The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales

Volume II of The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales traces, for the first time, the genesis and early evolution of two principal institutions in the criminal justice system, the Crown Court and the Crown Prosecution Service. This volume examines the origins and shaping of two critical institutions: the Crown Court, which rose from the ashes of the Courts of Assize and Quarter Sessions; and the Crown Prosecution Service which replaced a rather haphazard system of police prosecuting solicitors. The 1971 Courts Act and the 1985 Prosecution of Offences Act were to reconfigure the architecture of criminal justice, transforming the procedures by which people were charged, prosecuted and, in the weightier cases demanding a judge and jury, tried in the criminal courts of England and Wales. One stemmed from a crisis in a medieval system of travelling justices that tried people in the wrong places and for inadequate lengths of time. The other was precipitated by a scandal in which three men were wrongly convicted for the murder of a bisexual prostitute. Theirs is an as yet untold history that can be explored in depth because it is recent enough, in the words of Harold Wilson, to have been ‘written while the official records could still be supplemented by reference to the personal recollections of the public men who were involved’. This book will be of much interest to students of criminology and British history, politics and law.

Paul Rock is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. His published work has focused chiefly on the evolution of criminal justice policies in Canada and England and Wales, particularly for victims of crime, and on developments in criminological theory. Whitehall Histories: Government Official History Series ISSN: 1474–8398

The Government Official History series began in 1919 with wartime histories, and the peacetime series was inaugurated in 1966 by Harold Wilson. The aim of the series is to produce major histories in their own right, compiled by historians eminent in the field, who are afforded free access to all relevant material in the official archives. The Histories also provide a trusted secondary source for other historians and researchers while the official records are not in the public domain. The main criteria for selection of topics are that the histories should record important episodes or themes of British history while the official records can still be supplemented by the recollections of key players; and that they should be of general interest, and, preferably, involve the records of more than one government department.

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For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Government-Official-History-Series/book-series/SE0789 The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales Volume II: Institution-Building

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Names: Rock, Paul Elliott, author. Title: The official history of criminal justice in England and Wales : volume one: the "Liberal hour" / Paul Rock. Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019- | Series: Whitehall histories: government official history series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018043358 (print) | LCCN 2018061730 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429892226 (Web PDF) | ISBN 9780429892219 (ePub) | ISBN 9780429892202 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781138601673 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429469923 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Administration of justice--England--History. | Administration of justice--Wales--History. Classification: LCC HV9960.G7 (ebook) | LCC HV9960.G7 R635 2019 (print) | DDC 364.942--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043358

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-1-138-60165-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-46991-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Contents

List of figures vi Preface viii

1. Institution-Building: The Courts Act 1971, c. 23 and the founding of the Crown Court: I 1

2. Institution-Building: The Courts Act 1971, c. 23 and the founding of the Crown Court: II 49

3. Institution-Building: The Courts Act 1971, c. 23 and the founding of the Crown Court: III 104

4. Institution-Building: The Courts Act 1971, c. 23 and the founding of the Crown Court: IV 162

5. Institution-Building: An Independent Prosecution Service – The Prosecution of Offences Act 1985, c. 23: I Preamble 199

6. Institution-Building: An Independent Prosecution Service – The Prosecution of Offences Act 1985, c. 23: II The Death of Maxwell Confait 253

7. Institution-Building: An Independent Prosecution Service – The Prosecution of Offences Act 1985, c. 23: III Inquiries 309

8. Institution-Building: An Independent Prosecution Service – The Prosecution of Offences Act 1985, c. 23: IV Legislation 395

9. Institution-Building: An Independent Prosecution Service – The Prosecution of Offences Act 1985, c. 23: V Implementation 444

Index 543 Lists of figures

1.1 Persons granted legal aid: the higher courts of England and Wales 7 1.2 Liverpool Crown Court: number of prisoners tried 8 1.3 Manchester Crown Court sittings: numbers of ‘Judge/days’ 1957–1966 9 1.4 Manchester Crown Court: number of cases taken 1962–1966 9 1.5 Assize and Crown Court business in 1966 13 1.6 Assize towns with populations of over 50,000 in 1965 (000s) 14 1.7 Annual average number of indictable offences known to the police 1930–1964 16 1.8 Case-load of the higher criminal courts 1957–1967 16 1.9 The Coach of the Sheriff of Devonshire 31 2.1 Annual average number of indictable offences tried at Assizes and Quarter Sessions 1930–1964 49 2.2 Lord Beeching’s cartography of the rail network 60 2.3 Criminal cases in the Midlands Circuit 1961–1965 78 2.4 Summary of weight of evidence 80 2.5 British Railways Board: Specimen isochrone map for Birmingham, 16 May 1967 83 2.6 Hampshire Quarter Sessions: number of court days 85 3.1 Early proposal for a new regional geography of justice based on a Note by the Secretaries on Regional Centres, 30 March 1967 105 3.2 Richard Bingham’s map of the future administration of justice in England and Wales, December 1967 108 3.3 Richard Bingham’s proposed structure for a new North- Eastern Region 109 3.4 The Secretaries’ proposed map of part of a new North East Region, February 1968 113 3.5 The five centres of population 114 3.6 Administrative organisation of a circuit 121 3.7 Long-term proposals for court centres 122 3.8 Administrative circuits 123 Lists of figures vii 3.9 Appendix to memorandum submitted by the Court of Quarter Sessions and the County Council of Caernarvonshire 127 4.1 Expenditure on courts 1967–1971, central and local government share 184 4.2 Trials at Assize and Crown Court 187 5.1 Police forces and prosecuting solicitors departments 205 5.2 Proposed organisation of the office of the prosecuting solicitor to the West Yorkshire Police Authority in 1968 216 6.1 27 Doggett Road, London, SE6 254 6.2 The Environs of Doggett Road, Catford, South-East London 255 7.1 Incomplete sketch of the spatial organisation of the Maxwell Confait Inquiry 316 9.1 Some salient features of the organisation of the Bar in 1985 472 9.2 Court proceedings 1985–1987 480 9.3 CPS lawyers in post 498 9.4 CPS lawyers in post as % of requirement 498 9.5 CPS expenditure 1986–1995 499 Preface

This, the second volume in the official history of criminal justice, examines the origins and shaping of two critical institutions: the Crown Court, which rose from the ashes of the Courts of Assize and Quarter Sessions; and the Crown Prosecution Service which replaced a rather haphazard system of police prosecuting solicitors. The 1971 Courts Act and the 1985 Prosecution of Offences Act were to reconfigure the architecture of criminal justice, transforming the procedures by which people were charged, prosecuted and, in the weightier cases demanding a judge and jury, tried in the criminal courts of England and Wales. It is a story worth relating at some length. Pivotal as they are, theirs is an as yet untold history that can be explored in depth because, unlike the events traced in the first volume, it is recent enough, in the words of Harold Wilson, to have been ‘written while the official records could still be supplemented by reference to the personal recollections of the public men who were involved’.1 I have been given full access to those official documents and am alone responsible for the statements made and the views expressed.

Paul Rock 1 Institution-Building The Courts Act 1971, c. 23 and the founding of the Crown Court: I

Why flutter flags from the tower of the gaol and the keep of the castle, Bright ’gainst the gray sky behind the battlements black of the donjon? … ’Tis that the Judge is to come – the Red Judge – to hold the Assizes; Liberty bringing to some – but to others surcease from life’s labour – Hard labour – delight of the good – awarding the bad to chastise them. … Hark! the proud prancing of horse, tight-reined to ensure caracoling, Rumble of chariot wheels, and blare of uncertainly blown trumpets, Winded by tight-buttoned knaves in waistcoats for others commanded. Mark, ’tis the progress in state of the strength of the County High Sheriff. Coated in scarlet he comes; side furnished with sword, head with cocked hat, Such as great Wellington wore …1

The status ante quo

Introduction The 1966 Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, chaired by Lord Beeching, and its progeny, the Crown Court, established nationwide in 1972, are said to have accomplished one of the most profound changes ever in the history of criminal (and civil) justice in England and Wales. Lord Gardiner, the Lord Chancellor who launched the reforms, certainly hoped that that would be the case, claiming that the then prevailing network of higher courts was decrepit, beyond repair and should go. The simile he invoked repeatedly was that of an ‘ancient rambling mansion’.2 ‘It is’, he told magistrates just before the Royal Commission reported, ‘a thoroughly untidy system and the sooner it is scrapped and replaced with a sensible administrative structure the better’.3 Lord Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor who succeeded Lord Gardiner and inherited the Royal Commission’s proposals to bring them to fruition, was plainly impressed by the scale of what he purposed to do. He told members of the judiciary that ‘Beeching’s reforms [are] the biggest and most radical reforms in judicial administration especially of the higher criminal courts since Henry 2 The Courts Act 1971: I II sent his justices two by two to impose royal law on a country distracted with lawlessness and civil strife’;4 and he went yet further when he told the Central Criminal Court Journalists’ Association that they were ‘the most far reaching and radical change in the administration of the criminal law ever to have been undertaken in this country’. It had to be done because the system was ‘too ramshackle, too rigid and inflexible, and too tied up in penny packets …’5 Their statements carry conviction. The Courts Act 1971 did indeed scrap the ancient patchwork of Assizes and Quarter Sessions; replace it with a unitary criminal court under central government supervision; alter the topography of justice by removing courts from sparsely populated areas and setting down others where populations were concentrated; establish and staff a new class of circuit judges; and apply the new notion that criminal (and civil) justice should be treated as a system6 as it introduced, at a very early stage, a new managerialism and a new administrative hierarchy;7 and it thereby significantly enlarged the estate, reach, powers, working and influence of what had hitherto been only a minor government department, the Lord Chancellor’s Office, and began to reconfigure the political landscapes of local and central government.8 The Act reformed and ‘modernised’ legal institutions in a manner so sweeping that it is reminiscent of the project to rationalise the criminal and civil law that had been launched as part of the great state-building enterprise of the 1820s and 1830s.9 It too sought to dismantle remnants of the ancien régime (Lord Chorley wrote in 1970 that ‘It is on the Assize courts that the dead hand of the middle ages weighs most heavily’10). It too did away with what was dismissed as cumbersome, anachronistic and anomalous and install in its place a new order depicted as economical, functional and efficient. It too was supported by appeals to reason and evidence (in this instance, chiefly demographic, logisti- cal and geographical evidence) rather than to sentiment, custom and tradition. And it is for those reasons more than a little inviting to return to the argument ventured at the end of Chapter 7 in the first volume to read the reforms as if they were a continuation of the programme launched by Jeremy Bentham, Samuel Romilly and, in this instance, above all, by Lord Brougham,11 Jeremy Bentham’s follower12 – and himself an exceptional reforming Lord Chancellor13 – over a hundred years before. The barrister peer, Lord Ilford, certainly traced a parallel in November 1970 when he remarked that the Courts Bill ‘and the Administration of Justice Act which we passed last year, may be regarded as completing the reform of our judicial system, just as the great judicatory Acts of the last century completed the process of law reform in that century’.14 After the death of Samuel Romilly in 1818, and in his great, six-hour-long speech to the House of Commons in February 1828 (a draft of which he had submitted to Bentham six months before15), the ‘gigantic’16 Lord Brougham17 established himself as the chief parliamentary engine of legal change. One of his biographers said that the speech ‘exposed flaws in virtually every area of law’,18 excepting only chancery law and the criminal law (others had already subjected the law of equity to sweeping criticism,19 Lord Brougham observed, and ‘I do not think it right to unsettle the minds of those numerous The Courts Act 1971: I 3 and ignorant classes, on whom [the criminal law’s] sanctions are principally intended to operate. It might produce no good effects if they were all at once to learn, that the Criminal Code in the mass, as it were, had been sentenced to undergo a revision – that the whole penal code was unsettled and about to be remodelled’20). In words that anticipated much of the case that would be later put by Lord Beeching and Lord Gardiner,21 he argued for ‘the pure, prompt and cheap administration of justice’.22 To be sure, he was not wholly successful in everything he sought to do. He failed to change the manner in which judges were appointed. He was unable to reform the Court of Chancery and, in 1833, was unable to pass a Local Courts Bill23 that would have created a skein of small civil courts across the country (that was to be later effectively reintroduced with his qualified support24 as the 1842 County Courts Act25 by a new Lord Chancellor, Lord Lyndhurst). He did not touch on the venerable institution of Assizes until 1855, long after he had left office, and it was then that he criticised the maldistribution of criminal courts across the nation and proposed reforms of the circuits, the Assize courts and the judges who manned them.26 But he did establish a new machinery to deal with bankruptcy cases in 1831; found a new Court of Appeal, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, in 1833, and the Central Criminal Court in 1834; lend effective support, when out of office, to the Municipal Corporations Act of 183527 which reformed Quarter Sessions; and bring it about that cases in Chancery were resolved at unprecedented speed.28 There are intriguing parallels between the achievements of the two Lords Chancellor although Jeremy Horder did caution me that their application of utilitarianism is a label that can be ‘slapped down’ on almost any reform conducted in the name of applying systematic reason, and it would be extravagant to pursue them too far. Both were regarded as great reformers, it having been said of Lord Brougham that in 1828 he ‘set out the programme not only for his own policies as Chancellor but for half a century of radical reforms in which the English legal system was transformed …’;29 and of Lord Gardiner that ‘It is as a law reformer that [he] will live in English history.’30 Both redefined the powers and duties of their office, Lords Chancellor, having trained as lawyers and politicians,31 not being conventionally associated with innovation32 (Michael Blair,33 Lord Gardiner’s Private Secretary between 1968 and 1971, said in interview in December 2012 that ‘he liked Lord Brougham because of the law reform side … he thought he was the first person to get law reform onto the agenda’). Lord Gardiner could, after all, be construed as having somewhat exceeded the powers of his office to play a major role in the abolition of capital punishment, constitutionally the preserve of the Home Secretary (although he was entitled to speak on matters that affected the law). Both were notably energetic in their reforged role (Lord Chorley said that ‘we have been running pretty fast, and under my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner there was a quite exceptional burst of speed, of a kind which has not been seen since the middle years of the last century when, under a remarkable series of Lord Chancellors – Lord Brougham, Lord Westbury, and Lord Selborne, to 4 The Courts Act 1971: I mention only three – a remarkable number of projects were carried through to a successful conclusion’34). And both struggled against what they conceived to be the inertia and conservatism of the legal profession as they strived to bring about change. Lord Gardiner reflected that ‘there is always general opposition by lawyers to any reform of the law. If one looks at the history of law reform, this is quite astonishing, really, because of the extraordinary reasons given for that opposition. … in the long battle to get a Court of Criminal Appeal, every sort of argument was used. … [But] [h]ere, in the movement started by Lord Brougham, ultimately the whole of our pleading and practice was changed’.35 Lord Brougham was certainly occasionally in the minds of his successors at about the time the Royal Commission itself reported, if only because of his extraordinary prolixity and the need to condone their own wordiness when they talked about legal reform. Lord Gardiner called him ‘formidable’36 and adverted at length to the ambition and scale of the 1828 speech when he launched the Law Commission Bill in April 1965.37 So too did the Attorney General, Sir Elwyn Jones,38 when he said at the very outset of the formal parliamentary debate on the Beeching report that ‘When Lord Brougham made his famous speech on law reform in 1828 he took six hours. … I trust that I shall neither be as long as Lord Brougham nor in need of physical support at the conclusion of what I have to say, but with the leave of the House I shall be a little longer than is my wont in indicating the Government’s views on this very important report’.39 But the connection could be even more direct. Lord Hailsham remarked that ‘the County Court was the creature of Brougham’s genius though the Act creating them [sic] was the child of Lyndhurst… . So the Courts Bill … was conceived under Gardiner, though it was brought to birth by Hailsham’.40 And it may have been no accident (as the Marxists used to say) that Lord Gardiner kept a typescript copy of a paper written by the historian David Swinfen that charted Lord Brougham’s creation of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.41 There is a difficulty. Lord Gardiner tended to be a little closed to his officials and colleagues (Michael Blair said in interview that ‘he didn’t talk a great deal, Gerald. He did his work extremely hard and it all came out overnight with his squiggly hand. And he didn’t discuss things with his private secretaries very often’; and Derek Oulton,42 his other private secretary, said that ‘Gerald never confided in me, but again, he was a very, very modest man’). It is not clear now how large the shadow of Lord Brougham loomed before him when he contemplated legal reform, but it must be said that the Courts Act did look very much like a part of a long-delayed utilitarian, ‘modernising’ reconstruc- tion of the judicial apparatus of the state. There have been histories of the trial43 and the criminal law,44 but very few of the courts and courthouses,45 and none that maps in any detail the origins and founding of the Crown Court,46 the judge and jury tribunal of England and Wales that sat, in 2017, in some 77 centres across the nation47 and con- tended with some 100,000 defendants a year.48 It is an institution to be found, as the cliché goes, at the very heart of the system, and it merits a place in any The Courts Act 1971: I 5 history of criminal justice.49 And, as an aside, its birth is of some little interest to the academic observer because it helps to confound the core assumption of many scholars, so much in vogue at the time of its conception, that a social science should neglect what people actually say they are doing and turn instead to the study of the deep causes,50 latent functions51 and unintended consequences of action.52 The mechanics of the Royal Commission and the Courts Act offer reasonably firm evidence to the contrary.53 They were fostered by thoughtful officials and politicians who knew exactly what they were doing. Sir Derek Oulton, who was simultaneously a central participant in, and a close observer of, what transpired, put it simply in interview that ‘Beeching was … an exceptional, outstanding visionary and analyst who could see very quickly what the trouble was’.

