Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  On 26 June the police made two arrests. It isn’t known how Grace Richardson responded to the arrival of officers outside the hostel where she was staying, but Vicky Clark remained ‘perfectly composed’ as the constables led her out of the building where she was billeted, even taking the time to wave to someone inside. At Southend police station, both women were charged with murder, a move that did nothing whatsoever to calm the mood on Canvey Island over the next few days. When the women were brought back from Holloway Prison for a hearing at the beginning of July, people queued from six o’clock in the morning for a seat in the courtroom. Outside, the crowd was so febrile – the Recorder reported that it was one thousand strong – the police had to appeal for calm via a loudspeaker. Meanwhile the local spivs were out in force, selling houseboat ‘remains’ for half a crown a piece.

  Vicky Clark

  (Keystone.)

  The trial began at the Old Bailey on 29 October and lasted for two weeks. The prosecution alleged that the two women had been in cahoots, Clark having persuaded Richardson to order a gallon of paraffin and help her burn down the Windmill; with the twins gone her lover, Bill Smith, would agree to take her with him when he emigrated to Australia. Grace’s prize was to be rather more prosaic: with the Windmill destroyed, she would be free to move to a better houseboat, the Intruder. But since the prosecution’s star witnesses were Grace Richardson’s son Charlie and her daughter Ann, it was perhaps predictable that the case against her soon collapsed, and on 7 November she was sensationally freed by the judge. After this there seemed to be little hope for Vicky Clark, as she seemed to realise; in the dock she often had to be passed a bottle of smelling salts. The evidence of Ann Richardson, dressed in an emerald green coat, lasted for more than five hours and pointed strongly to Clark’s guilt. First of all there was her account of events on the night of 16 May. ‘She could have saved her babies if she’d let the clothes go,’ Ann told the court. Then there were the conversations she claimed to have overheard, during one of which Vicky told Grace, ‘Bill won’t take me [to Australia] with the boys, but he will take me without them.’ Clark, Ann insisted, was desperate to be with Smith: when he had travelled to Australia on a previous occasion, leaving Vicky behind, she had tried to commit suicide.

  Shortly before the fire, the court heard, Vicky had moved various of her possessions to yet another houseboat, the Beta Glen. She had also had the foresight to put fifty pounds in the basket she’d pushed through the window of the Windmill, whereas the Richardsons claimed to have lost £180 in the blaze. Vicky insisted Bill Smith was only a father figure to her, but the prosecution had got its hands on a letter she had written to him when he visited Australia: ‘You have done the very thing you promised never to do,’ it said. ‘[But] no matter how you have deceived me, I will always love you and if you ever come back, I will be waiting because deep in my heart I still cannot believe you could do such a despicable thing to me. Are you really no better than the rest?’ Another houseboat resident was called: Winifred Bowling. Mrs Bowling reported that Bill Smith had suggested that the twins, being such ‘beautiful kiddies’, could be sold ‘for a hundred pounds apiece’ at a nearby American airbase.

  Gerald Howard, QC and his team had been diligent; the prosecution case was damning and Vicky’s cross-examination relentless. Again and again she was asked why she hadn’t tried to save her children herself. Again and again she failed to come up with a convincing answer. But there were other things – helpful things, in the circumstances – that the prosecution didn’t need to spell out. Clark’s lifestyle spoke for itself* Her five children had two different fathers, only one of whom she had bothered to marry. Three of them lived apart from her, and the other two she had allegedly considered giving up for adoption. She had been seen openly kissing Bill Smith, a married man. To the public, and perhaps to members of the jury too, she was, as people used to have it, no better than she ought to be. While no one would ever know for certain whether, on the fateful night of 16 May, Vicky Clark really had struck a match and set fire to a gallon of paraffin, her private life left no room for doubt: her reputation was deserved.

