Anglonautes > English vocabulary > Justice > United Kingdom / UK > Courts

Tuesday 27 February 2007
Duncan Campbell
The Guardian
This article appeared in the Guardian
on Tuesday 27 February 2007.
It was published on guardian.co.uk
at 00.06 GMT
on Tuesday 27 February 2007.

Nothing can have given the Queen more satisfaction during her long reign than the Old Bailey.

At a rough estimate, defendants who have stood in its fabled docks must have served tens of thousands of years "at her Majesty's pleasure" for the murders and frauds, the robberies and kidnappings of which they have been convicted. Today the Old Bailey will celebrate its hundredth birthday, having opened for business in its current form in 1907.

During that century figures as diverse as Dr Crippen and the Kray Twins, Jeremy Thorpe and the Yorkshire Ripper, and Ruth Ellis and Lord Haw-Haw, have risen to the court usher's instructions of "silence and be upstanding".

Many more have heard a judge's stern command - "take him [occasionally, her] down" - after the jury foreman has delivered a guilty verdict.

Some things have changed since the days in 1910 when pieces of Dr Crippen's dead wife's skin were handed round the court in a soup-plate for inspection by jurors. Today there are laptops and microphones where once there were inkwells and ledgers. And, since the abolition of the death penalty, the only black caps to be seen are of the baseball variety, usually worn by friends of the accused sitting in the public gallery.

The last person to be sentenced in the first hundred years of the fabled Court One was 26-year-old Jermaine Smith who killed a man outside a takeaway in Enfield after an argument in which each had accused the other of staring.

Judge Ann Goddard QC jailed Smith yesterday for four years and three months for manslaughter after he had expressed his remorse through his counsel, Nadine Radford QC, who assured the judge that what had happened was "totally out of character".

Not all previous defendants have been so penitent. Ronnie Kray told the judge at his trial for murder in 1968 that if he had not been required in court he would "probably have been having tea with Judy Garland".

Peter Scott, the "king of the cat-burglars", who cut a swath through Mayfair and country houses in the 60s and who is now retired and living in Islington, north London, recalled last night the poignant words inscribed on the prisoner's side of the door leading into Court One by one previous, regretful defendant: "A boy's best friend is his mother."

"I can concur with that," said Mr Scott yesterday. "The Old Bailey has all kinds of mixed memories for me. There is a certain nostalgia and then I think about the wastage factor. I chose to be what is euphemistically called a cat-burglar but the reality is you spend years in prison and you end up in a council flat." He will not be at today's ceremony.

"I don't think people of my ilk are invited," he said.

Someone who has been invited is veteran court reporter David St George, who has been covering trials in the Old Bailey since 1969. He regrets that there is less of an appetite today for the detailed court reports that were once a staple of the daily press.

"I'm afraid all the newspapers are more interested in celebrities than trials today," he said, recalling a time when the press room in the bowels of the court used to heave with members of the Fourth Estate.

St George said the cases that stood out during nearly four decades of reporting were those of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, and Jeremy Thorpe, the former Liberal leader who was acquitted of conspiracy to murder in 1979 and who, he recalled, arrived in court carrying a cushion because of the unforgiving nature of the bench seats in the dock of Court One.

The current building, designed by EW Mountford, has survived a 1941 bombing by the Luftwaffe and a more recent attempt by the IRA in 1973. It has been memorialised in fiction by John Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey and, in its previous incarnation, by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities.

It is still handsomely maintained and decorated with the words "Domine, Dirige Nos," imprinted on the court seats. (The words can be translated as "Lord, direct us" or - if you are coming up from the cells - "God help us.")

Many royals have visited the Old Bailey in the past.

The Queen herself might well have paid an earlier visit had she chosen to be a witness in the trial of Princess Diana's butler, Paul Burrell, who was acquitted of theft in 2002.

Today she will have a chance to see whether the world's most famous court upholds the instructions outside its entrance to "Defend the Children of the Poor and Punish the Wrongdoer".