Eleanor Sharpston

0:04:17 Born in London in 1955; I come from a refugee family from Lithuania on my father's side and an Irish Republican family from southern Ireland on my mother's. My father's mother was born in Lithuania, in a small village called Vilkomar (now Ukmerge), about 50km from Vilnius, of a family of Litvak Jews with a number of Rabbis and a great love of learning on that side of the family. People who met my mother listened to her cut-glass Roedean accent – she was in fact the most Irish of Irish women you could possibly imagine, but she was born in Yorkshire in Poppleton. and went to a Girls' Public Day School Trust school in Croydon (hence the accent). Actually, my mother was lucky to have existed. Her mother (my grandmother) had a tendency to be late for things, and that meant that fortunately she managed to miss catching the Titanic, so the family line went on. My grandmother was actually very worried that she had missed the boat because she had been given the ticket by her then employers whom she was meant to join in America. She was working in France and she travelled from Paris to Cherbourg and then got a taxi to try to get to the Titanic. However, the ship was moored out in the roads as it was too big for the harbour; and she just couldn't get there in time. It is a story with a strange mirror image because when I was a young barrister working in Brussels and commuting on a motorbike between Brussels and London, once when I was due to make a trip I miscalculated the time it would take to finish the work in Brussels, so I failed to catch the 'Herald of Free Enterprise' at Zeebrugge. I used to take the night-time sailing because it enabled me to get some sleep as the crossing took five and a half hours. I didn't have the budget to enable me to rent a cabin but I had discovered a very nice place in the centre of the ship where there were some luggage racks. Nobody knew they were there and if you were reasonably athletic you could climb up into them. I'm small so I fitted into them neatly; and I used to take a sleeping bag with me and sleep there. There is no way I would ever have got out when the ship foundered.

5:20:23 I suppose my first memory is of watching our beloved dog Viking, in our rather small cramped house in Ealing, fail to adjust to a slippery floor at the bottom of the stairs and sliding on his side into the kitchen. I learnt to walk hanging onto the dog which seemed to please him, so that he wagged his tail and knocked me down; I learnt to deal with that by gripping his fur and adjusting myself to the wagging tail. I wonder, when later on I started sailing on square-riggers and working in the rigging, whether my relative comfort working aloft when the ship was pitching and rolling could be put back to this early memory of just hanging onto the dog.

7:13:07 I had wonderful parents; they were both very honourable and upright people. My father was brought up as an observant Orthodox Jew; at a certain point, which was after he went up to Cambridge as a student, he decided he didn't really believe, but continued to be an upright and moral person. My mother, in her turn, was very influenced by her father's experience working voluntarily to help the widows of comrades who had been killed in the First World War, writing letters for them so that they got their pension; he was killed when my mother was sixteen in a road accident; she was obviously affected by that, but nevertheless she got a major scholarship to Cambridge where she met my father. It was a very unlikely marriage between a very bright Irish girl who had just converted to Roman Catholicism, partly because she was reading the Spanish mystics, and a very bright Jewish boy who had ceased to practice. It was a marriage that at the time created great difficulties with the families on both sides – my father's family said the mourners' prayer for him – yet it was a marriage that continued rock-solid for over sixty years; that created a very stable and warm environment for me, one in which there was a natural expectation that you would be curious, interested in things, that you would want to read and ask questions, you would be analytical and discuss. Looking back at it, it never occurred to me that most families would not, perhaps, discuss the meaning of life over the breakfast table; my own family didn't strike me as strange at all until I went to school and discovered that my friends' families didn't work like mine; to me it was entirely normal, if you were driving in the car and passed a place with a strange name and then somebody made a reference to the Holy Roman Emperor, that you would naturally start looking at the historical background, or whatever it happened to be. We were a very tight family, almost a clan; I have one brother who is a lot older than me. My father was a mathematician and took a first in mathematics and then did economics; what he had planned to do was to be an actuary, but that was interrupted by the war; he went into doing work with the Ministry of Aircraft Production and put his statistical skills to enormous use in bamboozling the Americans on lend-lease to let the Brits have what they needed in order to keep the skies defended over the UK; meanwhile my mother was working at the Ministry of Fuel and Power with Harold Wilson; later she worked for the BBC.