Assizes and Quarter Sessions Courts of Assize were devised by Henry II in 1156 (Assize being a Norman French term, referring to an early form of the King’s Council, which later came to mean more generally the sitting of a court54); but the first statutory provision for a regular system of trial by circuit judges is to be found in c. 12 of Magna Carta which stipulated in 1215 that ‘We, or if we should be out of the realm, our chief justiciar, will send two justiciars through every county four times a year, who shall, along with four knights of the county chosen by the county, hold the said Assize in the county, on the day and in the place of meeting of the Court’. Assizes were thus originally conducted by trusted men who performed judicial, fiscal and administrative tasks on behalf of the Crown in each of the counties making up the realm. They represented and personified the king and the rule of law.55 They administered a court (and the coincidence in name with the assembly presided over by the monarch is telling). And they thereby extended and consolidated regal power at the expense of local magnates who often exercised their own, private justice,56 becoming in time a class of professional, paid judges who were commissioned to go about the country on circuit,57 summoning juries in the name of the sovereign and dis- pensing civil and criminal justice several days at a time in the principal place of every county (usually, but not invariably, the county town), trying all offences on indictment, and hearing civil cases, including the recovery of land from wrongful possessors and the collection of dues owing to the king.58 The origins of Courts of Quarter Session were more recent, some dating back to the mid-14th century,59 but many emerging rather later;60 and they were set down in the counties, where they were presided over by the justices of the peace – the ‘most worthy in the County’61 – men and women who might not be legally qualified but chaired by those who had to be legally qualified; and, after the passage of Lord Brougham’s Municipal Corporations Act of 1835,62 in the larger boroughs and cities, by Recorders, full or part-time judges, barristers of at least five years’ standing, who sat on their own.63 Quarter Sessions were inferior courts that would, as their name suggests, at first sit at least four times a 6 The Courts Act 1971: I year to try most of the indictable offences committed by the magistrates’ courts for trial in England and Wales (after 1844 they could sit continuously and, in law, they could try all offences other than those expressly excluded under the Quarter Sessions Act of 184264 and in subsequent legislation). Their numbers grew as the population of England and Wales itself grew, petitions for new Borough Sessions being granted by Lords Chancellor and Home Secretaries to a succession of towns whose inhabitants had come to exceed the statutory minimum of 65,000 – for example, in Croydon in 1928, Southend in 1929, and Blackpool in 1949. By 1967, at the time the Royal Commission began receiving evidence, there were 58 Courts of County Quarter Sessions and 93 Borough and City Courts in England and Wales. The role of the Assize judges on circuit was to embody royal authority, but their influence was inevitably weaker in some places than others, and it was weakest of all at the nation’s fringes – in the sometimes lawless borderlands that were far from London. Feudal and ecclesiastical authority remained resilient on the Northern65 and Welsh frontiers where the marcher lords could not be safely divested of their power, and, indeed, within Wales itself, where a number of native and hybrid forms of justice could linger on until central rule was further consolidated under Henry VIII66 and James I.67 Those (and other) areas tended to remain somewhat anomalous almost to the end68 (the semi-autonomous Palatine Chancery Court of Chester69 was abolished only in 183070 and its sister Palatine Courts at Durham and Lancaster71 lasted even later, until 197172). They were marked by a sense of exception, place and privilege, fuelled, in Wales, by a resurgent nationalism in mid-twentieth century, that would underscore their opposition to the redistribution of court centres proposed by Lord Beeching. Indeed, as I shall argue in the next chapter, many courts were invested with sentiments of tradition and entitlement that made their supporters resentful of change, none more so, perhaps, than those of Wales (with some of the very smallest and most vulnerable Assize towns (see Figure 1.6)) and of the Central Criminal Court, a symbolically potent73 Crown Court, combining the work of Assizes and Quarter Sessions, which would be successful in retaining some part of its independence even after the 1971 Act. What had been established in early medieval times tended to remain. By the 1960s, the 61 Assize venues in the 58 counties of England and Wales were still preponderantly the old county towns, although, from time to time, the circuits had been modified and new locations had been established in response to changes in the volume and distribution of business. As hard pressed as any was the Northern Circuit, founded in 1176 to cover the counties of York, Durham, Northumberland, Westmorland, Cumberland and Lancashire.74 In the early nineteenth century, a new Assize had had to be created in South Lancashire to accommodate a population that had swollen with urbanisa- tion and industrialisation; another had to be established in Liverpool in 1834; others still were created in Manchester and Leeds in 1864; another for the Salford Hundred in 1865; and yet another in Sheffield in 1955; and the circuit The Courts Act 1971: I 7 itself had had to be bifurcated to hive off an entirely new North-Eastern Circuit in 1876.75 The pressure of business in the northern circuits (and elsewhere) must have seemed unremitting. The protestations of a newly appointed Recorder of Liverpool, Henry Nelson,76 labouring under the strain,77 led to an enquiry, the Maxwell Committee, that reported in 1953;78 legislation, the Criminal Justice Administration Act of 1956;79 and the subsequent introduction of two quasi-experimental Crown Courts80 in permanent session in Liverpool81 and Manchester to cope with an increasing caseload that is evident in Figures 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4. Those two new courts combined the work of Assizes and quarter sessions under a Recorder and were devised continuously to try, with certain exceptions presided over by visiting ‘red’ High Court Judges,82 the graver criminal cases and appeals from civil cases from the Magistrates’ Courts. In the words of the Home Secretary, their task was to relieve the ‘congestion of judicial business in South Lancashire which had for some time given cause for concern’.83 Lord Goddard, opening the new court in Manchester in October 1956, echoed him when he said that ‘The state of business in south Lancashire has been a source of continuous anxiety to me since I became Chief Justice. The sessions in both cities were so over-loaded that it did not seem fair to require the Recorders – who; as in most other cities and towns, are part-time judicial officers – to deal with the mass of work laid before them at the expense of attending to their own practices’.84 Yet extra Recorders, County Court judges, silks and others still had to be enlisted for some years to come to deal with the volume of work,85 attributable, in part, thought a new Recorder of the Liverpool Court, to the more generous funding of the representation of defendants after the Legal Aid Act of 1960 (see Figure 1.1).86

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By the mid-1960s, the seven circuits of England and Wales were presided over by 38 Queen’s Bench judges, complemented, when necessary, by the Master of the Rolls, Lords Justice of Appeal and others, who were despatched from London to travel on Assize following predetermined schedules three times a year.87 Trials tended to be held at two or more Assize towns simultaneously in each circuit, the judges travelling with their separate itineraries. During the 1967 Northern Circuit’s Winter Assizes, for instance, one Judge, Sir Maurice Lyell,88 arrived at Manchester on ‘commission day’, 11 January, when time would be spent on allowing officials to open an office and prepare and publish the list for the next day; packed up and left for Liverpool on 30 January; and returned to Manchester on 6 March. At the same time, other trials were being held on the same circuit by his brother Judge in Carlisle, where the ‘commission day’ was 12 January, and in Lancaster where it was 31 January. Courts could not sit late on the last day because the circuit office had to readied for travel on the morrow. And the whole was governed by an inflexible timetable that necessarily depended on difficult and often inaccurate computations of just how many ‘judge-days’ and travel days each Assize would require: ‘The time available in each town … bears no relation to the amount of work actually waiting to be dealt with when the judges arrive’ said the Lincolnshire Law Society.89 They were computations that could easily go further awry as courts received late committals, or trials were postponed, over-ran, aborted or cracked.90 It was the view of members of the South-Eastern Circuit in 1967 that the periods of time allotted a judge at any one place tended in practice to be inadequate: ‘it is extremely difficult to fit in long cases, even a three or four day case can cause difficulty’.91 And further complications could arise because there were reported to be sporadic shortages of counsel stemming from the uneven distribution of 600

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Lords Justice Other judges

Figure 1.3 Manchester Crown Court sittings: numbers of ‘Judge/days’ 1957–1966

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0 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966

