Anthony Babington: Disabled British Judge, Historian & Campaigner, 1920 - 2004

Born in 1920, Anthony (Tony) Patrick Babington suffered severe injuries in battle in 1944. He lived a further 60 years pursuing, against considerable odds, a career as barrister, judge, writer and social campaigner with significant paralysis and speech impediment, dyslexia and dysgraphia, also tuberculosis, recurrent neurological problems and a persistent sense of humour. One of the more remarkable disabled British men of his century, he embodied the heroic and the ordinary, the convivial and the lonely, the participant in powerful insider groups and the neighbour of the proverbial Man on the Clapham Omnibus.

Young Babington belonged to a well-off Anglo-Irish family, but his father was ruined financially and died in 1930 leaving the mother to raise her children on slender means. Social divisions were sharp in England of the 1930s. The boy lost his privileged lifestyle and tasted the lives of those whom he had been taught to regard as inferiors. As an old man, he recalled adjusting easily to frugality and liking most of the boys at the ordinary school he now attended. He joined the Officers Training Corps, and on leaving school worked in a press agency, planning to study law later.

When war broke out in 1939, the OTC experience started Babington on a rapid rise from corporal to company commander, followed by a free fall to near-corpse level. In September 1944 the troops he commanded had pressed across newly liberated Belgium, then moved toward Arnhem against strong German defence. A shell blast caught him, resulting in complete paralysis - "My brain seemed now to have lost all contact with my body". Stretchered back to a first aid post, he heard a sergeant question whether they should use the sole working ambulance to take this dying man to the casualty clearing station. They trucked Babington to Brussels and he was flown to England.

In hospital, Babington was slowly coaxed back to life, some mobility, and the beginnings of speech. His fellow wrecks were pessimistic over prospects, believing that when the war ended, "severely disabled ex-servicemen would be brushed aside and consigned to oblivion," and they would "always be regarded as freakish and apart." Babington later reflected that this had not been his experience. "I soon discovered that the more you can forget your own disabilities, the more they will be forgotten by those around you." Through sheer cussedness and lack of any other plan, Babington persisted with his original aim to become a barrister. This required the means and capacity, over several years, to study and pass Bar exams, serve an apprenticeship with a senior barrister, then persuade a group of barristers to offer him a place in chambers where he could try to build up a practice, in a period when there was a large backlog of new entrants competing to enter the profession.

Learned people advised, quite accurately, that his neurological injuries would be aggravated by serious study; his damaged speech would never meet a barrister's need of ready rhetoric; even fit, qualified and established barristers often struggled to make a living. Perhaps some also perceived, as Babington did later, that he was too straight a man to perfect the art of arguing convincingly for cases he did not really believe in. A few voices told him to follow his dream. Others, while explaining why it would not work, still helped him over obstacles. Slowly he got the first requirements into place -- and promptly came down with TB and another long stay in hospital.

Through these vicissitudes, Babington seems to have been a keen observer of his fellow humans, and a connoisseur of the charms of young women among them. He did not pretend to like everyone he met; but his many anecdotes, even about the unlovable, still leave them some dignity. Amidst the law tomes and depressingly recurrent hospitalisations, Babington was acquiring a quality indispensable for a competent judge: the knack of understanding the huge variety of other people's lives and business, and entering imaginatively into the everyday situations that had legal outcomes. During months of waiting for a medical clearance, or waiting for legal work to come in, he turned his sole functional hand to writing, and supplemented his meagre War Disability pension. His Christian faith, to which he attributed his lifelong fortitude, could accommodate robust popular theology, such as "God helps those who help themselves"!

He qualified, he found a niche in chambers, it all disintegrated again with a long illness, he came back and picked up his career once more, prosecuted cases for the Post Office, and finally in 1964 landed a job suiting his interests and abilities, as a stipendiary magistrate at Bow Street, London's busiest court. The Swinging Sixties were in full boom, and Babington was soon in the public eye of a storm when he had to decide a moral issue of national importance: whether "a female who fully exposed her breasts in a public place was committing a criminal offence". It was a long hot summer, and newspapers reported widespread sightings.

Three flagrant cases were ready for trial, and the Chief Magistrate chose Babington for this interesting task. "'Whatever you decide,' he said, 'a whole lot of people are going to be furious with you. But you're the youngest magistrate on the Bench at the moment, and you should be more "with it" than the rest of us. Apart from that, you'll have longer to live down your unpopularity.'" With the eyes of Britain upon him, and his own focused on the offending items, Babington scratched his wig and found it not conducive to public order for the current conventions of decency to be so openly flouted. Soon afterward, the contentious flaunting of bosoms ceased; but as Babington noted with characteristic irony, that could have been because the weather turned cold. He must have been wryly amused, after another forty years in which the western world seemed to reach saturation with images of female flesh, to learn that a real-life flash of breast on American tv could still raise an uproar.

Babington continued to produce books and articles on law, war and history, from personal experience and research, throughout his forty years of legal service and fifteen of active retirement. His energetic membership and officership of PEN, the authors' organisation, gave many occasions for international jaunts. As a Circuit Judge from 1972-1987, he had to steer carefully around the restrictions on serving judges entering controversial public debates. He found these rules irksome, partly because his concept of being a judge required him to be better informed than most on the outcomes of 'justice'. To have "a better understanding of the nature of the sentences I was passing", Babington got a probation officer to arrange for him to make regular visits to prisons, borstals and detention centres, where he could speak to governors, staff and inmates about their actual experiences of detention, bail, life 'inside', and the effects of these practices.

Reflecting on the realities of serving in live battle conditions, Babington was convinced that the Armed Forces had often been brutal, stupid and unjust in their treatment of men traumatised by continuous shelling. As a distinguished combatant, wounded, patched up, fighting again, being nearly destroyed, and honoured with the French Croix de Guerre, his compassionate view carried more credibility than that of people whose opinions were purely theoretical. His For the Sake of Example in 1983 criticised the Army's World War I policy of executing men convicted of desertion or cowardice. In 1997 his Shell-Shock reviewed in detail the changing official views of war trauma. Babington continued into the new millennium to campaign with others for an official gesture of rethinking, in the form of a retrospective pardon for men convicted by clearly prejudiced and incompetent courts.

Considering the disabilities and infirmities he had overcome or ignored in himself, a lesser man might have been indifferent to the indignity inflicted on those long dead who had displayed less mental fortitude. But Anthony Babington knew that the injustice damaged both those who suffered it, and those who meted it out. He had seen and understood both sides.

Sources

Babington A. (1983) For The Sake of Example: capital courts-martial 1914-1920 . London: Cooper.

Babington A. (1997) Shell-Shock: a history of the changing attitude to war neurosis . London: Cooper.

Babington A. (2000) An Uncertain Voyage . Large Print Edn (2003). Leicester: Ulverscroft.

Babington A. (2000, Nov. 30) Letters to the Editor. The Times , London.

Fryer J. (2004, May 19) Anthony Babington. The Guardian , London.

Obituaries. (2004, May 17) Anthony Babington. The Times , London.

PEN (tributes from UK members) (2004) His Honour Judge Anthony Babington. www.englishpen.org/membership/hishonourjudgeanthonybabington/ accessed on 19 May 2004.

Who's Who 2001 . London: Black.

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