12:07:09 When my father married my mother, a non-Catholic marrying a Catholic (even if the non-Catholic was a fellow Christian) was meant to accept that the children would be brought up as Catholic. My father made that promise and being a very honourable man he absolutely kept it; so he didn't talk to me about Judaism. What he hadn't reckoned on was my natural curiosity. I have a very clear recollection, when I was probably twelve: I had two little rooms right at the top of the house, one was my bedroom and the other was my study; normally I would have heard somebody coming up because the stairs creaked; but I was very absorbed in what I was looking at. I became aware that my father was standing in the doorway and staring at me sitting on the floor with a number of books round me; I was puzzling my way through Maimonides 'Guide for the Perplexed', which is not an easy read at any age; I had a Talmud Commentary, possibly a Hebrew Grammar, and my father looked down at this and asked what I was doing. I remember being slightly disconcerted as he was stranger and sterner than he normally was. I said that he had never told me anything about Judaism so I was busy finding out. There was a long thoughtful pause; he nodded, and turned round and went back down the stairs; and we never ever came back to that conversation. Formally I was brought up Roman Catholic, I went to a convent school (my faith in God just about survived that), I did my first Holy Communion which you do at seven, I was confirmed at nine, so I continued as a practising Catholic. In parallel with that I continued finding out about Judaism; I have always been religious and always found it difficult and challenging but enormously absorbing to try to find out which side of this line I belong; I shall probably only find out the answer to that question after I die; in the course of sixty years I have moved from Catholicism to Church of England (I served as Sacristan for three years in King's Chapel) to Liberal Judaism – I went before the Beth Din earlier this year. We'll see where I end up.

16:55:04 My parents had worked in Tanganyika before I was born. I was born in the UK but just before I was six we left for San Paulo, Brazil, where my father was to set up the subsidiary of a British company. I have never understood why they chose him to do it, because you would have thought they would have chosen an engineer and he had no engineering background at all. We always felt that he had actually been chosen because he spoke French; of course you don't need French in Brazil, you need Portuguese, but perhaps they thought it was the same language. My father did learn Portuguese and made a very good job of setting up the subsidiary, so I was in Brazil for four years; it was there that I was at a Catholic school which was run by missionary sisters from the Mid-West of the US. I must have been an impossible child to have tried to have put through a Catholic education because they were very literal-minded conservative Catholics, and I asked all the awkward questions and found it very difficult to accept the answers I was given. I must have been deeply tedious to try to teach. We then moved briefly back to the UK and I went in turn to St Paul's Girls' Prep and St Paul's Girls' School. Then my family moved abroad again to Geneva because my father got a job there; and there was the question of schooling. I tried to stay on at St Paul's staying with a family, but that didn't work out; I then went to a boarding school for three years which was a complete disaster. I went to Bedales, which is meant to be, and on its own terms is, a kind of progressive and liberal school. However, we were on completely different wavelengths as to what liberal and progressive might mean; it did not work; I ran away three times and left just before I was sixteen; I think mutual relief would be the accurate description. On their side it would have been very awkward to expel me because I did have a scholarship and my academic results were fine, but it was quite clear that I didn't fit into the school; on my side I was not fitting in and I hated being there. I went back home to Vienna where my family by now was; my father was working for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO); there had been a rather awkward two years when my father didn't have a job and my mother kept the family going. In Vienna I went along to the Conservatory and rather to my amazement was admitted as a classical guitarist; so it wasn't very difficult to work out what I was going to do: I was going to bail out of Bedales and study music in Vienna, and do my academic work around my music.

22:08:19 Music has been enormously important in my life; I did have a short period of time when I entertained the hope that I might be good enough to do it professionally; at the Conservatory, as well as classical guitar, I was doing the violin as my orchestral instrument, and was also doing musical theory, history, choral singing and composition, all the bits that go with a proper Viennese musical education. As well as that I was keeping the academic side going: I had already done some 'O' levels and needed to do 'A' levels; it was all rather elaborate and typical of me that things were on simultaneous tracks. Music remains very important. In terms of my ambition to dazzle the world as a classical guitarist, that didn't work out, partly because I started going deaf; I hasten to add that it is not in the least bit evident that I would have been good enough anyway; I was fortunate that there were other things that I could do. After that I became more focussed on making an academic career but the music always remained there. Now, doing my current job, I play viola in an amateur orchestra in Luxembourg and occasionally play violin in a chamber orchestra, and I am still playing the guitar, so the music is very much there. Also, one of the many lovely things about my work in Luxembourg at the Court of Justice is that the big, new, beautiful concert building is directly across the road from the Court. Very often therefore I will switch off my computer at 7.45 p.m., go across and be sitting down with my nice free programme waiting for the concert to start at 8 p.m., with soup and a glass of wine in the interval: a very nice way of ending the working day.

