As the nation remembers the end of the second World War 60 years ago, Neil Rose and Elizabeth Cruickshank look at the role lawyers played at home and in the conflict


It is strangely reassuring to know that even at the worst of times during the Second World War, solicitors maintained a sense of professional order.

The August 1944 Gazette featured a photograph of members of the law society at POW camp Oflag 79 in Germany. The society, with a president (on a three-month term), secretary and treasurer, had 15 solicitors and 18 articled clerks, while barristers, undergraduate law students and Commonwealth lawyers swelled the membership to 90. It ran a law school for those who had been articled and by 1 July 1944, qualified POWs had held almost 500 lectures and tutorials.


For those without articles, or from other countries, a special examination was formulated at the same standard as the intermediate examination, with the promise that if they entered into articles, an application for exemption from the intermediate would be ‘favourably considered’.


The society held weekly talks, moots and discussions, such as a medico-legal debate on ‘insanity and drunkenness’ with medical POWs.


Law texts and other publications – including the Gazette – donated by solicitors and the Law Society, were sent out in Red Cross parcels. The Red Cross also distributed and collected examination papers; boredom was obviously an incentive to study as an unusually high proportion of POW candidates obtained distinction in the finals. The Gazette regularly ran the results.


It was in 1941 that the War Office asked the Law Society to help establish a system of legal correspondence courses for servicemen. There were eight subjects – contract, tort, the English legal system, bankruptcy, company law, sale of goods, negotiable instruments, and criminal law. Within a few months, some 1,200 men had signed up, and the figure was 2,800 by June 1943.


In August 1941, the Law Society received a letter from Lt Colonel Hugh Swinburne, the most senior of more than 20 lawyers at one POW camp in Germany, asking for the donation of law books.


He wrote: ‘I feel your council will not begrudge this expense, particularly to prevent rust growing on our brains after 14 months’ captivity, and we older solicitors want to encourage serious study among the younger in circumstances where the temptation to “let go” is all too strong, and further to keep up to date ourselves.’


Back home, mindful of its experience of a First World War meant to be ‘all over by Christmas’, the Law Society had prepared itself in the late 1930s for the seemingly inevitable conflict with Germany.


As war approached, the Society abandoned its annual conference and permitted articled clerks to take intermediate examinations early. The Society transferred its offices to Newbury as war broke out – although it returned a few months later – and approximately half of Chancery Lane’s clerical staff was immediately called up.


Their jobs were kept open for them and some wrote to Thomas Lund, the secretary, about their war experiences. One recounted: ‘We are today moving to a new station with bigger and newer guns and will actually be situated on the summit of Primrose Hill.


‘It is possible from our position to look right over London and on a clear day the Crystal Palace Towers are plainly visible. The Old Bailey stands out clearly and so it is easy to visualise the post of the Law Society’s Hall. We shall of course guard that particular spot most carefully.’


A specimen form of agreement between solicitors in the forces and those carrying on their practices was produced, and a committee worked to find solicitors able and willing to manage the practices of colleagues who had been called up, although ‘almost every solicitor in civil life already has more work than he himself can undertake’, the 1944 annual report noted.


Another committee collated applications to the Ministry of Labour and War for military service deferment for essential legal staff; by 1944, deferment had been obtained for 472 solicitors and 1,153 clerks. When in 1942 the depleted legal services were further threatened by the proposal to register women for national service, the Law Society president stated forcefully that ‘our training… is difficult and takes time, and it would be folly to take these newly trained women away from essential work to put them to other work for which they have not been trained’.


Early on in the conflict, the Treasury agreed to refund the stamp duty that was paid at the time on practising certificates, in respect of those solicitors serving in the forces, as well as the stamp duty paid on articles of clerkship for those articled clerks who had fallen.


Female solicitors holding practising certificates (only 164 in 1944) were also heavily involved. Barbara Littlewood practised at two firms simultaneously in Guildford and Elizabeth Watt became a Ministry of Aircraft Production conveyancer.


The Law Society services divorce department assisted servicemen who could not otherwise be helped or where the poor persons rules (the forerunner of legal aid) contribution was less than £10. One serviceman told Eulalie Spicer, the department’s supervising solicitor, who received a salary equivalent to that of an Army captain, that ‘I know you are doing your best for me but I suppose all the proper solicitors are now in the Army’.


The 1944 Law Society annual general meeting was curtailed because of the danger of flying bombs, although the offices avoided serious damage. For a period, most issues of the Gazette contained, alongside stark notices of solicitors dead or missing in action, announcements that bombed-out firms were now squatting in the offices of other solicitors.


Professional solidarity went further. Provincial solicitors took in evacuated solicitors and their families, while law societies in Canada offered to find homes for the children of judges and lawyers. Despite its more competitive ethos, the bar resolved in November 1940 that ‘every barrister remaining in practice should make it a point of honour to do what he can to ensure that every serving barrister shall get back his practice when he is able to resume work at the bar’.


It was similarly made a point of honour that any counsel taking on a case that had been earmarked for a serving barrister should ask the instructing solicitor to add to his name the words ‘in the absence of [name] on war service’. The new barrister was expected to account to the serving barrister for an agreed proportion of the fee, or in the absence of agreement, for half of it.


The Lord Chancellor, Viscount Simon, refrained from appointing King’s Counsel so as not to prejudice the prospects of serving junior barristers. However, he finally announced a silk round in May 1943, explaining that ‘the ranks of practising King’s Counsel have been so thinned by death and other causes that practical inconvenience arises’.


Foreign lawyers in the UK banded together, setting up the likes of the Association of Czechoslovak Lawyers in 1942 to look ahead to how legal problems in the country would be addressed after the cessation of hostilities. The British Council ran a project to help Allied lawyers in the UK learn more about the domestic legal system and make contact with the local profession.


Nonetheless, everyday legal practice continued – there was a Solicitors Act passed in 1941 – and the profession felt it was being dealt with unfairly. There was strong opposition to plans to remove legal representation before both hardship and price regulation committees. This was work that, according to Law Society President Randle Holme in 1940, helped offset ‘the falling off of many solicitors’ practices, sometimes reducing that practice to the vanishing point’ as a result of the war.


Mr Holme questioned whether there was a ‘conspiracy to eliminate the legal profession altogether’. Adding in the inequality caused by the lower amounts of stamp duty other professionals had to pay to practise, and accountants, estate agents and others ‘like a flock of sparrows pecking at what used to be our preserves’ of work, he said: ‘I know well that to win the war must be our first and overriding preoccupation, but we shall not win it any more quickly by permitting injustices at home.’


Competition also led to the creation of the Solicitors Compensation Fund, seen as a key measure to restore public confidence in the profession, which Mr Holme said was ‘at a very low level’.


There was a long-running sore over remuneration and the fact that the scales under which solicitors were paid – which were first set in 1882 and only occasionally updated thereafter – had fallen well behind rising overheads. Finally, in 1943, the Lord Chancellor agreed to a 12.5% rise.


The Law Society set up a post-war aid committee in 1942, finding out from serving solicitors and articled clerks whether their positions would be open to them upon demobilisation and looking at how to help those without jobs. It also planned refresher courses, and provided a list to the Colonial Office of those solicitors who were interested in ‘congenial’ post-war employment in the colonies.


Only 13,000 solicitors were left in practice in 1945, the lowest number since 1882. Many awaited demobilisation, while excessive work pressure had caused the death or breakdown of many of those who had struggled to keep the profession going. The council permitted solicitors returning from duty to breach the ban on advertising and place a notice in their local press that they were back in harness.


The far-sighted decision to promote legal education at POW camps was vital in ensuring that solicitor shortage was not even greater. The Law Society suggested that principals had a moral if not a legal obligation to take back former articled clerks under articles on cessation of hostilities without charging further premiums.


As the country came to terms with peace, the legal professions appeared to have changed very little. The Law Society received 1,000 practising certificate applications from ex-servicemen as demobilisation proceeded, and initially a flood of men returning from active service sought to become solicitors.


They found that solicitors, and even more so barristers, still came from a restricted range of social backgrounds, hampered by similar financial barriers to entry. Articled clerks remained on the whole unpaid, and women featured only slightly in the lists of newly qualifieds. Despite the 1943 rise, neither branch considered itself particularly well remunerated.


Private practice was also now in competition with local government and industry, which could offer benefits and pensions to associate solicitors, whose salaries had not materially changed between the wars. A beleagured Law Society discussed setting a minimum wage for qualified assistants in 1945, but did not implement it.


Along with the general population, lawyers suffered the irritations of food, clothing and petrol rationing, the latter a severe constraint on country practices. Even eight years later, the Law Society was still distributing food parcels from Commonwealth law societies to its members, who were also told firmly by the Postmaster-General that client confidentiality was not a sufficient reason for installing a sole rather than a party telephone line in solicitors’ homes.


But while the profession still lived up to its Dickensian image, the shoots of change were about to emerge as the government made it slightly easier for young people to enter the profession and for the poor to access its services. In 1949, stamp duty on articles and practising certificates was abolished, and the Legal Aid and Advice Act was passed.



Pride Tinged With Sadness


The profession was simultaneously proud of and saddened by its contribution to the war. Some 7,202 solicitors and 2,253 articled clerks served in the forces; more than 70% were commissioned and more than 1,000 awards for gallantry were received. However, the Roll of Honour recorded the names of another 316 solicitors and 221 articled clerks for whom the statue of Pallas Athene, now standing in the Law Society Reading Room, was commissioned as a memorial.


Notable among those who served were Neil Oughtred, who practised as a solicitor in north London after the war, and was a commando involved in one of its most famous operations, the raid on St Nazaire, codenamed Operation Chariot and dubbed ‘the greatest raid of all’.


It was the destruction of the heavily defended Normandie Dock, the only facility on the Atlantic seaboard capable of taking in huge German battleships for repair. HMS Campbeltown was gutted, packed with explosives and rammed into the dock gate, supported by small ships carrying commandos to finish the job.


Mr Oughtred completed his role but was wounded in the neck as the commandos escaped. His life was saved by a soldier who plugged the wound with his thumb, and he went on to be deputy governor of an Italian province after the Germans surrendered. He died last year, aged 85.


Flight Lieutenant John ‘Hoppy’ Hopgood, an articled clerk and the son of a solicitor, flew the second Lancaster bomber to attack in the famous Dambuster raid. It is said that his plane was hit by flak as he attacked and it caused his bouncing bomb to overshoot the Mohne Dam’s parapet and explode directly under the aircraft.


He kept the bomber airborne long enough for two crew members to parachute out and then died in the crash. A voice overheard on the squadron radio lamented: ‘Poor old Hoppy.’ He was played by John Fraser in the 1954 film.


The death in a gunboat action in 1943 of Lieutenant Commander Robert Hichens, a well-known West Country solicitor who went on 148 operations, was decorated after Dunkirk and led a flotilla in the Coastal Forces, caused particular upset in the profession. The Robert Hichens Memorial Institute for Seafarers was created in Falmouth and he posthumously had a book published, called We fought them in gunboats.


Lieutenant Colonel Lionel Wigram, a London solicitor, was a Territorial Army officer, but made a major contribution by devising a new system of battle schools that trained infantry junior leaders in home forces from 1942 onwards, having overcome opposition from those who did not consider him a ‘proper’ soldier. Seeking first-hand experience of actual battle conditions to test and improve his technique, he went to Italy, where he raised and trained a band of Italian irregulars. He was killed at their head in a night attack on a village in 1944.


It was a 27-year-old solicitor, Pilot Office John Isaac of 600 Squadron, a partner at City firm Clifford-Turner & Co – one of the two firms that merged to create global giant Clifford Chance half a century later – who has been named as the first British subject to die in the Second World War. On 3 September 1939, one hour and 50 minutes after Britain declared war on Germany, he was piloting a Bristol Blenheim fighter-bomber which crashed in Hendon, north London.