Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  Nevertheless, by September 1939 she had been taken on by chambers in Castle Street, Liverpool. Her timing, though she would not have grasped this in the moment, was fortuitous. In the same month Britain declared war on Germany. Across the city her male colleagues would soon be leaving to fight, or to take on other forms of war work.* For all that it was unnerving to see sandbags appear outside the city’s buildings – she gathered together her most precious possessions so they were easy to grab if there was a bombardment – a lot more work was going to come her way in these circumstances than it might have done in peacetime. In 1939 barristers were paid considerably less than now, and many of them were often woefully underemployed (even at the height of her career, Helena Normanton was compelled to let rooms in her house in Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, the better to supplement her income; there simply wasn’t enough work to go round); all the same, solicitors who might otherwise have been wary of Rose would now be biting off her hand.

  The next few years weren’t easy. Either she was overwhelmed by work, devoting her entire weekend to preparing her cases, or things were so slow she worried about paying her bills. She had persuaded her father to take on a housekeeper – she shared the cost – which meant she no longer had to worry about what they would eat for dinner, but she was still running their home (Annie had moved out) and there was the Blitz to contend with: Liverpool was savagely bombed, and in 1941 her chambers were burned out. Slowly, though, her practice began to thrive. Divorces, motoring accidents, breaches of wartime regulations, she dealt with them all, and in October 1942 she became the first woman to lead in a murder trial, securing a manslaughter charge for her client Henry Larkin, a dock worker who’d cut the throat of his live-in lover with a razor. By April of the following year her finances were in rude enough health that she was able to buy the family home from her father.

  The war ended. Rose’s reputation was now such that the return of her male colleagues was unlikely to have much impact on her status: some solicitors were already talking of her making silk. ‘Rose has a sense of form in court,’ said one, trying to explain her success to a newspaper reporter. ‘She’s no mumbler and she puts over a case with lucidity, persuasion and perfect courtesy. But she’s a pugilist at heart. You can’t knock Rosie off her feet with an unexpected thrust of argument.’ However, she was also about to meet another, more important ally. In April 1945 she was introduced to Nathaniel (Nat) Burstein, the sports-mad son of Polish émigrés and a local GP. Burstein had seen Rose at the assizes, which he had visited with a friend who was involved in the prison board, and having admired her from the public benches had engineered an invitation to a party he knew she would be attending. Their courtship was swift; an engagement followed two weeks later. They were married on 9 August in Harrogate, by a rabbi cousin of Rose’s. She wore a pink dress and a black hat with a veil. The couple honeymooned in Torquay.

  Nat would play a crucial role in Rose’s future success (their marriage would last sixty years). The first time he’d laid eyes on her, after all, she had been dressed in her robe and wig. For him, that had been part of the attraction; he was certainly not about to try to persuade her to give up her career. Nor, having been a bachelor for so long, was he desperately in need of someone to keep home for him (a decade her senior, he was forty when they married). His own work came with manageable hours and did not involve, as Rose’s soon would, trips away from home: if they had children he could be around in the evenings, even when she wasn’t. He was easy-going and funny: an asset when it came to the social events that greased her professional life. And he had a steady income, something that was no doubt in the front of her mind when in 1946 she leased premises in Castle Street and became head of her own chambers.

  (Reynold’s News.)

  Rose fell pregnant in the early spring of 1948 and worked throughout: the story goes that she even took her legal papers into hospital with her when she went into labour. Hilary, her only child, was born on 2 January 1949, and though the baby was delivered by emergency caesarean section – Rose nearly died during the birth – it was only six weeks before she was back in court. Eight weeks after this a letter from the Lord Chancellor’s Office arrived. At the age of just thirty-four she had made silk, momentous news that was splashed across front pages throughout the Commonwealth. (As if it wasn’t enough that she was the first woman to take silk, she was the third youngest KC ever appointed.) Every court reporter had his own special memories of the great Rosie – she was often called Rosie in headlines, and in Liverpool this was the name by which she was generally known – reminiscences that now came into their own. ‘Miss Heilbron has impressed me on scores of occasions,’ said Norman Cook of the Daily Post. ‘She has brought a refreshing sparkle into the most wearying of assize civil actions. Her admirable air of confidence, her twinkling eyes, and – more often than not – the tilt of her wig with just that slight suggestion of rakishness, make her presentation of a case an affair of interest no matter how dull its content.’