25:16:18 I remember one teacher from St Paul's Girls' School, Rosemary Jenkinson, my English teacher, who certainly helped me by conveying her love of words combined with the rigour of writing clearly and grammatically enough so that the exact nuance of the meaning you wished to convey did get communicated; she also encouraged me to write poetry which I will always be grateful to her for; I still do write poetry.

26:13:06 I was in the second year of women at King's College, Cambridge, in 1973; I came up as a classicist. The end of my education was actually very Edwardian as I was doing music, but also (with elaborately constructed private arrangements) Latin, Greek, French and English; I was based in Vienna. studying Latin with a gentleman who taught at the Theresianum in Vienna so I Wash doing Latin proses through German, translating English into German and asking what the Latin would be for what I had translated; I was doing Greek with a very pleasant woman who had bailed out of Oxford just before doing her finals in order to study singing in Vienna; I was doing the remaining bits of both languages by correspondence with a formidable teacher, Diana Zvegintsov, in London; I was doing French prose with a colleague of my mother's who had been at the siege of Dien Bien Phu, and doing all the literature with my own beloved mother who was one of the best literature teachers you could ever have the privilege of studying with.We did most of our studying together walking through the Vienna woods talking about books and how they fitted into their context; it was an amazing way of bringing one's schooling to an end. Against that background I was going to try to get into King's and was going to offer classics; I would technically have been able to offer Latin and elementary Greek because I had done so little Greek. I remember Mrs Zvegintsov, when I was doing the final bit in London, looking over the top of the glasses and saying that we would have a look at the paper; we looked at a three hour elementary Greek paper which we went through in 25 minutes; I certainly didn't get all of it right and the pace was breath-taking, but she said that we wouldn't bother with that but would do full classics. It was on the strength of full classics entrance that King's offered me a place; at the time there was a very curious arrangement between the three colleges that had just started admitting women and the women's colleges; the latter were petrified that they were going to lose their best students to the new mixed colleges, so the deal was that the men's colleges would only offer places and would not offer awards whereas the women's colleges would still be able to offer scholarships and exhibitions. I did the entrance for King's and while I was waiting a little message was passed to me through the economics don at Girton to my brother who was a lecturer in the economics faculty, that if I would like to change my preference Girton would offer me a major scholarship. One of the really clear memories that I have is walking through the Vienna woods with my mother, absolutely exploding at the iniquity of this psychological blackmail. Girton knew very well that I hadn't heard back from King's and they were hoping to get me to change at this moment, and I would see them in Hell first. I then waited, and Christmas came and went with no news; various friends of mine in Vienna had heard that they were getting places at Cambridge; I got a letter from Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford saying that if Cambridge doesn't want you we will be happy to take you, but I wanted King's; finally on 5th January a scruffy brown envelope turned up with a second class English stamp on it; this was the letter from King's offering me a place; so my parents and I embraced each other and shot down to the central post office to get there before it closed and send a telegramme accepting the offer; my interview had been with Geoffrey Lloyd and Chris Prendergast, but I cannot now remember who was the author of the letter.

32:49:08 When I came up to do classics, and later found out I had done really quite well in the classics entrance, I didn't read classics; I read economics in my first year; in my second year I read modern languages, French and Spanish with a bit of classics; I switched back to economics just at the end of that year and did that in my final year and got a first in Tripos; I then did a further year reading law under Ken Polack. He was a wonderful human being and a wonderful lawyer in equal measure. Later, when I heard I was coming back to Cambridge I asked to come back to King's and hoped that I would be working with Ken as his junior colleague; unfortunately, by that stage he was ill and so I came here as his successor in the Fellowship; I felt as though Elijah had disappeared in a chariot and thrown the mantle in my direction. Ken was enormously generous and helped me when I came back; he was wonderful as a lawyer because at the same time he could look at the whole way that the legal issue you were discussing fitted into law and society and be absolutely rigorous about how you constructed legal argument, applied legal rules: that is, about what you did and how you did it. It was always very clear working with Ken that if you were the lawyer working for the good cause, that would not exempt you from being technically as good a lawyer as the person who was working for the big bank or big insurance company. You had to be better than them. You couldn't just say that your heart was with the cause, that you would do it for free, and that would help; you had to be better than your opponents, than the brightest lawyers, that the big company could afford to pay for. That was an enormously important way of approaching things and an understanding to pass on to people who were doing law. Ken did very well in terms of the King's lawyers whom he taught. Nick Phillips was his, Tony Clark, Igor Judge, Patrick Elias, they were all people who were taught and influenced by Ken; I had a year with Ken, and when I came back to College as the Law Fellow here, he was more than generous in his help and his time. I also knew his wife, Rosemary, whom I think of under two completely different headings. Of course I think of her as being Ken's wife because she made their house so welcome and open to Ken's lawyers, but also when I came back, and particularly after Ken died, I had the pleasure of getting to know Rosemary as Rosemary, of knowing her own work and the quality of her work and her legal thinking, which is deeply impressive. Again, Rosemary has the ability to see both telescopically and microscopically, and she manages to adjust the setting at will.

