3. Brother barristers: masculinity and the culture of the Victorian bar

Ren Pepitone

In the 1890s, the newly minted barrister Gilchrist Alexander lived in a world of pristinely manicured lawns and rotting wooden floors, drab brick facades and double hammer-beam ceilings, draughty rooms and mahogany toilet seats and the nearly endless company of fellow men. He shared residential chambers in one of the four Inns of Court, ancient extra-governmental institutions in central London which regulated admission to and practice at the upper half of the English and imperial bars. Workday mornings Alexander and his flatmate, Jimmy Gray, woke early, but not before their laundress had lit the fire and cooked breakfast. Alexander dressed in dark clothes topped with a silk hat, then cut across the Inn to his set of business chambers, where he prepared briefs for his mentor, the successful barrister Willes Chitty. Alexander’s amiable junior clerk, Arthur Smith, carried finished notes to Chitty’s chambers at the top of the street. At the end of the workday Alexander headed for the common room, where he could find friends smoking cigars, chatting or reading newspapers. They indulged in a game of bowls or lawn tennis in fine weather, a game of chess in foul. Eventually they sallied forth from the Inns to one of the taverns on Fleet Street for dinner, then retired to somebody’s chambers to drink and smoke before heading off to bed.¹

Alexander’s life as a young barrister revolved around his links to other men in the profession – his flatmate, his mentor, his clerk, his friends – relationships deliberately cultivated by the Inns of Court. The purpose of the Victorian Inns, in essence professional societies, was not to instruct students in the technicalities of law nor to hone essential legal skills such as oratory but to instil in students the values and attitudes appropriate to British barristers. The Inns promoted these attitudes through a culture of fraternity, encouraging members to take part in dining rituals, socialization in common spaces and volunteer drill corps. Given the societies’ emphasis on sociality, methodologically this chapter departs from traditional works on the professions that examine education, training or formal processes to focus instead on professional culture.² It approaches the legal profession through the lens of cultural history in order to explain why the bar remained a preserve of elite white men long after formal barriers to women and minorities had been cleared away. Its analysis centres on masculinity.³ Unlike most studies, this chapter holds that the bar’s 500-year male-only tenure was not incidental and that the very paradigm of ‘barrister’ was constituted by performances of gentlemanly professionalism. This particular form of masculinity was learned through socialization between junior and senior members of the bar, practised via embodied rituals in the historic spaces of the Inns and necessarily repeated across generations of successive members to reiterate barristers’ elite standing and authority. By uniting analysis of material culture, the built environment and homosociality, this chapter accounts for entrenched and enduring conservatism in the legal profession and suggests a methodology for unpacking similar resistance to change across a range of historical – and contemporary – institutions.

The Inns of Court epitomized a homosocial culture of affective same-sex bonds. An expansive term coined by Eve Sedgwick, ‘homosocial’ leaves room for erotic desire in relationships between men but does not necessarily assert claims of homosexuality.⁴ Historians have deployed Sedgwick’s concept of the homosocial to analyse a variety of same-sex social interactions and institutions, such as public schools and universities, sports teams and gentlemen’s clubs.⁵ These fraternal worlds and activities would have been familiar to many members of the Inns; in fact, the societies would have been one of many homosocial spaces inhabited by law students and barristers.⁶ Like other Victorian homosocial spaces, the Inns were elite, all-male, focused on ceremonies and rituals which touted their ancient origins, and populated by the same cast of characters. But unlike the universities, for instance, whose all-male environs were connected to late adolescence, membership at and participation in the masculine world of the Inns of Court spanned a man’s adult lifetime. Another counterpart to the Inns, gentlemen’s clubs, likewise shared similarities with the societies. Membership at the Inns overlapped with that of London clubland, but clubs strictly removed professional life from fraternization. Whereas clubs prohibited all talk of ‘business’, socialization at the Inns – by design – forged professional solidarity.⁷ Law resembled other gentlemanly professions like politics or medicine that drew men of means. But neither politics nor medicine demanded the same centralized training across the country and empire as did law. To practise as a barrister in England or most of its colonies, one had to spend three years at one of the Inns; in comparison, medical schools abounded. Likewise, women in the nineteenth century made inroads into medicine as nurses and even doctors and achieved some success in local politics. Law excluded women from both the upper and lower branches until parliamentary intervention in 1919.⁸ Before then, as Leslie Howsam’s chapter in this volume shows, women could undertake legal work that did not require formal qualification, but such women were few in number and their positions might hinge on the goodwill of barristers or solicitors inclined to feed them (and take credit for their) work.⁹ Thus the culture of the bar – concentrated, enduring and pertinaciously masculine – stands as an example par excellence of the gendered operations of Victorian professional life.