  There is a well-known photograph of Rose Heilbron and Helena Normanton, taken on the morning a fortnight later when they were sworn in as King’s Counsels at the House of Lords; it, too, made all the front pages. While Normanton gazes into the crowd donnishly, a pair of wire-framed spectacles on her nose, Rose looks straight at the camera. Her eyebrows are pencilled, her lips are painted, her nose is powdered. She looks wonderfully glamorous. Her smile, though, is surprisingly cool. Oh, it was satisfying to be standing there on the steps of the Palace of Westminster with all the other new KCs. She was pleased, and proud. But however significant the moment, it was only that: a pause for breath. She certainly didn’t intend to let it go to her head.

  Rose’s career as a KC began with the case with which, in Liverpool at least, she is still most strongly associated: the Cameo Murders. On the night of 19 March 1949 Leonard Thomas, the manager of the Cameo Cinema in Wavertree, and his assistant, John Catterall, were shot dead by a masked man demanding their takings. Rose’s involvement began when she was instructed to defend Donald Johnson, supposedly an accessory to the murder (arrested for stealing thirty shillings from a labourer on his way home, Johnson claimed – apparently in exchange for bail – that he had been asked to hide the Cameo killer’s gun). Having argued that Johnson’s statements to the police had been obtained by inducements such as the provision of a surety, Rose won him an acquittal – and a round of triumphant headlines.

  Three months later George Kelly, a small-time criminal, and Charles Connolly, a former boxer, were arrested for the murders. The Crown’s case was built on the evidence of Jacqueline Dickson, a prostitute, and her pimp, James Northam, who claimed to have heard Connolly suggest a ‘stick-up’ at the Cameo, and to have seen Kelly produce a gun. When Kelly heard that Rose would be defending him, he was the opposite of delighted. ‘Why couldn’t I have a fella, like you’ve got?’ he asked Connolly. ‘Whoever heard of a judy defending anyone?’ But then he met his barrister, and his attitude changed. The story goes that in the hospital wing of Walton prison, where he was on remand, he could be heard singing, Al Jolson-style, ‘Rosie you are my posy. You are my heart’s bouquet. Come on out into the moonlight, there’s something sweet love I wanna say.’

  In the end, though, his heart’s bouquet couldn’t save him. The trial that followed – at thirteen days, the longest murder trial in British legal history – resulted in a hung jury, at a time when majority verdicts were not yet acceptable. The judge had no choice but to order a retrial, but this time the two men would be tried separately. Six days later, after a summing-up by Rose that lasted three hours, George Kelly was found guilty. It seemed the jury had largely believed the prosecution’s star witness, Robert Graham, a criminal with a history of mental illness who claimed to have helped Kelly and Connolly communicate with each other in Walton prison. According to Graham, their messages supported the prosecution’s case. His appeal dismissed, Kelly was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint on 28 March 1950. He maintained his innocence right up
until the moment he died.*

  For Rose, this must have been painful: over the course of the two trials she had built a relationship with Kelly. Those who knew him thought that he was telling the truth when he said he did not know Connolly before their arrest, and that he had never fired a gun in his life – and in 2003, after a long campaign by his family, the Court of Appeal quashed his conviction. Kelly, it seemed, had been fitted up by the police. According to Hilary Heilbron’s biography, Rose and Kelly travelled back to Liverpool from his appeal on the same train and at some point the guard came to ask her if she would speak to the prisoner; he was concerned about him. Rose never forgot Kelly’s parting remark to her, made as she returned to her own compartment. ‘Don’t you worry about me, love,’ he said. ‘You just look after yourself.’ The consoler, he could see, needed to be consoled.

