Every decade and court has its great – and often eccentric – advocate, and in the 1920s, Western Australia’s Arthur Haynes neatly filled the bill, writes James Morton.

Haynes trained trotting horses and, after staying at his club until the early hours, would get up at dawn to work in his garden.

Acquitted in 1931 of trying to suborn a witness to commit perjury, on the grounds that there was no corroboration, he was described admiringly as ‘theatrical, oratorical, creative, clever and cunning’.

Haynes appeared for the defence in many celebrated cases of the 1920s, including an unsuccessful defence of two of the accused in the 1926 Goldfields Murder, when two policemen were lured to their deaths.

But perhaps his most famous and best defence, a year earlier, was that of Audrey Jacob, a beautiful 25-year-old art student and flapper, who shot and killed her former boyfriend, Cyril Gidley, at the St John of God Free Ward Ball at Government House, Perth.

There is no doubt Gidley had lured Jacob from a previous boyfriend by promising to marry her, but there is also no doubt she racketed around and had been banned from visiting a number of ships in the harbour.

Now, at the charity ball, when she saw Gidley dancing with another girl and he refused to speak to her, she returned home, changed from her pierrot outfit to a frock, collected a pistol given to her by another former fiancé, returned to the ball and shot him dead.

Jacob’s [or Haynes’s] defence was that she had gone home intending to commit suicide and had woken up in a police cell remembering nothing.

Brilliantly defended by Haynes, who had her convert from Judaism to Catholicism and then ensured most of the jury were Roman Catholics, she was acquitted after he heaped abuse on the dead man and managed to have much of the evidence of her own conduct ruled inadmissible.

The case threw up one of those judicial ‘Who are the Beatles?’ exchanges. Haynes said Gidley was behaving like The Sheik, an allusion to the Rudolph Valentino film (pictured) that was popular at the time.

‘Who is the Sheik?’ asked the judge. ‘A master of women,’ replied Haynes.

‘A woman friend of mine has seen it 28 times.’

Within months of her acquittal, Jacob married a rich New Yorker and sailed away to a new life.