  And so the trial entered its final stage: the defence began its summing-up. Clark’s counsel pointed out that in the days before the first fire she had been busy repainting the Buchra. Why would someone destroy something on which they’d worked so hard? And what about the Richardsons? The family was behind on a number of hire-purchase agreements and in arrears on its rent. If they had really been in possession of £180, why hadn’t they used it to pay off these debts? It was, the defence argued, all very well to lay all the blame on Mrs Clark for the deaths of Colin and Reggie, but there was no denying the fact that two able-bodied young men had escaped the burning boat ahead of her. At this point the subject of Vicky Clark’s morals was at last tackled head on. Yes, she was an ‘immoral’ woman, but immorality was not a crime – and even if it was, she was not charged with it.

  As closing arguments go, these were straightforward enough. However, in the next day’s newspapers it would be the defence’s final and most unexpected flourish that would grab the column inches. Would Violet Clark, her barrister asked the court, really have gone to bed in her curlers on the night of 16 May if she had planned the fire? If she had known that just a short while later she would come face to face with firemen, police officers and her staring neighbours? Surely not.

  On the face of it, drawing attention to what the Daily Herald referred to as ‘this foible’ of the female sex should have had little impact on the jury. (‘It is just one of those things with women,’ said the paper. ‘They won’t be seen with their hair in curlers, or not if they can help it.’) In 1956 it wasn’t vanity that stopped women wandering about in their rollers so much as their sense of what was respectable, and in the minds of most Vicky Clark had been a stranger to the idea of respectability for most of her adult life.* But for those listening in court such thoughts were suddenly fugitive. It was, you see, Clark’s great good fortune to have for a barrister an elegant, highly intelligent, much-photographed woman whose own hair, always immaculate, the jury would often have seen in the press, and whose own distaste at the thought of such a nocturnal encounter – it was there in her manner if not in her words – worked on her audience like a spell. Her mildly outraged tone suggested that this aversion was something she and her client had in common, for all that they could not be more different outwardly, and for a few fleeting moments Clark, the hard-faced goodtime girl, was made to seem just a little vulnerable.

  (Daily Herald.)

  What happened next astonished everyone. On 13 November the jury returned its verdict. Vicky Clark was found guilty not of murder but of manslaughter, for criminal neglect in the duty to her children, a crime for which she was sentenced to just three years in prison.*

  Hearing the news in Fleet Street, the headline-writers rubbed their hands with glee. Rose Heilbron, the housewife lawyer – the most famous lawyer in the land – had won yet again, and in a case that had seemed, right until the end, to be cut and dried.

  It would be difficult to overstate how well known and admired – loved, even – Rose Heilbron was in her day. Partly, this was the nature of her business. Thanks to the death penalty, murder trials were followed far more avidly than now; a life was at stake, which gave even the most straightforward of cases a queasy import. A decade after the end of the war, moreover, there was still widespread unease about what the violence people had experienced meant for civil society. Were its long-term effects on display in the criminal courts? But even among the famous lawyers whose names filled the newspaper columns, Rose was in a class of her own. In 1956 there were only two women Queen’s Counsels in England: Heilbron, and Helena Normanton.* They had taken silk together in 1948, the first barristers of their sex to do so. Normanton, however, was some three decades Rose’s senior and, owing to poor health, had not practised for several years. To all intents and purposes, the beautiful, determined and highly successful Rose was in a class o
f one.

  The papers reported everything she said and everything she did – including, on one occasion, the news that she had dared to wear a calf-length evening gown. In the eyes of the press, she was a ‘housewife Portia’, her brilliance in the courtroom and her hefty earnings – facts that might otherwise have irked them – softened and made more acceptable by the knowledge that she was also married with a small daughter, and kept a delightful house. As the Daily Mirror put it, ‘[At home in Liverpool] Rose Heilbron leaves behind her wig and gown, and the majesty of the law becomes the quiet attractive housewife in a fawn coat who, as the tradesmen say, “wouldn’t dream of trying to use her position to jump the queue”.’ The same article noted approvingly that her family’s favourite foods included liver sausage, olives, gherkins and salad, and that she owned a ‘magnificent’ collection of classical records and drove a Triumph. Others wrote of the Bechstein piano that stood in a bay window of her house, and of the pink geraniums blooming cheerily in its porch. In the weekly magazine Tit-Bits, a musical actress called Joanne Heal, who’d met Heilbron at a reception, reported happily that, for all her cleverness, what she was most anxious to talk about was ‘the thrill of owning a new dish-washing machine’. Even the cartoonists treated her with affection. A good example dates from shortly after the case of the Burning Houseboat, when she was appointed Recorder of Burnley, and thus became England’s first female judge: a Rose-like figure, wearing a judge’s long wig, leans over the bench and whispers to the barrister below, ‘I washed it this morning, and I can’t do a thing with it.’