  Her performance in the case – meticulous and controlled – sealed her reputation as an advocate, and not only among her colleagues. The newspapers relished the way she had battled, noting that on one occasion her arguments with the judge had lasted so long the jury had to be sent home for the night (the judge in question was the forensically brilliant George Lynskey, who had chaired of the 1948 Lynskey tribunal, investigating corruption by government ministers and civil servants – an inquiry that had resulted in a ministerial resignation). As a result, Rose found herself in demand not only as a barrister but as a public speaker too. Look at these after-dinner speeches – seemingly indefatigable, she accepted a great many invitations – and you can almost feel her confidence growing. Her views, avowedly feminist, were straightforward and unembarrassed. Prejudice was still rampant, she told her audiences, and women must not flag in their efforts to overcome it. Nor should they ever forget those who had won for them such rights as the vote. She believed in equal pay for women and was disdainful of laws such as the Income Tax Act of 1918, which bracketed women with lunatics, idiots and insane persons. Why, she wanted to know, was it still the case that if a married woman saved money from her housekeeping, such savings still belonged in law to her husband?

  In the years after the Cameo trial the cases came thick and fast, each one seemingly more sensational than the last. In 1951 she represented three Liverpool dockers who, it was claimed, had gone on strike unlawfully. She won, and when her train pulled into Lime Street Station a crowd of dock workers was waiting to cheer her walk along the platform. The newspapers reported that she received £750, plus £150 a day, to represent the dockers, then the highest brief fee ever paid to a woman. This was followed by the Bootle Bath Murder, in which she defended twenty-seven-year-old Anna Neary, accused of drowning her neighbour Emma Grace in her bath. (‘Another victory in a series of triumphant cases conducted by thirty-six-year-old, petite, dark-haired Miss Heilbron . . .’ said the News of the World, reporting the acquittal.)

  Nineteen fifty-two brought a stunning hat-trick of victories. First of all there was the case of Louis Bloom, a Hartlepool solicitor accused of murdering Patricia Hessler, a former client with whom he had been having an affair. Bloom had been trying to end the relationship – Hessler was a drinker with a complicated past – and when she had loudly objected to this one night he had grabbed her throat. Soon afterwards, realising that he’d strangled her, Bloom rang the police and admitted what he had done. For Rose, it was a difficult trial. Bloom’s early confession stacked the odds against him, and the judge, Mr Justice Hallett, seemed determined to give her a hard time. Nonetheless, she was undaunted, dragging a two-foot-high red and yellow plastic model of a human neck into the court to illustrate the medical evidence to the jury. ‘She showed sufficient knowledge of the human larynx to tackle a medical exam on the subject,’ commented one journalist. Under cross-examination she was able to get the Crown pathologist to concede that there were no outward signs that Hessler had died from asphyxia, and that death from inhibition of the vagal nerve (pressure on it causes the heart to stop) is not always the result of violence.

  But it was her closing speech – made to a court in full mourning, following the news that George VI had died – that seems to have been most impressive; Justice Hallet warned the jury afterwards that ‘common sense should not be moved by oratory, however much you admire the oratory or the orator’. It was theatrical, even by her standards. First, she spoke of Bloom’s passion, his infatuation, the fact that he did not want to hurt a single hair on his lover’s head. Then she moved on to his account of Hessler’s death. ‘How truthful Bloom’s story rings!’ she said. ‘There is a woman screaming . . . What more natural thing than to press on her neck and tell her to be quiet . . . But if you make a mistake and press a little too hard, the damage is done . . . The whole thing happened like that. One, two, three [she rapped on the bench with a knuckle three times to show the fatal speed with which the tragedy occurred] and she is dead.’ The jury returned a verdict of manslaughter, and Bloom was given just three years. ‘No fuss please,’ said Rose emerging into the crowd from the court. Afterwards a fan wrote to her: ‘Dear lady,’ said his note. ‘You can’t go around persuading juries that men are entitled to strangle their lady friends.’

