Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  Rose lodged an appeal on the grounds that the judge had misdirected the jury on the issue of burden of proof. But the three-man Court of Criminal Appeal could not agree on a verdict, and for the first time in legal history a second appeal would be heard, this time before a five-man court. ‘In this case,’ she told the reconstituted court, ‘the dividing line between murder and accident is so thin, so narrow and so close that it was exceptionally important for the judge to put accurately, clearly and in full the direction as to burden of proof.’ It was, she added, the ‘pride of these courts’ that a case had to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Why had the jury not been reminded of this? The appeal was allowed. Murtagh, who had spent the last nine weeks in the condemned cell at Strangeways Prison, was released. ‘We want Rose! We want Rose!’ chanted the crowd outside the court, but as usual Rose slipped off to catch her train, unseen. The case attracted a great deal of press attention. Murtagh had come perilously close to being hanged; from his cell to the gallows in the room next door, had he but known it, was a walk of just ten seconds.

  And then – cue mambo on the jukebox – there was Jack Comer, aka Jack Spot, the self-styled King of Soho whose nickname he owed to the large black mole on his left cheek. Born Jacob Comacho, Comer was the son of a Jewish tailor’s machinist from Lodz in Poland, and grew up in the East End where he claimed to have been involved in the Battle of Cable Street as a young man (a fat lie, sadly). In 1955 Comer was arrested following a bloody knife fight with Albert Dimes, one of the henchmen of Billy Hill, Comer’s former partner and now his major rival when it came to betting rackets and all the other business of the criminal underworld. Comer, who lost so much blood after the fight he had nearly died, and Dimes, who had an injury to his head that required twenty stitches, were charged with unlawful fighting and causing affray. The issue for the jury would be which of them used their knife first, and whether it was in self-defence. Two days into the trial, however, the judge ruled that Comer and Dimes be charged separately on a charge of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. Comer – unlike Dimes – was also charged with being in possession of a knife.

  At his trial, Comer insisted that he had been the victim of an unprovoked attack. As for Dimes’s injuries, those were (preposterous, this) self-inflicted. Sophie Hyams, the tearful wife of the proprietor of the Continental Fruit Shop, where the two men had rolled on the ground, was called. ‘Mrs Hyams,’ said Rose, ‘you are a frightened woman, aren’t you?’ The judge intervened. ‘Perhaps you are frightened of Miss Heilbron,’ he said, to much laughter. The defence also called a surprise witness in the Reverend Basil Andrews, an octogenarian priest who had seen the whole thing with his own eyes. Rose, who had done her homework, visiting the Soho street where the fight had supposedly taken place under police protection, made an impassioned closing address in which she referred to the Alice in Wonderland feeling of a trial in which her client was accused of wounding a man who had wounded him just as badly – and it worked. (Her description also stuck; the fight soon passed into gangster folklore as the ‘Mirage of Soho’ and ‘the fight that never was’.) The jury, which retired for just sixty-five minutes, returned a verdict of not guilty and Comer punched the air delightedly. ‘Don’t write about me,’ he told the journalists gathered outside the Old Bailey. ‘Write your story about Rose, [the] greatest lawyer in history.’ (This, his counsel felt, was ‘something of an exaggeration’ – though at least one newspaper took him at his word, beginning a serial that told the story of ‘the greatest lawyer in the world’ that very month.) Only later was it discovered that the doddery priest, a man who had seemed so sweet and so upright on the stand, had been paid twenty-five pounds to perjure himself* – and since Comer could not be tried for the same offence twice, he was safe.

  (Daily Mail.)

  It was a big deal to appear in a trial like this one. The newspapers had close relationships with Comer and Hill, and were apt to write of them as if they were celebrities, with the result that the coverage was exhaustive. (The crime reporters even claimed to have discovered that the victorious Comer kept a framed photograph of Rose on his sideboard. ‘A Jewish lady, she is,’ said Moisha Bluebell, one of his associates. ‘It’s an education just to listen to her speak.’) It was also fraught with danger. Soho gangsters treated their lawyers as they would any other employee: Patrick Marrinan, QC was struck off after it was revealed that he was in the pay of Billy Hill. It seems that vague attempts were made to nobble Rose too: in a Soho street prosecution witnesses asked her to buy fruit, their sales pitches rather too firm in the circumstances, and during the trial a ‘sinister Italian’ deliberately bumped into her. But the Daily Mail reported that she showed ‘no signs of strain’ afterwards; she simply rushed home to Liverpool for a ‘well-earned restful weekend’.

