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#Clive Anderson: Garrow - s Law gives credit to a neglected legal hero

The former barrister turned television and radio presenter hails the radical 18th-century lawyer celebrated in new BBC drama series Garrow's Law.

5:20PM GMT 29 Oct 2009

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In general, nobody has a good word to say for the legal profession: The first thing we do, let s kill all the lawyers is perhaps the best known line in all of Shakespeare well, in all of Shakespeare s Henry VI Part 2, at any rate.

But the barrister battling away on behalf of the poor defendant in a criminal case is a well-recognised exception to this rule. From Atticus Finch to Rumpole of the Bailey, from Perry Mason to Kavanagh QC, counsel for the defence is seen as a romantic and attractive figure. We may want our government to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime, but in courtroom dramas we don t take to the gimlet-eyed prosecutor. Our hero is the learned friend of the establishment, who plies his trade by undermining it.

And I suppose we think there have always been such people in court. But though an English courtroom is a very traditional place where they still wear black in mourning for the death of Queen Anne, and horse-hair wigs because that used to be fashionable a couple of centuries ago, the way trials are conducted has not always been the same. Even something as basic as a defendant giving evidence in his own defence only became possible in 1898. And the right to have a barrister to speak for you, to cross-examine witnesses, to address the jury the very stuff of a fair trial did not arrive fully formed when trial by jury replaced trial by ordeal in 1215. It had to grow slowly and not always surely and, indeed, be fought for.

Apparently, a key figure in the development of trials at the Old Bailey and beyond was William Garrow, the inspiration for BBC One s four-part drama series Garrow s Law, which starts on Sunday.

I say apparently because even though I have taken a keen interest in criminal legal history before, during and since I was a criminal barrister myself, I was not aware of Garrow s importance. This is testimony to my own ignorance. But in mitigation, in preparing to write this piece I turned to my copy of Professor David Walker s Oxford Companion to the Law (1980), a comprehensive encyclopaedia of legal learning and lore. Mentioned in it are all manner of legal bigwigs, reformers and office holders but of William Garrow there is not a word. I suspect this is a measure of the low standing of criminal courts in the grand legal scheme of things.

It is not as though Sir William Garrow is particularly obscure. In due course he became Solicitor and then Attorney General and a member of Parliament. But it is his early career that the series concentrates on, when he threw himself into the art of the advocate in the rough-and-ready world of trials at the Old Bailey of the late 18th century. This was before it was established in 1834 as the Central Criminal Court for the whole country but after its courtroom had been reconstructed in 1734 with disastrous effect. Until then the court was half outdoors, open to the elements, and for good reason. The court was attached to Newgate Prison from which the defendants emerged, reeking and infected with jail fever. Once it was enclosed, going to court became a risky business. In 1750 the Lord Mayor, two judges and many others died of typhus. Judges at the Old Bailey still come to court with posies of flowers in the summer months to disguise the stench.

Garrow had to argue for the right to argue the case for defendants and more or less invented the art of the advocate cross-examining prosecution witnesses. Until then such cross-examination as there was was done by the judge or even the jury. Criminal defendants in the main were desperately poor or just desperate and the thief catchers and bounty hunters who testified against them often not much better. The better class of lawyer turned their noses up at such low-life matters but Garrow s nose for justice established key features of the adversarial trial as we know it today.

In this screen version the exterior of the Old Bailey looks rather more like Somerset House than a cramped criminal court building and inside, you might wonder if English barristers ever did quite so much walking around the courtroom and going up to witnesses and the jury like American attorneys do in TV programmes and films.

But William Garrow s pioneering work deserves to be celebrated, and the criminal records of 18th-century London should provide enough storylines to keep the programme in business for more than one series of four.

Garrow s Law begins on Sunday on BBC One at 9.00pm