  Bloom was followed by Mary Standish, charged with murdering her husband with a knife. Rose argued in court that Standish had only meant to frighten her husband, who had been drinking and who had hit her earlier in the evening. It took the jury just seventeen minutes to find her not guilty. Afterwards she told the Sunday Express that Rose was not at all the ‘stern poker-faced sort of woman’ she had been expecting. ‘She was so friendly and quiet, the kind of woman whom when she asks you a difficult question, you don’t think twice about giving an honest answer to . . . I’ll never forget it. She remembered to smile at me across the court. I don’t expect to meet anyone like her again.’

  Finally, there was the murder of Lord and Lady Derby’s butler, Walter Stallard, and their under-butler, Douglas Stuart, by Harold Winstanley, a trainee footman at Knowsley Hall. (Lady Derby, watching television in the smoke room, was also attacked, though she escaped with her life.) Boldly – a masterstroke, people said afterwards – Rose called just one witness in Winstanley’s defence: a psychiatrist. But this was enough. The jury accepted that he was insane, and he was sent to Broadmoor.* The press now began to speculate that Rose would one day become Britain’s first woman judge.

  (Manchester Evening Chronicle.)

  For the most part, the newspapers were swoonily reverential. ‘Success has not spoiled Rose Heilbron, QC,’ purred the Liverpool Post. ‘She is charming, unaffected, modest and likes nothing better in her spare time than doing her own shopping.’ But this didn’t mean that she welcomed interest in her life. It was uncomfortable, wondering who would be standing outside every time she opened her front door, and she resented the way the press tried to get quotes from friends and local shopkeepers. (Not that these scraps of information were particularly revelatory. ‘The main thing about Miss H,’ one shopkeeper said, ‘is that you can’t sell her any old rubbish. Just good, plain clothes.’) It was also against the rules of her profession for a barrister either to give or to authorise interviews. This caught her both ways. Not only was it impossible for her to correct reporters’ misapprehensions; on more than one occasion she had to reassure the Bar Council that she had not in fact supplied a newspaper with a photograph, or details of her earnings.

  Perhaps, too, the press occasionally touched a nerve. She seems to have taken particular exception to an article that appeared in the Empire News in August 1951 under the headline ‘Two SISTERS, BUT THEY LIVE IN DIFFERENT WORLDS’. The writer of the story, Arnold Rosenfield, had tracked down Annie to the ‘one and threes’ – the cheap seats – at her local cinema, where she had been watching Walt Disney’s Cinderella. Annie, he revealed, was a former teacher of music who now lived with her foundry-worker husband Arthur, their four-year-old daughter Elaine and her father Max in a modest terrace near Penny Lane, a working-class area of Liverpool where, according to Rosenfield, ‘the only flowers that bloom thereabouts are th
e ones they buy’. Rose, Annie said, visited her father dutifully every week. But the inference of the piece was clear: while Rose soared, Annie only scraped by. ‘Rose always knew what she wanted,’ Annie told the reporter.*

  The year 1955 brought Rose her greatest triumphs yet. The first took place at Manchester Assizes, where a young man, Dennis Murtagh, stood accused of the murder of William Jackson, a stock-car racer. It was an unusual case: the murder weapon was alleged to be a Ford Zephyr, which Murtagh had used to crush his victim against the wall of his house.

  Rose’s client had been involved in a fight with Jackson two days earlier, after which the accused had repeatedly driven past his house. The first time he did this Jackson’s wife had, it was alleged, thrown a brick at Murtagh’s car; the second time Jackson had thrown an iron coal scuttle, breaking its windscreen. Both incidents had been reported to the police. The issue for the jury involved a third occasion on which Murtagh had driven by, for this was when Jackson had been killed. Had he intended to murder his victim, or had he, as the defence contended, lost control of the car, having swerved to avoid the coal scuttle for a second time? The jury thought the former was the more likely scenario and found him guilty of murder, for which he was duly sentenced to death.