters; I remember being fascinated by the X-ray machines in Clark's in Oxford Street (used to check whether shoes were the right size); I went first to the Kindergarten which was attached to the Synagogue in Stamford Hill; when I was six we were evacuated to Welwyn Garden City; at that time my sisters were all at the Skinners' Company School for Girls at the top of Stamford Hill; the school took girls from eight to eleven, and then had a scholarship band for the grammar school part of the school from eleven to eighteen; on evacuation from the school, the rule was that they could take younger siblings so as not to split families; I do remember having a gas mask and a packet of sandwiches; we had to get up early on the 1st September before war was declared, and go on the train from the local station to Welwyn Garden City, which seemed a big journey; the train was crowded with kids whom I didn't know, but I had my sisters; we children came out and sat in a hall and people came in and read out names and all the children were eventually taken, but us; we were the very last because they were trying to find somewhere that would keep us all together; in the end I was taken with my eldest sister to look after me, and Brenda and Joan went together; they had found two houses in Barleycroft Road, we were at number 30 and they were at 36; I vividly remember going into this house with Pearl, and there was a budgerigar in a cage - a bird I had never seen before - and it was sunny and they had French windows open into the garden; there were three more sisters sitting there and there was a tortoise on the lawn; I sat on the grass and tried to play with it; they were lovely, four sisters, just as we were, and only one had been married though another had lost a fiancée in the war; they were called aunties Ruth, Omy, Addie and Winnie; they were really nice people; I shared a room with my sister; I kept wondering whether the war was going to start and then it did; my other two sisters did not do so well; they went to a house with a rather spoilt daughter; there were suggestions that as these were East End kids they might have fleas; they were put in bunk beds and as they were found still to have their sandwiches they were told to eat them; I think they were more miserable; I felt very safe because Pearl was almost sixteen; with my sisters, after a few months their host's branch of the Civil Service was moved to the north and my parents, who had never had a house because they had lived with my grandparents, bought the house and we all moved in together; my father commuted to the factory at Seven Kings in East London, staying at Stamford Hill during the week and coming back at weekends; so I did not have the difficult time that so many other children had; we were there all through the war; I went to a local primary school; it was a mixed school and I had a fight with a boy on the way home from school, which I remember because I was teased about it; I was there for about a year and then went to the junior part of Skinners' School which had been evacuated; our classes had to be held in the Friends' Meeting House; the senior school had to share the new buildings of Welwyn Garden City Grammar School, now a comprehensive school; it was very good and so when Skinners' went back to London before the end of the war, I went into the second year of the grammar school; it was a revelation because the teachers at Skinners' were all women, and science was very badly taught; the grammar school started Latin a year earlier than we did, and I had to work hard at that, but I got a much better education for about two or three years; when we moved back to London a year after the end of the war, both my grandparents had died, and went back to Skinners'