  Helena Normanton and Rose Heilbron take silk

  (© Mary Evans Picture Library/The Women’s Library@LSE.)

  ‘I washed it this morning and I can’t do a thing with it’

  On the part of the press, this love affair represented quite some U-turn. Until the advent of Rose, the newspapers had been firmly on the side of those who still regarded the admittance of women to the English Bar* as an unhappy experiment, and who lived in fear of the arrival of women QCs or – God forbid – judges. Barely a week went by without yet another columnist taking up his pen to complain that it was thoroughly unnatural for a woman to appear in court. Of course, women made ‘splendid solicitors’. Being very conscientious, they excelled at correspondence, at dealing with wills and conveyancing, at running around getting things filed and stamped and served. But barristers? No. As Hervey Middleton (a pseudonym, presumably for a male lawyer) put it in the Daily Mail on 29 June 1938, not only were women unable to see that there were two sides to every question, their ‘righteous indignation’ meant they would never be able to remain sufficiently cool to open a case. And then, of course, there were their physical handicaps: their stature, their hair. ‘How is a woman to wear a wig?’ asked Middleton. ‘If she waves her hair and puts her wig on top of it, she looks as if she were carrying a beehive. Alternatively, if she wears a close-fitting wig over short, straight hair she looks like a female convict when she takes it off.’ As for the female voice – this was the thing that ‘concerned’ these men almost to the point of obsession – it was ‘designed by nature’ to carry about ten feet and no further: ‘A man can pitch his voice so that it fills the courtroom without losing any of its resonance or character. A woman, attempting the same feat, only produces a noise like the hooting of an owl; a noise which is unendurable in the course of a long speech, and grotesque in cross-examination.’ Contrast this with the courtroom hacks’ admiring descriptions of Rose’s voice – low, mellifluous, and with a warm touch of the Mersey at its edges – and you wonder, what was her secret? Extraordinary enough that she had made silk. But to have won the press over too? How on earth did she do it?

  Rose Heilbron was born on 19 August 1914, in St James Road, Liverpool, the younger daughter of Max and Nellie. The family was Jewish. At the time of her birth Max, who had begun his working life as a watchmaker, was in business with his father and one of his seven older brothers. The Heilbrons had various interests: they were cigar merchants, and they owned several boarding houses; Max also invented a beauty aid known as ‘Max’s Panstick’. But the bulk of their living came from Heilbron’s Cunard Hotel in Great George’s Square, where emigrants en route from Europe to a new life in America stayed while they awaited passage. In the early part of the last century there were several establishments like this in Liverpool, the bulk of whose clients were Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms of eastern Europe. For their homesick guests, they weren’t happy places; at night, passers-by could sometimes hear the mournful sound of violins and Russian folk songs coming from the windows. But for their owners they were extremely lucrative, and in 1931 Max and his family were able to leave the city centre and move to a five-bedroomed house in the prosperous suburb of Allerton.

  Nellie Heilbron wanted her daughters to get on, and to this end Rose was sent to the Belvedere School, then a direct-grant grammar school. She also arranged for her to have elocution lessons. Rose was good at elocution, winning several prizes. In 1930, in a strange foreshadowing of her future career, she gave a recitation at St George’s Hall, which housed Liverpool’s assize courts; the following year she became the youngest person in England to pass the Licentiateship of the Guildhall School of Music in elocution.* Her carefully trained voice undoubtedly gave her the confidence her parents longed for her to have, but they must have been more alarmed than pleased when, at seventeen, she left Liverpool for London, where she hoped to make it on the stage (an enthusiastic schoolgirl actress, the Liverpool Post had already praised her ‘finely swaggering Petruchio’). Their daughter was very bright; they had hoped for something better. Did she and her father fall out over this decision? No one seems to know. But if they did, it must have been difficult when, six months later, she admitted defeat and returned home – and perhaps this is also why she kept her brief theatrical career a secret thereafter. It became public only in 2012 when a biography by her daughter Hilary revealed that her mother had adopted the stage name Rose Bron, found herself digs and joined the cast of a play called Hokuspokus (a version of the Curt Goetz play, later a movie, in which a woman is put on trial for the murder of her husband only for him to turn up again alive).