  Whether people grasped it at the time or not, the trial of Vicky Clark for the murder of her twin sons in 1956 – Rose’s next big case – suggested that when it came to life in Britain the stays were beginning to give. Even as people remained conservative enough to buy the idea that a woman would not choose to let a strange man catch sight of her rollers, it found itself in thrall to a successful and tough working woman who, it was clear, thought of herself as a trailblazer rather than an aberration. (Rose’s speeches at this time, with their emphasis on such things as maternity leave and childcare, never failed to look to a future in which ‘trained women’ were increasingly the norm.) The Houseboat Murders trial threw over the old order, the idea of ‘good’ girls versus ‘bad’. Instead of tutting about Vicky Clark’s morals and whispering that she had got away with it, attention was focused instead on the triumph of the clever, indomitable Rose: a ‘good’ girl, to be sure, but one who resembled other women of one’s acquaintance hardly at all. The public’s response to Rose, like the media’s, was increasingly striking. People responded to her with – to use one example – far less anxiety than they would to another successful barrister, Margaret Thatcher, some years later.* Her dazzling ability, combined with her looks, her earthy Liverpudlian roots and a set of professional rules which dictated that she could not accept the invitations she received to appear on popular panel shows, meant that she was, rather like the Queen, a person to be admired from afar. Such distance contrived to put her beyond the reach of envy and spite. Fondly claimed by popular culture – she was the inspiration for Mary Randall, QC, Anna Neagle’s character in the 1958 film The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk, and the subject of a flattering joke in an episode of Hancock’s Half Hour* – a woman who might otherwise have represented a threat became instead a star, a national treasure. And she wasn’t done yet. On 26 November, thirteen days after Vicky Clark’s surprise conviction for manslaughter, Rose was announced as the new Recorder of Burnley and thus England’s first woman judge. This was news that produced not only more headlines, but also editorials, letters, cartoons, invitations, telegrams, speeches and, from the Women’s Sunday Mirror, two dozen red roses.

  (Evening Telegraph.)

  On 6 January 1957 unprecedented numbers of ‘housewives and schoolgirls’ waited two hours to see her installed. The mood was celebratory, almost en fête. ‘It was the most exciting quarter sessions Burnley has known,’ wrote the Daily Herald’s reporter, rushing to convey the mood. ‘Because the Recorder was a pretty woman; because barristers stumbled over the new address [Rose had decided she would be called Madam Recorder]; because all Burnley turned up to see what was going on. A pushing, curious crowd strained to find seats in the crowded courtroom: in the public gallery were women shoppers who had brought out their best hats for the occasion; in the Press seats were 16 men on a bench made for six. Policemen guarding the doors told the Press that there was no room left; told the jurors to push their way through. They even told one of the prisoners to go away, but he obligingly persisted in establishing his identity and they let him through. The prisoners, indeed, were nearly overlooked. They were the men with the walking-on parts in a cast that had bigger stars.’ Other journalists noted
the way Rose fussed over her starched neckbands, twisted her wedding ring and touched her crimson lipstick to check for smudging. That first day she sent two men to prison and another to Borstal, though there were also several conditional discharges; she presided over twelve cases in all. One can only imagine how this must have felt: the strange solemnity of it – a first for her, if not for the defendants – dissipating far too quickly in a courtroom turned party-warm by massed pride and expectation.

