Pupillage Experience

For me, Oxbridge was never on the cards as I wasn’t going to get the grades. I had always had it in mind to try to become a barrister and so it never entered my thinking that not going to Oxbridge might stop me doing that. So, instead, I went to Manchester Uni, a great city and a fantastic place to study law in the early 80s. Little did I know that my contract and family law tutor would later become Dame Brenda Hale, with another of our lecturers, Andrew Burrows, also now sitting as a Judge of the Supreme Court.

I passed my eleven plus but didn’t want to go to the local girls’ High School as I couldn’t see how single-sex education could prepare me for a world in which men and women needed to be comfortable together and understand each other.  So I went to the co-ed Technical High School and took needlework, cookery and jewellery-making lessons alongside the traditional academic subjects.  I asked to take Latin but there was no provision for the only pupil who was interested in it.

In one sense I had an entirely conventional route to the Commercial Bar. I went to private school and Oxbridge. The difference is that I did this while Black and over 20 years ago. My education helped as did the fact that my mother was a barrister and my father was judge both practising in Nigeria. They had been called to the English Bar and I had many close relatives who were also barristers.

My mother was an Irish immigrant who came to this country to train as a nurse at the same time as the people who came on the Windrush and experienced the “no blacks no dogs no Irish” signs on the boarding house doors.  When I was young (and for a long time after) it was not very comfortable to be the child of an Irish immigrant and I grew up feeling like an outsider.

I consider myself very fortunate to be embarking upon a career at the Bar as it is a world that could have very easily passed me by. Growing up, I didn’t know that such a job existed. I went to a comprehensive school and there were no lawyers in my family. As an undergraduate, I studied philosophy at the University of Manchester and on the odd occasion when friends and I would discuss the dreaded subject of getting a job, the Bar was not on any of our horizons.

When I was growing up I was going to write a Great Novel (or it could’ve been a Great Poem) which would cause World Peace to break out, or possibly I was going to become a campaigning journalist who would cause World Peace to break out, or possibly I was going to travel the world and come back and write a Great Travel Book which would also…  Anyway, these were not recognised ambitions.  I went to a fairly rough state comprehensive and the careers advice consisted of a list of leaflets you could send off for on various jobs (this was before the internet).  I sent off for the one for Vending Machine Attendant, just to give my parents a conniption fit.  I’ve no idea whether barrister was even on the list.  At any rate, my parents were teachers, I didn’t know any lawyers at all, and none of my friends’ parents were lawyers either.