  Heilbron’s Cunard Hotel

  Luckily, Rose had a plan B. In October 1932 she took up a place at Liverpool University to study for a law degree. Why law? Again, no one seems to know. It may have been that a career as a barrister (for this was her ambition) was the next best thing to a career on the stage. Or it may have been connected to the wider culture of the hour; this was, after all, the golden age of detective fiction and, in the real world, the heyday of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the famous forensic pathologist. But whatever the attraction, she worked extremely hard. By some accounts she was rarely to be seen at social gatherings. ‘She was a pretty girl,’ a contemporary said years later, ‘but she was always working in the library. I don’t remember seeing her at any dances, and I know that although I continually asked her out, she only came out to tea twice.’ Happily, though, her efforts paid off. Three years later she was awarded a first-class degree, the first woman at Liverpool University to achieve such a distinction, and only the second in the country. In November 1935 she joined Gray’s Inn, having been awarded the Lord Justice Holker Scholarship,* and in 1937 received her LLM (Master of Laws), after which she began to read for the Bar. As a result, even before she had begun to practise she found herself a minor local celebrity, the News Chronicle reporting her degree in the headline ‘HER AMBITION – YOUNGEST BARRISTER’.

  It all sounds straightforward, even easy – if perhaps a little lonely. But this was not the case at all. At home, where Rose was still living, circumstances had changed dramatically. The Depression had had a serious effect on Max Heilbron’s business and, if the family was to stay afloat, an alternative source of income needed to be found. In 1935 the Heilbrons opened a small hotel, the Dorchester, in a Georgian terrace in Rodney Street, and here it was all hands on deck. Luckily for Rose, her sister Annie took on the
greater burden. ‘Let Rose get on with her studying,’ Nellie said to her older daughter. ‘Our Rose was always Mummy’s pet,’ Annie would later tell the newspapers.

  Much worse, a few weeks after Rose received her LLM her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. According to Annie, while their mother was ill Rose appeared at her bedside in a hired wig and gown, knowing that she would not live to see her called to the Bar: ‘Mother’s face lit up,’ she said. But once Nellie was gone – she died in May 1938, at the age of just forty-nine – her younger daughter had to put her ambition on hold; by one account, she considered abandoning her career altogether. Her father needed her. When she did return to her studies six months later her resolve was rooted in the practical. The family business was still in a parlous state and she needed to earn a living (once the war came, moreover, the hotel would be requisitioned). And so it happened that in May 1939, a year almost to the day after her mother’s death, Rose did indeed become Britain’s youngest woman barrister.

  Her call to the Bar attracted the attention of the national press, something that seems to have unsettled her not at all. One interview in particular stands out, for its clear-sightedness, but also for its guile. Rose knew exactly how to position herself: plucky but not threatening, serious but with her girlishness winningly intact. ‘I am no bluestocking,’ she told the Daily Express. ‘The general impression of a woman lawyer seems to be a sober old maid. I have not adopted the law as a hobby. I am serious about my career, but that does not mean I shall give up dancing, swimming, golf or tennis. Legal problems will not keep me from the other jobs I love – housework and gardening. When I marry I intend to continue as a barrister. I have many men friends. Some have possibly fallen in love with me, but I have no plans for marriage. I am not in love. This does not mean I am sacrificing my life for my career. I am a home-lover. I have kept house for my father since my mother died, so the job of running my own home when I am married will not be a strange one.’ Talking about a career, however, was not the same as having one, and it soon became apparent that securing a pupillage – a twelve-month apprenticeship to a barrister five years her senior – was going to be more difficult than she had assumed. At least one set of chambers turned her down specifically on the grounds of her sex; she had to understand that while its members didn’t object to women barristers in principle, some of the men would feel ‘constraint and diffidence’ if she was working alongside them.