The Law Society is in its bicentenary year, marking its 2 June 1825 foundation. In common with other professions whose self-regulation was placed on a statutory footing, solicitors were successful in making the case to parliament that the profession’s existence was in the public interest, and that its proper regulation through a body established in law would further the profession’s contribution to the wider public good.
Bicentenary events across England and Wales take up that public interest theme, highlighting the central role the profession and its members have in serving both those in need and the country’s economy.
Birmingham
In this city of trade, technology and innovation solicitors have been early adopters of change
By the middle of the 19th century, Birmingham was known as a city of a ‘thousand trades’. It was the source of innovations, including the steam engine, which would go on to shape the industrial revolution.
Between 1722 and 1852, 776 of the patents granted by the Patent Office originated in Birmingham. Two that revolutionised the working lives of 19th-century lawyers and their clerks were James Watt’s copying press and button maker Joseph Gillott’s steel pen.
Both innovations fundamentally changed the way that documents could be produced and enabled multiple copies to be made. A copy press machine would have been in every firm and used well into the 20th century until superseded by the typewriter and photocopier.
Birmingham was an early adopter of technology. The first telephone arrived in the city in 1879. By the end of the year, Birmingham had its first exchange; the same year as London’s first exchange.
In 1886, Birmingham’s first telephone directory listed 30 solicitors. The first Birmingham firm to have subscribed, assigned number 121, was Barlow, Smith and Pinsent (now Pinsent Masons).
Another early adopter was Wragge & Co (now Gowling WLG), although making and taking calls remained a slow process. Telegrams were more widely used until the 1920s.
Bristol
The work of solicitors in improving the city shows the impact of everyday legal work
Bristolian solicitors have a proud history of improving the governance, living conditions and life chances of the people of their city.
In the early 19th century, the reform-minded Charles Houlden Walker issued a series of pamphlets calling out city officers who were neglectful of their duties. In 1808 and 1813 he also successfully prosecuted two dishonest solicitors and upheld the integrity of his profession.
Lewis Fry MP was admitted to the roll in 1854 and served as the first chair of the Bristol School Board and president of the Bristol School of Science and Art.
He helped establish the University of Bristol and was the first chair of its council. In his parliamentary career, he was involved with improving housing for working people in industrial towns.
Francis Gilmore Barnett served as solicitor to the Bristol Industrial Dwellings Co Ltd, which built new blocks of housing designed to improve the health and wellbeing of its occupants.
His work as a long-time councillor and member of the city’s Health Committee and Board of Guardians in the late 1800s also sought to improve conditions for the city’s poorer inhabitants. Francis was also involved in the co-operative movement in Bristol and Bedminster.
Law clinic: the University of Bristol Law Clinic has provided 390 law students with the opportunity to represent Bristolians at inquests, benefit appeals, school exclusion hearings and employment tribunals.
Cardiff
A political career called for two Welsh solicitors who left a positive legacy in law
A solicitor from Criccieth, north Wales, David Lloyd George’s political career took off when he was elected as a Liberal MP in 1890. He remains the only solicitor to become prime minister (1916-1922). In addition to being remembered as a wartime prime minister, his reforming social policies paved the way for the later creation of the welfare state.
Cardiff solicitor Leo Abse (1917 to 2008) founded the leading Welsh firm, Abse & Cohen (now part of Slater and Gordon). However, he arguably had a greater impact on the law as an MP for nearly 30 years.
The bills Leo introduced on divorce, women’s rights, widows’ damages, family planning and industrial injuries helped to liberalise British society. He also introduced a private bill on homosexuality in 1967, which ultimately led to its decriminalisation.
Leeds
The eminent legal services city had a role in the creation of legal aid
Before 1949, access to legal advice for those who could not afford to pay was piecemeal and often provided on a voluntary, no-fee basis through Poor Man’s Lawyer organisations.
Although access to the courts was a constitutional right, there was no standardised right to legal assistance. The Legal Aid and Advice Act 1949 introduced a consistent approach across England and Wales, making legal advice available to ‘persons of small or moderate means’.
This followed the Rushcliffe Committee’s recommendations and years of work by members of the Law Society Council, whose number included Francis John Fallowfield Curtis, president of Leeds Law Society from 1946 to 1947.
Liverpool
The city’s first woman solicitor went on to create the first all-female law firm
One of the first 10 women to qualify as a solicitor in England and Wales, Edith Berthen was also the first woman to qualify in Liverpool.
Born in 1877 at Rockferry on the Wirral peninsula, Edith Annie Jones Berthen qualified in 1923 after a brief career in education.