For the Victorians, the Inns of Court were a multivalent cultural symbol, an impressively ancient but sometimes fusty preserve of Old London. In the 1840s and 1850s, newspapers, guidebooks and fiction by Charles Dickens and other luminaries noted the antiquated infrastructure and decaying grounds of the Inns.¹⁰ These authors characterized the societies as physical manifestations of their ‘shabby genteel’ residents. In reality, the nineteenth-century middle-class exodus to London’s suburbs reduced the number of mildewing residences and their mouldering occupants at the Inns.¹¹ Historians have outlined the growing spatial separation between home and work for middle-class professionals.¹² As part of this trend, chambers that had once been home and office alike increasingly came to be used by barristers as office alone. Middle-class professionals required the spaces they occupied to provide what historian Patrick Joyce terms ‘liberal infrastructure’, the material conditions that created the possibility for these individuals to function as self-disciplining liberal subjects.¹³ As such, mid-nineteenth-century tenants demanded running water and other modern amenities necessary to cultivate professional respectability and the Inns responded by gradually renovating their deteriorating buildings.

Calls for modernization and improvements did not, however, diminish the importance of the past for members of the Victorian Inns. A wide variety of scholars have examined the Victorian fascination with the past as it manifested in everything from literary and artistic movements to capitalist enterprise.¹⁴ For the legal societies, whose privileges stemmed from their ancient roots and the role of precedent in common law, the past legitimized their very existence. Architecture was critical. The Inns of Court cast their environs as remains of Old London, their medieval church and Elizabethan hall as material evidence of their ancient origins. Following their valuation of these buildings, the Inns deliberately shaped the rest of their built environment to reflect this particular lineage. Architectural renovations and new constructions purposely evoked the medieval and the Elizabethan, high points in the societies’ history and extremely popular periods within Victorian culture more broadly.

Furthermore, the Inns’ material environs did not just house but actively contributed to the societies’ affective culture. As theorists Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja insist, not only do people make and remake space, but space in turn shapes its occupants.¹⁵ The Inns’ architectural spaces and embodied practices inducted members of the bar into a resolutely English, masculine sociability. As historians and literary critics argue, whether manifested in the Hellenistic friendships of Oxbridge aesthetes or in the robust comradeship of martial activities, idealized male affect occupied a privileged place in Victorian society.¹⁶ At the Inns, the societies relied on fraternization with older generations, rather than codified rules, to inculcate new members with the priorities of the legal profession. Sara Ahmed and others have explained ‘how emotions become attributes of collectives’, arguing that social groups can deploy affective rhetoric and praxis to mark insiders and outsiders.¹⁷ In letters, diaries and memoirs, barristers defined legal culture as one in which men studied together in the library, chatted in the common room, drilled with the Volunteer Rifle Corps in the garden and, most importantly, dined together in the hall. This latter practice was intended to instil a sense of brotherhood in members by enacting a series of formal rituals of medieval or early modern origin revived or re-emphasized by the Victorian societies.¹⁸

The Inns of Court may have asserted their role as preservers of history, but developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries forced the societies to respond and adapt to the growth of the capital and the empire – concurrent cultural shifts – and the ravages of war. An increasing number of men from across the empire came to study at the Inns of Court, bringing with them unfamiliar religious, sumptuary, dietary and cultural needs and practices. Urban development projects, such as Victoria Embankment, disturbed the solitude of the Inns with the noise of construction, trains and traffic. The City remained the preserve of masculine professionals, but the West End, a short walk from the Inns, blossomed into a cosmopolitan pleasure zone. A variety of spaces still offered men the comforts of all- male company, but an increasing number of heterosocial spaces – music and dance halls, theatres and eventually cinemas – helped to change the expectation that men and women would socialize apart.¹⁹ The Boer War brought members of the Inns of Court Rifle Volunteers into active service for the first time, and a decade later the First World War depopulated legal London of young students and barristers. At war’s end, the 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act opened the legal profession to women for the first time in history.