Assize type cases taken by Assize Judges Quarter Session type cases taken by Assize Judges Assize type cases taken by Recorder and Commissioners Quarter Session cases taken by Recorder and Commissioners Figure 1.4* Manchester Crown Court: number of cases taken 1962–1966 * Based on information supplied in a Memorandum by the Recorder of the Manchester Crown Court, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, March 1967, LCO7/67. 10 The Courts Act 1971: I lawyers across the country and sporadic congestion when, for example, Quarter Sessions and Assizes were sitting simultaneously, as they did from time to time in Leeds, with its 57 local barristers, and Birmingham, with 77.92 Appearing in the Assize Courts in the mid-1960s were some 1800 barristers, 600 of whom were lodged mainly in provincial chambers in 23 different towns,93 and the remainder of whom were based in London (1031 juniors and 169 silks), who ‘banded themselves together’94 to practise on the different circuits. No barrister could appear in a higher court unless he or she was a member of the affiliated circuit. No barrister was allowed to be a member of more than one circuit.95 So it was that 217 members of the Northern Circuit were to be found in provincial chambers, and 31 were in London; 111 members of the North Eastern Circuit were in provincial chambers, 47 in London; whilst the Crown Court at Manchester had its own retinue of 122 local counsel and Liverpool 93.96 Such banding was to be consequential socially. It was not only instrumental in bringing people together professionally for purposes of action. It engendered small social worlds made up of people who appeared in and around the same courts together continually, meeting face to face, fighting, collaborat- ing and negotiating. It could well be marked by intimacy, competition, attach- ment, informal control97 and the development of tacit, local rules of conduct. At a hearing held on 18 July 1967, representatives of the Bar Council told the Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions that theirs was a small, ‘well-knit’ profession which was consolidated by circuits that ‘not only exercise (rarely) disciplinary powers based on conventional rules but continuously set and maintain a high standard of professional behaviour. … [The circuit system] engenders the corporate (one might say collegiate) spirit of mutual confidence and commonsense relationship among members of the Bar which is, without doubt, unique to the Bar and of inestimable value to the public. … [Members] belong to the circuit’.98 A later Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, was to observe that ‘On all the circuits the standard of conduct required of their members was extremely high. Each circuit was jealous of its standards and they were vigor- ously enforced by the peer pressure that was possible because of the limited size and intimacy of each of the circuits’.99 It was that sense of interdependence, intimacy and affiliation, marked by ties of sociability, loyalty, reputation and reci- procity, embedded in sets of chambers, that made proposals to alter or abolish a number of the circuits so unwelcome to many counsel. There was, for instance, what Michael Blair, an official of the Lord Chancellor’s Office, called ‘the death or mutilation of the Oxford Circuit’, and he had in mind the deeply resented absorption of the Oxford Circuit into the new Midland Circuit: ‘The Bar on the Oxford Circuit were very unhappy about being merged with the Midland’, he told me, ‘and that was still rumbling when I took over the M & O [the Midland and Oxford Circuit] in 1982’.100 I shall return to that death in Chapter 3. Administration of the whole was in ‘many hands’.101 In the counties, the 58 Quarter Sessions were made up of all the Justices on the Commission for Peace for the County, and were each presided over by a Chairman or Deputy Chairman, appointed by the Queen on the advice of the Lord Chancellor. The Courts Act 1971: I 11 Greater London was divided into five Commission areas, each of which was treated as a county for administrative purposes, and each of which had its own Quarter Sessions presided over by a full-time chairman assisted by one or more full-time deputy chairmen. The 96 Borough and City Quarter Sessions were presided over by a single, usually part-time judge, the Recorder, again appointed by the Queen on the advice of the Lord Chancellor. Financial responsibility was exercised by the county councils for the buildings and the remuneration of the Clerks of the Peace,102 Chairmen and Deputy Chairmen, Recorders and Deputy and Assistant Recorders, and staff of the Quarter Sessions; and for the buildings and staff of Courts of Assize, which were administered locally by the Sheriffs, Under Sheriffs,103 Clerks of Assize (who were barristers or solicitors of five years’ standing) and Assistant Clerks of Assize. The Clerks of Assize and their Assistants were themselves located in the headquarters town of their circuit ‘with very little contact between the seven circuits’.104 There was no central funding but some financial direction from the centre, local authorities being in general responsible for the building of new courts, whilst the Home Office exercised ‘capital investment control’ and advised on design and costs; and, to compound matters, the Exchequer bore 80% of the costs of the magistrates courts whose courtrooms could sometimes nevertheless be used by the higher courts.105 In the Guildhall in Nottingham, for example, two of the five courtrooms normally occupied by the magistrates had to be given up when the Courts of Assizes and Quarter Sessions were sitting.106 And progress on circuits and the preparation of indictments were co-ordinated by Circuit Officers and Circuit Clerks attached to the Central Office of the Supreme Court and under the control of Queen’s Bench Masters, themselves under a Senior Master, the Lord Chief Justice and, indirectly, the Lord Chancellor. Arrangements for Assizes were thereby supervised by a combination of the local Sheriff, Under Sheriff and their attendant staff, on the one hand, and the London-based and headquarters town-based officers of the Supreme Court and their peripatetic colleagues on circuit, on the other. A memorandum from the Clerks of Assize, those local headquarters-based officers, put it that the ‘system requires the setting up of a temporary centre for administration in each county, and much time and money is therefore spent by judges, their retinues, the Clerks of Assize and their staffs travelling from one county to another, settling in lodgings and setting up temporary office accommodation’,107 often with only the most basic of equipment.108 More succinctly, Michael Blair remembered that ‘the Quarter Sessions were run by the counties and the Assize system was run by the skeleton staff with hampers, wandering around from town to town and imposing themselves on the local authorities for accommodation’.109 And John Brindley, one of the first circuit office officials, and later a Circuit Administrator, called them ‘a peripatetic travelling circus organising court business subject largely to the wishes of judges and their clerks’.110 Thus itinerant, and in the era before mobile telephones, court staff could sometimes beincommunicado , leading to complaints from Justices’ Clerks who could not always reach them ‘in cases of urgency’111 and from solicitors that changes in the lists might take place without consultation.112 12 The Courts Act 1971: I Manchester and Liverpool Crown Courts were again exceptions – the City Councils of those two cities were required to pay half the costs of the salaries and pension costs of the two Recorders in addition to half the salaries of the Commissioners sitting in the courts. The other Crown Court, the Central Criminal Court, had its building costs funded by the Corporation of the City of London and its staff costs by the Greater London Council. London’s Quarter Sessions were funded by the Greater London Council; and the Lord Chancellor was responsible for the High Court and the County Courts. It all amounted to administration without much coordination, coherence or effective communication. John Brindley reflected that ‘the system was so fragmented that there wasn’t any simple piece of information you could take to loop over a wide area. So whoever was running the [system] at national level, whoever was running the system before the Crown Court, I don’t know how they managed …’ An absence of central direction, communication, funding and financial control113 also brought it about that there could be scant uniformity in the conditions in which justice was practised across the country. The facilities at some courthouses were deemed to be quite unsatisfactory. One instance was Leeds. A circuit judge, Mr Justice Karminski,114 complained in early 1968 that ‘before Christmas I was at Manchester, where the courts are new, excellently designed and maintained, and consequently pleasant to work in. I have just returned from Leeds where conditions are exactly the opposite. The Courts are old, badly designed and maintained, it is difficult to see and hear witnesses, no adequate desk is provided for the Judge, and the heating seldom works. At Manchester the Judges’ rooms are excellent; at Leeds, dirty and ill furnished’.115 The Under Sheriff of Yorkshire concurred with the judge, saying in a letter to the Town Clerk of Leeds, the ‘present [judges’] retiring room is in fact used as a stationery repository by the adjoining office and contains cabinets and cup- boards entirely unsuitable for a judge’s retiring room. … Jurymen and others whose ill-luck it is to have to come to Assizes, Sessions or Magistrates’ Courts still have to sit in theatre-type seats in the corridors: the Barristers still have a luncheon room resembling the Black Hole of Calcutta. Cannot something be done?’116 The problem, he reflected elsewhere, ‘is always how to persuade the Local Authority to spend more money’.117 By the mid-1960s, at the time that the Beeching Royal Commission began its task, the outcome was a mosaic of towns and cities housing courthouses of varying ages, conditions and levels of activity, some of which, like Appleby,118 the Assizes town of Cumberland and the Old Sarum of the Northern Circuit, where a judge had on one occasion but 30 minutes’ work,119 had very small populations and little or no business (and the convention then was that the judge would be given a pair of white gloves to signify the purity of the place); some, like the old Assize towns of Carlisle and Lancaster, continuing to be busy; and others, like Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool, all newer locations, were very busy indeed (see Figure 1.5). The disparity between the location of the courts and the numbers of people they served is conveyed even more starkly when the Assize towns are ranked The Courts Act 1971: I 13

Northern Circuit

Assize Town No of Days on which No of Days on which civil Population (1965) prisoners were tried actions or suits were tried (Thousands) Appleby 2 1 2 Carlisle 19 21 99 Lancaster 67 14 48 Liverpool – 180 722 Manchester – 160 638

North Eastern Circuit Leeds 255 250 509 Sheffield 33 103 489 Durham 49 39 23 Newcastle 74 64 257 York 39 25 106

Figure 1.5* Assize and Crown Court business in 1966 * The figure is reproduced from data given in Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO/7 231 and the note by the Lord Chancellor’s Office, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/240. by size. The juridical map of England and Wales had been semi-frozen at an early stage, leaving the newer industrial towns of the Midlands and North, the Southern resort towns and new towns of the 1950s and 1960s, and, indeed, the soon-to-be-expanding towns like Milton Keynes,120 with many fewer courts than their present or likely future populations might warrant; and the older, rural areas with many more. And problems were compounded because there was a running dilemma about whether the administration of justice should be concentrated in large centres of population, or dispersed, allowing those in the more sparsely inhabited areas to attend court without journeying great distances (jurors should not be obliged to travel to court above an hour and a half each way, thought the Under-Sheriff and the Clerk of the Peace for Oxfordshire121), and avoiding what a Select Committee would later call a ‘rural penalty’122 that was growing ever more burdensome as the provision of public transport in country areas declined.123

Inquiries I reported in Chapter 1 of the first volume how there had been a seemingly inexorable rise in crime throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s, and it was quite inevitable that that rise would feed itself into the fluctuating caseloads of the higher courts, sometimes causing blockages and congestion, and leading on occasion to Assize courts being unable to accept committals from the magistrates.124 The Police Federation and Superintendents’ Association, representing those who brought or briefed prosecutions, argued in April 1967 that ‘It is well known that the Courts of Assize and Quarter Session Assize Towns with Populations of over 50,000 in 1965 (000s) Birmingham 1,103 Northampton 121 Liverpool 722 Norwich 119 Manchester 638 Oxford 109 Leeds 509 Newport 107 Sheffield 489 York 106 Bristol 431 Cambridge 99 Cardiff (260) & Swansea (171) 431 Exeter 82 Nottingham 311 Lincoln 77 Leicester 267 Gloucester 72 Newcastle-upon-Tyne 257 Carlisle 71 Kingston-upon-Thames 146 Worcester 68 Ipswich (121) & Bury St. Edmunds (23) 144 Bedford 67 Derby 129 Maidstone 64 Reading 124 Chester 60 Chelmsford 54 Shrewsbury 52 Stafford 51

Assize Towns with Populations under 50,000 Lancaster 48 Huntingdon 13 Hereford 45 Caernarvon 9 Salibury (36) & Devizes (9) 45 Haverfordwest 91 Taunton (37) & Wells (7) 44 Mold 7 Aylesbury 34 Bodmin 7 Winchester 30 Welshpool 7 Durham 23 Brecon 6 Hertford 18 Oakham 5 Warwick 17 Ruthin 4 Lewes 14 Dolgellau 3 Dorchester 13 Lampeter 2 Carmarthen 13 Beaumaris 2 Appleby 2 Presteigne 1

Non-Assize Towns with Populations over 50,000 Coventry 330 South Shields 109 Kingston-upon-Hull 300 Basildon 107 St. Helens 104 Bradford 298 Blackburn 103 Stoke 277 Wellesley 103 Portsmouth 216 Gateshead 102 Plymouth 213 Solihull 101 Southampton 209 West Bromwich 98 Sunderland 188 Swindon 98 Southend 166 Poole 96 Brighton 163 Halifax 95 Bolton 158 Grimsby 95 Middlesbrough 157 Havant and Waterloo 91 Bournemouth 151 Doncaster 87 Luton 151 Rotherham 87 The Courts Act 1971: I 15

Wolverhampton 150 Rochdale 86 Blackpool 150 Slough 86 Salford 148 Darlington 84 Birkenhead 144 Stockton on Tees 83 Stockport 142 Bootle 83 Huddersfield 132 Bath 83 Walsall 120 Worthing 81 Thurrock 120 Brierley Hill 61 Oldham 111 Aldridge 61 Preston 109 Wakefield 60 Southport 80 Stretford 60 Gillingham 80 Crosby 60 Burnley 79 Crawley 60 West Hartlepool 79 Beeston & Stapleford 60 Sutton Coldfield 79 Kirkby 60 Wigan 78 Middleton 59 Newcastle-Under-Lyme 78 Harrogate 59 Watford 76 Keighley 56 Woking 76 Chigwell 56 Barnsley 75 Brentwood 56 Warrington 75 Reigate 55 Cheltenham 75 Rugby 55 Hove 73 Mansfield 55 Gosport 73 Oldbury 55 Tynemouth 72 Guildford 55 Epsom and Ewell 72 Gravesend 55 Fareham 71 Sale 55 Scunthorpe 70 Bebington 54 Chesterfield 70 High Wycombe 54 Colchester 70 Widnes 54 Huyton-with-Roby 68 Stevenage 54 Smethwick 67 Staines 54 Hastings 67 Dewsbury 53 Harlow 66 Crewe 53 Eastbourne 65 Great Yarmouth 53 Barrow-in-Furness 65 Rochester 53 Peterborough 65 Torquay 53 Dudley 64 Cheadle & Gatley 52 Bury 63 St. Albans 52 Hemel Hempstead 63 Chatham 52 Esher 62 Burton upon Trent 50+ Nuneaton 61

Figure 1.6* Assize towns with populations of over 50,000 in 1965 (000s) * Figures taken from Note by the Lord Chancellor’s Office, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/240. carry a volume of work for which they were never designed. The business today is such that it is not always possible for them to complete their calendar’.125 One response was to be an inquiry, an interdepartmental committee,127 set up in 1958 under Sir Geoffrey Streatfeild,128 a High Court judge with 16 The Courts Act 1971: I

Figure 1.7* Annual average number of indictable offences known to the police 1930–1964 * Based on successive editions of the annual Criminal Statistics England and Wales, Home Office, London.

Figure 1.8* Case-load of the higher criminal courts 1957–1967 * Based on figures contained in Special Statistical Survey, A Report by Mr. G.N.G. Rose,126 (1971); Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, HMSO, London. professional experience of the North-Eastern Circuit and the palatine courts, to examine court congestion and devise possible improvements in the dis- posal of cases and management of information. It came to recommend a set of quite modest reforms which included the preparation of pre-trial and post-conviction reports, the requirement that all defendants should be tried within eight weeks of their committal for trial, an increase in the number of cases that could be tried summarily, the appointment of more circuit judges and an enlargement of the number of ‘judge-itineraries’ within the The Courts Act 1971: I 17 existing system of seven circuits, but it balked at abolishing existing Assizes or founding new, permanent criminal courts staffed by full-time judges on the pattern of Manchester and Liverpool. The committee had reviewed the two Crown Courts in passing and had come to the judgement that an unrelieved diet of criminal work and permanent sittings without any movement on circuit could make judges isolated, ‘stale’129 and overly-partisan (‘prosecution- minded’ was the phrase that was used130). It was an allegation that was not universally endorsed131 but it stuck, becoming conventional enough to grow into what a later memorandum from Hampshire Quarter Sessions called ‘all the well-known arguments’.132 The Crown Courts were for a time dismissed as a possible model for emulation elsewhere. The justice system of England and Wales, the Committee said, may have been ‘creaking under the strain which [was] being put upon’ it, but the Lancashire Crown Courts offered no solution.133 The findings and aftermath of the Streatfeild Committee were perfectly in keeping with what had gone before. Politicians had had a long history of commissioning investigations into the faltering organisation of Assizes and quarter sessions but of then avoiding substantial action. They had balked in the 1870s when they were loath to implement the recommendations of the 1869 first report of the Benthamite Judicature Commission,134 a report which had trenchantly complained of the inefficiencies of the system then in place135 and suggested that ‘the venue for trials should be enlarged by the consolidation of several counties into districts, both the districts and the Assize towns in them being determined with a view solely to convenience’136 (the solicitor general’s comment was that ‘We may take it for granted that for our time, at all events, Assizes will be held throughout the country, and that the number of Assizes will be increased instead of diminished’137). Although the ensuing Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875 did confer the powers in law which the commission had proposed, no discernible practical action followed, and, commented the Lord Chancellor’s Office in a note to the Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions ninety years later, ‘little fundamental change … [took] place’.138 Politicians balked again in 1913 after the Royal Commission on Delay in the King’s Bench Division noted that ‘There has always been so much opposition [to the reform of Assizes] partly due to private interests, but mainly to a strong and universal sentiment of country or municipal patriotism, that it had never been carried into effect’. Opposition stemmed, it said, from arguments about ‘The ancient right of every accused person to be indicted and tried in the county where the offence was committed [and] The moral and social effect of the presence of the King’s Judge of Assize in keeping alive there the sense of the Sovereign power and dignity and majesty of the law’.139 They balked once more in 1923 when they chose not to act after a committee on the arrangement of the circuits had recommended that legislation should enable Orders in Council to specify the towns at which Assizes should be held.140 In 1932, although a Business of Courts Committee under the Chairmanship of Lord Hanworth, the Master of the Rolls, was instructed in its letter of 18 The Courts Act 1971: I appointment to have ‘due regard … to the maintenance of the present Circuit System on its main lines’,141 it did nevertheless recommend the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Welsh circuits and the abolition of the Assizes at Appleby, Huntingdon and Oakham (yet all those courts survived until the Courts Act 1971). Another Royal Commission, on the Despatch of Business at Common Law (Cmd. 5065), appointed in 1934 under Lord Peel, examined the Assize system, observed that Assizes were often sited in small towns with little business but were absent in 38 of the 50 largest boroughs, county boroughs and urban districts; noted the strength of opposition to change registered in previous enquiries; declared itself in favour of retaining the county basis of the circuits; and concluded by putting forward ways of reforming the schedul- ing of the commission days at Assizes towns to reflect the volume of business that could be expected to take place in them. New Assize courts should, it said, be established in Hull and Sheffield; Newport should be substituted as an Assize town for Monmouth, and Plymouth for Bodmin and Exeter. An immediate offshoot of that Royal Commission was the establishment of yet another committee, the Circuit Towns Committee,142 under the chairmanship of Lord Finlay, which was invited to consider its proposals in greater detail. It suggested that Beaumaris, Mold, Presteigne, Oakham and Newtown should cease to be Assizes towns; the Welsh circuits should become one; and Sheffield should have its own Assizes. Some changes did undoubtedly occur as a result: the Welsh circuits were amalgamated; the business of Newtown was transferred to a new court at Monmouth in 1939; but Beaumaris, Mold, Presteigne and Oakham continued to function. And politicians balked yet again when the Evershed Committee on Supreme Court Practice and Procedure, convened in 1949, conceiving its task to be the provision of a fair, economical and efficient process of law, issued an interim report in 1949 (Cmd. 7764) argu- ing for a regrouping of a number of Assize towns143 around Sheffield, Hull, Southampton and Plymouth. Sheffield was finally granted its Assizes in 1955 ‘after many years of asking’,144 but little else came of the report. It was as if proposals to abolish particular Assize courts simply could not be countenanced: they affronted too many powerful people, offended too many loyal sentiments and excited too much resistance. The judgement of The Times after the publication of the report of the Circuit Towns Committee was that ‘in all alive to the traditions of our county towns [it] should stir historic memories and sentimental regrets. … It is natural that all the splendour and business brought to town and cities should be jealously guarded and eagerly coveted’.145 It was thus quite unremarkable that politicians continued to be timid at the time of the Streatfeild Committee. Even before that Committee reported, the ever-cautious Home Secretary, R.A. Butler, shied away from change: ‘The Assize system was inaugurated by Henry II, really quite a long time ago,’ he told the House of Commons in the autumn of 1958. ‘It is very much hallowed by tradition and much supported by the members of the Bar and, as far as I know, by the leading members of the judiciary. I have myself ventured to look at it, for a cat may look at Henry but I do not at present, subject to further The Courts Act 1971: I 19 consideration, see any immediate prospect of altering so fundamental a feature of our justice’.146

