In 1938, a man was arrested for an indecent assault that had been committed by another man. However, events would prove that this was anything but the unkindest cut

It is interesting to see that it has taken so long for the question to come to court of whether cutting off someone’s hair against her will could amount to actual bodily harm (DPP v Smith (Michael) The Times, 19 January 2006)


The justices who had decided that there was no case to answer, on the grounds that hair growing from the head was by its nature dead, will now have to continue the hearing after it was thrown back by the Court of Appeal. In this case, the allegation is that the snipping was done out of revenge but, in the past, it has usually been the sexual fetishists who have ended in court.


In the 1920s and 1930s there were several of these cases that were dealt with as indecent assaults. In 1938 a man cut a girl’s hair in Brook Green, west London, and then scampered home. The police promptly arrested a second man and found in his possession photographs of women with long hair, an envelope with newspaper cuttings about long-haired girls and, unsurprisingly, a pair of scissors.


He was put on a series of identity parades; two girls thought he was their attacker and one girl was positive. He was remanded in custody but whilst there the first man was caught in the act and confessed to the earlier attack. He was bound over and ordered to attend a hospital.


It must have been a case of rounding up the usual suspects because it transpired that the second man had a string of convictions for hair-cutting assaults from 1921 to 1936, when he received a 12-month sentence.


Think of his chances of an acquittal on the Brook Green case today. ‘You have five previous convictions for the same offence. Are you really telling the members of the jury you did not cut that unfortunate girl’s hair?’ ‘Guilty, my Lord.’




***


Still on the subject of sex, the government’s new proposals on prostitution and brothel-keeping are, of course, completely flawed. There is something to be said for allowing two girls to work together in a flat for safety reasons, but to suggest that this will eliminate pimps is surely wrong. Are girls who work in a sauna necessarily pimp-free? I very much doubt it, more than I doubt that girls who operate out of flats always do so of their own free will.

Even more untenable is the suggestion that men who kerb-crawl should be named and shamed, as occurs in Middlesbrough. There, if I read the papers correctly, letters are read out in court in a manner which resembles a revivalist meeting or a public confessional: ‘By my impure thoughts and actions I have brought shame on my loved ones in a manner etc etc.’ No matter that the poor wife and children have their names all over the papers for the husband’s sins.


There is also a one-day training course for kerb-crawlers to attend. Not so if the man goes to a nice, and possibly clean (or possibly not so clean), mini-brothel. It would seem no training is required for lustful men for that seemingly equally bad bit of behaviour.




***


I was interested to see that my old friend David Sarch has been named as being involved in the £1 million payment to a US pressure group linked to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He was never a close friend but over the 30 years or so during which we knew each other, we would meet on the magistrates’ court circuit, and he was a fine solicitor-advocate.

I was actually in court when he fell foul of the ‘I can’t hear you’ rule. David rather favoured suits with a Prince of Wales check, something which did not appeal to one of the more austere of Marlborough Street magistrates – it would have been either Gradwell or Robey.


‘I can’t hear you,’ said the stipe, only for David to speak louder until someone was prevailed upon to explain the game. Things like this were common enough in the 1960s.


A most genial Irishman, David was physically huge with a red beard and appetites to match his size. When I was trying to write a book on Lord Goodman – an exercise on which his Lordship stamped with some severity – he introduced me to his uncle ‘Jolly’ Jack Sarch, who knew both Arnold and his brother Theodore, although he had little time for either of them. ‘The meanest man in Christendom,’ David said of Theo, adding, ‘and in the Muslim world as well.’


Sarch had been peripherally involved in one of the most interesting London gang murders of the 1960s and when from time to time we had a drink or lunch together, he would tell me snippets of what, he said, had really been behind the killing.


Finally, in May 1998, he decided sufficient time had passed for him to be able to tell me all and we arranged to meet for lunch. I rang his office to confirm the time and one of his staff said, ‘Haven’t you heard? Mr Sarch died in his sleep last night’. Gather ye rosebuds…


James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist