Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties
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* It’s possible to put a different spin on this, as Tom Priestley does: ‘After the divorce they got rid of a lot of the old friends. I remember Ralph Richardson saying, “Why don’t I see your father any more?” This is a slightly delicate thing, but I think that Jacquetta felt that she owned my father, that he was hers and hers only, and it was difficult for her to accept that he’d had a whole other life . . . I can also tell you that [my sister] Rachel felt that Jacquetta interfered with the relationship with her father.’ The children, according to Tom, were ‘put on a rota’ in terms of visiting.
* In 1954 there were 1069 men in prison for homosexuality. In the same year the Conservative government set up a Departmental Committee to investigate British sex laws. The result of their work was published three years later as the Wolfenden Report. John Wolfenden’s fifteen-strong committee included three women. It says quite a lot about Fifties mores that, for their sake, he suggested everyone use the terms ‘Huntleys’ and ‘Palmers’ (after the biscuit manufacturers): Huntleys for homosexuals and Palmers for prostitutes. Sadly for everyone involved, the law was not changed until 1967.
* He did not find out about the book for several years. ‘When he did, it was quite tricky,’ says his son.
* In A Quest of Love, Jacquetta writes of two states of being: ‘absence from oneself, which is akin to being invisible, and its opposite, ‘participation mystique’, in which ‘the other flows into oneself and becomes extraordinarily concentrated’. The latter enables one to empathise not only with strangers, but with animals and birds too. It was something she experienced often as a child and young woman, but hardly at all in the years thereafter. Whatever its cause, this was a blunting of the senses and clearly the source of some regret. It’s interesting, too, to read her contradictory responses to feminism. She derides Women’s Liberation for its extremism in one breath, and in the next makes the case for a woman’s right to have a career now that ‘childbearing is largely voluntary and the social and religious tyrannies devised and imposed by men have been exposed for what they were’. Like many women of her age and class, she worried that feminism was unfeminine.
* Among its leading lights were Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and the garden designer Christopher Tunnard. For more, see Alexandra Harris’s excellent book, Romantic Modems. Jacquetta admired Nash and Sutherland, and owned works by both.
* It also gives the lie to those who believe that the Fifties wanted for disordered families.
* I can’t help but think of my grandmothers, born only a few years before Vicky Clark, who as young women had hairstyles very similar to hers (which is to say, they wore veritable helmets of curls fixed with setting lotion). My maternal grandmother, the more middle class of the two, would rather have died than be seen in her rollers; she wouldn’t so much as step outside the front door without having first applied lipstick and swapped her ‘flatties’ for heels. My paternal grandmother, more working class, would have been less flustered by the idea of a strange man seeing her rollers. But only a little less. They weren’t vain, either of them. It was a matter of what was ‘nice’.
* She served only eighteen months.
* Helena Normanton (1882–1957), who was called to the Bar in 1922, was the first woman in England to lead the prosecution in a murder trial. She was also the first married British woman to be issued a passport in her maiden name (in 1924), though she used Mrs for work because it was better for business. A former suffragette, she was a committed campaigner for the rights of women in general, and for women lawyers in particular – and thus an avid writer of articles and letters to the newspapers. Responding to a piece in Strand magazine in 1932, in which Margot Asquith had claimed that ‘a judicial mind is not the strongest part of a woman’s intellectual equipment . . . few of us would like to be tried by a female judge’, Normanton told the editor, ‘[Your magazine] will rapidly disappear if you publish inaccurate articles of a frumpish and out-of-date point of view.’ She probably deserves a book of her own.
* Women were admitted to the Bar in 1919, following an Act of Parliament for which Helena Normanton and others vigorously campaigned.
* According to her daughter Hilary Heilbron, Rose noted in an exercise book from this period that elocution lessons were important because they helped one ‘to speak well in one’s intercourse with men’. Hilary Heilbron is also a QC; her mother encouraged her to change her surname by deed poll (from Burstein, her father’s name) when she left school.
* She was the first woman to receive it.
* Women were not conscripted until 1942. Rose was lucky not to be called up between 1942 and 1945, and she did not volunteer for one of the Services, as some women did.
* After the verdict at the Kelly trial, George Connolly was advised that if he pleaded guilty to robbery the murder charge would be dropped. He did, and was released from prison in 1956. According to Hilary Heilbron’s biography of her mother, in 1993 he wrote to Rose Heilbron, asking her if his decision to plead guilty had jeopardised George Kelly’s appeal, a worry that had haunted him. This was a hugely complicated case; For more information, see The Cameo Conspiracy by George Skelly.
* This trial was held at the same time as that of Christopher Craig and Derek Bentley for the murder of a policeman, a case that later became a cause célèbre. (Bentley, who had learning difficulties, was hanged, having shouted the words ‘Let him have it, Chris.’; sixteen-year-old Craig, who fired the gun, was too young to be hanged.) According to Hilary Heilbron, had she not been appearing for Winstanley, Rose would have been instructed to defend Craig.
* This narrative seems to have had no effect on Rose’s reputation, not even in the sisters’ home town. ‘[Liverpool] wears Rosie like a medal,’ wrote Drusilla Beyfus in the Sunday Express in 1953. ‘She will always be bright and new and young to the ordinary people there. “I wouldn’t miss a word of Rosie,” they say.’
* Comer’s associates Moisha Bluebell, Sonny the Yank and Tall Pat, as well as his wife Rita, were later found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice. The Reverend Andrews gave evidence against them.
* Margaret Thatcher would be elected MP for Finchley in 1959. In 1952, when Thatcher was studying for the Bar, she wrote a newspaper article in which she said she hoped to see more and more women combining marriage and a career. ‘Unless Britain, in the new age to come, can produce more Rose Heilbrons – not only in the field of law, of course – we shall have betrayed the tremendous work of those who fought for equal rights against such misguided opposition.’
* In The Lawyer, James Hancock, QC is ticked off for having spent most of his afternoon in court ‘trying to sit on Rose Heilbron’s knee’.
* In 1904 Christabel Pankhurst had been refused permission to become a barrister.
* The six categories were: murders committed in the course or furtherance of theft; by shooting or causing an explosion; while resisting arrest or during an escape; the second of two murders committed on different occasions; of a police officer; of a prison officer by a prisoner. Capital punishment was finally abolished in 1965.
† Women on the Northern Circuit did not become full members of Bar Mess until 1970.
† Elizabeth Lane (1905–88) was a remarkable woman. She did not go to university and only studied law after she was married, joining her husband when he decided to read for the Bar. In 1950 she became the third woman to take silk. Between 1971 and 1973 she chaired the committee working on the Abortion Act.
* Customarily, this honour went to the most senior silk on the circuit but, as a senior barrister said in 1970, ‘with a certain amount of care to avoid Rose Heilbron’.
* The famous Liverpool department store, where Rose used to have her hair done.
his book with friends