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.

My eyes were opened to so many different areas of the law, including administrative law, conflict of laws, employment law and the law of intellectual property. With some hard work, I got a good upper second degree which was enough to qualify for the Bar Vocational Course. Construction law really didn’t feature in my thinking until I applied for pupillage when it sounded like an interesting thing to do. How right I was. Keating was recommended to me as a good set to try for, so I applied and made it through the selection process.

My student time in Manchester has stood me in good stead and I am still very fond of the place. About ten years ago, I was appointed to decide a defects dispute at a hearing taking place in a brand new, high-rise office block in Manchester City Centre. Nearby, the grotty backstreet pub where I used to drink in my Uni days had gone. We had both moved on.

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.

I loved watching Crown Court and General Hospital on television but not as career research.  There were neither lawyers nor medics in my family and we didn’t know any.  Nobody in the family had even been to university. So, imagine my surprise when I was 13 and my father returned home from a parents evening to announce that he had told my Maths teacher I was going to be a judge!  It was deeply embarrassing for me and I still have no idea where he got such an idea from.  It was it never mentioned again.  I wish my father had lived long enough to see me sworn in 30 years later as a part-time judge (Recorder) and that he could have come to the Crown Court to see me presiding over jury trials.

Fast forward 3 years and my 16-year-old self had a boyfriend studying a law degree. I wondered if law might be interesting, so I applied to do my work experience in a local solicitors office.  There I was welcomed and encouraged by the kindest of people and I immediately decided to be a divorce solicitor.

I studied law in London and, for reasons I cannot identify, I made a sudden decision in my third year to be a barrister.  In those days there were no pupillage awards and my parents couldn’t have afforded to support me through pupillage.  But they always gave me moral support and never allowed me to think anything was beyond my reach.  I obtained a grant to go to Bar School and was lucky enough to be awarded a Middle Temple scholarship.

I will never cease to be grateful to Keating Chambers, who decided in that year (together with Falcon Chambers) to offer the first ever pupillage awards.  I was successful in my application so received £750 to see me through my first 6 months of pupillage. That paid my rent.  I made my own black suits and white shirts with detachable collars (the needlework O’Level paid off!), I lectured on Tuesday evenings and I worked at Selfridges on Saturdays selling maternity clothes.  Without my pupillage award I could never have come to the Bar.

In 1983 I became a tenant at Keating Chambers, the first woman amongst all of the men.  It felt like a welcoming second family then, and it still does now.

I first decided I wanted to become a barrister after binge-watching DVDs of John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey aged 15 (note: I recommend doing more research than this). There was, however, a problem – or, at least, what I thought was a problem at the time. The problem was that I would not fit in. I am not from an affluent background (cf. everyone in Rumpole); I was socially awkward; I was going to a local state school; and there were certainly no lawyers in my family. When I told the school careers advisor about my plan, she first assumed that I was joking and then told me – firmly – that I needed to be more realistic.

Things might well have ended there, but luckily for me I had a school friend whose dad was a barrister, who offered to take me to court on work experience. I watched him cross-examine a witness for an afternoon, and distinctly remember the moment at which it became impossible for me to imagine doing anything else myself. I decided to ignore the careers advisor and went on to read Law at the University of Warwick.

When I was at Warwick there was precious little help for aspiring barristers (happily I understand this has now changed for the better). I do not recall meeting a single alumnus who had gone on to be a commercial barrister. There were no connections. I do, however, remember a well-known Chambers (who shall remain nameless) giving a presentation to our Law Society in which they made clear that they were only really interested in Oxbridge graduates.

I applied for pupillage whilst doing my finals. Despite wanting to do contract law, Keating was the only commercial set I had dared apply to, and the offer came as a complete – but wonderful – surprise. Even now, years later, I still sometimes find myself wondering if it is all an elaborate hoax.

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.

However, despite these obvious advantages, the Commercial Bar was still an at times hostile place. I have had experiences which I am sure are common to Black barristers including the old chestnut of being mistaken for the defendant when you go to court or the casually racist comment which I was expected to ignore.

I have been told that I am the first ethnic minority member of TecBar (the specialist Bar Association for barristers practicing in construction).  From my experience I have no reason to doubt that this is true and the sad fact is that today, more than 20 years later, the numbers have not improved dramatically at the Commercial Bar. In cases in court in the UK it is almost always the rule that I am the only Black face in the room apart from the occasional court staff. In international arbitration things are a little different particularly when the arbitration is in Africa or if you have African parties. One deceptively small but practically significant improvement has been the advent of photographs on chamber’s website. My name is not immediately placeable unless you are familiar with Nigerian names so in the early days I had to deal with the quickly suppressed shock of some clients when meeting me for the first time.

All of this may sound negative and discouraging but I am hopeful that things are changing.  It was definitely noteworthy that in a recent international arbitration in the Middle East in addition to my representing one of the parties, one of the panel members was Black as was one of the expert witnesses.  The Bar, and in particular the Commercial Bar, appears to have woken up to the problem that it has with diversity. There are a number of very encouraging initiatives which are being pursued to increase the number of Black practitioners at the Commercial Bar. It remains a tough and competitive process but, if you have the skills, the fact that you are Black or any other ethnic minority should not stop you trying.