28:38:03 I thought the teaching at Welwyn was extremely good, and particularly the science teaching; it was a new school, forward-looking, and when it came to the 1945 election the Headmaster's wife was the Labour candidate for Welwyn Garden City; I knew from home about the Labour Party caring about everybody; there were political debates in school, and it just seemed right for me - I suppose I was twelve or thirteen; the English teacher was very good and when I went back to Skinners' I got involved in acting; the history mistress at Skinners' was good but left the year after I left; Skinners' had not a great tradition of sending women to university; Pearl went to L.S.E., Joan got into Newnham to read English, and started at seventeen; Brenda had a year in Switzerland, ostensibly learning languages, but it was very snobby and I felt estranged from her at the time, but then she went to L.S.E. and read sociology; I wanted to go to drama school but was persuaded to go to L.S.E. where there were opportunities for acting but I could also get a degree, and thought I would also do sociology; however, my sister was very attractive and she brought people home as we all did; as the house was near the Skinners' building girls from my year would come in and my mother would give them tea; after the war, we got a table tennis table in the basement room; Brenda used to bring home friends who were reading law; I would talk to them and thought it sounded really interesting so before I started at the L.S.E. I asked to change from sociology to law, and it was agreed; I was taught by Professor Hughes Parry, Stanley de Smith, whose widow is still a friend of mine, living in Cambridge because he came here, Griffiths, company lawyer and best, Prof Kahn-Freund, taught family law and unemployment, my two favourite subjects; because we didn't have separate degrees there, she scheme was that we shared with King's and University College and you could choose between them; I started with U.C. in my first year but the land law lecturer was so boring, and someone told me that the lecturer at King's, London, was much better; I think the name of the man at U.C. was Powell; what I do remember from that time was one large man who was the only one to ask questions, and he later became Lord Chief Justice, Harry Woolf; supervisions were within college and the best tutorials were in family law and labour law, which were more important to me that company law and land law, tort and contract; at the L.S.E. I was acting, had a period on the College Union council, I was in the Labour Club, and I liked dancing; a lot of my closest friends were sociologists, anthropologists - I knew Edmund Leach's name long before Cambridge; I enjoyed it, but didn't work as much as I should have; I remember Claus Moser and Raymond Firth, mostly through friends talking about them; I also did sport; one of the best things about L.S.E. was that it had a squash court and shower rooms for women, so you could do it in the lunch hour; I also played hockey and netball, and a bit of tennis

40:05:09 By the end I decided to go to the Bar so I did Bar exams; you eat dinners for three years; it became more of a university thing because you had been at university doing the basic subjects, for which you got exemption from Part 1 of the Bar exams; there were people called Gibson and Weldon who became the Bar school and then widened out for solicitors as well, and you went to their courses to get through the subjects for Bar finals; now it has got rather better in that the dinners are not so central, and there is far more emphasis on debates and moots inside your Inn of Court; also young barristers and older ones are encouraged to take on tutees; when I was at the Bar that had started for the first time and I had overseas students, including one Chinese, at different times - I was at the Bar for eight years - and Orton Chirwa, whom I remember with affection, and we kept up correspondence for some time; I was in the Middle Temple; it was like a university campus; the thing that impressed me most was that, after I had qualified and was in Chambers, was that you went across to have lunch, and everybody talked about elements of cases that they were involved in; it was a great place to learn, and you certainly could ask questions; it was the same in Chambers as you could always go to someone else and ask; at the beginning when you were doing all the rubbish work, I was there at the time when hire purchase was coming in; there were things about cars being fit for the purpose, and you would get a brief from someone who had been sold a car; I would go in to someone like Patrick Garland, or my ex-pupil master - you had a year's pupillage before you really practised - and I remember having explained to me what a crown wheel and pinion was; I couldn't explain it a week after the case, but you got into the habit of learning technical things for a purpose, and then blotting it out because you were onto something else; in work as a barrister, the thing to remember is that the witness or your client is more important than you; that is something that used to irritate me about some of the people at the Bar who would hold forth at parties; it was a time when not many women were at the Bar and I don't know what impelled me there - probably lack of knowledge; if I had had Ken [later husband] as a tutor I wouldn't have ended up there because he would have said it was too difficult for a woman; I remember one of my first dinners at the Bar; I didn't know where to sit; you sit in a group of four and the older people are supposed to help you; I sat where there were, to me, two quite ancient women, who had been among the first to be admitted; that was fascinating because in their day, people didn't really practise, they got the qualification because they felt they should, once it had been opened up to women; I do remember reading a statistic in about my second year at the Bar, that there were 2,000 barristers in practise, about half of them out of London practising at provincial Bars; of the 2,000, about 100 were women, with again half in the provinces and half in London; of those in London, the ones in Chancery were doing paperwork and not court work; there were some women who did law reporting - Poppy Jolovitz was a law reporter and barrister, but I don't think she ever practised in courts; I was very lucky; I did two pupillages, one through a solicitor contact of my father's, and I went into those Chambers for six months; they were really too high-powered for someone new; I did see some things but they were much more commercial Chambers; you could change and do a second six months; I got into a different set of Chambers where there was quite a lot of family work, ordinary County Court work and ordinary criminal work, so I got a taste of everything; they kept me on and I was the only woman there; the Chambers was 11 King's Bench Walk and didn't have a separate name; it was a joint set; there was an entrance, Stuart Horner's Chambers which I was in, and Heathcote Williams' Chambers on the other side; they each had a clerk, but there was only one clerks' room, so you got some work from both sides; the Heathcote Williams' Chambers did a lot of landlord and tenant work, so I got to do the small stuff of some of that - rent Acts and things like that which were in the County Courts

