Judicial Committee of the Privy Council: momma’s baby, poppa’s maybe

Genealogy is the second most visited category of website after pornography, according to ABC News in America. That is impossible to verify, but I wonder how much of the internet is used for genealogy porn – dodgy conclusions drawn by self-indulgent hobbyists from evidence that won’t stand up. I overheard quite a bit of that when I was hanging around in public records offices.
 
Today's case came about because the Pringle clan, seeking to confirm who should be chief, decided to bring scientific rigour to the proceedings. They organised DNA tests for men in the family. Just asking for trouble. And they got it. 

A mother was posthumously discovered to have given birth to the child of a man not her husband.

‘It was my instruction that it was a great surprise,’ says counsel.

Maybe she was following a primeval imperative to rev up the gene pool. Her handsome son, Lt-Gen Sir Steuart Pringle, 10th Baronet, had a distinguished military career and, according to his Daily Telegraph obituary, was ‘noted for his intellect, shrewdness and acerbic sense of humour.’

The DNA test result is not disputed. Instead, the court is examining how legitimacy and biological descent are related - ‘factors which are more important than the possible truth,’ as counsel puts it.  

In the matter of Baronetcy of Pringle of Stichill is causing an establishment frisson because of its implications for holders of hereditary titles, and is the only Privy Council case this term to be heard by seven justices rather than the usual five.

It isn't a tussle to see who inherits the Spode: there is no estate at stake, no proto-Chatsworth. It is about, as Lord Reed puts it, ‘the honour of holding the title.’

 







In court I spot two people who resemble Archibald Skirving’s pastel portrait of Mrs John Pringle of Stitchell [sic], née Mary Drummond (1719–1804).

It starts with a bang. The bench tells both teams that their arguments should give more consideration to Scottish law, so there will have to be a further hearing. After a dazed ten-minute adjournment, counsel resume starting positions.

Counsel: ‘It is rather unfortunate that events have taken this turn.’

Lord Neuberger: ‘Well, we are where we are.’

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council knows where and what it is. But what am I? I mean, like you care, but bear with me.



This is a detail from my father's birth certificate.

And this is a detail from his marriage certificate.

These tight-lipped inked lines are the only images I have of my unnamed grandfather. My parents didn't tell me about my father's illegitimacy until my sister and I worked it out independently. To them it was a stigma. I'm not telling you what could or should be, only what was the pattern of those times. When I see a pregnant woman, my conditioned reflex is to glance at her ring finger.
 

I never met my father’s mother. I don't know what she looked like. I wasn’t told her Christian name. I was brought up far from Toxteth, the lair of unmentionable family secrets.

So a few years ago, when those who could have been hurt were dead or cocooned by dementia, I followed the ancestry trail and joined some of the dots.

In 1918, Annie Williams was an 18-year-old who worked in a munitions factory in Liverpool and lived with her parents. Assuming that her pregnancy ran to a normal term, my father was conceived on or around the Whitsun bank holiday. She never said who the father was.

My father was born in 1919 and brought up by Annie's mother. 

In 1923 Annie married a docker called Jimmy. Six months after the wedding she gave birth. They had four children. Jimmy, Annie and their growing brood lived in the same street as my father, who never entered their home and kept apart from his half-siblings. 

I traced Jimmy’s only surviving child. 'Are you Arthur's girl?' she said immediately, as if she'd been waiting for me to ring. ‘Me dad would offer ’im sweets to come in the ’ouse and play with the other children but ’e never did. We always thought ’e was a shy boy who liked to be by ’imself. Gorra go now, luv.’

Annie died aged 88 in Skellington Fold, Liverpool. Old bones. 

I'll give this one a shot of watercolour

Further reading

Counsel are relying heavily on A Treatise on the Law of Adulterine Bastardy by Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas (1836), still in print and free online. 

“You girls are my vocation. If I were to receive a proposal of marriage tomorrow from the Lord Lyon King of Arms I would decline it. I am dedicated to you in my prime.”
                             – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark.

That makes him some dude but in court we’re told that the Lord Lyon King of Arms, who handles heraldic spats north of the border, found himself unable to deal with the matter in hand. 

Edmund: …Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,
Got 'tween asleep and wake?

– King Lear, Shakespeare

Is there any chance that you and I might be related? 

Arthur Williams, 1919-2014

If you see anyone who looks like my father, let me know. 





















Bist du bei mir

Postscript: garbage from the Daily Telegraph - predictive text is a killer:

Bid to be drawn by me - charity auction 16 Nov, Inner Temple

Never mind Christie's, are you free to attend a quiz night at the Inner Temple on 16 November (tickets £100)? Incentives are a) Clive Anderson as quiz master and b) my drawing services as one of the auction items.

If you're the top bidder I'll sketch you and/or something else you like. If you provide biscuits I might throw in a free frame. (All the money goes to charity, not to me.) And I'd rather draw your kitten than you.

Here are some I prepared earlier:

 ...a leaf (Ricinus communis)...

...the RCJ...

...the RCJ again...









 ...the Supreme Court...

...a life class model....

...model, fire-eater and international champion pole performer Ayumi LaNoire...








Z2K and the Bar Pro Bono Unit present the Clive Anderson Quiz Night at 7pm on Monday 16 Nov, Inner Temple Hall.

Supreme Court: Trunki business

Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 

- William Blake, The Tyger

Nature rips itself off without compunction. Here's a leaf-tailed gecko, copying foliage to stay alive:









Plants and animals don't have image rights (correct me if you must). The immortal hand or eye doesn't claim copyright on creation, and evolution would make that area of law very murky anyway, so the entrepreneurial designer Rob Law re-framed the tiger for his Trunki children's ride-on suitcase:

Then his business rivals had a go with their not dissimilar Kiddee Case:

It's not just the tigers which are in contention today. To depict the relentless colours of the fauna in court I've brought wax crayons. And I'm guessing a bit. From my restricted-view seat I can spot a flash of orange in front of the bench but not enough to see whether it's a Trunki or a Kiddee Case.

Just one issue is being examined in PMS International Limited v Magmatic Limited: what is the significance - in design infringement terms - of the fact that there is no surface decoration on Trunki's Community registered design? I hope counsel will be very clear in their arguments: overlooking the scene is a portrait of John Fielding, the blind magistrate. 

The unsung hero is drawing - not the wispy stuff I do but ye olde measured drawing. A key question today is whether proper line drawings - rather than a 3D-effect monochrome computer-aided design - would have clarified what the Trunki image rights were supposed to protect. 

The other day I was watching a short film of a dinosaur skeleton being excavated.  Cameras were there, yes, and paleontologists brushing sand from vertebrae - but also a patient artist making an essential record of what the camera can't see. 

Above, right: Magmatic Limited Registered Design no. 000043427-0001

Meanwhile I'm wasting time drawing a Friesian cow when I notice that counsel has his knee on the table. Alternate knees but mainly the left. In full flow he switches rapidly from one knee to the other. Without falling over. His spine and suit are under enormous strain.

Later on I try this at home. Don't. Fronting up to the Supreme Court bench can define careers and must always generate a huge slug of adrenalin, but even so this is the most interesting forensic fight-or-flight posture I have ever seen.
 
Come the evening I'm on my way to an event when in an inadvertently Faustian way I conjure up Lord Neuberger on the wet pavement. He's had a busy day facing garish plastic followed by a London commute and won't want to be accosted by a random fan.

I get to the event, a fundraising talk for portersprogressuk.org by ace mountaineer Stephen Venables. Luke Hughes is there. I accost him. He'll know how high the Supreme Court barristers' benches are. He designed them, and my kitchen table. 74cm is the answer.

He is also a gifted mountaineer and has climbed the north face of the Eiger with Venables while discussing Mozart and Proust as they do. Heights hold no fears for Hughes. He talks of overcoming the Ministry of Justice's health-and-safety fears about installing ladders in the Supreme Court library.

I've met him before, when he was giving a talk in the Supreme Court. On that occasion he asked me if I was a climber. I can't even rest my knee on my desk.

Update: on seeing this post a friend wrote: 'I did jury service earlier this year. The mangled postures of the barristers were the most fascinating thing about it.'