  Rose was an unusually energetic person. But then, she needed to be. Her work as a Recorder had to run alongside her own busy practice and by the early Sixties she was also sometimes chosen to prosecute cases for the Crown. Then there were her speaking engagements, the many dinners and opening nights to which she was now invited, and the good causes to which she was asked to put her name – in 1958, she was one of several high-profile women who wrote to The Times arguing there should be a national monument to Christabel Pankhurst.* She had a new role, too, as an honorary colonel in the Women’s Royal Army Corps. She and Nat were also building themselves a house, Parklands, in a street close to Calderstones Park in Allerton (smart, and modern: five bedrooms, an acre of landscaped gardens, tennis court). How did she manage? Staff, and plenty of them. In addition to her secretary and clerk she employed a cleaner, a cook and a gardener. It was a pay roll that caused her no anxiety; she hoped only to be able to afford it. One of the great up-sides of being the first of a kind was that guilt, at least as it pertained to working women, had not yet been invented. You looked at magazines for recipes and dress patterns, not to be told how bad you should be feeling for the way you chose to live your life.

  Rose, in all her finery: the press loved to report on her clothes

  (Associated Newspapers/REX.)

  Her career continued to build. Rose was a good lawyer as well as a good advocate, and many of her cases made it to the Law Reports, the legal equivalent, I suppose, of a novel being published as a classic. Some continued to be reported by the press too, albeit in less detail than before: the Homicide Act of 1957, which limited capital punishment to only six categories of murder, was the beginning of the end for the death sentence in Britain, and as fewer people were hanged or at risk of hanging, interest in murder trials fell away.* One question, however, remained: would she be appointed a high court judge? Or was this as far as she would be allowed to go?

  If it was going to happen at all, it was clearly going to take time. The legal world, fusty and bigoted, showed no sign at all of wanting to modernise. Women were still excluded from Bar Mess, the twice-weekly dinners held during assizes – it was said that their presence would ‘spoil’ the atmosphere.† She was also barred from judges’ dinners and, when she was away from home, would have to eat alone. In February 1962 she was the first woman to be appointed a Commissioner of Assize by the Lord Chancellor, a role that involved assisting a high court judge with a heavy caseload, and which meant staying at the judges’ lodgings: in effect, a trial run. But in 1965 it was announced that Elizabeth Lane QC‡ would be the first woman high court judge, sitting in the Family Division. Even if Rose did not make her feelings public, this was entirely baffling; Lane was so much less well known than her. But perhaps this in itself was part of the reason she got there first. Rose’s popularity may have been the source of envy and some irritation in the higher echelons of her profession – how else to explain its slowness to award her the status she deserved? It wasn’t until 1968 that she was elected a bencher of Gray’s Inn, and it wasn’t until 1973 that she was elected leader of the Northern Circuit.* A man with the same experience would not have had to wait half as long.

  In 1972, in her capacity as a Recorder, she sat at the Old Bailey as a judge: another first for a woman. The Daily Mail reported that ‘With a trace of deep crimson lipstick, and only an occasional pat at her wig, the first woman judge – “My Lady” as they addressed her – took her seat in the Old Bailey yesterday. The seismographs registered nil.’ Outside the court, however, the moment, according to the Evening Standard, was ‘greeted with all the camera-popping ceremonial of the birth of a film star’s baby’. The Liverpool Daily Post, sounding unexpectedly modern, bemoaned the fact that Rose was still ‘imprisoned by masculine curiosity. The gossip columnists seem more interested in finding suitable adjectives for her smile at prosecuting council – it’s enough to strain the quality of anyone’s mercy.’

  Finally, though, it happened. In 1974 the new Lord Chancellor, Lord Elwyn-Jones, appointed Rose a high court judge assigned to the Family Division. Given her criminal work, and the many personal injury cases she had taken on over the years, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for her to have expected to be assigned to the Queen’s Bench Division; in the Family Division her vast experience would be wasted, there was no getting away from that. But she had waited too long for this moment to allow it to be clouded with regret. She was sworn in at 9.30 a.m. on 1 October, queenly in a robe of scarlet.

  ‘Only an occasional pat of her wig’: a portrait of Rose in her judge’s robes by June Mendoza, which hangs in Gray’s Inn

  (© June Mendoza. By permission of the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn.)

