This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
In my more melancholic moods, I occasionally think about Emma Hamlyn. I know very little about her, but as no-one else does either, it does not matter. Nor do I know what she looked like, for there are no likenesses of her that have survived.
Miss Hamlyn was from Torquay. Her father could trace their ancestry to an old Devon family in the Domesday Book, but his own father was a humble gardener. William Hamlyn worked hard, and by the time of his death was a solicitor and JP, when such things mattered a lot. He was a Methodist, much involved in church business.
As an only child, Emma lived comfortably and travelled widely in Europe, though we do not know where. After her father’s death, she retired to her cottage and disappeared from public view.
In 1939 she made her last will and testament; and she died in 1941, as the war raged. In life, she was described as an intelligent woman, an Edwardian and an autocrat. She read widely and was a fine pianist. If she is remembered today, it is because of her will. After the usual stipulations, she left what remained of her estate:
upon trust to apply the income of the Trust Fund in the furtherance by lectures or otherwise amongst the Common People of this Country of the knowledge of the Comparative Jurisprudence and the Ethnology of the Chief European countries including our own and the circumstances of the growth of such Jurisprudence to the intent that the Common People of our Country may realise the privileges which in law and custom they enjoy in comparison with other European Peoples and realising and appreciating such privileges may recognise the responsibilities and obligations attaching to them.
The wording was hers. Her solicitors thought it too vague for the intended trust to be good. But Miss Hamlyn resisted any change. It seemed that she had intended to endow the trust in her father’s memory. In 1948, the Chancery Division of the High Court approved a scheme for the trust, substituting references such as “this Country” to “United Kingdom”.
Denning found it easy to fulfil the terms of Miss Hamlyn’s will — his successors found it harder
In 1949, Mr Justice Denning, as he was, gave the first Hamlyn Lectures, and the printed version went through at least 13 impressions. The Lectures have been given annually since then and are amongst the most prestigious law lectures in the British Isles.
Denning found it easy to fulfil the terms of Miss Hamlyn’s will: his lectures were about “the greatest heritage of all — the heritage of freedom”. But his successors often had a harder time honouring the intent of their benefactress, often taking refuge in learned subjects of very limited interest to Miss Hamlyn or to the “Common People” of the United Kingdom. Some have sneered at her; most simply choose to ignore her.
The last Hamlyn lecturer who openly professed belief in what Miss Hamlyn preached was probably Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone, who gave his lectures more than four decades ago, in 1983. After a survey of the British system, he concluded that “Miss Hamlyn’s message is amply justified in both its parts. I do not find anything in the essential structure of our institutions or our law, or our sense of continuity with our past, which I should wish to alter.”
Would he still agree? Would Miss Hamlyn? Certainly, Hailsham did not believe it for much of his career, for when he invented the catchphrase “elective dictatorship” (in another lecture) he was calling for a codified constitution and a bill of rights, since Labour was in charge and could not be trusted. Once on the woolsack, he forgot these qualms.
It is in connection with civil liberties that British law is at its lowest ebb. Denning in 1949 could say without making an ugly face that “rights are no good unless you can enforce them; and it is in their enforcement that English law has shown its peculiar genius”. Can one say this today, with the police arresting people for off-colour remarks in private settings or for standing silently in public spaces?
The rest of British justice is not in much better shape, with nothing between the Rolls Building and half-collapsing crown courts in Brutalist machine-gun emplacements euphemistically known as “court centres”, and with ministers who can only praise the legal system as an export business whose job is to provide a venue for the world’s plutocrats to sue one another. For that matter, what would Miss Hamlyn make of the sub-postmasters’ affair?
If one can date the death of the legal world which Miss Hamlyn wanted to honour, I propose 1993. That was when Singapore stopped incorporating English laws into the laws of Singapore. The last British Act of Parliament that was thus incorporated was the Carriage of Goods by Sea Act 1992.
Before then, England could still be considered as the home of the common law in its rawest: now, it is simply another legal market.