@otium_Catulle

Supreme Court: joint enterprise with the Privy Council

Today's Supreme Court hearing involves two murders but the procedural calm helps to alleviate tension. The usher has made sure that families with opposing interests are seated apart. A man next to me drops off for a while, snoring gently. This is not fair on counsel who are firing on all cylinders. Tip to counsel: I wouldn't refer to the bench constantly as 'my lords'. At one point Lady Hale makes emphatic use of a stapler.

Hoods in the public seats

For the first time, the Supreme Court and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council are sitting together. They are hearing two linked appeals, R v Jogee and Ruddock v The Queen (Jamaica), involving the controversial principle of joint enterprise - can someone who incites murder be guilty of it? Echoing in my head are the words 'Let him have it' from the notorious trial of Derek Bentley (hanged then pardoned).

If a potential death penalty had been involved I wouldn't be here, but I checked the case details on the court's website beforehand. I'd been startled when I discovered that the JCPC hears appeals from jurisdictions which carry out capital punishment - as does Jamaica - although the court would never sanction such a penalty.

Four Supreme Court justices are accompanied today by the Lord Chief Justice, marking the significance of these criminal appeals. 

The Supreme Court flag is joined by the Jamaican flag. As a spotter, I wonder if the oval JCPC rug with the royal crest (Honi soit qui mal y pense) has been moved to court 1 - the largest court, being used for today's packed-out hearing - from court 3 where it normally lies. The answer is no, because another JCPC case is being heard today in court 3. (The role of the JCPC is technically to advise the monarch, hence the crest. And the mysteries of the Privy Council are explained in a new book: By Royal Appointment: Tales from the Privy Council.)

I'm normally near the front, floating on a lagoon of dark suits, but today I'm at the back, giving ground to the crowd. I've just got back from Venice and my head is full of hectic colour and Renaissance paintings of near-naked bodies, not appropriate for today's sober outing.

Peril in Venice

Screaming pope in Cannaregio

Venice. Don't ask me. Read up on it. Look at the things to look at.‎ And tell them where to shove their selfie sticks. 

Venice is sinking along with its property prices but I'm a lightweight. I don't make a difference.  

Top online tip for tourists: 'The floating landing stage is not the vaporetto.‎'  

The Italian Renaissance all-comers free-style match at the Accademia is won by the Bellini family.  

The Madonna con il Bambino (workshop of Piero della Francesca) at the Palazzo Cini, with its translucent cool poise, reminds me of the polished, pallid cross-section of a fossilised waterborne thing floating through eternity which I've just seen in the Museo di Storia Naturale - a tendrilly blob which might have had a single impulse, genesis. Wish I'd taken a photo.

The talented blogger KnitOxford‎.wordpress.com sends me someone else's clever post about designing a jumper based on the Doge's palace. 

Why not knit the Grand Canal with intarsia gondole and crocheted palazzo edges? It would make a nice scarf.

Members of a watercolour class

I get lost and end up stuck in the appalling Rialto crowds and tat. I become one of the people who annoy me by clogging the arteries of my Portobello home ground. 

I'm not here to draw but on the last night I sit by the Grand Canal as the damp chill rises, eat a zabaglione-stuffed choux bun and have a pen malfunction. 

Free the caged songbirds, you bastards!

Time for Italian Hours by Henry James:

Venetian life, in the large old sense, has long since come to an end, and the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities resides simply in its being the most beautiful of tombs. Nowhere else has the past been laid to rest with such tenderness, such a sadness of resignation and remembrance. Nowhere else is the present so alien, so discontinuous, so like a crowd in a cemetery without garlands for the graves....

...It is a fact that almost every one interesting, appealing, melancholy, memorable, odd, seems at one time or another, after many days and much life, to have gravitated to Venice by a happy instinct, settling in it and treating it, cherishing it, as a sort of repository of consolations; all of which to-day, for the conscious mind, is mixed with its air and constitutes its unwritten history. The deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored, have seemed to find there something that no other place could give. But such people came for themselves, as we seem to see them—only with the egotism of their grievances and the vanity of their hopes...

Left: La Meditazione or La Malinconia, Domenico Fetti (or followers), c.1618, Accademia. Is the version in the Louvre the first or second?


...the very vulgarest rubbish in all the modern market...

...It is possible to dislike Venice, and to entertain the sentiment in a responsible and intelligent manner. There are travellers who think the place odious, and those who are not of this opinion often find themselves wishing that the others were only more numerous. 