Unlike most of the historical actors in this volume, then, white male barristers experienced professional precarity not because they were outsiders but because the forces of metropolitan modernity threatened the homogeneity of the bar. In the face of these disruptions, tradition and precedent became more important to legal culture than ever before. Indeed, the trope of the Inns, their occupants and their rituals as a ruin of Old London endured and gained force in the twentieth century, as a new generation of writers figured the Inns as a bastion of continuity with the past. Beginning in the 1890s and peaking just after the First World War, members of the societies published works entirely devoted to the Inns of Court. Drawing on mid-Victorian literary depictions, these works were steeped in nostalgia for a pleasingly deteriorated version of the Inns. Rather than the fragmented and fraught relations between men depicted in modernist literary works, members of the Inns focused their attention on a rosier, more Victorian notion of idealized friendship.²⁰ The books ignored or dismissed male outsiders to this world, particularly colonial subjects. They prized and reaffirmed the value of friendship between men and propagated a culture deeply resistant to women. Given the dissipation of formal barriers to women and minorities at the bar, late-Victorian and interwar members redoubled the emphasis on precedent, adopted a retrospective gaze and wielded historicism as an effective tool for maintaining a conservative status quo within the culture of the legal profession.

In the Victorian metropolis, the Societies of the Inner and Middle Temple were located on the City of London’s western border, just north of the Thames; Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn lay a short distance north in Holborn. Thus, the Inns of Court were not only among the oldest professional societies in England, but they also occupied some of the most ancient – and by extension, prestigious – real estate in the capital. Law was a particularly metropolitan profession. The concentration of lawyers in London stemmed in part from the centripetal nature of training at the Inns, which required students from across England and the empire to spend three years in the capital. Even after calls to the bar, most lawyers practised in the two square miles surrounding the Inns of Court; they made twice-yearly pilgrimages to serve provincial legal needs via the circuit courts. As a response to overcrowding in the profession, a small but growing number of barristers made a living in larger provincial cities or colonial outposts, but these options were viewed as inferior to practice in legal London. The exception came in the form of law students from the empire, the majority of whom returned to practise in their countries of origin.²¹

By the mid nineteenth century, the buildings and grounds of the Inns included a medieval church, an Elizabethan hall and row upon row of Georgian brown-brick chambers.²² Chambers primarily provided barristers and law students with offices and residences, making the Inns a majority-male enclave. Renting a set of chambers was customary rather than compulsory, but a successful barrister was likely to have chambers at his Inn. Residential chambers housed a dwindling population of barristers and law students, a number of clerks, a few tradesmen, some civil servants and house servants, known as laundresses.²³ Families were not unknown, but residents were overwhelmingly bachelors or widowers. Single women in residence tended to be servants, widows or the daughters of male tenants.²⁴ Chambers at the Inns thus provided the fellowship of other single men unrestrained by the tenets of conventional domesticity.

Throughout the nineteenth century, for a variety of reasons, the Inns experienced a decline in their rental rates. Members increasingly chose to live in purpose-built mansion flats or outside the city centre in growing suburbs like Islington, Kensington or Belgravia.²⁵ By the 1850s, there emerged a new professional practice of sharing chambers between several barristers, it being more ‘convenient and more economical, for two or three to take a set of Chambers’ rather than to each rent their own.²⁶ Such a strategy may have been necessary for members of a profession whose numbers at mid-century exceeded the demand for practitioners. Significantly, the trend of sharing not only chambers but also secretaries, clerks and cases grew to become standard practice for barristers by the twentieth century. As Raymond Cocks argues, practising together presented senior barristers with new means of regulating the conduct of young initiates and gave junior barristers greater impetus for seeking the approval of senior members.²⁷