Assize ritual Something was clearly afoot. Over and again, the Assize courts were staunchly defended by arguments invoking allegiance to place, circuit and tradition. An editorial in The Solicitors’ Journal of 15 September 1961 might have recommended transferring the work of smaller Assize towns such as Huntingdon and Hertford to Cambridge, but it was obliged to acknowledge that any loss ‘of centuries-old colour and pageantry enjoyed by these towns would arouse strenuous opposition.’ That ‘centuries-old colour and pageantry’, that ‘sense of the Sovereign power and dignity and majesty of the law’, and what The Times called ‘The dignity of the Judges’ procession, the opportunity for a display of mayoral and shrieval magnificence …’147 were consequential facts in the lives of many lawyers, judges and politicians. To be sure, they were not uniformly visible across the country. Assize processions had lost much of their pomp in many places from a relatively early time, linked, Graham would argue, in part to the coming of the railways and changes in the way in which judges travelled around the country.148 By the mid-1960s, little was to be seen in a number of the big cities like Birmingham (‘where traffic blocks have got to be avoided at all costs’149), but it was different elsewhere, in Exeter, for example, where there were still trumpeters, javelin men and a sheriff’s coach. Consider how that ritual was reproduced thrice annually in the streets, churches and courtrooms of many Assize towns. Assize commissions were ini- tiated afresh every summer, autumn and winter, being composed of an orderly and meticulous sequence of steps requiring the despatch of 45 separate documents,150 the first of which were royal warrants signed by the monarch direct- ing the Lord Chancellor to cause the commission to be issued; followed by the queen’s warrant for the judges; warrants emanating from the Lord Chancellor to each crown court and to the Earl of Derby – the Custos Retulorum151 for Lancashire; warrants from each Assize commission ‘in due season’ to ‘empower the Circuiteers on each Circuit to be of the quorum of Assize Courts’;152 warrants issued to sheriffs153 to organise the progress of the Assizes in each of the circuit towns; and, finally, a letter from the Crown Office to each Clerk of Assize enclosing copies of all the above documents. Derek Oulton, the Secretary of the Beeching Commission, told me in interview ‘I wish you could have rolled back 40 years and gone to the opening of an Assizes. And these crackling parchments, done in our office, opened out and then sonorously read out by the Clerk of Assize!’ One such crackling parchment, ancient in its wording, steeped in the orotund, idiosyncratic in its punctuation, anachronistic in its inventory of offences – sonorous indeed – was the warrant issued to the sheriff of Caernarvon by Sir William Mars-Jones, a Judge of the High Court of Justice, 20 The Courts Act 1971: I Queen’s Bench Division, instructing him to make ready the preparations for the last Caernarvon Assizes in 1971. It opened:

THE HONOURABLE SIR WILLIAM MARS-JONES, KNIGHT M.B.E. ONE OF THE JUSTICES of our Lady the Queen assigned by Letters Patent of our said Lady the Queen under the Great Seal of the Realm to me and others and to any two of us made to inquire more fully the Truth by the oath of good and lawful Men of the County of Caernarvon and by other Ways Means and Methods by which we shall or may better know (as well with Liberties as without) by whom the Truth of the Matter may be better known and inquired into of all Treasons Misprisions of Treasons Insurrections Rebellions Counterfeitings Clippings Washings False Coinings and other Falsities of the Money of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and other Kingdoms or Dominions whatsoever and of all Murders Felonies Manslaughters Burglaries Rapes of Women Unlawful Meetings and Conventicles Unlawful Uttering of Words Assemblies Misprisions154 Confederacies False Allegations Trespasses Riots Routs Retentions Escapes Contempts Falsities Negligences Concealments Maintenances Oppressions Champerties155 Deceits and all other Evil Doings Offences and Injuries whatsoever and also the Accessories of them with the above County aforesaid (as well as within Liberties as without) by whomsoever and in what Manner soever done committed or perpetrated and by whom or to whom when how and after what Manner. And of all other Articles and Circumstances concerning the Premises and according to the Laws and Customs of England and Wales for this time to hear and determine.

TO THE SHERIFF of the said County of Caernarvon Greeting. On the Behalf of our said Lady the Queen I command you that you omit not for any Liberty within your Bailiwick but that you cause to come before me and others my Fellows Justices aforesaid or any two or more of us at Caernarvon on MONDAY the 18th day of OCTOBER, 1971 a compe- tent number of good and lawful Men of the body of your said County qualified according to Law to do and receive all those Things which on behalf of our said Lady the Queen shall be then and there enjoined them. And that you yourself and your Under-Sheriff be then and there in your own persons together with your Bailiffs and other your Ministers to do those things which to you and their Offices appertain in this Behalf to be done. And that you have then and there the Names of the Jurors and this Precept. …156

There would then follow a set of advance preparations, orchestrated principally by the Under Sheriff, and involving the receipt of precepts (com- mandments or instructions) from the Clerks of Assize; informing different The Courts Act 1971: I 21 bodies of the impending Assize; advertising the Assize in the press; arranging lodgings for the judges and courtrooms for the trials; and summoning jurors and assembling jury panels.157 On commission day itself he would attend to the ceremonial business of receiving the Judges on Assize, and waiting upon them as they processed to church, courthouse and lodging. We are able to ascertain precisely what was entailed from a remarkably thorough list of directions given by the High Sheriff158 for its conduct in another ancient Assize town,159 Bedford:160

NOTES ON EACH ASSIZE

1. About six weeks before the Assize, agree with the Sheriff the list of guests to be invited to the luncheon. 2. Arrange for list to be typed, giving names and addresses. (Four copies of list, one to keep, one for the High Sheriff, one to send him when it is marked up with acceptances and one spare). 3. Write out invitation cards and type envelopes. Most Sheriff’s [sic] like them posted about a month before the luncheon. Ask the High Sheriff if this is his wish. Also ask him if he would like them to be stuck down and stamped with a 2½p. Stamp or the flaps merely pushed in. 4. As replies come in cross off refusals and tick off acceptances. 5. When all acceptances are in type out a card for each guest giving the full title with full decorations. These cards are usually placed on the table on the day of the luncheon. I usually use old invitation cards cut into four. 6. Prepare the table plan and discuss it with the High Sheriff. It must be ready to be typed the day before the luncheon. 7. Ask the High Sheriff whether he will be bringing his wife and guests to the Church service and if so how many seats he would like reserved in the Gallery.

ASSIZE DAY

1. Meet the trumpeters161 at 9.30 a.m. at the Shire Hall162 and help them thread the banners on to the trumpets. This takes about twenty minutes and the trumpeters have to be ready at the door at five to ten. 2. If they are new trumpeters tell them that the High Sheriff will provide them with lunch at the Bridge Hotel and that sometime during the day they must see you in order to be paid for their services. 3. Cash a cheque for £15 which you will need as petty cash during the Assize. Any unspent balance can be paid back into the bank at the end of the Assize, and all expenditure must be entered in the special cash book kept for the High Sheriff’s personal account. 4. Place reserved cards on the seats in the Gallery for the High Sheriff’s wife and friends. 22 The Courts Act 1971: I 5. When the High Sheriff’s wife and friends come out of the Church meet them outside the Shire Hall and take them up to the Gallery as quickly as possible so they will be there in time for the opening. 6. At twelve o’clock take table plans and indexes and name cards with drawing pins to the Bridge Hotel. Place the cards round the tables in the order shown on the table plan. Place one table plan in front of the High Sheriff’s chair and one in front of the Under Sheriff’s chair and pin one on the blackboard and one on the wall. 7. Pay the trumpeters during the day asking each one to sign a receipt. If they are cadets the High Sheriff usually allows them for their loss of wages plus about 7s. 6d. tip. 8. Pay Fuller [the Judge’s driver] his tip of 15s. asking him to sign a receipt. (He prefers to be paid while sitting in the car outside the Shire Hall rather than the money should be taken round to his house.) 9. Ask the Footman to see you before he leaves at the end of the Assize so that you can pay him. He is paid 30s. a day. He too must sign a receipt. 10. If there is a [police] Cadet Guard of Honour, the officer in charge will see you during the morning for the necessary payment for the guard. He must sign a receipt. 11. The Hallkeeper is paid £2 5s 0d. an Assize for preparing the Courts. He does not wish anyone in the Shire Hall to know that he receives this payment so I have asked him to call at your office to collect it. He must sign a receipt.

MAY ASSIZE ONLY

12. Prepare a list of Sheriffs including the name to be left by the present Sheriff and give it to Mr. Stevens who will hand it to the Judge or the Judge’s clerk. 13. …

GENERALLY

The High Sheriff must get out of the car first and the Judge last. The High Sheriff must always precede the Judge wherever he goes and into the room, even for instance when he is taking the Judge back to lunch. He gets out of the car first, he walks ahead of the Judge into the house right into the room. The Judge will there shake hands with him if he is saying goodbye, or, if he is to come back, the High Sheriff is to bow and leave the room. It is most important that the High Sheriff should get out of the car at Elstow,163 and walk right into the house, and into the room, for he is there to protect the The Courts Act 1971: I 23 Judge, and he is not discharging his duties in this respect unless he has walked right into the room. The idea being, in the olden days, that there might have been someone in the room with a spear in his hand. … After the opening day H.M. [Her Majesty’s] Judge of Assize usually sits at 10.30 a.m. The wife of the Under Sheriff usually inspects the Judge’s lodgings with a view to seeing that the rooms are in good order and that H.M. Judge is provided with flowers and suitable books from the Library. Experience has shewn that most modern “thrillers” are appreciated. If H.M. Judge of Assizes arrives in the morning “The Times” is left, whilst if he arrives in the evening the evening paper is left. It has been invariably found that a little attention to their comfort is very much appreciated by H.M. Judge of Assizes and adds much to the warmth of the reception which the High Sheriff gets on arriving at the Lodging the next morning.

FOOTMAN

Report to Under Sheriff’s office at 9.30 a.m. in order to be ready to leave with the High Sheriff at 10 a.m. Accompany the procession out of the Shire Hall and open car doors – hat in hand. Travel in Mr. Fuller’s car next to the driver, to Elstow and back. – – – – – – – – – On arrival at the church, open Judge’s door and follow the procession into the church. – – – – – – – – – Come out of the church at the end of the procession, and follow it up the middle of the road, carrying hat. Follow the Judge into the Shire Hall, round to the Judge’s room, and then be ready to do what is required. The Mayor is probably coming to meet the Judge, and it may be necessary for you to announce him. – – – – – – – – – The Judge then goes into the Court and you follow and stand at the back, behind the High Sheriff. – – – – – – – – – 24 The Courts Act 1971: I Tea Interval – be ready to hand round tea when Judge adjourns. – – – – – – – – – On rising of Court in the afternoon, be ready to escort the Judge back to Elstow Lodge.

FOOTMAN FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS

1. The Footman always walks at the end of the procession, except on the following occasions:- (a) When he escorts the High Sheriff out of the Shire Hall at 10 o’clock in the morning to fetch the Judge. (b) When the procession leaves the Shire Hall at Lunch time. (c) When the procession leaves the Shire Hall in the evening. 2. On arriving at Elstow Lodge, the Footman gets out of the car, rings the bell of the house, and then opens the car door and always stands with his hat off. He never goes into the Judge’s Lodgings. 3. The Footman always travels on the Judge’s car, sitting next to Mr. Fuller the driver. 4. In church, the Footman sits in the pew behind the Under Sheriff. Sometimes the Judge’s Clerk sits with the Under Sheriff and sometimes with the Footman. 5. When the Judge goes into the Judge’s Room, the Footman waits outside the room, and remains ready to follow the Judge into Court and remains in Court behind the High Sheriff. When the Judge comes out of Court, the Footman always comes first, in order to open doors and particularly the door of the Judge’s Room.