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 was state educated for all but two years of my education.  I thought about the Bar at school, but it seemed an insurmountable target at the time.  After school I did a degree in Geography at Manchester University.  I then went to work for a housing association building and refurbishing homes for people in housing need.  While I was working, I did a part time Masters in Public and Social Administration at Brunel University.  We enjoyed our fair share of construction litigation at the housing association and we instructed Richard Fernyhough QC and Rosemary Jackson (as she then was), both Keating barristers.  This renewed my early interest in the Bar and I decided that I would like to try.  Encouraged by my mother, I left work, took out what seemed a huge professional studies loan and did the conversion course at Middlesex Polytechnic.  I wanted to do construction law and after Bar School and pupillage I was taken on at Serjeants’ Inn Chambers.  That was a great place for my early years at the Bar, full of friendship, fun and very hard work.  I spent 16 very happy years with good friends and colleagues.  However, the team doing construction there gradually diminished and in 2008 I moved to Keating, where I practice in public procurement and construction work.

I have been able to combine my work at the Bar with being the mother of two children (for part of the time as a single mother) with sympathetic clerking and supportive clients, both of which Keating has in abundance.  When I came to the Bar nearly thirty years ago, I felt at a disadvantage because I was not Oxbridge educated and I had done the conversion course and not a law degree.  It turns out that I managed without Oxbridge and I value my rather tortuous route to the Bar, and its setbacks.  The varied work that I did at the start of my practice broadened my experience and horizons and made me realise how very lucky we are at Keating.

Most of us suffer from imposter syndrome  – when my great friend and mentor at the Bar, the highly respected and extremely able Philip Naughton QC retired, he said at the dinner we held for him “I did it!  I fooled them all right to the end.”  Lots of us also suffer from the feeling that “we won’t fit in;” but the Bar is full of people from all sorts of backgrounds.  What counts is how good you are.  It has always been a tough profession to get into and to get started in, but a very able senior practitioner said to me when I started that if you really want it, and are prepared to work very hard and to never give up, you will get there.  And he was right.

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.

My first job out of university was as a teacher. There were many aspects of teaching that I enjoyed, but ultimately I decided it wasn’t the right fit for me in the long-term. It was only at that stage, when I began researching a wide range of alternative careers, that I happened upon the idea of becoming a barrister.

As I began my conversion to law, I felt instantly behind many of my peers who seemed to have always known that they wanted to be lawyers. The only decision I had made up to that point was that I wanted to be a barrister. I hadn’t decided on an area of law or which sets to apply to, nor had I obtained any relevant experience. It seemed to me that I was the only one who didn’t know exactly where I was headed and exactly how I was going to get there.

In addition to this, I hadn’t readied myself for the rejection that is part and parcel of applying for pupillage. Each unsuccessful application felt like confirmation that I had made a huge mistake in chasing a career that was clearly not for me. But then the offer from Keating came and with it the opportunity to pursue a career that appealed to me more than any other. So far it has not disappointed.

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.

Having tried and failed to get into Oxbridge, I went to Manchester to do English Lit.  I had my first curry and my first kebab.  I went to Amsterdam for my second year on an ERASMUS exchange (with a scholarship).  In my final year, I had to work full time in a pub despite having a grant.  I got a student loan and then another loan.

When I graduated, my ideas about what I might do for a living hadn’t really moved on.  I took a year out, did a series of awful jobs (including packing sweetcorn on a factory line) to save up money, then went backpacking round the world for 8 months.  When I got back, I hadn’t written the Great Travel Book and I really did need to decide what to do.  My parents somewhat desperately remembered that they used to live next door to a barrister 25 years before, and asked him to let me go in to his old chambers (he’d retired) for a few days.  He fixed this up; I went in; it was a family law chambers which was not for me, but there and then I could instantly see that being a barrister was very cool and decided on the spot that was what I would do.

I then did the PgDL and the Bar Course (two more loans and another scholarship) and was lucky enough to get pupillage first time round, at a general civil and commercial chambers.  I moved to Keating after about 3 years and am still loving every day of it.

The commercial Bar remains male dominated.  I am still often the only woman in the room, especially at my level of seniority.  However, things are improving.  Many more women are applying and the number of women at the commercial Bar and in chambers is gradually increasing.  A couple of years ago, I did a hearing in front of a female High Court Judge (now on the Court of Appeal), my opponent was a woman and so was my instructing solicitor.  Chambers is supportive and friendly; the number of our female silks and the fact that we can boast two female High Court Judges whose barrister career was at Keating is testament to that.

I also want to mention one other thing which may resonate with some candidates considering applying.  Just after I moved to Keating, a family member became seriously mentally ill.  I had to rush off without notice at intervals over the next 10 years.  Every time, the clerks and fellow barristers on my cases were entirely supportive.  I will be forever grateful to Keating for that support.