The Inns’ steady decline in occupants in part came about because of the disastrous state of their buildings at mid-century. The societies’ descriptions of these ‘very wretched’ wooden structures conjured up images closer to the ramshackle housing stock of the city’s poor than the homes and offices of the professional elite.²⁸ Chafing at the attendant discomforts of life at the Inns, mid-century residents complained of bleak conditions. In 1857, for example, a tenant explained that his chambers had become ‘so ruinous and unsafe for habitation’ that three years prior he had removed his ‘furniture and books … to a place of safety’.²⁹ Other members decried the failure of material interventions, such as heating and ventilation, to ensure the uninterrupted mental labour of the middle-class professional. In 1855, George W. Hastings claimed that he had suffered a serious illness from a cold caught in the Middle Temple Library, ‘a cold and draughty room’.³⁰ Men of learning, members charged, could not carry out cognitive tasks in rooms that failed to provide for their basic bodily requirements.

Aware that their buildings were both insalubrious and unappealing to tenants, the societies undertook a great number of renovations and expansions between the 1850s and 1890s. The Victorian societies stressed the modern amenities with which these buildings would be equipped. When the Inner Temple replaced its 1678 hall with a neo-Gothic building in 1870, for example, the society ensured that the structure was fitted with lavatories, gas lighting, hot water, heating and the ‘latest modern appliances’ in the kitchen.³¹ The cost of modern amenities marked wealth and status for the societies and their members. Equally important, these features rationalized the bourgeois interior, allowing for the greater subdivision of spaces according to their function and the removal or rapid elimination of waste and dirt from the body and the home.³²

At the same time, the Victorian societies deliberately chose architectural forms that would reflect the Inns’ importance and the grandeur of their past. The medieval and Elizabethan eras had been high points for the societies, and the Inns embraced historicist architectural styles that represented these moments. In 1842, for example, the Inner and Middle Temples collaborated to restore the Temple Church to a medieval appearance. Originally constructed in the twelfth century, the church had been remodelled by the societies in 1682 to conform to the hybrid classical and baroque style (or English baroque) characteristic of the buildings of Sir Christopher Wren, the royal architect. The trustees of the Victorian Inns rejected English baroque in favour of Gothic Revival, which rose to prominence for the construction of churches in the nineteenth century as it highlighted the long tradition and history of Christianity.³³ In an attempt to realize a perfect medieval ideal, the project’s architect mercilessly removed all traces of Wren from the church.³⁴ He laid a solid-coloured floor, installed new stained-glass windows and commissioned the colourful painting of the walls and ceiling.³⁵ Covered in bright images of the Gospels and elaborate scrollwork, they stood in sharp contrast to the formerly imageless and muted walls. The renovation received glowing praise from the press, which extolled the church’s ‘pristine beauty’, its ‘mystic and quaint devices’. Newspapers wasted no ink mourning the former Wren fittings, instead devoting paragraphs to the restoration’s colours, paintings and stained glass. The Inns, papers contended, had done ‘all lovers of antiquity’ a great service in restoring the church to an ancient appearance ‘unparalleled in modern days’.³⁶

The Inns of Court’s topography significantly shaped members’ activities and the culture of the bar. Parts of the Inns abutted the City of London, for example, but the societies fiercely policed these boundaries. Such enforcement preserved the Inns as a local authority, but physical divisions also reiterated the symbolic distinction between the commercial city and the gentlemanly Inns. Indeed, much of barristers’ professional identity was defined by what a gentlemanly professional was not and did not do. Legal etiquette forbade barristers from engaging in trade, for example, and from working – or even having worked – as a solicitor. Barristers were paid an honorarium, not wages. They did not advertise in newspapers or court briefs from solicitors. Such behaviours were beneath the dignity of the profession, and barristers who engaged in them could be censured or disbarred by the Inns. Some barristers found the line between the permissible and the prohibited unclear. After all, legal etiquette was based on custom and precedent rather than codified rules. It was not written down until the second half of the nineteenth century, and then incompletely so.³⁷ This meant that a student could learn law from reading textbooks, but to learn the rules of the legal profession he absolutely had to socialize with established members of the bar.

