Law Society’s Gazette, March 1940

Excerpt from a speech given by Randle Fynes Wilson Holme, B.A., president of the Law Society, who was chairing a special general meeting to discuss establishing a fund ‘to recompense persons who suffer from defalcations by solicitors’

‘We have indeed come to a crisis in our profession. Ideas which have been simmering for years have come to the boil. Would that our forefathers about 50 years ago had dealt with them instead of leaving them to us, their sons, the heirs of all the ages, to deal with! One is forced to cry, "O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right!" I regret to say that, though it is certainly no fault of any of you, or of any member of the council, the stock of our profession is at present at a very low level, perhaps lower than that at which it has ever stood. Powerful and important though the legal profession should be, our voice carries little or no weight in the councils of the nation. Our just complaints are not listened to and not redressed; we have recently, as I pointed out in my address to the Society last month, been, like Czechoslovakia and Poland, the victims of unprovoked aggression in the matter of legal representation before sundry government tribunals. In other words, we are, as I said last month, treated as the Cinderella of the professions, and no fairy godmother appears to send us to the ball.’