The Temple.
Ah, yes, the Temple.
The Temple had seen rogues, geniuses, drunkards, wigs, scandals, bankrupts, future lord chancellors and enough legal pomposity to float a battleship. But on May 10th, 1922, it saw something it had never seen before.
A woman being called to the English bar.
So, yes, London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks. Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
This day in London history time.
And today, May 10th, belongs to Ivy Williams.
A name most Londoners have never heard.
Which is a shame.
Because what happened to her in London on this day in 1922 was quietly revolutionary.
Not loud revolutionary.
No mobs.
No broken windows.
No barricades.
Just a woman in the Inner Temple calmly walking through a door that had been locked for centuries.
And once that door opened, it never shut again.
Now there’s a lovely London setting to all this.
The Inns of Court.
The Temple.
That little hidden kingdom between Fleet Street and the Thames.
One of the great secret landscapes of London.
You step through the gatehouse and suddenly the city changes temperature. The traffic noise falls away. The streets narrow. The brick darkens.
The windows become Georgian. Barristers in wigs hurry along clutching papers. Church bells drift across from Temple Church. There are courtyards and fountains and old chambers and libraries and plane trees and silence.
London becomes old law.
And for centuries it was entirely male territory.
The law, after all, had a rather dim view of women becoming lawyers.
One legal authority in the nineteenth century more or less argued that women entering the profession would lead to the collapse of civilisation, or words to that effect.
Which is always a useful reminder that every age thinks its prejudices are rational.
Ivy Williams was having none of it.
She was brilliantly educated. Languages, law, European travel, Oxford, London University. She studied jurisprudence before many men in the legal world could probably spell the word.
And yet for years she hit wall after wall after wall.
Oxford wouldn’t even properly matriculate women when she first studied there. Imagine that. You can do the work, sit the examinations, prove the scholarship, but officially you’re not quite a full member of the university.
File this under: things it’s rather fun to know. Women at Oxford were only finally allowed to matriculate and receive full degrees in 1920.
Nineteen twenty.
People hear “Oxford” and think medieval traditions and dreaming spires and ancient wisdom. Quite right too. But sometimes ancient wisdom took an awfully long time to wise up.
And here’s a wonderful Inns of Court image for you. Before women were even officially admitted to the Inns, Ivy Williams was already unofficially reading in chambers at Lincoln’s Inn.
She was there before she was officially supposed to be there.
London often changes that way. Reality arrives before the rulebook catches up.
Then came the breakthrough.
In December 1919 the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act became law. Women could finally enter the Inns of Court.
And wonderfully, the very first woman admitted to one of the Inns had joined only weeks earlier, on Christmas Eve 1919.
Talk about a legal stocking filler.
Ivy Williams joined the Inner Temple on January 26th, 1920.
Picture the scene.
A woman of forty-two walking into the Temple. Past all those portraits. All those dead judges glaring down from the walls. All those centuries of masculine certainty.
And saying, in effect: right then, here I am.
And here’s another delicious London layer.
The man who sponsored her application was Sir John Simon, one of the great legal and political figures of the age.
And the man who called her to the bar on May 10th, 1922?
Henry Dickens.
Yes indeed. Henry Fielding Dickens. Charles Dickens’s son.
Which somehow feels exactly right.
Because Dickens’s London hovers all around the Temple.
Temple Bar.
Tellson’s Bank in A Tale of Two Cities, modelled on Child & Co at Temple Bar, one of the oldest banks in London. Nell Gwyn banked there. So did the Duke of Marlborough.
And lurking nearby in Dickens’s London is Jerry Cruncher, the wonderfully named odd-job man from A Tale of Two Cities who works outside Tellson’s by day and robs graves by night. A resurrectionist. A body snatcher. He lives in Hanging Sword Alley, just east of the Temple.
And Jerry, it’s worth remembering, belongs to that old rough world of bullying male authority and domestic intimidation that Dickens knew so well. Poor Mrs Cruncher gets terrorised for daring to pray against her husband’s interests. Jerry calls it ‘flopping.’
Which is funny.
Until you stop and think about it.
And it somehow makes it all the more striking that Dickens’s own son should be the man formally welcoming the first woman into the English bar.
You can almost feel old Victorian London shifting on its foundations.
And Ivy Williams did not merely scrape through.
Oh no.
She passed with first-class honours.
So impressively, in fact, that she was excused some of the compulsory qualifying dinners which sped up her call to the bar ahead of dozens of other aspiring women candidates.
File this under: things it’s rather fun to know. Her call to the English bar was reported in the New York Times.
The story crossed the Atlantic.
This was world news.
And when Ivy Williams was finally called to the bar on May 10th, 1922, she said it was “the dream of my life.”
Which tells you something.
She hadn’t drifted into history accidentally. She had been pushing against this locked door for years.
There had been plenty of sneering along the way.
One legal journal had earlier dismissed the whole idea of women at the bar as “a futile attempt of a persistent lady.”
A persistent lady.
Translation: a woman refusing to know her place.
And Ivy Williams had a splendid answer to that sort of thinking years earlier. She basically warned the profession that if women were not admitted, they’d create their own parallel legal world outside it.
Very calm.
Very measured.
And faintly terrifying.
Now here’s the interesting wrinkle.
Although Ivy Williams became the first woman called to the English bar, she never really practised as a barrister in court.
Which disappointed some people who’d expected a dramatic courtroom pioneer.
But that slightly misses the point.
Opening the gate matters.
Sometimes history turns not on the person who storms the fortress, but on the person who first quietly walks through the gate and proves it can be done.
And Ivy Williams did something else that feels rather admirable.
She became a teacher.
A mentor.
A scholar.
A supporter of younger women entering the profession.
Indeed, she became the first woman ever to teach law at an English university.
That’s a remarkable thing to have quietly sitting on your CV.
She endowed scholarships.
Encouraged students.
Helped create the future she herself had once been denied.
And there’s another deeply attractive thing about her.
She said one reason she wanted to become a barrister was so she could offer free legal advice to poor people.
Very Dickensian, that.
Very London.
And in later life there’s another extraordinary chapter.
Her eyesight began to fail.
So what did she do?
She taught herself Braille.
Not only taught herself Braille. She then turned the experience into teaching materials for blind readers and spent years helping other people learn it.
That’s remarkable.
And rather moving.
Because by then she had already conquered one closed world and opened it for others.
Now she was doing it again.
One of the reasons for tuning into London Calling, by the way, is precisely stories like this.
Because otherwise Ivy Williams might remain invisible.
And she shouldn’t be invisible.
Not in London.
Not in the Temple.
Not in the history of the law.
Today, women barristers are so woven into British legal life that it can be hard to remember how recent all this is.
One century.
That’s all.
Just over a hundred years since a woman first walked into the Inner Temple and was formally told: yes, you belong here too.
And London changed a little that day.
Quietly.
Permanently.
May 10th. In London. A day to remember.
See you tomorrow.