51:00:06 There is a mixture of work in Chambers; you get all your cases from solicitors, or did then; solicitors can may be advocates in the County Court, and also they could work in Magistrates' Courts, but were often much too busy to do it; they had clients at their doors where we just had solicitors, so often at the last minute we were asked to appear for them; one particular firm in Grays near Southend, used to send me a lot of work, including their rubbish work - judgement orders and the like; I was also sent family cases in the Magistrates' Court; I used to go to Cambridge House which was a place which supplied lawyers for the poor; you got a brief marked £2 4s 6d - the tradition was still guineas then, so you got 2gns and 2s 6d for the clerk; it was the same with undefended divorces which solicitors could not do themselves, even though they were undefended, because there was no right of audience before a judge sitting in open court with his wig on; solicitors later got right of audience when the law changed on divorce, so it came to the County Court; before that it was High Court, where solicitors could not appear; what I enjoyed was a case with a bit of real argument; I did go on the Assizes because you could just pick up cases, either dock briefs or assigned prosecutions; I didn't particularly like criminal law because although every case is different on its facts there is not much law involved on the whole, and you are going to be as good or bad as your witnesses; provided you know the rules of evidence and don't ask the wrong sort of questions - there are all sorts of things that can go wrong like asking a question in cross-examination, and getting an answer you don't expect which can undermine your case completely; on juries - I think, on the whole, they got it right; I think having a jury is a good thing; one judge can make a mistake or be prejudiced, but not so likely with a range of people

Second Part

0:05:07 The most important qualities in a good barrister are clarity, fluency to some extent, but preparation is tremendously important, particularly if you are arguing law; in trying to get evidence out of witnesses you have to be able to guide them without suggesting the answer, so you have got to be clear that you are doing open questions and not leading questions; also, working out beforehand what the issues are, what the important points are in evidence, what you want to stress and how you want to stress it; having some sort of plan but being flexible enough to change it; you certainly can't plan all your cross-examination of witnesses because you have got to be open to adapt to their answer, see whether you should press further or leave it at that, or that you are never going to get the answer that you want and if you press them they are more likely to stick; humour is perhaps more important in a criminal case and you want to captivate the jury; on the whole, judges prefer to make funny remarks themselves; early on when we did undefended divorces and the law was quite different, the judge who sat in the High Court was a County Court judge - they all sat as Special Commissioners in the High Court - used to laugh, teasing young barristers with white wigs by asking irrelevant questions

