Through this other aspect of my professional life I have been privileged to meet an array of remarkable criminal lawyers. I found I had gathered a vastĪmount of material for a second book, not about just an individual but about a courtroom.

It was while researching Jeremy’s life that I began to read the fascinating literature of the practice of criminal law in the 20th century and to discover the excitement and drama of the criminal trials in that period. On a personal level it was a project which offered some form of antidote to the ephemerality of practice at the Bar, which had been nagging at me. I knew I had to memorialise both his life and his cases: otherwise when he died he might, like so many other great lawyers, have faded from the public memory. I had unlocked the scale of his achievements and the extraordinary life he had led. I am ashamed to admit it but I had not heard of him and was told simply that he had been a criminal barrister in the post-war period. Like many people, lawyers and non-lawyers alike, I was aware of the great criminal advocates of the past and had read Marjoribanks’ Life of Sir Edward Marshall Hall and some of the Penguin Famous Trials series.īut the key moment was when I was introduced to Jeremy Hutchinson, then aged 97. What drew a relatively young chancery silk to this interest in criminal trials and, in particular, Court Number One? And yet, amongst the general public, you are best known as the author of Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories and most recently, Court Number One: The Old Bailey Trials that Defined Modern Britain. DE Tom, you are a chancery and commercial silk, and editor and contributor to many publications in your field.

Court number one by thomas grant