39:11:21 If I had been able to plan my career and had a trajectory and exactly what I wanted, I probably wouldn't have been bold enough to say that I would finish up as Advocate-General in Luxembourg. It is my dream job and I am very lucky to have it, and I enjoy it immensely. What I have done and how I have done it has helped very much to fit me to try to do that job: doing what I currently do as a Member of the Court of Justice of the European Union. As one of the Advocates-General, you are trying to show the Court what the issues are and why you should decide one way rather than another, yet at the same time you are also concerned with the very tight, detailed legal reasoning. You have got to be able to see what that bit of law is doing in the overall shape of the picture, and you have also got to be technically a good lawyer. That ties in with everything Ken tried to teach me, and everything that I tried to teach my students here at King's while I was Director of Studies; it also ties in with the fact that my career has been a mixture of academic and practitioner. For all the time between my two stints in Luxembourg, that is from 1990 to 2006 when I went back to the Court, I was running an academic career in parallel with a practitioner's career. That was not planned but it has been immensely helpful, because what I now do indeed requires me to be able to explain how the bit of law is meant to work, academically, but I cannot come up with a solution that I propose to the Court which is all right in theory but is incapable of being applied at the end of a Friday afternoon by a minor, harassed, official somewhere in a registry in a Member State. It has got to work in practice as well and not just be a nice abstract solution. In fact I have been lucky, because what I have done in my practising career as a barrister has always been EU law under some guise or another plus human rights law; and that has helped with everything I am now doing, even though I would also say that EU law is so broad that every week I am reading something that I haven't worked on before. The Bar is an absorbing, challenging place to work, but also at times immensely frustrating. It took me ten years as a woman without connections to the Bar to get a seat in London chambers as a tenant; if I were less bloody-minded I would have probably just walked away from it; it finally happened because I was working in Luxembourg as référendaire for the then British Judge at the court (the previous Advocate General), Sir Gordon Slynn, who became Lord Slynn of Hadley. As Gordon's most senior staff person, I got to look after visitors from the UK who wanted to know stuff about the court. I was therefore asked to look after a couple of visiting barristers; in fact they were trying to find a barrister to join their chambers in London; they didn't have lots of EU work on the books to give the person but they had a feeling that they ought to have somebody who knew about doing it. So my pleasant discussion ended up being my tenancy interview; they offered me a rent holiday for the first year at their chambers and I said yes. That is partly why I had the academic career in parallel, because I had no income at all to start with: my first quarter back in practice brought in £250 plus VAT. Fortunately UCL was paying me as a law lecturer. I spent two years there and then I got a lectureship in Cambridge and at that stage came back to King's. I should also say that an enormously important part of the story, sadly not for as long as either of us would have wanted, was another Kingsman, David Lyon who was my husband; David and I met each other on an old-fashioned sailing ship and fell hopelessly in love; I married him just after I started back in the UK in 1991 and he died in 2000, but he was immensely important, central to the whole process of my being back at the Bar, establishing myself, having the confidence to go for things, being back at King's; he loved the fact that I was back in College, and College got two for the price of one because David threw himself into the community; it would not be fair to do any kind of attempt to summarize what was going on without saying how important David was in that.