A variety of activities forged homosocial relationships at the Inns – informal common-room chats, chess, lawn tennis, the debating and musical societies – but without a doubt members placed the greatest weight on dining in hall. In the mid nineteenth century, the only requirement for students to be called to the bar was to ‘keep term’ by dining in the societies’ halls at least three times each quarter. For some social commentators, this practice was a source of derision, a way of becoming ‘gastronomically-learned in the law’.³⁸ Mid-Victorian barristers, however, defended the dining requirement on professional grounds. Some of the highest-ranking members of the bar, including the vice-chancellor, insisted that ‘dining together not unfrequently [sic] in Hall’ gave students the ‘considerable advantage’ of ‘social intercourse’. Such opportunities were all the more important, he contended, given that ‘Members of the Inns of Court have … ceased to reside in their precincts or vicinity’.³⁹ Dining in commons, legal luminaries argued, allowed students and young barristers to connect with older and more established members of the profession, even if those members had taken residence in some of London’s new suburbs.

Other barristers maintained that dinners functioned as a conversational space for students to reinforce what they had learned from their law books and tutors. William Lloyd Birkbeck, the 1854 Reader on Equity, explained, ‘it is impossible to fix a subject of such extent as Law upon [students’] memory without that sort of repetition which is induced by conversation’. The Middle Temple Treasurer likewise emphasized the importance of association for learning ‘professional conduct’.⁴⁰ In encouraging conversations about law and professional practice, the Inns of Court significantly differed from counterparts like the gentlemen’s clubs of the West End, where such topics were prohibited.⁴¹

In addition to dining in hall, members underscored another great source of pride: joining and drilling with the Inns of Court Volunteer Rifle Corps, or the ‘Devil’s Own’. According to a recruiting pamphlet, the corps had first been formed in 1584 to fight at Tilbury – a suspiciously grand beginning – and over the centuries had traditionally disbanded and reassembled as necessary.⁴² The Victorian corps re-formed in 1859 as part of the then popular Volunteer Movement, and remained in existence until its transformation into an Officers’ Training Corps early in the First World War.⁴³ Less than a year after its re-formation, the Inns of Court Volunteer Rifle Corps had upwards of 260 members.⁴⁴ Featuring patriotic displays of robust masculinity, participation in the corps signalled the vitality of both its members and the nation. The societies supported the corps, allowing them to drill in the gardens and to dine later than usual in hall and providing headquarters and training space at Lincoln’s Inn. They hung Devil’s Own banners from the reign of George III in the societies’ halls, sponsored cups for shooting matches and hosted the corps’ balls and events.

Drilling with the corps, ‘a delightful brotherhood within the brotherhood of lawyers’, reimagined legal fraternity as common physical exertion beyond the boundaries of the Inns.⁴⁵ Though the Volunteers sometimes drilled in the Temple or Lincoln’s Inn, they most frequently gathered at the Deer Park in Richmond, far beyond London’s bounds. William Grantham recorded frequent shooting practices with friends there, and Lord Justice Paul Ogden Lawrence, then a young man at the bar, recalled rowing away from camp with a friend or two to fish and drink beer. Drill could also be an important place to make connections with more advanced members of the profession, especially as ‘distinctions of ranks were not observed’. Lawrence fondly recalled a lunch with the corps: ‘I remember being frightfully thrilled that a Lord Justice … should be handing me (a young law student) potatoes’.⁴⁶ Equally important for promoting this fraternal atmosphere was time spent roughing it in the outdoors. Grantham described a ‘splendid day’ as one in which he had to ‘skirmish through a forest of juniper bushes’ and ended up ‘covered with mud if not with glory’. Yet despite mud and brambles and gruelling twenty-mile marches, almost every diarist or memoirist recorded singing together in the evening, noting favourite songs or vocalists.⁴⁷

When the Second Boer War began in 1899, fewer than fifty members of the Devil’s Own shipped out to South Africa. These men experienced little action and few casualties, but newspaper contributors marked their participation in actual warfare as a significant departure from the past.⁴⁸ Fifteen years later, hundreds of members of the Inns volunteered or were drafted into the Great War. Almost all ‘the young barristers’, explained memoirist Stephen Coleridge, ‘voluntarily joined the fighting forces’ and ‘vacat[ed] their chambers’. He lamented the Temple’s ‘temporary loss of character’ brought about by the ‘intrusion of a crowd of tenants having no connexion with the law, nor any personal distinction’. Coleridge also noted disturbances to the material Inns. The Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve drilled in the gardens, and a gun was mounted to the Victoria Embankment to fire at raiding German planes. At the end of the war, Coleridge was much relieved to find ‘the reverend buildings [returned] to their proper and dignified purposes’.⁴⁹ He imagined the societies as having successfully resisted dramatic changes wrought by the war on almost every other aspect of British life, making them a mainstay of continuity with the past.