  ‘Heilbron rules her courtroom with a rod of silk – smooth and elegant, but very tough.’ Daily Mail

  Rose spent fourteen years on the High Court Bench and made a number of famous judgments. In 1976, for instance, she made an eleven-year-old girl who suffered from a rare congenital syndrome a ward of court in order to prevent the sterilisation that her mother had agreed with her paediatrician and gynaecologist. Rose held that it was neither medically necessary nor in her interest to perform an operation that would involve ‘the deprivation of a basic human right, namely the right of a woman to reproduce’. More notoriously, in 1988 she held that the putative father of an unborn child could not prevent the mother having an abortion, either on his own behalf or on behalf of the unborn child, a judgment that was upheld by the Court of Appeal.

  In 1975 she was appointed by the home secretary, Roy Jenkins, to chair the advisory group on the law of rape, a body created to respond to the outcry after the decision in DPP v. Morgan (1975) that a man was not guilty of rape if he believed that the woman was consenting, no matter how unreasonable that belief might be. The report recommended, among other things, that it should be made clear that the offence was rooted in the absence of consent, not violence; that a complainant should not have to answer questions about her sexual history; and that complainants should be anonymous.

  Soon after she became a high court judge, Rose and Nat left Liverpool for London, where they lived in a flat at 2 Gray’s Inn Square. And here she remained until 2000, when the vascular dementia from which she had been suffering for some years became too severe for Nat to care for her. She died in an Islington nursing home on 8 December 2005, at the age of ninety-one, and Nat five years later at the age of 104.

  Rose Heilbron blazed a trail, but what difference did she make? Not as much of a difference, one suspects, as she would have hoped. Let’s work our way up, as she did. As I write there are 1310 QCs in England, of whom just 176 are women; 1020 Recorders, of whom 201 are women; 559 circuit judges, of whom 106 are women; 91 high court judges, of whom 17 are women. In the supreme court, there sits only one woman. According to one recent report, at the present rate it will be another fifty-five years before women achieve equality in the senior judiciary. In fifty-five years, a snail could crawl around the M25 nine times.

  She would have been appalled by this, but not surprised. For all her success, for all her supreme professionalism, Rose knew what it felt like to be patronised and passed over. She kept quiet about this, mostly, but it must have rankled. How could it not? In the end, it wasn’t her brilliance that was rewarded so much as her patience and tenacity, the one hidden discreetly beneath the other, an iron fist inside the finest velvet glove George Henry Lees* had to offer.

  Perhaps you are wondering what happened to Vicky Clark. The story goes that, on her release from prison, s
he changed her name to Violet Smith and sailed to Australia, as she had always dreamed of doing, only to be turned back: the immigration authorities had discovered her criminal record.

  She died in Clacton, Essex, in 2005. On Canvey Island some people, or so I have heard, still shudder at the sound of her name.

  Fashion in the Fifties

  Audrey Hepburn models Givenchy’s revolutionary ‘sack’ dress, 1958

  (© 2005 Credit: TopFoto/AP.)

  Fashion in the Fifties

  ‘It was around VE DAY that the old itch came back to me again. As the last guns rumbled and the last all-clear sounded, all the squalor and discomfort and roughness that had seemed fitting for so long began to feel old-fashioned. Instead of consenting willingly to bear them I wanted to fight them. I wanted to throw the dried eggs out of the window, burn my shabby curtains and wear a Paris hat again.’

  Anne Scott-James, In the Mink

  I don’t want to get too hung up on fashion; the ethos of ‘make do and mend’ didn’t die in 1945. In the years after the war, some people were so hard up for clothes they turned their blackout curtains into coats. But still, many of the women in this book were, thanks entirely to their own efforts, increasingly well off as the Fifties wore on. They could afford to shop, and they were interested in fashion: then, as now, clothes were an effective way of making a statement about their place in the world. And even had they been broke – as Patience Gray often was – they would still have rushed out to buy nylons and lipstick once they became available again, as women did all over Britain. Or they might have made things, as Alison Smithson liked to do (a built-in sewing machine was the sole retro reference point in the House of the Future she designed for the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1956). Sylvia Syms told me a wonderful story about how, in the early Fifties, she went to a party in a copy of a Dior dress she’d made herself – only to find Ava Gardner sitting there in the real thing. ‘I told you it would look better on a blonde,’ Gardner said to Frank Sinatra on catching sight of her.