She established her first partnership, with Liverpudlian Hector Munro, in the East End of London before returning in 1927 to Liverpool, and to the firm of HJ Davis with whom she had trained.
Four years later, Edith went into partnership in London with Beatrice Davy. Beatrice had been called to the bar at the Middle Temple in November 1922 (one of eight pioneering women barristers), but eventually abandoned the bar and requalified as a solicitor.
Edith and Beatrice’s articled clerk, Madge Easton Anderson, qualified in 1937 and joined the partnership, which became Messrs Berthen, Davy, and Anderson.
Manchester
The city’s legal community played its part in the campaign for homosexual equality
The decade between the publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957 and the Sexual Offences Act 1967 saw several groups set up to fight for equality via legal reform including the Homosexual Law Reform Society.
The society’s first local committee, the North Western Homosexual Law Reform Committee, was founded in Manchester in 1964.
It became a national organisation in 1969, renamed the Committee for Homosexual Equality (CHE), and the Campaign for Homosexual Equality in 1971.
CHE is the oldest surviving LGBTQ+ organisation in the UK with nationwide reach. Manchester continued to play a significant role in the campaign for equality.
The city held its first Pride event in 1985 and drew a crowd of 20,000 to protest against the introduction of section 28 in 1988.
Newcastle upon Tyne
Solicitor Robert Spence Watson’s ambition was to see his city lit by electric light ‘before I die’. He went much further than that
In November 1880, Newcastle solicitor Robert Spence Watson wrote to his daughter Mabel: ‘J.W. Swan gave a wonderful lecture on the electric light … I look to see Newcastle lighted by this method before I die. It will be the greatest practical social revolution of our day.’
Robert would go on to play a part in not only lighting up Newcastle, but taking Swan’s invention to the world and becoming his solicitor.
Robert helped set up the Swan Electric Light Company. Working with Swan’s London agent Montgomery, he secured patents around the world for the Newcastle chemist’s light bulb design, from Belgium to Russia, Norway and India.
Swan and his competitor Thomas Edison would merge their companies. The newly formed company engaged the London firm Ashurst Morris Crisp to issue the company’s first prospectus.
Robert was also later involved in the removal of statutory restrictions on the extension of electricity across the country.
Norwich
A solicitor and notary helped take English mustard global
Ernest Watson, solicitor and notary public, was involved in promoting the overseas business of various Norwich firms, including its most celebrated, J & J Colman (makers of Colman’s mustard), for nearly a half-century between 1900 and 1946.
Ernest witnessed signatures by Sir Jeremiah Colman for documents enabling the company to renew trade marks in Constantinople and to do business in Romania, India and South Africa (the latter through their subsidiary Colman-Keen (Africa) Ltd).
Mary Pickup: born and educated in Wales, Mary Pickup moved to Birmingham to work for solicitor Thomas William Pickup. They married in 1910. Mary was one of the first four women to pass the Law Society finals and was admitted to the roll of solicitors in January 1923. As a Soroptimist who believed legal advice should be available to all, Pickup shared many traits with her fellow women pioneers. She was the first solicitor who was also a mother.
As well as assisting families and individuals, the clinic supports local charities and co-hosts a project with Avon and Somerset Constabulary that supports young people in connection with child abuse cases.
Frederick de Courcy Hamilton: the solicitor was also a cricketer, developer and supporter of the local community, workers’ rights, jobs and housing. Following unrest and race riots at Cardiff docks in June 1919, as president of the Cardiff World Mission Frederick wrote a supportive letter to The Times outlining the problems facing Cardiff’s black community.
Frederick was sympathetic to the area’s minority ethnic communities, which included many Yemeni, Somali and Caribbean seafarers. In 1917, he helped establish a multi-racial cricket team in Butetown (later the Cardiff International Athletic Club), one of the first multi-racial sports teams in the UK.
He oversaw several schemes to improve the conditions of workers in Butetown and Cardiff docks, building hundreds of houses for workers via his Barry Island Cottage Company and Glamorgan Workmen’s Cottage companies.
Serving the community: The Liverpool Law Society was instrumental in setting up the Vauxhall Law Centre in 1973. Its work on housing, homelessness, employment and immigration law has been widely recognised for its impact on the community.
The initiative followed in the footsteps of Liverpool’s Sydney Silverman, who defended mainly working-class Liverpudlians unable to afford a lawyer. Sydney later went on to play a leading role in the abolition of the death penalty.
For the Law Society’s full account of the contributions of some solicitors across England and Wales, and details of upcoming Bicentenary events, click here.
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