The Juryman's Tale

by Trevor Grove

  Kate was the youngest of us. She was 21 years old. She was plump, pretty, sharp-tongued and wonderfully sour about men, women, the newspapers, the jury system and almost anything else that came up in our communal conversation until the day we were locked up to deliberate. Then she became quite steely and tough-minded. She had ten GCSEs and two BTec diplomas. She had a job (her first) providing what she called helpdesk support on the computer system of a big firm of City solicitors. She was a swimmer. Her boyfriend was a professional golfer working his way up the ladder. She would meet him off the plane after an overseas tournament, half-pleased, half-cross to be caught in the press camera lenses. Kate saw Bob coming a mile off. She kept him at bay with put-downs of a scorn that would have made lesser men shrivel. They bounced off Bob like airgun pellets off a rhino.

  Sophie was the next youngest. She was small and sweet-natured and the only one of the women jurors who smoked. This consigned her to the ashtray-littered, male-dominated zone of the jury restaurant reserved for smokers, where she puffed away unconcernedly. It turned out that she too was a Post Office worker who could have got off if she had wanted to, but didn’t. She was a sorter, but was surely headed for promotion. She was bright, and turned out to have an unerring ear for the tongue-twisting Greek names which jostled in the cast list. She was the only one of us to know which Petros was which and never to confuse Whatyoumacallitakis with Whatsernameopoulos. Perhaps this was her GPO training.

  As well as a pair of postal workers we had a couple of cleaners. Keith’s job was out at Heathrow. Sweeping up the debris of the busiest airport in the world might sound a touch dreary. But as far as Keith was concerned there could be no more fulfilling occupation on earth, since Keith’s great passion in life was plane-spotting. Billy Bunter put in charge of the tuck shop could not have been more contented. A slow-moving, Smike-ish figure whose blundering at cards regularly provoked good-natured jeers from the other players, he seemed to derive an inner insouciance from the contents of his carrier bag, which included a pair of binoculars. When we were shooed from court for points of law, he would huddle over his clip-board of plane numbers like a Talmudic scholar. My impression was that he formed his opinions about what was going on in court early in the proceedings, then stuck to them doggedly.

  Eddie was an office cleaner. He was a pleasant, bespectacled, shy young man who would have looked more in place behind a bank counter in Burgos, changing your traveller’s cheques into pesetas, than in the Central Criminal Court. His full name was Eduardo. He was born in London of Spanish parents twenty-three years ago. Since I speak some Spanish, we would exchange a ‘Buenos dias’ every morning at the hand-dryer in the Gents’. But he seemed much happier being a thorough-going north London lad. He had even anglicised the pronunciation of his surname, in a fashion that must have been painful to his parents’ ears. Eddie was a keen badminton-player. Somewhere along the line he had picked up some knowledge of electronics and telecommunications. In a trial where mobile telephones played a key role, this turned out to be an unexpected benefit.

  Ah, the glories of random jury selection. Here was a case concerning four men of what you might loosely call Mediterranean background. And, as luck would have it, here was a London jury which included not only Eduardo but also Anna. Anna was an East Ender through and through, and noisily proud of it. But she was also as Italian as provolone. We had an excitable argument over the best kind of soup to make from Christmas turkey bones.

  Once upon a time under English law, foreign defendants were allowed to ask for a jury de medietate linguae, half-composed of fellow countrymen, or at any rate non-Englishmen. That rather fair-minded practice fell into disuse in the middle of the last century. Our jury seemed to have almost resuscitated it. Two of our number had Latin blood in their veins. A third (myself) had grown up in a Latin country, Argentina, and even spoke a smidgin of tourist Greek.

  Anna was 49, a working wife and mother. She was on the check-out at an inner-city Sainsbury’s, a happy combination of London hard-headedness and Italian sentimentality. One minute she would be loosing off some cockney obscenity about the tiresomeness of a male juror, the next waving her hands in anguish over poor Mrs Fraghistas. Anna was unwavering on one theme: the strength of the family in the Mediterranean world. A son would never do that to his mamma, she would say to me firmly. A sister will always stand by her brother. And so on. These were valuable insights.