Incoronazione della virgine, Andrea di Bartolo, Ca' d'Oro

In court with the Naked Rambler

[Note: you’ll see that I’m not drawing the characters, just casting them from Spotlight.]

Someone has left a startling amount of male and female imagery lying around outside Winchester Crown Court. 

It's a bracing reminder that we're here because of the Naked Rambler's genitalia and buttocks, frequent sightings of which have excited magistrates' opprobrium to such a degree that he now has his own special ASBO which leads with lumpen logic to a potential infinity of jury trials - this is his fourth - and custodial sentences.

'Prometheus', Gustave Moreau, 1868

He’s a huge burden on the taxpayer: a one-man Trident but with arguably less deterrent effect.

Before the jury are admitted, The Naked Rambler aka Steve (Jim Dale) is summoned from the deep. 

I hear shackles rattling à la Marley’s ghost - surely he isn’t chained? The usher assures me that it's the jangle of the accompanying official’s keys to the cells. But later I’m told that, when out of sight, he’s in handcuffs.

Steve must have been wearing clothes occasionally - his forearms and neck are darker than his bony chest and shoulders. He is thinner and rangier than the last time I saw him, in August; his beard is on the march again. 

From my viewpoint, only his top half is visible. In the dock he is shielded by a wooden screen below, glass above. He gazes up to heaven like a grizzled terrier or leans forward, straining to hear, his nose against the glass. 

He rubs off the condensation from his breath and a fragment of Yeats, writing about Keats, comes to mind:

I see a schoolboy when I think of him,

With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,

For certainly he sank into his grave

His senses and his heart unsatisfied

Hmn, a bit dark for Steve, but it’s there.

To my mind, the only person truly naked in this court is barrister Matthew Scott (Tim Piggott-Smith), who has been Steve’s loyal brief in the past.

Inaccurately billed as 'leading QC' on the front page of the latest Sunday Times, Scott is nevertheless top man - nobly standing on the sidelines as an unofficial amicus curiae without brief, wig, robe or ability to raise an invoice, because Steve wishes to represent himself. But that’s impossible if you aren't allowed in court at the same time as the jury. Steve won’t promise to remain seated - with his genitals out of the jury’s sight - so he is sent back to the cells.

Prosecuting counsel: ‘Mr Gough does have a wish often to stand up.’

Judge: ‘We can’t ask a prison officer to chain his legs to the floor.’

A Police Community Support Officer (Billie Piper) is looking after cellophane packets containing a pale grey marl top and tracksuit bottoms, ready for Steve to pop on if he relents.

Steve when at liberty

During one of the longueurs triggered by attempts to fit Steve’s caprice into court procedure, Scott asks his pupil (whose duties may not have been explained adequately at interview) to stand fully clothed in the witness box, then in the dock, ‎and scrutinises him to assess whether the offending genitalia really could be seen by the jury. Then Steve himself is summoned back to the dock for the same exercise. When Steve stands up, ‘The top of the pubic hair is visible, my lord.’

Judge love

The judge (Timothy West elided with Ronnie Barker) is humane and authoritative. He is particularly considerate towards Scott and expresses profuse gratitude: to represent this, in my notebook, I sketch a heart and a flower, then realise with horror that I have drawn in the court, my biggest fear as it’s illegal to do so.

It’s tempting to glamorise Steve as Joan of Arc or Peter Grimes or Job (‘Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither’) but that would be false.

I won’t regale you with Steve’s Fotherington-Thomas comments about the human body because I think they are irrelevant. I spend a lot of time drawing people who are naked as models or performers. Whether professional or enthusiastic amateurs, they embrace discipline and stick up notices on doors to the outside world saying NO NUDITY BEYOND THIS DOOR.

Steve hasn’t found the door. He isn’t even looking for it. His struggle is not concerned with some right to be naked in Asda, but with an eccentric compulsion to challenge authority.

He is using nudity as a figleaf.‎

‘The arguments against me have no foundation,’ he says.

The judge questions his intransigence: ‘Do you think something is going to change in your lifetime?’

‘Probably not.’

‘You’ll just get older and colder?’

In the court cafeteria, the clock has stopped. 

   
Steve is remanded in custody awaiting a psychiatric report and sentencing.