3:45:20 I came to Cambridge after I married Ken Polack; I met him at a New Year's Eve party; I was then qualified and in my pupillage, and a friend from university took me to a party at Newnham; Ken has not gone home to South Africa for the holiday so was brought along; Ken was still eating dinners at that time so suggested meeting; I did not take much notice but thought he was a nice young man; he was at King's, doing an affiliated degree - he had got a degree from Rhodes first - and was in his Tripos year; we did meet up after our meal because he was in Inner Temple and I was in Middle Temple and had coffee together; he did ring some time later but it was five years before we married; I did go on a holiday with him and his friend, Rodney, who was a lawyer as well; I went to South Africa once, and then we had a year when he was doing his fellowship dissertation and we didn't see each other because he wanted to concentrate on it; after that we went out together and then got married; he got his Fellowship at King's; I think Noel Annan had earmarked him as they were waiting for a lawyer; Ken was a perfectionist, very warm, highly intelligent, was interested in other people and full of questions; that was one of the things I noticed early on that he always wanted to know more about what people were doing and how they were, and very empathetic, but also not judgemental which is part of being a lawyer; he taught law but also did a pupillage; he got a case in the Privy Council and mentioned in the Law Reports long before I did; for my part, my father got very excited when some nondescript criminal law case of mine had a three inch report in the 'News of the World'; I did get a case in the Law Reports when I was still at the Bar, and that was rather a silly one; when I first came to Cambridge we lived in a flat in Croft Gardens that belonged to Ken's friend, Jim Turner, who had been made a Fellow at the same time; they had gone to California for a year so we moved in; after that we had a flat in St Edward's Passage - the top one; Hal and Heather [Dixon] had moved to a house, and before them the Annans had had it; it had this wonderful roof garden from where you could see onto the Chapel roof; Lydia Lopokova was still in the flat below - the Keynes flat; when she gave it up, just before she died, Tony Tanner and Marcia had it; we married in 1961 and were there from 1962-68, and then we moved here; on other King's friends - the Browns came and lived next door to us and we bought it from the Williamsons; we knew Shirley Williams, Bernard Williams first wife, because she was interested in either the Garden House or Rudi Dutschke case, and wanted some background information; Ken helped so many people so we did see quite a lot of King's people; for the first three years of our marriage I was still working as a barrister in London and elsewhere, Ken could dine in King's so I did not need to worry that I was neglecting him; when they were able to take wives into dinner I found a mixed business; earlier it was worse; I went once on Founder's Day where you were allocated to a wife who would give a dinner party for wives; all these dinner parties would congregate and you had to go into the gallery of the dining hall and have dessert and wine, and you could listen to the speeches and see the tops of the heads of your husbands below; once was enough; later it was more welcoming, but dining in you could find yourself placed next to a fascinating person or a bore, and talking across the table was pretty impossible; so I have always felt a bit reluctant; I have dining rights as a member of high table, but I wouldn't go in unless I knew someone because I would feel an intruder

19:19:21 We made a decision sometime in 1963 to start a family; as there was no local Bar in Cambridge, and there was no way we could have a family if I was working in London, so the obvious thing was to become a solicitor; I could get an exemption in certain subjects but would have to do Solicitor’s finals; because I had been at the Bar more than five years there was a rule that you did not have to do solicitor's training, or do Articles, so it just meant you did the exams and then you were a solicitor; you had to be debarred; I remember being debarred at my own request and doing my last case in the High Court in late July; I remember someone raising an eyebrow, saying they had heard something "Miss Sands", and Judy was born in September; during the time between I had been mugging up for Solicitor’s exams and at that time - it may still be true - as long as you did three papers and got through them all first time, you then add the others one by one; so I took three that I had been practising in - family law, sale of goods, and possibly, contract - and I got through; while I was at home I added the others one by one while looking after children; at some time during that period I started doing some supervision for some of the colleges in family law; Derry Irvine gave me his supervisions notes; as he was going to L.S.E. it seemed very apposite; I did about eight hours a week seeing people once a fortnight in twos and threes; while we were in St Edward's Passage that was fine and I continued when we came here; students used to come here for about a year, and then I looked for a part-time job; that was very difficult; the first people I asked - Wild Hewitson and Shaw - gave me a very nice interview, but the senior partner said they did not want a woman or someone who was part-time; the next one, though nice, said they couldn't afford to give a room to someone working part-time; then I found Tony Hawley, who I think had been to some of Ken's lectures, who had just taken over a moribund practice called Miller that had had a family connection with a firm in London, and he was willing to take me on as a tame barrister to do the court work; as I said before, divorce came to the County Court so solicitors were able to undertake divorces in court, and I knew how to do them; they were bread and butter things and you could do ten in a day in High Court if you were instructed; I never had that many here; the funny thing was that one of the older solicitors from a old firm in town who was on the Council of the Law Society tried to do it; however, he had never sat behind Counsel, he started off by asking leading questions when he should not have done, the Judge got irritated, he got things in the wrong order, and all the other solicitors sitting behind Counsel got terrified and wouldn't do it; then I came along; I knew the Judge because he used to sit in Southend and Grays and had also seen me in the Bar Theatrical Society - he knew I had been a ‘member of the club’; we sailed through and I think that was why I started getting a reputation in Cambridge - I did them and other people didn't; clients did not have to go through two people, a solicitor and a barrister; it was all serendipity and not planned; I joined Millers and later became a partner, and senior partner in the end



27:37:17 We were on sabbatical when the Garden House affair actually happened but got back soon after; I found more than nine people, mostly from King's, waiting to see me; it was the time of the Greek Colonels, and there had also been a film shown in Cambridge and elsewhere of the run up to the take-over by the Colonels and the awful things that had happened; Communists had been harried and it really was a coup; the Greek Government were very keen to start up their tourist industry again after the chaos and organised 'Greek Week' in Cambridge; one of the travel companies was involved with this and set up a big dinner at the Garden House where people paid a lot to hear about wonderful holidays in Greece; people from top to bottom in Cambridge were horrified by this and decided to make a peaceful demonstration; there was a committee with people known to be left-wingers, and there was a demonstration on the lawns outside the Garden House which was invaded by a few anarchists and kid who had heard that there was going to be fun in the Garden House; it got totally out of had with people throwing stones and smashing windows; the Proctor and the Bulldogs, whatever they were called, were there; one of the things that inflamed it even more was that they gave names to the police of people they knew were well to the left; a lot of people there were just expressing their disapproval of the dinner in Cambridge for that purpose; there were twenty-three prosecutions altogether and three firms of solicitors; Peter Shaw had left Wild Hewiston and Shaw and gone off on his own - a very nice man - and as far as I knew the only other Labour Party solicitor in town, and a London solicitor, Barry Amiel, represented three; I had the most for some reason because a lot of them happened to be King's; it went to the Magistrates' Court first for committal and we had no case to answer for some of them, including one against whom nobody had said anything or seen to be doing anything; I found out afterwards was that what had happened was that somebody had wrongly identified him as a person on the roof, who was in fact his younger brother, and only fifteen at the time; we got some of them out but then it went to the Assizes and they wouldn't have it in Cambridge, so it went to Hertford; the Judge who was appointed to sit lived in a house called 'Truncheons', was known to be anti-student, and severe - Melford Stevenson; he directed the jury; we had witnesses from Cambridge - Bob Rowthorn was one - and he launched out at senior members as well, "the evil influence of Dons..", it was awful; we had to go to Appeal; I used to go down to visit my King's people in Wormwood Scrubs, taking them cigarettes; Rod Caird, who wasn't one of mine, got three years I think; it was out of all proportion; in the end, the only people who were convicted had something else other than being there; Rod Caird I think was holding a stick..no that was probably our chap, Williams, but he got a year in Youth Detention; Brian Williams had a mole fuse in his pocket, a thing about the size of a cigarette, and he came out on appeal; two of them had deportation orders, one South African the other South American; it got into the Law Reports and gave birth to the Law Surgery which we ran in Cambridge for many years, with people like Bob Hepple and Ken, myself, and David Pearl, lawyers around the place, so something good came out of it



37:41:08 Rudi Dutschke was the chap in Berlin who was shot in the head and came here for medical treatment; they set up a special tribunal; the change from Reginald Maudling who had let him in for medical treatment, and then Macleod who said that had finished; Pippard, at Clare Hall, had agreed that he could do a PhD here, but that was considered as something different to what he had been admitted for and they wanted to turn him out; it was the only time the Special Tribunal sat and the case was presented by the Attorney General; there was Peter Rawlinson, and we had Michael Foot, all sorts of witnesses on his behalf, but he got thrown out; Bob Young, at King's, was very much involved and it was he who brought him to me; Dutschke could not go back to Germany but Denmark took him and he went to Aarhus, and died a few years later; he had a wife and children here who were residents at Clare Hall; I defended him and I used the same team as I had used in the Garden House affair; he seemed extremely nice, and his wife was too; politically he could not totally disengage and people did come to visit him, but there were all sorts of things about how they were collecting evidence; there was a day, unprecedented, when we were not only not allowed to hear the evidence, but nor was Counsel, nor the solicitors, and nor was he, so we never knew what was said against him; I wonder that nobody has mentioned it since because recently they have been talking about the wrongs and rights of exclusion