The emotional resistance to change evident in Coleridge’s memoir likewise informed much of the literary output from the twentieth-century Inns, as members published works devoted to the societies, nostalgic for fusty Victorian days. These works began to appear as early as the 1890s but were published with increasing frequency after the First World War. Authors most often categorized their works as histories of the Inns, though in reality the books spanned genres, incorporating aspects of antiquarianism, memoir and topographic guidebook. Like tourist guides, histories of legal London highlighted landmarks, legends and literary references of interest to visitors, but they fused this content with authors’ memories of the pre-war Inns, musings on the present-day societies and short pieces of fiction. Unpreoccupied by accuracy or authenticity, the works connected the Inns to eminent political, literary and artistic moments and figures in Britain’s past to claim prestige for the societies. In the face of the broad upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authors accentuated references and practices that figured the Inns as unchanging homosocial preserves.

Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century histories of legal London invoked romanticized images of serenity and decay from mid-Victorian literary depictions of the Inns and their environs. Members regularly quoted poems by William Makepeace Thackeray and Tom Taylor – who shared chambers at the Inner Temple – to cast the societies as a homey refuge of fraternity inhabited by impoverished, literary bohemians. An even greater number of these histories referred to Charles Dickens’s description of the Middle Temple’s Fountain Court in Martin Chuzzlewit: ‘Merrily the Fountain leaped and danced.’⁵⁰ Dickens’s animated language lent the Inns a playful, spirited atmosphere. Significantly, authors omitted his more ambivalent references to the societies in his other works, or even those within Martin Chuzzlewit, which described the Inns as lonely, decaying and haunted.⁵¹ By highlighting only select passages, authors capitalized on the cultural cachet of Dickens’s London without sacrificing the picturesque image of the Inns.

Histories of legal London also ignored the modern amenities added to the Inns and conflated Victorian historicist renovations with surviving medieval and Elizabethan architecture. In The Temple (1914), Hugh Bellot imaginatively positioned the painted walls of Temple Church as a backdrop for mysterious medieval legends and secrets, even though its neo-Gothic interior had been created in the 1840s.⁵² Similarly, interwar histories obsessed over the Inns’ Elizabethan moment, a period marked by monarchical favour and a population of fashionable gentlemen dilettantes.⁵³ The Elizabethan period tied the Inns to legends, events and figures that formed part of a British national heritage and identity. Histories of legal London lauded the Elizabethan Inns for their revels, festivals and plays, including the first performance of Twelfth Night.⁵⁴ Connecting Shakespeare to the Inns was one way that authors catapulted the societies from the local to the national, collective British past. Using material artefacts to attach Elizabeth I to the Inns also tied the societies to a national heritage. Many authors declared the benchers’ table in Middle Temple Hall to be made of wood from Drake’s Golden Hinde, referencing a triumph of Elizabethan imperial navigation.⁵⁵ These authors amalgamated archival research and oral or written legend, including in their works stories without historical evidence, so long as their connection to the Inns was long-standing.

Placing new value on longevity and connection with the past, authors linked the Inns’ ancient architectural spaces to the historic practices they housed, especially dining to keep term. While mid-Victorian members emphasized the practicalities of this custom, late-nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century authors defended keeping term as a historic ritual. For Edwardian and interwar members of the Inns, the societies and their rituals represented physical and embodied manifestations of valued pasts.⁵⁶ Histories detailed the Elizabethan features of the Middle Temple Hall, especially the dark wood panelling, elaborately carved screen and double hammer-beam roof, to impress on readers the hall’s great age. At the Middle Temple, authors noted, dinner began with the sounding of a medieval summoning horn. A 1919 article in the Globe proudly described this as ‘London’s oldest custom’. Whether or not this was true, the article substantiated its claim by referencing William George Thorpe’s Middle Temple Table Talk (1895), itself a mixture of archival research and oral legend. According to the Globe, before the start of the meal, an usher in a purple gown knocked twice on the floor with his staff. The seated barristers and students, in black gowns, rose and ‘“dress[ed]” shoulder to shoulder, in military fashion’. The benchers then processed into the hall, led by the bearer of the ceremonial mace. While the other Inns had let such formalities go, the article lauded the Middle Temple for ‘scrupulously’ preserving the Inn’s ancient rituals.⁵⁷