  Pat was the only one of us who was not born in the UK. She was a fair-haired, apple-cheeked New Zealander, who had lived in London for years. She had come over to England on the obligatory European tour as a young Kiwi and had simply stayed put, though she still had the slightly distrait air of an antipodean who had only temporarily alighted in the motherland. Sure enough, she and her partner and their baby daughter were in the throes of uprooting to go and settle back in Auckland. Every day Pat arrived with a mobile phone and a satchel full of documents. She was a one-woman emigration department. One week she would be negotiating the sale of her home, the next organising the shipping of its contents. The rest of us had ringside seats. Pat sought Bob’s advice on what sort of car to take out with them, prices back home being so exorbitant. The ladies were consulted about curtain materials. As the trial rolled on and one provisional deadline succeeded another, Pat’s move became a sort of parallel drama. Would we finish in time, or would the jury have to shrink to eleven because one of the jurors had emigrated? In actual fact, the dilemma would never have arisen. Though I suspect Pat was the kind of person who dislikes being judgemental, she was very conscientious about her juror’s role and would have seen it through however long the trial took.

  Anna spent a lot of her lunch-breaks with Daphne. Daph was a handsome grey-haired woman in her late sixties. A retired secretary at the Factory Inspectorate, she never failed to be on time for court despite the fact that her journey to court was one of the longest. I sometimes followed her up the hill to the Old Bailey from Blackfriars tube station and she usually outpaced me. Daph was a Scrabble demon. We only had time for one full game, despite all the hundreds of hours we spent in each other’s company. But she came armed with her Travel Scrabble and a diary of previous scores. I realised I was up against a player who not only knew all those beastly two-letter words beginning with ‘x’ but was also bang up-to-date about the newly allowed non-U word ‘qi’ (an Oriental life force, supposedly). Dangerous stuff. So when Daph described her chance encounter with a pair of police handcuffs and how they worked, we all listened. It was highly relevant.

  The most outspoken member of our jury was Stuart. He was a self-employed builder in his early fifties, a Glaswegian with a passion for Rangers and an opinion on everything, mostly of a no-nonsense reactionary variety. He was tough, canny, down-to-earth and good company. He wasted no time at all in finding out exactly what the self-employed among us should be claiming for lost earnings. Naturally he was the one who started the card school and who proposed that we should set up a lottery syndicate. He smoked roll-ups, preferred beer to whisky, read the Express, outraged the women with his chauvinistic banter and never wore anything but trainers during the whole of the trial. He seemed to me to be an excellent juror, quick to grasp the essentials. His other talents included a cab-driver’s knowledge of central London streets and a fund of information about previous criminal trials, especially those that had taken place at the Bailey.

  The oldest juryman was Magnus, a 68-year-old former schools inspector with the Inner London Education Authority who had retired in 1988. He had a BSc, a PhD and was also a qualified educational psychologist. A beaming, bespectacled, invariably blazered figure, he had got his doctor to prescribe him speed to keep him awake during the trial. He was one of those old-fashioned Englishmen who have real, time-consuming hobbies, and are perplexed that the modern generation gets by without them. Magnus was a Rotarian; a movie buff who kept records of all the films he saw; he collected old postcards, stamps and cigarette cards and did so sufficiently seriously to make quite a bi
t of money out of it. While the rest of us kicked our heels waiting to go into court, he would pore over catalogues. Several times during the trial he trotted off during the lunch-break to attend an auction.

  His other obsession was telling jokes. Four or five times a day he would begin: ‘Have I told you the one about…?’ As the weeks went by, the chorus of mock-protest that rose every time he said this grew louder. Magnus would plough on undaunted, shouldering aside our objections like an icebreaker under full steam. Everyone and anyone was a potential audience, until the time came when bailiffs, ushers and jurors on other cases would flinch at his approach as though he were the Ancient Mariner. Yet not once do I recall his repeating a crack. Nor did we ever see him looking one up in the tiny notebook he always carried in his pocket and which we believed must be crammed with risqué ribaldry from a lifetime’s Rotary Club after-dinner speeches. In any case, the amiable wisecracker was also pretty wise. To have a qualified psychologist on the team was a bonus: every jury should have one.

  The conventional wisdom among lawyers is that older jurors are more inclined to be conservative and less inclined to acquit. My observation is that this is an unjustified prejudice (Magnus was a liberal-minded Independent-reader). More to the point, since experience of life is the only resource a juror brings to the undertaking, the longer that life has been, the better.

  In the witness box, we operated in pairs. This was because the documentation in the case was so massive and the binders which contained it so cumbersome that had we each had a set the court would have been hidden from us behind ramparts of files. My team-mate was a petite, sharp-faced, auburn-haired young woman called Terrie. She looked about 30, though later confessed that she was 41. She had worked for a tour-operator in Spain for some time, had lived out there and loved it (another Latinate element in our jury). Now she had a job at a hotel in Essex which she loved rather less and was thinking of leaving. The trial, she confided, would be a useful time for reflection. It might even be a turning point. She took notes assiduously and managed our set of documents with busy efficiency. When we all gave Christmas cards to each other I wrote in hers: ‘To my bundle-partner’, which she did not quite know how to take.

  As for myself, 51, I struck the others as rather stand-offish, one of them told me later. I read books. I dressed stuffily. I knew shamefully little about football or cards. And I preferred getting out of the place and exploring the local City eateries to lunching in the jury restaurant. But I was not the only fan of Larry Sanders and The Simpsons in the group and I had at least watched Friends and The X Files a few times. As a former newspaper editor I could answer the odd question about the forthcoming general election. And as a married father-of-four I was able to explain to Kate, who demanded the information in a loud and unembarrassed voice one morning while she was reading a magazine article, how an IUD worked, though I suspect she was having me on.

  Although comradeships were established quite quickly, I think we all instinctively understood that it was best not to form into camps: one day we would be locked up together to reach a verdict and would not want to be taking sides for the wrong reasons. There were no outbreaks of cliqueishness. If we did gang up from time to time against someone’s particularly maddening behaviour, we managed to keep it good-humoured.

  Magnus the educational psychologist could probably explain this as a manifestation of group protective behaviour. Solidarity was our best defence against the bossiness of the court and the risk of making fools of ourselves. But I am sure those national characteristics of tolerance and decency which the British are supposed to have discarded soon after the Second World War had something to do with it too. My parents’ generation never tired of saying the war brought out the best in people. Maybe jury service does the same in a lesser way, the sobering ambience of the court turning even men prone to behaving badly into jurors behaving, well … well.

  USHERS

  It is the ushers who keep the wheels of justice turning. They have various functions in court, such as administering the oaths and handing around exhibits, but their main job as far as we were concerned was acting as shepherd-cum-sheepdog to their flocks. One minute they would be jollying the jurors along, making them feel wanted, explaining what barristers’ wigs are made of; the next they’d be nipping at their heels and rounding up the stragglers to herd them into court on time. Woe betide the usher who lost one of his sheep. And woe betide the lost sheep.

  Many ushers seem to tell the same story to new jurors, claiming that they were there when it happened. The story is that one day a London court was held up for a quarter of an hour because a woman juror was late back from lunch. When the jury was safely penned in its box again, the judge, a beak of the old school, asked the woman juror to stand up. ‘Will you please tell the court why you were late?’ he said mildly.

  The woman explained that she was sorry: she had been doing some shopping in the sales and had misjudged the time it would take to get back. ‘Oh yes?’ responded the judge in a good-natured way. ‘And what did you buy?’

  ‘I bought a coat,’ she answered.

  ‘What did it cost, may I ask?’ said the genial judge.

  ‘A hundred and twenty pounds.’