DUTIES OF HIGH SHERIFF AT ASSIZES

…

Opening Day of Assizes

Arrive at Shire Hall in time to leave again in car of H.M. Judge of Assizes shortly after 10 o’clock in order to meet the Judge at the Judge’s lodgings. The High Sheriff’s or Under Sheriff’s own car is used by the Under Sheriff. H.M. Judge of Assizes enters his car first, the High Sheriff and Chaplain then enter the car and sit facing the Judge with backs to the driver. No one can sit next the Judge for he represents His Majesty the King. The car then proceeds to St. Paul’s Church. The Courts Act 1971: I 25 The Mayor and Corporation arrive at the Church just before H.M. Judge of Assizes. The High Sheriff and Chaplain leave the car followed by H.M. Judge of Assizes whilst the Trumpeters blow a Fanfare. The Under Sheriff, who of course always arrives before H.M. Judge of Assizes, leads the Procession into the Church in the following order:- Under Sheriff, High Sheriff’s Chaplain, High Sheriff, Judge’s Clerk, H.M. Judge of Assizes, Judge’s Marshal, Footman. The Procession proceeds down the central aisle, and the High Sheriff enters the pew on his right side, where the red carpet ends, followed by H.M. Judge of Assizes. The Service is taken by the High Sheriff’s Chaplain. He reads the ancient Bidding Prayer during the short service. At the end of the Service, the Mayor and Corporation leave the Church first, followed by Under Sheriff, High Sheriff’s Chaplain, High Sheriff, Judge’s Clerk, H.M. Judge of Assizes, Judge’s Marshal and Footman. [The Lord Lieutenant and the Bishop of Bedford were not named in the instructions but they also attended the service]. H.M. Judge of Assizes usually stops to shake hands with the Mayor on leaving the Church. The Procession then leaves the Church Yard as the Trumpeters again blow a Fanfare, and walks across to the Shire Hall in the order indicated. If there is a Guard of Honour the Judge should be asked before he leaves the Lodgings if he will stop and inspect it on his way from the Church to the Shire Hall. On arrival at the Shire Hall another Fanfare is sounded, and the Judge proceeds to the Judge’s Room, where the Under Sheriff, High Sheriff’s Chaplain and High Sheriff walk into the room in front of H.M. Judge of Assizes. It is most important to note that the High Sheriff and his Under Sheriff always precede H.M. Judge of Assizes into any room as his Protectors. At 11 o’clock the Procession again proceeds from the Judge’s Room to the Crown Court, where the Clerk of Assize opens the Assize by reading the Commission of Assize. When the Commission has been read, the Judge’s Clerk calls upon the High Sheriff to hand to H.M. Judge of Assizes the several Writs and Precepts, which are thereupon handed to the High Sheriff by the Under Sheriff, and the High Sheriff, making a bow to H.M. Judge of Assizes who then hands the documents to the Clerk of Assize and again leaves the Court to change his full bottomed Wig. The entry again into Court is made as heretofore. 26 The Courts Act 1971: I On the adjournment of the Court for lunch, H.M. Judge of Assizes usually excuses (if asked, and he must be asked) the High Sheriff from accompany- ing him to his lodgings. As the High Sheriff is entertaining guests at luncheon he cannot of course return to meet H.M. Judge of Assizes at the Shire Hall steps and conduct him to the Judge’s Room and thence into Court. This duty according to custom is discharged by the Under Sheriff alone who takes leave of the High Sheriff during the luncheon. [The menu opened with Florida cocktail; proceeded to Roast Chicken and Bacon, peas and roast potatoes; thence to fruit salad and cream and ended with cheese and biscuits]. At the conclusion of the day’s business a Procession is formed to take H.M. Judge of Assizes to his car at the Shire Hall steps, where he usually releases the High Sheriff for the day. The High Sheriff usually has a cup of tea while waiting for his own car (which conveys H.M. Judges staff) to return from the Judge’s lodgings. High Court Judges are usually prepared to release the High Sheriff after the Criminal business has been disposed of, but not of course the Under Sheriff who must be in attendance during the civil as well as the Criminal business.

One who was there at Bedford, a barrister, Martin Bowley, recalled in interview how ‘the judge always used to arrive with the trumpeter. You had the Commission of Assize read in open court and the judge sitting there in his full wig. … [There were] wonderful phrases – oyez and terminer and general gaol delivery – read by the very pompous clerk of Assize. [When the judge was named] everybody – half-way through I seem to remember – was allowed to sit down. And alongside him you had the under-sheriff and the high sheriff and the high sheriff’s chaplain, all in set order and all wearing, the ladies wearing, very elaborate hats’. All that public display was made possible by a prodigious expenditure of time, effort and money off-stage, itself evidence of the importance attached to what was in train. There were payments to be made by the Under Sheriff of Bedford, totalling £3,410 in 1971 (equivalent to just over £48,500 in 2017164), for the attendance and retaining fees of courtroom ushers and clean- ers, the driver and footman, the Chaplain and Under Sheriff; for the costs of summoning and recompensing jurors; for lodgings, wine and stationery; for the services of Mr Pote, the Toastmaster, at the Assizes luncheon; and for the hire of the judge’s car, a Rolls-Royce, and of a second, more modest car to accompany it, leased from Clarabut and Plumbe, the local undertakers, at £7 5s. and £1 a day respectively. Two trumpeters had to be secured from the Southern Area Band of the Royal Air Force, Henlow. Flowers had to be arranged for the church service. The Chief Education Officer had to be approached about the release of schoolchildren to attend the Church service. The Courts Act 1971: I 27 Police cadets had to be mustered on parade for the judge’s inspection. Police escorts had to be organised. Cooks and butlers may sometimes have travelled with the commissioners but their provision was becoming ever more uncertain and the undersheriff had every so often to procure their services himself (the Clerk of the Lists reported that they ‘are in very short supply. It is extremely difficult to man all the circuits at the present time …’165) On one occasion, in 1970, a copious correspondence passed between the undersheriff, an additional Commissioner of Assize, the Clerk to the Lord Chief Justice and the Principal Establishment Officer of the Lord Chancellor’s Office about how to find staff for a commissioner assigned at short notice to try a fraud case transferred from Buckinghamshire to Bedford. The Principal Establishment Officer was obliged to tell the undersheriff that ‘I expect you know how difficult a task this is nowadays: the demand has increased and my sources of supply [of servants] have diminished’.166 The matter could not be rushed, he said, and it would have been helpful to have been given greater warning (‘It is just possible that, with rather more notice, we could find cooks and even butlers locally who would be prepared to look after the Judges of Assize. But plenty of time would be required and I am sure it would not be easy’167). Officials were eventually obliged to abandon their search, and the Commissioner of Assize was sent, not to lodgings, but to a hotel. It has been worth reporting these matters in such detail because they are so illuminating, not only about the scale, import, meanings and complex- ity of Assize ritual but also about the attentiveness with which it was done. Proceedings were clearly regarded as highly important. They were intended to be imbued with a sense of dignity, and a ‘comforting sureness and … ancient stability’.168 They imparted substantive lessons about the august character of the judge and his personification of the majesty of the law and of the Crown in whose name the business of law was transacted; and more abstract lessons about continuity, social harmony, social order, authority, hierarchy and deference underwritten by God, long tradition and the visible presence of the secular powers.169 They gave shape to the legal year. They advertised the omnipres- ence of the law, constructing a potent vision of the efficacy and inexorability of justice (members of the South Eastern Circuit put it that ‘The existence of an Assize or Quarter Sessions Court which can reasonably be regarded as an institution belonging to the locality in which it sits, serves to nourish and stimulate interest and pride in what that Court represents, namely a beneficial and pervading justice’170). They were designed to impress spectators, deter malefactors and confer social cohesion, serving, it seemed to be hoped, to induce the ‘positive social effects of punishment’ through ‘the symbolic display of collective sentiments, the reinforcement of solidarity, the expressive release of collective emotion’.171 Traffic and pedestrians – the civilian population and the everyday life of a town – had to give way to judicial power. Proceedings may have been transformative, creating, in Meredith Rossner’s words, strong collective symbols, a sense of solidarity, a ‘model of an ideal system’172 and a bold situated identity, the dramatised persona, of the judge who was at their 28 The Courts Act 1971: I centre.173 Rossner added in a comment on an earlier draft of this chapter that ‘The very tedious detail here is what makes this list so remarkable. This is a great (Goffmanian174) insight into rituals – that they are very highly staged, choreographed, and symbolic. The stakes are high here, they are symbolising the power of the crown, rule of law, etc. …’ Assize rituals had their admirers. ‘The visit of the “Red Judge”’,175 so called because of the robes worn by those who sat in the High Court, submitted members of the Oxford Circuit to the Royal Commission in July 1967, ‘has a real value. To paraphrase George V’s justification of the monarchy, it makes the administration of justice interesting to the people; it fosters the high regard of the people for the Judges and the Law …’176 James Westoll, the Deputy Chairman of Cumberland Quarter Sessions between 1960 and 1971, and the High Sheriff of Cumberland in 1964, said that ‘The picture of the itinerant red judge is still not without its intended effect in the provinces, bringing home to all and sundry the supremacy of the law’.177 And one of those selfsame red judges, Sir Ralph Cusack,178 a man at the very epicentre of the ritual, was minded to say that:

The sense of authority asserted by Assizes would to some extent be lost if ceremonial were curtailed or county towns no longer visited. It is remarkable how rare in this country is any real disorder in court or any contempt in the face of the court. I believe that in a way that is not easy to define, but which is not the less valid, the respect for law and for the authority of the courts is connected with the historic tradition that every county is reg- ularly visited by an Assize Judge and that his presence is made manifest.179

The Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions was to be repeatedly reminded about the symbolic impact of visitations by judges on Assize.180 Lord Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor who implemented its recommendations, himself wished to retain it, professing his anxiety on the eve of the Courts Act to ‘keep all the traditional forms possible. Part of respect for the law consists in the power of its traditional authority, even its pomp and pageantry …’181 And, he repeated elsewhere, ‘I am sure it is desirable to continue and adapt the former ceremonial occasions, at least in those counties where High Court Judges will be sitting …’182 Respect for the law was not the only reason why Assize ritual was considered important. It was also held to instil a sense of local pride183 in the place where it was held. One is reminded of Robert Park’s dictum that ‘The city … is a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of the organised attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition’.184 Alongside the church, the barracks, the palace, the university and the town hall, the Assizes could, it appears, reproduce and animate just such a body of urban customs and tradition. They importantly defined and represented what their organisers must have believed was the public character of their town, delineating its corporate identity, its principal institutions and The Courts Act 1971: I 29 personages, acting, in effect, as a tableau vivant of official Bedford and the other Assize towns (after all, reflected Anselm Strauss, ‘The city as a whole is inacces- sible to the imagination unless it can be reduced and simplified’185). Whether that effect was achieved, whether the popular imagination of justice, law and town was indeed shaped by the Assize ceremonies, cannot now be certain. We have no evidence on the matter. Some who contemplated the demise of the ancient Bedford Assizes were evidently troubled about the possible effect of its impending loss on the standing of the town186 (Figure 1.6 makes it clear how very marginal it was in its size of population). A headline in the Bedfordshire Times of 3 October 1969 reported the ‘Beeching bid to reduce town’s status’ and opened with the statement that ‘Bedford will cease to be an important criminal court centre if the recommendations of a Royal Commission, published this week, are accepted by the Government’ (in the event the decision was reversed by the Lord Chancellor a year later, and a new, third-tier Crown Court was installed in the town187). Yet there were also those who were sceptical about the symbolic and practical utility of all that ceremonial work, and they tended to deploy the evidence-based, utilitarian arguments of inefficiency, waste and anachronism. Clare Graham, the historian of trials and courthouses, reflected that ‘Literate, industrialised societies seem to pride themselves on having left symbolism and ritual behind and developed … more rational methods of communication. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our attitudes to the rituals of state power’.188 Consider how that prime representative of the literate, industrialised society, Hugh Barker, the businessman-member of the Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, a legal outsider, was moved to ask Derek Oulton, its secretary:

Is there any real substance in “Bringing Justice to the people”? To what extent if at all should this be considered outside the logistic context? Whereas everyone would agree that the proximity of a policeman deters crime, does the sheer proximity of a Court have any significant effect? … Is there any significant good derived from the ceremonial aspects of Assizes? Do any material numbers of the public see these ceremonials or are they simply in the nature of a social perquisite for local functionaries?189

What, he went on to ask, was the impact of an Assize procession on a society steeped in television, radio and the newspapers? Might it not simply evoke incredulous responses from the few that witnessed it? There is, he said, ‘no spirit of ridicule in the suggestion that a radio equipped Police Car may inspire more practical respect today than the High Sheriff’s traditional dress’.190 Derek Oulton was to reply, ‘Mrs. Demmery [his Home Office colleague] and I went to see the Chairman [Lord Beeching] yester- day and agreed with him that we would act in just the way that you suggest. The Chairman is inclined to think that the right way of tackling this question is to carry out some form of poll to see how many people know 30 The Courts Act 1971: I where the local Assize Court is or have seen an Assize Judge in the past 12 months’.191 (In the event, there is no record that this poll did actually take place. The legal historian, Linda Mulcahy, commented ‘Do we know it was only a few? This is a genuine question. There seemed to be waning of interest in the Assizes in the c20th but there are still a number of photographs of people lining the streets. … What a shame they did not carry out that poll’192). The Undersheriff of Oxfordshire, one of those responsible for manning the ceremonial, was equally sceptical, observing that the public appearance of the judge in an Assize town ‘is no longer of any significance and indeed only causes resentment because of the dislocation of traffic’193 and, he continued, ‘I am always surprised that suitable men are still prepared to accept nomina- tion to the office of High Sheriff, because it is in real life these days rather a thankless and useless task … ’ It could indeed be tedious to many of the extras who had to be mustered to deal with the establishment of temporary quarters, the disruption of traffic and a host of other inconveniences. The Staff Side of the Supreme Court Whitley Council complained on behalf of the Clerks of Assize that ‘the present Assize system in England and Wales is now outmoded, cumbersome and unnecessarily expensive’.194 Groups representing the police were, it seems, particularly disgruntled. After all, they had to cope with the tedious work of escorting and protecting the judges, closing streets, shepherd- ing onlookers and diverting motor vehicles. An ad hoc committee of ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers, described the ceremonies as wasteful of police time and constricting of traffic in town centres;195 and their colleagues in the Police Federation and the Superintendents’ Association agreed, complaining that they were obsolete, over-blown and obstructive (‘The opening of Assizes and the coming and going of Judges throughout the sitting does not justify a modern City coming to a standstill… The police expend a great deal of time and manpower in escorting H.M. Judges and in controlling traffic …’196) Tank Waddington, once a City of Birmingham Police Constable, latterly Professor of Social Policy at the University of Wolverhampton, recalled how judges attending Birmingham Assizes in the centre of the city had to be driven in their motorcars to lodgings in Edgbaston without interruption or stopping: a feat that was accomplished only with some difficulty by a police force lacking radios or mobile telephones, and one that was accompanied by the continual expression of other motorists’ irritation and the sounding of horns along the route. In short, performances could degenerate into what Meredith Rossner, again following Erving Goffman, called ‘stagnant rituals’, where behaviour no longer evokes any sense of the sacred and the transcendental197 – ‘at some point’, she said, ‘people tolerate them, but have a mild distaste or see them as an inconvenience’.198 A Home Office circular, 208/66, made it apparent that a number of judges would themselves have had less police protection and a more spartan ceremony. They did not always take to the flummery of the circuit. Derek Oulton summed up for Lord Beeching the quantity of evidence that had been submitted on that head to the Royal Commission: The Courts Act 1971: I 31 Although its effect on the administration of justice must be trifling, a surprising number of witnesses have criticised the existing ceremonies … Since Assize ceremonies are criticised by the Police, who might possibly be expected to favour their continuance as a discouragement of malefactors, you might feel enabled to recommend its substantial abolition.199