The same historic rituals and traditions that marked insider status for British members of legal London, however, equally denoted outsider status for foreign members of the Inns, a fact glossed over by most interwar authors. As early as 1885, 12 per cent of barristers and an even greater proportion of law students hailed from overseas, and their numbers only grew in the early twentieth century.⁵⁸ To a limited extent, the Inns made concessions to overseas students’ varying sumptuary, dietary, religious or cultural backgrounds. In the 1890s, the Inner Temple agreed to provide more satisfying vegetarian meals for Mohandas Gandhi than the bread, boiled potatoes and cabbage he had been resigned to while dining in hall. The societies permitted foreign students to substitute other ancient languages for the Latin examination. In 1909 the India Office thanked the Middle Temple for their ‘concession in regard to the wearing of Turbans’ rather than wigs for Sikh students called to the bar.⁵⁹

Even with these concessions, overseas students nevertheless faced difficulties at the resolutely English Inns. Gandhi recalled that he and other married students from the subcontinent passed themselves off as bachelors to hide the shame of ‘child marriages’.⁶⁰ While some law students, both English and colonial, claimed that all students intermingled, others maintained that English and colonial students kept apart. When asked by interviewers from the India Office if overseas students participated in the social life of the Inns via activities such as the Hardwicke Debating Society, B. S. Vaidya, an Indian law student at Lincoln’s Inn, replied that they did not. Their primary means of contact with English students was, he claimed, through dining, when they sat together ‘quite freely’. Even so, he admitted, though he went to court and dined in hall, he did not know any barristers ‘personally’.⁶¹

For their part, English memoirists rarely mentioned interactions – let alone friendships – with overseas students. Those who did described overseas students at the Inns as exotic others, not quite unwelcome but decidedly separate. Gilchrist Alexander, for example, noted the diversity of the Middle Temple, populated by ‘English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Colonial and others, with hundreds from India’s coral strands and Afric’s [sic] sunny fountains’. Alexander treated overseas members as a curiosity, recounting their ‘woolly heads’ in rows at the library as he might animals at the zoo.⁶² Few authors noted much socialization between Anglo-British and overseas students, barristers or residents. Some writers contended that while dining in hall men of all backgrounds ate with one another, but self-interest motivated these interactions. Diners in hall were divided into ‘messes’ of four people, and each mess allotted a certain portion of wine. As one author quipped, ‘for this reason a Mohammedan … is welcomed eagerly in any mess, for his unconsumed portion goes to augment the never sufficient allotment of the other members’.⁶³ As histories of legal London made clear, Anglo-British and international students did not dine together to share in cultural exchange. In fact, though foreign cuisine reigned supreme in the nearby restaurants of the West End, with the Inns’ menus of ‘soup or fish, a joint with potatoes and vegetables, apple or gooseberry tart, cheese, bread, and butter’, the cuisine and culture within them remained reassuringly English.⁶⁴

Histories of legal London also contrasted their enduring, all-male professional world with caricatures of new female white-collar employees elsewhere in London. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, women made inroads into the business sector as secretaries and stenographers, but they remained shut out of work at the Inns. Authors like C. P. Hawkes compared ‘the shingled “lady-stenographer” with her long French heels and her wide English simper’ with the ‘Barrister’s clerk, discreet, omniscient, and with an air of well-deserved responsibility’.⁶⁵ Hawkes set stereotypes of the frivolous New Woman against the contained body of the responsible, male clerk. He also reaffirmed existent professional relationships and power dynamics between barristers and barristers’ clerks. A good clerk knew how to win the best cases from solicitors for his barrister. In return he was paid a varying percentage (between 2.5 per cent and 5 per cent) of the barrister’s fees. Thus, the success or failure of a barrister and a barrister’s clerk was mutual. As a result, successive generations of barristers and clerks from the same families often had close ties and working relationships.⁶⁶ Men outside the bar might cultivate professional relationships with women, but histories of legal London celebrated barristers’ perpetuation of a time-tested, thoroughly masculine work environment.