47:25:03 Amongst other King's people who were important, apart from Ken, was Tess Atkins who had been my personal tutor when I was here. I phoned her when I knew that I had been offered the lectureship by the faculty and rather diffidently asked if she remembered me. She snorted down the phone and said that if I really thought that fifteen years would have eradicated her memory of me I was mistaken; I asked whether it would be possible to come back to King's; she asked for 48 hours, and it was only when I did come back that I realized how difficult a job it was, but in that time she had managed to talk to people and it was possible. In fact, in my mind, taking the faculty job was dependent on coming back to King's because I didn't want to go any other college. I have been very lucky with my King's students and a lot have become good friends - Dubi Rubinstein, now based in Zurich, Sally Gore, a barrister - she says I am responsible for her having made this terrible career choice - or any of a number of others. At King's, I liked the combination of the intellectual ability of so many people with the approachability, with the relative lack of distance between the students and the fellowship. I can illustrate that by giving credit to another Fellow, Wynne Godley. A term before I did Part II Economics, Wynne published a block-buster article in the Economic Journal in which he suggested that the two main levers to drive the economy, the exchange rate and the interest rate, controlled the opposite things to what everyone thought they controlled. It was a very clever article and none of us really understood it. We were ten final-year economists, we had all read the article, and we met each other and talked about it and we simply did not understand it. So, King's being King's, we went and found Wynne Godley in the bar (for some reason, I had been nominated as spokesman), told him who we were and that we had a little difficulty with his article. He apologised and acknowledged that some bits were not totally clear but he had been racing to finish it. He asked if it would help if we all met and talked together about it. At the time he was working with the Treasury, but he made time to do two seminars for the King's final year economists. We looked together at what the theory was before, and the sort of issues where people might be challenging him. It was extraordinary, intellectually challenging, generous, and everything that was lovely about this College. I owe Wynne my First, because I took the material he so kindly gave us and used it in my answers in theTripos paper. It exemplified what was wonderful about coming and studying at King's, that there was a shared search for knowledge, a thirst for advancing knowledge, and the work of minds together to get there. When I came back into the Fellowship it was that that I wanted to help and carry forward. Coming back you see all the rest: the committee meetings and the times when people don't come up to ideals, but what came through so clearly when David died was that colleagues and students in College were very close; a year and a half after his death, my King's lawyers came and said they would like there to be a tree to his memory in the Fellows' garden; they simply wrote to the Provost, Pat Bateson, asking that it be put on the agenda of the appropriate committee - this was King's.

55:58:03 When I am asked to give advice on a career in law, it is usually whether to become a barrister or a solicitor. The answer that I always give is that there are different types of legal animal; some are good at dealing face-on with the client, they have a good working knowledge of law, they don't really want to spend time in the library checking out some arcane point, but want to make sure that law and society are managing to co-exist. Then there is the sort of lawyer who is rather shy and introvert but an excellent researcher. And there is the sort of lawyer who frankly loves pleading cases, who is a bit of a showman. I usually start my advice by saying you need to decide what type of legal animal you are. The answer to that question will help you to see how you can be a good lawyer, because unless you are comfortable in your legal skin you probably will not be as good at your job as potentially you could be. I do (naturally) say that it is about service and not about money because I think that is an important message to get across. Money matters of course, but the law is not and must not be about 'which way of being a lawyer am I going to make most money in'. The law is actually about a vocation of service. The old definition of a barrister was that the barrister was the person who would put your case the way that you would put it if you had the barrister's knowledge of the law and his eloquence. When you take the oath as a Queen's Counsel, you make a promise to serve Her Majesty the Queen and all of her subjects who you may be called upon to serve as one of her counsel learned in the law. It is a solemn promise to make your skill and ability available, and to use it, not only for this side of the case where the money is, but sometimes for the cause that is deeply unpopular. The old definition also includes the principle that you have not got liberty unless a person who is suspected of the most heinous and appalling crimes can nevertheless find somebody who will defend them, correctly, within the limits of the law, and absolutely fearlessly. You have to be able to do that and see law as that. I did the sadomasochist case in the House of Lords, which was a very frightening experience. It was just after I came to King's as a law don and I had had very little practice on my feet as a barrister. Doing 'Brown and others' was just my tenth time on my feet 'live' in court. I was in the House of Lords in the appeal against their conviction. Lord Templeman was the Chairman of the panel and he had no sympathy at all with the idea that your sexual orientation might be sadomasochist. There was a moment when he said to me, "Miss Sharpston, you can't possibly be suggesting that these vile and disgusting practices have anything to do with love". I remember taking a very deep breath and saying, "Yes My Lord, that is precisely my submission".