It was, he thought more privately, all a little absurd:

An entertaining part of the job was watching the Assize system in action. In many places the old formalities were still in force. When the High Court judge arrived in his scarlet robes he would often be met by trumpeters (who rarely managed to blast off either completely in tune or in time with one another) and even, when some could be drummed up, by a motley crew of amateur pikemen in uniform of some uncertain period. He was usually taken to court from his lodgings by limo, but when we visited Exeter we saw the original [Sheriff’s] coach [built between 1838 and 1848200] still being pressed into service. It was drawn by some magnificent dray horses borrowed from the local brewery, and it was a heart-stopping sight when the coach came lumbering down a steep hill, and with considerable difficulty achieved a tight bend round to the law

Figure 1.9 The Coach of the Sheriff of Devonshire* * http://www.exeter.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=2888&listid=10183 I am very grateful to Exeter City Council for giving me permission to reproduce this image. 32 The Courts Act 1971: I courts with the coachman, sweating in unaccustomed livery, desperately ramming the elderly brakes down onto the wheels.201 Then when the judge entered the court the Clerk of Assize unfolded the crackling Commissions of Oyer and Terminer, General Gaol Delivery and Assize, which gave the judge authority to try all the outstanding criminal and civil cases, and read them out at length while he tried not to stumble over the antique grammar.202

It is noteworthy that the judge who presided over the very last Assize at Bedford, the town which had prepared so lavishly to receive him, alluded to the tribunal’s weight of history but also proved himself to be remarkably sanguine about the possibility of its coming to an end, saying after the very last hearing:

… we sit here, you and I, the inheritors of 800 years of trial by judge and jury in this place within a year of the 700th anniversary of the accession of the King called the English Justinian [Edward I, crowned in 1272]. … In the involvement in the legal process of the ordinary people of the counties the application of their common sense has made it possible for the common law of England to keep up with the times. After this legal term a different system is going to operate. It is an alteration of administration only and not an alteration of substance. This historic town and county may no longer be the venue for an Assize but the principle of bringing the law and administration of justice to the people will still continue and in Bedfordshire men and women will still have their parts to play in that administration of justice.203

Conclusion The business of Assizes and quarter sessions had swollen appreciably within a rigid system that had changed little in its administration, geographical distribution and organisational style for years. It was being conducted in the wrong places, at the wrong times and, some thought, in the wrong manner, and the response of different governments over the years had been to mobilise a succession of committees and commissions intended to correct what was amiss. The language of those inquiries tended to draw on a vocabulary of calculation, utility, reason and administrative consistency; but it was parried ever by a rival language that invoked the value of custom, morality, loyalty to place, and symbolic display in the maintenance of the authority of the judges and the legitimacy of the law. Like many another debate about criminal justice that had resounded throughout the last two centuries, there was an impasse between two styles of reasoning that were so incommensurable that it was difficult to conceive of an accommodation between them. What finally tilted the balance was again to be the coming to power of the Labour Governments of 1964 and 1966 and their reforming Lord Chancellor, Lord Gardiner, and then of his Conservative successor, Lord Hailsham, who pursued Lord Gardiner’s reforms as if they were his own. The Courts Act 1971: I 33 Lord Gardiner had disclosed no publicly stated intention of reforming the Courts of Assize and Quarter Sessions when he entered office. He was chiefly set on establishing a Benthamite Law Commission204 and abolishing capital punishment. His private secretary, Michael Blair, recollected that ‘He wanted the Law Commission to be his memorial … He wanted to abolish the rope … ’, and I have already discussed at length in the first volume of this history his involvement in the campaigns and politics of hanging. In March 1964, six months before the general election, and at a time when it was speculated he might become Lord Chancellor, he talked in an extensive interview published in The Economist about the matters which might occupy him in office: abortion, homosexual law reform, the organisation of the legal profession, the codification of the criminal law, the prospect of a Ministry of Justice, the jurisdiction of the House of Lords, reform of the appellate courts, and much else. Assizes and quarter sessions received no mention.205 He and Andrew Martin did not allude to Assizes and quarter sessions in Law Reform Now,206 their edited prospectus for change, sponsored by the Society of Labour Lawyers, published in 1964, and serving as a successor volume to Glanville Williams’ 1951 edited collection, Reform of the Law.207 It is true that Lord Gardiner had taken early soundings in the office about what he should do as Lord Chancellor, and that must have helped to prepare the ground for what was to come. His officials – and Derek Oulton208 in particular – had nominated reform of the courts as one of the first matters he should consider. He himself recalled that ‘shortly after taking office I said to all my legal staff, “If you were Lord Chancellor for five years, what would you do?” – because they were the people who were going to do the work, and I thought they ought to have a say. The first thing was Assizes and quarter sessions. We have all known this. We are gravely threatened with a real breakdown’.209 But that was still not perhaps a sufficient catalyst. Neither was a review of the work that might be done by the new Law Commission.210 It was another crowning event that attracted his gaze and precipitated a response, and it is that which I shall discuss in the next chapter.

Acknowledgements I am most grateful to Michael Blair, John Brindley, Linda Mulcahy, Sir Derek Oulton, Meredith Rossner, Tank Waddington and Julia Whitburn for their comments on earlier drafts of the chapters on the Courts Act.