40:54:21 My children have been a joy; one is working at one of the village colleges, she trained as a journalist and did work for the Cambridge News for many years, the other is a doctor, bringing up children, and doing part-time G.P. work and university teaching

ADDENDUM - ADDED LATER

I never mentioned, as I meant to do, how much my husband Ken was a tower of strength and support to me. He was a wonderful loving husband, friend and father to our children. He endured early Parkinson’ disease, causing depression, followed by diabetes and then terminal cancer. He stayed alive through will power to see the first of our lovely grandchildren and he then died a week after she was born.

I also want to touch on certain things in my later life that were important to me. One of these was my connection with the Trust that Cannon Collins founded to help the struggle against Apartheid and the movement towards democracy (the original contact was through a South African friend of Ken’s). My part in the decade from 1980 until quite soon after Mandela’s release, was continuing as a link in the chain funnelling money to lawyers in South Africa who were defending people accused of crimes with political implications. Because of the laws introduced to prevent institutions sending in money and also the vigilance of BOSS, the South African secret service who were known to tap phones and censor letters, the pretence was maintained that I would consult with one of my clients to see whether money could be found to fund their defence. Behind the screen I had one lawyer contact only, a city Solicitor, and requests were passed on through one or two more stages before money came through to be passed on provided they explained what was involved and what funds were needed. It became such a big thing that we later had to set up the virtual equivalent of a legal aid fund to ensure the money was properly spent and that the solicitors and advocates were not mixing up criminal cases with the political ones and the solicitors applying had to justify their requests. The Trust had decide on whether a case was to be funded and later employed an accountant in South Africa to audit and check the accounts as we sent money on estimates that initially had little or no check as there was room for corruption. What was particularly interesting for me was that I was visited by several South African lawyers, including Africans, Indians mixed race and European who were involved in cases and who came to see me in my office in search of funding. I met Mandela’s lawyer twice in the period. This made it difficult to keep from people in the office other than those directly involved from guessing what we were doing.

Another major interest in the last part of my career was my involvement in Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR), at first in the mediation movement in family law. I felt very strongly that divorce cases, particularly those where children were involved, should be dealt with away from courts and fighting which often left the spouses unhappy and poorer, and the children confused with divided loyalties. With an academic family lawyer we set up a committee and started the Family and Divorce Centre in Cambridge, the 2nd such centre in England. We were able to raise enough money to train and employ family mediators. The Cambridge Family Mediation Centre is still working over 30 years later. More recently I was fortunate enough to be introduced by a friend in Canada to another form of ADR called collaborative family law just starting there following its introduction in the USA. It offers a stronger and more structured format for specially trained lawyers to help those willing couples resolve the problems of marriage breakdown, each with the support of their own lawyer; All four must agree to try to arrive at solutions that are in the interests of the whole family and are as fair to both without court procedures, save the obtaining of consent Court Orders; it also encourages lawyers to suggest the involvement of jointly instructed expert help, both with emotional problems or practical or material ones. It is now a national movement and Cambridge is well provided with mediators and collaborative lawyers members; I am glad to have been involved with others in establishing a better way for many couples and children than litigation.

I also failed to mention in the comments or the addendum that the late1960s saw uprisings in France and Germany. Dutschke was the German charismatic leader and the demonstration in Berlin where he called for change was attended by people from different factions. The shooting seems to have been the work of a lone fanatic.