  ‘Clerk,’ snapped the judge, all trace of amiability vanishing, ‘fine that woman a hundred and twenty pounds for lateness!’

  One of the ushers gave us this account during our first week. Later I learnt from a juror on another trial that they had been told the same tale by their usher. Later still, I read a feature in the Sunday Telegraph by a journalist colleague, Carole Dawson, who had just done jury service, in which she recounted the same sequence of events – only the coat had cost £150. Well, perhaps judges do this sort of thing at intervals, just to keep jurors on their toes. But since I first heard the story back in 1976, identical in every detail except that the coat had then cost £75, I suspect it is really one of those urban myths, which ushers find handy for scaring their charges.

  We had a number of different ushers looking after us during our four months. Apart from one with a sour face and a mobile-phone phobia, they could all have done a good job as Butlin’s redcoats. One of them was a come-hitherishly made-up young woman with a winning smile. Even in her subfusc robes she looked less like an usher than an usherette. But mostly we were in the hands of Roy, a moustachioed RSM type with the belly of an ex-butcher – which he had indeed been for thirty-two years. Roy was a card. His unvarying catchphrase to chivvy us into court was ‘Let’s rock and roll’. He had a knack of cupping his roll-up in his fist that suggested a lifetime of surreptitious smokos. Sophie confided in me after the trial that she thought we would never have been such a good team had it not been for Roy’s patient friendliness. A motion to enroll him in our lottery syndicate was carried nem. con.

  Every morning Roy would round us up, joshing if we were all present and correct but as stern as he was capable of being with latecomers. My bundle-partner, Terrie, was the chief object of these admonitions. Floods, fires and bomb-scares took it in turn to disrupt Terrie’s journey into the City. More than once she was summoned before the clerk of the court for a dressing down. Even the judge was driven to deliver an oblique wigging. But nothing could re-set Terrie’s inner clock, which automatically seemed to add half an hour to any given deadline. Poor Terrie was furious when she discovered that Stuart was running a book on her exact time of arrival. How she discovered was that one morning Stuart gave her a smacking kiss and announced, ‘A nicker, a nicker. Ye’ve won me a quid, lassie!’

  In truth, judges are in no position to get high-falutin over jury time-keeping. Court hours hardly convey a sense of urgency in the first place: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with fifty minutes for lunch would not strike a fair-minded person as onerous. Add to that a coffee-break in the morning, a tea-break in the afternoon and, as I say, you would not form the impression that time was of the essence in an English trial.

  What really brought this home, though, were the almost daily intermissions during
which the court would discuss sundry ‘points of law’ in the absence of the jury. Sometimes we would be kept hanging around for whole mornings. Eventually we would be brought back into court – only to be told we could break for lunch. Warned on pain of unnamed retributions to be back at five to two, we might spend a further hour in idle suspense, wondering what on earth was going on.

  One morning my tube station in north London was closed because of a fire. I ran home and my wife gamely agreed to drive me in to the City. Half an hour later we were still only at King’s Cross. The traffic was abominable. I got out and walked the final two miles at top speed, arriving at the Old Bailey panting and perspiring. No one seemed impressed by this show of dedication to public duty, which was not surprising since an hour later we still hadn’t gone into court.

  Occasionally His Honour Judge Simon Goldstein would give us a rough idea what the hold-up was all about, but usually not. This was profoundly irritating, especially as the public gallery was not evacuated during these legalistic conferences and the press could look on (though not report) to their hearts’ content. It made us feel like children forced to leave the room while the grown-ups discussed something supremely interesting behind our backs. When I learned after the trial about some of the hair-raising stuff that had indeed been discussed in our absence, it merely confirmed a suspicion that a British trial is not always the quickest or surest way to arrive at the truth, even if it is the fairest. On reflection, I thought crossly, it is not blindfolded Justice with a set of scales in her hand that should symbolise the impartiality of the law: it is a blindfolded juror holding a styrofoam coffee cup.