Notes 1 Judge A. Darling (1909); On the Oxford Circuit, London: Smith, Elder and Co., 7 et seq. 2 He used the expression in the March 1968 Holdsworth Lecture at the University of Birmingham on ‘The Trials of a Lord Chancellor’ (Gard. 19, Gardiner papers in the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge), and see ‘Law court reform on the way’, The Times, 26 September 1968. 34 The Courts Act 1971: I 3 ‘Lord Chancellor’s Speech to the Inner London Branch of the Magistrates’ Association’, 21 February 1969, Gard. 19. Gardiner papers in the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. 4 Draft speech to judges at the Lord Mayor’s Dinner, 15 July 1972, HLSM 3/4/16, Hailsham papers in the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. 5 The Lord Chancellor’s Speech at the Central Criminal Court Journalists’ Association Dinner at Cutler’s Hall, 5 November 1971. HLSM 3/4/17, Hailsham papers in the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. 6 See R.J.S. Baker (1974); ‘The New Courts Administration: The Case for a Systems Theory Approach’, Public Administration, Vol. 52, No. 3, 285–302; and A. Bottoms (1995); ‘The Philosophy and Politics of Punishment and Sentencing’ in C. Clarkson and R. Morgan (eds.), The Politics of Sentencing Reform, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 24. 7 See E. Friesen (1975); English Criminal Justice, Denver, Co.: Institute for Court Management, 81–83. 8 See N. Underhill (1978); The Lord Chancellor, Lavenham: Terence Dalton, 198. 9 See B. Abel-Smith and R. Stevens (1968); In Search of Justice, London: Allen Lane, 37; and J. Farrar; Law Reform and the Law Commission (1974); London: Sweet and Maxwell, 5–7. 10 Lord Chorley (March 1970); ‘The Report of the Royal Commission of Assizes and Quarter Sessions’, Modern Law Review, Vol. 33, No. 2, 188. 11 It must be conceded that Sir Derek Oulton, the Secretary of the Royal Commission, was less persuaded about the affinities between Lord Brougham and Lord Gardiner. He remarked in interview in 2012 that Lord Gardiner ‘may well have [thought of the connection] but he … he was much too modest. … . He was a reserved man, a kind, gentleman, very reserved. I think to have seen himself as a latterday Brougham, I mean he would have rather died’. 12 Although Bentham disowned some of his proposals. See J. Bentham (1832); Lord Brougham Displayed including 1. Boa Constrictor, alias Helluo Curiarum …, London: Robert Heward. 13 Reforming Lords Chancellor were taken to be most unusual at the time. See G. Garratt (1935); Lord Brougham, London: Macmillan and Co., 232. 14 HL Deb 19 November 1970 Vol. 312 cc1271–322. 15 See C. New (1961); The Life of Henry Brougham to 1830, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 391. 16 See Lady Holland (1869); A Memoir of the Rev. Sydney Smith by his daughter, Lady Holland, London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 36. 17 Henry Brougham, 1778–1868, trained at the Bar, pursued a career in journalism and then became a Member of Parliament between 1810 and 1812 and again between 1816 and 1830, when he was appointed Lord Chancellor. 18 M. Lobban, ‘Lord Brougham’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/3581?docPos=2) 19 See M. Lobban (November 2000); ‘Henry Brougham and Law Reform’, The English Historical Review, Vol. 115, No. 464, 1189. 20 HC Deb 7 February 1828 Vol. 18 cc127–258. 21 Thus Lord Gardiner complained to the Cabinet of ‘the wastefulness and inefficiency of the system’ of Assizes and Quarter Sessions, and Lord Beeching’s prime concern was delays in awaiting trial. (Lord Gardiner’s criticism may be found in ‘The Need for an Inquiry into Assizes And Quarter Sessions: Memorandum by the Lord Chancellor’, 29 July, 1966, C (66) 123. 22 HC Deb 7 February 1828 Vol. 18 cc127–258. 23 See G. Harris (1868); Lord Brougham, London: Butterworths, 41. Ironically, it was opposed by Lord Lyndhurst on the grounds that it would cede too much control to localities. The Courts Act 1971: I 35 24 See W. Holdsworth ( January 1941); ‘John Singleton Copley, Lord Lyndhurst’, The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 50, No. 3, 428–430. Lord Brougham pronounced that it was ‘a very important and valuable step; but lamented… that it did not go much further, retaining his decided preference for the principle of his Local Courts Bill of 1833’. HL Deb 26 July 1842 Vol. 65 cc630–1. 25 The Act founded courts in districts defined by the Poor Law Unions, groups of districts themselves falling into circuits that were controlled by a single judge. 26 ‘Is it not’, he asked, ‘quite self-evident that we must, and without further delay … take care that the very highest duties of the Government towards the people should be discharged by providing a sufficient number of Criminal Courts in every part of the kingdom? … By arrangement of the Circuits and the Assizes … there cannot be any difficulty in providing everywhere a Criminal Court once a fortnight’. HL Deb 23 March 1855 Vol. 137 cc952–77. 27 See HL Deb 28 August 1835 Vol. 30 cc1070–3, and http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/3581?docPos=2 28 See R. Stewart (1986); Henry Brougham 1778–1868, London: The Bodley Head, 258. 29 N. Underhill, The Lord Chancellor, op. cit., 174. 30 N. Heuston (1987); Lives of the Lord Chancellors 1940–1970, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 226. 31 Linda Mulcahy pointed out to me in an email of 17 February 2015 that ‘This can be explained away by the fact that they were until recently judges and politicians. Reforming the administration of justice is not really a vote winner – so whilst they may have recognised the need for reform they were probably tempted by other sexier subjects. For lawyers many LCs are remembered for their reforming zeal as far as their work as a judge is concerned and their development of common law principles’. 32 ‘It is not easy for a lawyer to make a mark as a reformer when he becomes Chancellor’, said Heuston (Lives of the Lord Chancellors 1940–1970, op cit., 226). 33 Michael Blair was called to the Bar in 1965, worked in what became the Lord Chancellor’s Department between 1966 and 1987, becoming an Undersecretary in 1982, and Circuit Administrator of the Midland and Oxford Circuit, in the same year. See http://www.ukwhoswho.com/view/article/oupww/whoswho/U7768/ BLAIR_Michael_Campbell?index=1&results=QuicksearchResults&query=0 34 HL Deb 30 March 1971 Vol. 316 cc1273–313. 35 HL Deb 1 April 1965 Vol. 264 cc1140–223. 36 HL Deb 24 July 1974 Vol. 353 cc1806–52. 37 HL Deb 1 April 1965 Vol. 264 cc1140–223. See M. Box (1983); Rebel Advocate: A Biography of Gerald Gardiner, London: Victor Gollancz, 177. 38 Elwyn Jones, 1909–1989, was elected as the Labour Member for Plaistow in 1945, becoming parliamentary private secretary to the attorney general, Sir Hartley Shawcross, between 1946 and 1951. He was appointed a recorder in 1949, took silk in 1953, and was himself appointed attorney general between 1964 and 1970 (based on the biography written by Emlyn Hooson in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/40088?docPos=1). 39 HC Deb 7 May 1970 Vol. 801 cc602–96. 40 Lord Hailsham; Lord Chancellor’s Speech at the County Court Judges’ Dinner, 30 October 1971, HLSM 3/4/17, Hailsham papers in the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. 41 D. Swinfen, Henry Brougham and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, unpublished, no date. D. Swinfen was a history lecturer at St Andrew’s University and the author of works on the Privy Council as an imperial appeal tribunal. 42 Sir Derek Oulton, 1927–2016, described in his obituary in The Times of 4 August 2016 as ‘one of the great reforming civil servants of his generation’, took law at Cambridge, 36 The Courts Act 1971: I was called to the Bar in 1952, joined the Lord Chancellor’s Office in 1960, and was private secretary to three successive Lords Chancellor. He became permanent secretary in 1982, retiring in 1989. 43 See J. Cockburn (1972); A History of English Assizes, 1558–1714, London: Cambridge University Press and J. Langbein (2003); The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 44 Most prominently, W. Holdsworth (1932); A History of English Law, London: Methuen; L. Radzinowicz (1956); A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750, London: Steven; and J. Stephen (1996); A History of the Criminal Law of Englan d, reprinted by London: Routledge. 45 Exceptions are C. Graham (2003); Ordering Law: the architectural and social history of the English law court to 1914, Aldershot; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. L. Mulcahy (2011); Legal Architecture, London: Routledge. 46 The works on the Crown Court which I did consult were invariably procedural man- uals written for the practitioner without context or history. An example is P. Morrish and I. McLean (1975); The Crown Court, Chichester: Barry Rose. 47 http://212.137.36.113/HMCSCourtFinder/ListCourts.do?pager.offset=48, website consulted in July 2013. 48 Table 3a, Criminal justice statistics quarterly update to September 2012, London: Ministry of Justice, 29 May 2013 (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ criminal-justice-statistics--2). 49 For a recent account of the workings of the Crown Court, see J. Jacobson et al (2015); Inside Crown Court, Bristol: Policy Press. 50 See L. Althusser and É. Balibar (1970); Reading ‘Capital’, London: New Left Books. 51 See R. Merton (1968); Social Theory and Social Structure, New York: Free Press. 52 See, for example, P. Cohen, review of K. Popper; The Poverty of Historicism, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 14, No. 55 (November 1963); 246–261; and M. Archer (December 1982); ‘Morphogenesis versus structuration: on combining structure and action’, The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 33, No. 4, 455–483. 53 To be sure, it was not as if there were no unintended consequences, latent functions or deep causes which could be studied to profit, but they should not be allowed to monopolise analysis. 54 http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/about-the-judiciary/introduction-to-justice-system/ history-of-the-judiciary. 55 See F. Maitland and F. Montague (1915); English Legal History, New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s sons, 36–7. 56 The Clerk of the Peace for Essex put it that Assizes were intended to collect the revenues due to the King and to control the barons by ensuring that ‘the King’s laws were observed in all parts of his domain’. Letter from the Clerk of the Peace for Essex, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, April 1967, LCO7/183. 57 The Council of the Law Society maintained that that began with Magna Carta in 1215 (Memorandum of the Council of the Law Society to the Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, June 1967, LCO7/80). 58 See F. Pollock (1899–1900); ‘The King’s Peace in the Middle Ages’, The Harvard Law Review, Vol. 13, No. 177, 186. 59 The Society of Clerks of the Peace and County Councils gives the founding document as the Statute of 1361 which translated keepers of the peace into justices of the peace with powers to hear cases of felony and trespass and constituting them as presiding over courts of record (Memorandum of Evidence to the Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, April 1967, LCO7/106). 60 For example, Chester Quarter Sessions was founded in 1506; Bath in 1590; Sussex in 1594; and Hereford in 1597 (see Justice of the Peace, July 29th 1972, 489–491). The Courts Act 1971: I 37 61 Justices of the Peace Act 1361, Chapter 1 34 Edw 3. 62 5&6 Will. IV c. 76. 63 See J. Devlin (1967); Criminal Courts and Procedure, London: Butterworths, Chapter 4. 64 Including treason, murder, ‘offences against the Queen’s title’, blasphemy and offences against religion, forgery, bigamy, and abduction of women and girls. 65 The Palatinate Courts of Durham (founded in 1217) and Lancaster survived until their abolition under the 1971 Act. 66 A memorandum to the Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions recorded, for instance, that ‘No uniform legal system existed in Wales at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Palatinates of Glamorgan and Pembroke were governed by the laws and customs of England, the Marches by the laws of the Marcher Lords, the old ‘shire ground’, consisting of Anglesey, Caernarvon, Merioneth, Cardigan and Carmarthen was administered as if they were English counties, though a modicum of Welsh laws and customs had been preserved by the Statute of Wales 1284. Flintshire was connected in a loose way with Cheshire, and in the rest of Wales the old Welsh laws continued to apply. The Statute of Wales 1536 abolished Welsh law, replaced it with English law and created five new counties, the eight older counties being enlarged at the same time. In 1542 ‘An Act for certain ordinances in the King’s Dominion and Principality of Wales’ was passed. These courts administered the English law in 12 Welsh counties and Cheshire from 1542 until 1830’. Memorandum on Behalf of the Wales and Chester Circuit to the Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/7: 13 July 1967. 67 For instance, special Commissioners for the Pacification of the Marches had to be appointed for Cumberland in1603 (see M. Meikle (2004); A British Frontier? Lairds and Gentlemen in the Eastern Border, 1540–1603, East Linton: Tuckwell; and C. Wedgwood (1950); ‘Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1603–1640’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 32, 31–48). 68 A number of somewhat anachronistic civil courts were still scattered around the country, lying unreformed, in effect, outside the mainland of justice that had been established in and around the 1830s. They included the Liverpool Court of Passage, the Norwich Guildhall Court, the Salford Hundred Court and the Bristol Tolzey Court. 69 See D. Clayton (1991); The Administration of the County Palatine of Chester, 1442–1485, Manchester: University of Manchester Press. 70 HC Deb 27 April 1830 Vol. 24 cc104–22. 71 The Lancashire Court of Quarter Sessions was also semi-autonomous in that it was covered by separate legislation (the Lancashire Quarter Sessions Acts of 1928 and 1961), appointments being made by the Chancellor on behalf of the Queen. Memorandum from the Justices of the Peace for the County Palatine of Lancaster in Quarter Sessions Assembled, April 1967. Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/70. 72 For a discussion of their early history, see J. Alexander (1983); ‘The English Palatinates and Edward I’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1–22. 73 Not only was the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, the most famous criminal court in England and Wales, quartered, as it was, in the heart of the capital, in the City of London, but also it took many of the most notorious cases of the day, avidly reported by crime reporters based a few hundred yards away in Fleet Street. It was maintained by the Corporation of London with which it was symbolically identified. Its ceremonial opening each Session was correspondingly magnificent, marking its importance. The Corporation described the proceedings in its memorandum to the Royal Commission, beginning ‘the Lord Mayor proceeds from the Mansion House in full state. He is attended by the Sheriffs, Swordbearer, Common Cryer and City Marshal. …’ LCO7/119 Memorandum of Evidence by the Corporation of the 38 The Courts Act 1971: I City of London, April 1968, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/119. 74 Their Assize towns were York, Durham, Newcastle, Appleby, Carlisle and Lancaster respectively. 75 Memorandum by the Clerk of Assizes for the Northern Circuit, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/31. 76 See The Times, 12 July 1950. 77 See ‘“Serious State” Of Lancashire Crime’, The Times, 8 January 1953. 78 Report of the Departmental Committee on a Central Criminal Court in South Lancashire, (1953); Cmd. 8955, HMSO. 79 C. 46, 4 & 5 Eliz. 2. 80 The term ‘Crown Court’ itself is quite ancient, and was often used to distin- guish the criminal business of Assizes, conducted in the name of the monarch, from the hearing of civil actions conducted in the ‘Nisi Prius Court’. Note by the Lord Chancellor’s Office, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/240. 81 The Central Criminal Court in London was also technically a Crown Court, but it was not commonly referred to by that description. 82 Certain cases were to be tried by visiting High Court or ‘Red’ Judges only: murder, manslaughter, infanticide, rape, incest, causing death by dangerous driving and sexual intercourse with a girl under 13. 83 HC Deb 19 December 1955 Vol. 547 cc1751–804. 84 The Times, 9 October 1956. 85 Written Evidence of the Lord Chancellor’s Office, (1967); London: HMSO, 4. 86 Memorandum from the Recorder of Liverpool, April 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/68A. 87 Memorandum by the Clerk of the Lists, June 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, RC/WE/92. 88 Sir Maurice Lyell, 1901–1975, was a Judge of the Queen’s Bench Division, High Court of Justice, 1962–71. 89 Memorandum from the Council of the Lincolnshire Law Society, March 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/96. 90 A ‘cracked’ trial is one that was listed for a not guilty hearing but which does not proceed because the defendant changes his or her plea in whole or part. 91 Memorandum of the South Eastern Circuit, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/6. 92 Note by the Secretaries on the strength of the Bar, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/268. 93 Ibid. 94 Note by the Lord Chancellor’s Office, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/240. 95 Extract from Pages 41 and 42 of the Annual Statement of the General Council of the Bar, 1964, Bar Council papers in the archives of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. 96 Figures submitted in a memorandum of evidence from the Bar Council, June 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/1. 97 Representatives of the Western Circuit endorsed that view in their memorandum to the Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/8. 98 Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/1. 99 Foreword to G. Williams (2006); Death of a Circuit, London: Wildy, Simmons and Hill Publishing, iii. 100 Email 16 October 2013. Michael Blair continued to be Circuit Administrator until 1987. The Courts Act 1971: I 39 101 Report of the working party on the administration of the courts. Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/234. 102 The Clerk of the Peace was originally responsible for the writing of official documents for a local authority and, on the establishment of Quarter Sessions, became engaged in the work of drawing up recognisances, indictments and other legal documents (based on Assizes and Quarter Sessions in Exeter, Exeter: Exeter City Council, 1971, n.p., pxB/ EXE/347.0236/ASS, Devon Heritage Services). 103 Under Sheriffs could undertake all the duties of a Sheriff other than those demanding the presence of the Sheriff in person. 104 Memorandum of Evidence by the Staff Side of the Supreme Court Administrative Whitley Council, May 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/166. 105 Note by the Home Office, January 1967. Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/246. 106 T. R. Heald, Deputy Chairman of Lindsey Quarter Sessions; Memorandum to the Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/16. 107 Memorandum of Evidence by the Staff Side of the Supreme Court Administrative Whitley Council, May 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/166. 108 The Lincolnshire Law Society complained, for example, about the absence of copying machines on circuit. Memorandum from the Council of the Lincolnshire Law Society, March 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/96. 109 And see the almost identical remarks of Michael Davies, the Leader of the Midland Circuit, in ‘The Impact of the Beeching Report on the Midlands: Edited Transcript of the Proceedings of a Conference held at the University of Birmingham in July, 1970’, Institute of Judicial Administration, Faculty of Law, Birmingham University, December 1970, 32. 110 Speaking notes for an unspecified occasion. 111 Evidence from the Justices’ Clerks’ Society, February 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/136; and Memorandum from the Council of the Lincolnshire Law Society, March 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/96. 112 Memorandum from the Council of the Lincolnshire Law Society, March 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/96. 113 A Royal Commission working party on the administration of the courts, chaired by Sir George Coldstream, opened its report by saying that ‘We have been struck by the great difficulties facing those responsible for running the business of Assizes and Quarter Sessions under the present system. Judged by current standards of business management we noted a remarkable absence of overall planning and coordination, and of the tools necessary to enable those responsible for the different courts to manage their business’. (Sir George, 1907–2004, was Permanent Secretary to the Lord Chancellor between 1954 and 1968 and a member of the Royal Commission). Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/234. 114 Sir Seymour Edward Karminski, 1902–1974, was a Judge of the High Court (Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division), 1951–1969; and Lord Justice of Appeal, 1969–1973. 115 Memorandum from Mr Justice Karminski, March 1968, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/61. 116 Letter of 26 January 1968, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/61. 117 Memorandum by the Under-Sheriffs of Yorkshire and Hallamshire, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, April 1967, LCO7/196. 118 The Clerk of Assizes for the Northern Circuit described Appleby as a ‘small but con- venient Assize town which disposed expeditiously of the small amount of Assize crime 40 The Courts Act 1971: I that one finds in a rural community …’ Memorandum, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/31. As early as 1894, The Law Times protested that ‘it has a population of eight hundred. There is no gaol in the county [Westmorland] to deliver. Yet a judge still goes thither as he does to Manchester and Liverpool’ (97 LT 238). 119 Mr Justice Waller, a Northern Circuit Judge, recalled that ‘I had ½ an hour’s work at Appleby which could equally well have been done at Carlisle. I spent three nights at Appleby for this purpose’. Memorandum from Mr Justice Waller, June 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/65. 120 A point made by Derek Oulton in his Brief to the Chairman for the Meeting of 5 April 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/226. Milton Keynes was designated a new town in January 1967 with a design brief to become a city with a population of 250,000 in due course (see The Times, 14 January 1966). 121 Memorandum by the Under Sheriff and Clerk of the Peace for Oxfordshire, April 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/189. 122 Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, th6 Report, Rural Communities, HC 602, 23 July 2013. 123 A point made in Evidence submitted by the Society of Town Clerks, April 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/107. 124 That was to be the evidence presented by some magistrates, for example in the Memorandum of Evidence submitted by the Magistrates’ Courts Committee for the City of Bradford, 24 July 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/132. 125 Joint Memorandum of Evidence by the Police Federation and the Superintendents’ Association, April 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/165. 126 G.N.G. Rose was a nom de plume devised to differentiate Gerry Rose from Gordon Rose, another criminologist at the time – N.G. stood for ‘not Gordon’. 127 Home Office and Lord Chancellor’s Office; Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on the Business of the Criminal Courts, Cmnd. 1289, 1960–61. The Committee had been charged in 1958 with examining the arrangements for bringing accused cases to trial. It was prompted by the increase in the number of cases coming to trial in the higher courts that had risen from some 10,000 a year in 1938 to 20,500 in 1959. 128 Sir Geoffrey Streatfeild, 1897–1979, was called to the Bar in 1921, joining the North- Eastern Circuit a year later. He was to be a Recorder in various Boroughs before becoming Solicitor-General and Attorney-General of the County Palatine of Durham between 1939 and 1947 and the Commissioner of Assize for the Western Circuit in 1949. Between 1947 and 1966 he was a Judge of the High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division. http://www.ukwhoswho.com/view/article/oupww/whowaswho/ U160027/STREATFEILD_Sir_Geoffrey_Hugh_Benbow?index=2&results=Quicks earchResults&query=0 129 It was an allegation that would later be tested by the Royal Commission and the bulk of witnesses contested it. Ewen Montagu, for example told the Royal Commission that ‘I have tried crime whole-time now for over twenty years and I am still fas- cinated by it and I do not think I have ever been bored with it’. (Ewen Montagu Q.C., 1901–1985, was Chairman of the Quarter Sessions for the Middlesex area of Greater London, 1965–1969). Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/74B. 130 The Committee said in para. 128 that witnesses had suggested that a concentration on crime alone brought it about that ‘The full-time criminal judge was in danger of becoming stale, and even prosecution-minded …’ 131 For example, Eryl Hall Williams was not wholly persuaded by it, saying that the Committee’s criticisms of the Crown Courts were ‘none … insuperable or entirely convincing. … all the statistical evidence shows that from the point of view of avoiding The Courts Act 1971: I 41 delays the continuous courts have a far better record, as might be expected. Would it not have been possible to combine quarter sessions in circuits with a continuously sitting court somewhere on the circuit, even if we must give up the idea of continuously sitting judges?’ J. E. Hall Williams (May 1961); ‘Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on the Business of the Criminal Courts’, The Modern Law Review, Vol. 24, No. 3, 363. 132 Hampshire Quarter Sessions Memorandum of Evidence to the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, March 1967, LCO7/173. 133 The Beeching Royal Commission would eventually look at their work anew, dis- sent from the Committee’s findings and adopt some of the courts’ features when it shaped its own recommendations. Note by the Secretaries on Crown Courts, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/257. Indeed, data supplied by the recorders of the two courts provide evidence to suggest that the new Crown Courts were despatching their business ever more expeditiously:

Manchester and Liverpool Courts

Average no of 'judge/days' per case 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966

Manchester Liverpool 134 See http://www.courts.ie/courts.ie/library3.nsf/pagecurrent/8b9125171cfba7808025 6de5004011f8 135 The Report stated that ‘the necessity for holding Assizes in every county, without regard to the extent of the business to be transacted in each county, leads, in our judgement, to a great waste of judicial strength, and a great loss of time in going from one circuit town to another, and causes much unnecessary cost and inconvenience to those whose attendance is necessary or customary at the Assizes’. 136 See ‘The Report of the Judicature Commission’, The Times, 22 April 1869. 137 HC Deb 22 February 1867 Vol. 185 cc841–86. 138 Note by the Lord Chancellor’s Office, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/240. 139 Second and Final Report of the Commissioners, Cd. 7177, Royal Commission on Delay in the King’s Bench Division, London: HMSO,1913, 13. Some minor reforms were suggested in the allocation of the businesss of Assizes, chiefly that the Assize at Monmouth should be transferred to Newport, that Assizes should be held in Sheffield, that steps should be taken to ensure that Quarter Sessions could not take cases committed to a Court of Assize, and that an Assize should be abandoned if there were fewer than three prisoners awaiting trial whose cases could not be taken at Quarter Sessions. 140 Report of the Committee Appointed to consider what re-arrangement of the Circuits can be effected so as to promote economy and the greater dispatch of the business of the High Court, 42 The Courts Act 1971: I (1923); Cmd. 1831, London: HMSO. It reported on p. 4 that ‘Since the existing Circuit Towns at which the Judges sit to discharge their functions were selected, populations have shifted, travelling facilities have developed, new and vast industrial centres have arisen and it is clear that whilst Justice should still be brought to a point as near as practical to every man’s door, that point may shift as different periods of time produce different conditions of living, working and travelling for the great mass of people. … it is obvious that for practical purposes at the present time the bound- ary of a county is not necessarily the best means of determining the places at which the Judges of the High Court should sit …’ It then proceeded to make a number of recommendations that included the amalgamation of the two Welsh circuits and the Chester Circuit and the transfer of the work of the Warwickshire Assizes to Birmingham. 141 Business of Courts Committee, (1933); Interim Report, Cmnd. 4265, London: HMSO, 3. 142 Circuit Towns Committee, (1936); Report, Cmd 5262, London: HMSO. 143 The Times, 21 March 1953. 144 The words are those of Mr Justice Waller. Memorandum, June 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/65. 145 ‘The Assize Towns’, The Times, 20 August 1936. 146 HC Deb 31 October 1958 Vol. 594 cc476–577. 147 The Times, 20 August 1936. 148 See C. Graham; Ordering Law: the architectural and social history of the English law court to 1914, op. cit., 272. 149 Derek Oulton, Brief to Lord Beeching for the Meeting of 3 October 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/226. 150 Based in part on ‘Documents Issued at Autumn, Winter and Summer Assizes’, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/366. 151 The Custos Retulorum was the keeper of the rolls and principal justice of a county. 152 Letter from Lord Coldstream to Derek Oulton, 16 June 1969, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/230. 153 Sheriffs were originally the ‘king’s outpost officers’, royal executive officers, who saw to the king’s fiscal interests and were responsible for policing and military matters. See A. Carter (1935); A History of the English Courts, London: Butterworth, 17. 154 Neglect or wrong performance of official duty (http://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary) 155 ‘A proceeding by which a person not a party in a suit bargains to aid in or carry on its prosecution or defence in consideration of a share of the matter in suit’ (http://www. merriam-webster.com/dictionary) 156 Gwynedd Archives, Caernarfon Record Office, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, XQF/1/59. 1970. 157 Taken from ‘Heads of Under Sheriffs’ Duties’, Letter from the Under Sheriffs Association, January 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/192. 158 The office of the High Sheriff of Bedfordshire is some 1,000 years old. The website of the Sheriff in the summer of 2013 recited that ‘Originally the office held many of the powers now vested in Lords-Lieutenant, High Court Judges, Magistrates, Local Authorities, Coroners and even the Inland Revenue …’ She is still responsible for providing the hospitality for, and looking after the well-being of, High Court judges when they visit the county on circuit (http://www.centralbedfordshire.gov.uk/council-and-democracy/whos-who-at-the-council/high-sheriff-deborah-inskip.aspx). Her predecessor, Jack Sapsworth, attended religious services for judges at the opening of judicial terms in September and November 2012, and those ceremonies were still accompanied by a degree of ceremony attended by senior police officers, police cadets, The Courts Act 1971: I 43 clergy, mace-bearers and others (http://www.flickr.com/photos/centralbedfordshire/ sets/72157632016105966/). 159 The first recorded Bedford Assize took place in 1202. 160 The documents were housed in the Bedford and Luton Archives, Bedford, as HS/ COR2/6. 161 There had been trumpeters at the opening of the Bedford Assize since the mid-17th century. 162 The first Shire Hall was opened in 1753 as the Assize court house. It was demolished and replaced by a new building, designed by Waterhouse, in 1881. 163 Elstow is the village on the outskirts of Bedford where Elstow Lodge, now a care home, served as the judges’ lodging. 164 Based on http://www.whatsthecost.com/cpi.aspx 165 Memorandum by the Clerk of the Lists, June 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, RC/WE/92. 166 Letter of 20 October 1970. 167 Letter from Principal Establishment Officer, Lord Chancellor’s Office, to W.G. Low, the Commissioner of Assize, Royal Courts of Justice, 3 November 1970. 168 M. Lerner (1937); ‘Constitution and Court as Symbols’, The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 46, No. 8, 1291. 169 See A. Garapon (1997); Bien Juger: Essai sur le rituel judiciaire, Paris: Editions Odile Jacob. 170 Memorandum from the South Eastern Circuit, July 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/6. 171 D. Garland (1983); ‘Durkheim’s Theory of Punishment’, in D. Garland and P. Young (eds.), The Power to Punish, London: Heinemann, 59. 172 See M. Rossner and M. Meher (2014); ‘Emotions in ritual theories’, in J. Stets and J. Turner (eds.) Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions: Volume II, Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer Netherlands. 173 See M. Rossner (2013); Just Emotions: Rituals of Restorative Justice, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 29 et seq. 174 She was alluding to the work of Erving Goffman (1967) and his Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior, Chicago: Aldine. 175 So named because of the colour of his robes. 176 Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/5. 177 Memorandum by Mr. J. Westoll, 27 April 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/27. 178 Sir Ralph Cusack, 1916–1978, was the Recorder of Gloucester, 1961–1964, and of Wolverhampton, 1964–1966; Commissioner of Assize for the South Eastern Circuit, July 1965; Leader of the Oxford Circuit, 1964–1966; and Deputy Chairman of Berkshire Quarter Sessions, 1962–1968. He became a Judge of the High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division, in 1966. (http://www.ukwhoswho.com/view/article/oupww/whowaswho/U153674/CUSACK_Hon._Sir_Ralph_Vincent?index=2 &results=QuicksearchResults&query=0) 179 Memorandum from Mr Justice Cusack, February 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/60. 180 For example, in documents submitted by the Clerk of Assize for the Midland Circuit in April 1967 (LCO7/29); the Clerk of Assize for the Northern Circuit who talked about the importance of ‘showing the flag in an age which is in danger of losing its former respect for Law’ (LCO7/31); the Law Society (LCO7/80); and the Norwich and Norfolk Incorporated Law Society (LCO/100). 181 The Lord Chancellor’s Speech at the Central Criminal Court Journalists’ Association Dinner at Cutler’s Hall, 5 November 1971. HLSM 3/4/17, Hailsham papers in the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. 44 The Courts Act 1971: I 182 The Lord Chancellor’s Speech to the Society of Clerks of the Peace of the Counties and Clerks of County Councils at their 148th Annual Dinner on 8 December 1971, HLSM 1/1/3, Hailsham papers in the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. 183 An argument put by Mr Justice O’Connor in his Memorandum of October 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/62. 184 R. Park (1925); The City, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1. 185 A. Strauss (1961); Images of the American City, New York: Free Press, 8. 186 Although there would be compensations. Supporting the Assizes and Quarter Sessions was expensive in money and labour. George Brewis, the clerk of Bedfordshire county council, was reported to have said the recommendations ‘would relieve a very great burden which falls on the county council staff of solicitors who act as clerks at quarter sessions’ (Bedfordshire Times, 3 October 1969). 187 See Bedford Record, 13 October 1970. 188 C. Graham, Ordering Law: the architectural and social history of the English law court to 1914, op. cit., 12–13. 189 Letter of 21 February 1967. 190 H. Barker, ‘The Ceremonial Aspects of Assizes,’ July 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/289. 191 Letter of 22 February 1967. 192 Email, 17 February 2015. 193 Memorandum by the Under Sheriff and Clerk of the Peace for Oxfordshire, April 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/189. And David Garland would probably have agreed with him. See chapter 4 of his (2001); The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 194 Memorandum of Evidence by the Staff Side of the Supreme Court Administrative Whitley Council, May 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/166. 195 Report of Ad Hoc Committee Acting on behalf of the Association of Chief Police Officers of England and Wales, March 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/147. 196 Joint Memorandum of Evidence from the Police Federation and the Superintendents’ Association, April 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/165. 197 See the treatment of the issue in P. Creelan (Spring 1987); ‘The Degradation of the Sacred: Approaches of Cooley and Goffman’, Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 10, No. 1, esp. 50 et seq. 198 Mr Justice James informed a conference on ‘The Impact of the Beeching Report on the Midlands’, that the impact of the arrival of High Court Judges ‘is small enough now in the towns where it is most needed. The Assize Service in most towns is sparsely attended. Such ceremonial as there is is repeated so many times a year that it is ‘accepted’ and no more’. ‘Edited Transcript of the Proceedings of a Conference held at the University of Birmingham in July, 1970’, op. cit., 26. Sir Arthur James had joined the Midland Circuit in 1939; became the Recorder of Great Grimsby, 1961–63; the Recorder of Derby, 1963–65; Deputy Chairman of Warwick Quarter Sessions, 1962–71; and a Judge of the High Court, Queen’s Bench Division, 1965– 72 (http://www.ukwhoswho.com/view/article/oupww/whowaswho/U156067/ JAMES_Rt_Hon._Sir_Arthur_Evan?index=1&results=QuicksearchResults&qu ery=00). 199 Brief to the Chairman, 19 April 1967, Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions, LCO7/226. 200 See http://www.exeter.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=2888&listid=10183 The Courts Act 1971: I 45 201 An official history of Exeter recorded that ‘A letter to the Town Clerk in November 1930 pointed out that: “… special horses are required having regard to the fact that the coach has no brakes … the driver of the coach proceeds down Castle Street and South Street in fear and trembling of an accident”’, (http://www.exeter.gov.uk/index.aspx? articleid=2888&listid=10183) 202 Unpublished memoir. 203 The Honourable Mr. Justice Forbes at the closing of the last Bedfordshire Assizes, Shire Hall, Bedford, 19 October 1971 (Bedford and Luton Archives, Bedford). Mr. Justice Forbes, 1917–1985, was called to the bar in 1946 and became the chairman of the Lincolnshire Quarter Sessions, 1967–71; and Deputy Chairman of the Huntingdon and Peterborough Quarter Sessions, 1965–1970 (http://www.ukwhoswho.com/ view/article/oupww/whowaswho/U164242/FORBES_Hon._Sir_Hugh_Harry_Val entine?index=1&results=QuicksearchResults&query=0). 204 See The Times, 22 April 1964. 205 ‘The Economist Interviews … Lord Gardiner’, The Economist, 28 March 1964, 1209–1212. 206 G. Gardiner and A. Martin (eds.) (1964); Law Reform Now, London: Gollancz. 207 W. Glanville Williams (ed.) (1951); Reform of the Law, Society of Labour Lawyers, London: Gollancz. 208 Tom Legg, then a junior official, remembered that ‘In 1966, Gerald held a competition within the office for the best idea for the next major law reform. My senior colleague and great friend Derek Oulton and I won joint first prize (and bottles of champagne), he for proposing a reorganisation of the courts, I for proposing a Ministry of Justice. My own idea had to wait over 40 years, but Derek’s was put into effect very soon. Gerald set up a Royal Commission on the Courts, which led to the Courts Act 1972. [sic] This abolished the old Assizes and Quarter Sessions, and set up the Crown Courts in their place. It put the Lord Chancellor in charge of all the courts in England and Wales, except for the magistrates’ courts and certain tribunals, which had to wait until later. The 1972 Act also established the centralised Court Service, across the country, also under the LCD’. Constitution Society: Talk by Sir Thomas Legg; Tuesday 9 May 2017, King’s College London: ‘Government and the Rule of Law: Reflections on a Career at the Frontier’, 4. 209 HL Deb 29 October 1969 Vol. 305 cc31–117. 210 See N. Heuston, Lives of the Lord Chancellors 1940–1970, op cit., 235. The Law Commission had been established under the Law Commissions Act 1965 ‘to keep the law under review and to recommend reform where it is needed’ (http://lawcommis- sion.justice.gov.uk/). In fact, neither the Law Commission’s first two annual reports for 1965–66 and 1966–67 nor the items listed in its first programme touched on the Assizes, Quarter Sessions or circuits (Law Commissions Act 1965: First Programme, HMSO, London, 1965). When the time came, the Law Commissioners expressed only rather an oblique interest in the Royal Commission itself, recording at their meeting of 15 November 1966 that ‘the Commission would want to give evidence in relation to jurisdiction in family law matters, but it was generally thought too early to decide on what other matters they should give evidence’ (Law Commission: Meetings of the Law Commissioners, BC 3/2 Part II). Family law was one of the seventeen areas covered by the Law Commission’s first programme. Later, the Law Commission continued to show little interest in the work of the Royal Commission, minuting at one of its later meetings that ‘the Chairman and the Secretary had had a discussion with Mr. Oulton, Secretary of the Royal Commission, and had explained that the Law Commissioners could not give evidence to the Royal Commission on the points mentioned in Mr. Oulton’s letter of 18 January without themselves seeking evidence and duplicating the Royal Commission’s work’ (Commissioners’ Meeting held on 31 January 1967, Law Commission: Meetings of the Law Commissioners, BC 3/3). 46 The Courts Act 1971: I The letter to which he referred was one widely circulated to relevant bodies as part of the evidence-gathering process, and it will be discussed below.

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