Women in the law

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2020

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Trailblazing British lawyer Rose Heilbron was the first female judge at London's famous Old Bailey criminal court. Her daughter Hillary Heilbron QC remembers how hard she had to fight to be accepted. Dana Denis-Smith, founder of the First 100 Years Project about the history of women in law, discusses women's participation in legal professions around the world.

Plus, being a Muslim in China, the Swedish warship restored after 300 years, the assassination that aimed to revenge the Amritsar massacre, and Pando, the biggest living organism in the world by mass.

Photo: English KC (King's Counsel) Rose Heilbron (1914 - 2005) arrives at the House of Lords in London, for the traditional champagne breakfast hosted by the Lord Chancellor at the start of the Michaelmas Term for the law courts, 2nd October 1950. (Credit William Vanderson/Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,
0:05.3	where we continue to delve into the past to bring you enlightening and sometimes uplifting stories
0:10.1	from times gone by as the whole world struggles to cope with our current pandemic worries.
0:16.0	This week, the moment Sweden's maritime history emerged in all its glory.
0:20.0	Today we've got royalty, dignitaries, a Royal Naval band, helicopters, the nation's eye concentrated
0:26.5	upon these few square yards of murky harbour water.
0:29.9	Plus from 1940, an assassination in London seen by many Sikhs as an act of revenge for the
0:35.2	1919 Amritso Massacre, and from the 1990s how the world's most massive organism was identified.
0:42.4	I was astonished.
0:43.5	It was so big and so large that it had a paved road that goes through it.
0:48.2	It had a picnic campground inside it.
0:50.9	But what was it?
0:51.9	Find out later in the podcast. We begin this week with the story of a
0:56.6	woman who was a remarkable trailblazer in what had been until she got involved the very
1:01.8	male world of the law. In the 1950s and 60s, Rose
1:06.4	Heilbron became internationally celebrated as the leading female courtroom lawyer in Britain.
1:12.4	Later, she was the first woman judge to sit in the
1:15.2	most famous criminal court in the world, London's old Bailey. Claire Bowes has been
1:19.8	speaking to her daughter and biographer Hillary Heilbron.
1:23.6	The press loved her and in all the press cuttings that I've looked at, I never found a single
1:28.9	word which was other than praise worthy, the sort of press coverage that celebrities today would die for.
1:36.3	Hillary Halbrin was just a little girl when her mother was hitting the headlines.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.