Authors of these histories uniformly ignored the most significant change in women’s professional presence at the societies, the admission of women to the Inns of Court in 1919. Almost none of the histories of legal London written in the 1920s or 1930s acknowledged women barristers and law students at the Inns, despite women’s presence there being highly publicized in the press.⁶⁷ As challenges to both precedent and the Inns’ homosocial culture, women members disrupted the continuous traditions that authors intended their works to convey. Hawkes alone included an ambivalent section on ‘Portia’, in which he pondered whether women could adjust to the ‘masculine religion d’avocat of the English Bar’. For Hawkes, women’s integration into professional life was not impossible, but it required ‘time and mutual understanding’ to ‘solve the difficulties of comradeship of men and women on circuit and in chambers’. Tellingly, Hawkes concluded his section by paraphrasing The Merchant of Venice: ‘Portia may confidently trust that “The four winds blow in renownèd suitors [sic] ” (perhaps not only in the legal sense of the word) “in plenty to her chambers”’.⁶⁸ By invoking a Shakespearean female lawyer, Hawkes reminded readers of the connection between the bard and the Inns, and subtly indicated that women barristers were not entirely unprecedented. His parenthetical interjection about personal rather than professional suitors, however, conveyed his hope that women barristers would find husbands, presumably to carry them safely back to the domestic realm.

Histories of legal London ignored or denigrated women’s presence at the Inns, but letters and diaries reveal that many members of the societies took advantage of the increased facility of interacting with women in their personal if not their professional lives. The Inns of Court Rifle Corps, that brotherhood within a brotherhood, offered a variety of new heterosocial activities that encouraged interactions between men and women. When members of the mid-Victorian corps mentioned women at all, it was usually on those occasions when women materialized to admire men in uniform. In 1860, for example, William Grantham marvelled at his ‘good luck to win a lady’s ticket … to see [the] Volunteer Review’. Sir Paul Ogden Lawrence’s 1878–82 diary mentioned several occasions on which female friends came to Richmond to watch drills on ‘ladies day’. By the end of the century, however, the Volunteer Rifle Corps was sponsoring annual concerts, dinners, balls and, perhaps the most whimsical of heterosocial events, the yearly gymkhana. In addition to regular jumping competitions, this event included horse races forcing riders to dress in drag, collect potatoes or smoke cigars. Certain races required competitors to partner with a lady who would have to draw an animal or guess a whistled tune before the rider could finish the race.⁶⁹ Unlike the solemn volunteer review, at the gymkhana women could laugh at the antics of their male peers or even participate in the comedy themselves.

The most noticeable changes to the Inns of Court came during the Second World War; when members left for the armed forces, the societies had neither funds nor staff to serve dinners in hall and German bombs transformed the Inns from figurative to literal London ruins. After the war, however, the societies gradually re-established their resolutely English, masculine character. Like their Victorian predecessors, the post-war Inns embraced historicist architecture, replacing bombed-out Georgian brick with new brick, neo-Gothic facades with newer neo-Gothic facades. Dining rituals resumed, and English male barristers and law students – temporarily in the minority – became the majority once more.⁷⁰

To this day, women and minorities at the bar are under-represented, particularly among senior counsel and the judiciary.⁷¹ For example, women and men are admitted to the profession in almost equal numbers, but despite improved maternity leave policies and support for flexible working, women are not equally retained. In a 2016 survey by the Bar Standards Board, two out of every five women said they had suffered harassment and discrimination at the bar, though only one in five had reported it, for fear of negative career impact. The survey concluded that, rather than it being an issue with particular policies, it was ‘elements of the culture of the Bar and legal profession more generally’ that created a ‘barrier to the retention of women’.⁷² Some contemporary commentators argue that the gradual increase in the number of women and minority barristers will slowly equalize the imbalances in the profession. This assurance, however, ignores the centuries-old fraternal logics of legal culture that persist and organize professional practice.