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Barnhill, Jura. June 2015. (Thanks to the kindness of the Fletcher family).

Mabel who?

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Sometimes the personalities in a courtroom can cause particular interest.

Laurence Olivier's authorised biography, Olivier, by Terry Coleman, tells of the moment an individual who seemed to be one of the solicitors innocuously sitting at the side of the court - in a case where the Director of Public Prosecutions had taken an interest in an English Stage Company production at the Royal Court Theatre - rose to give evidence in the witness box. 

This wasn't a solicitor. Coleman tells of his astonishment that it was Laurence Olivier demonstrating his 'astounding ability to make himself invisible'.

Olivier and Yorick "I knew him Horatio"

"I knew him Horatio". Yet nobody recognized Olivier.

This may, possibly, have been during proceedings resulting from the Lord Chamberlain's antipathy towards John Osborne's 1965 play A Patriot for Me.

Before being stripped of the power of theatre censorship on September 26th 1968, the Lord Chamberlain's office had suffocated work by Ibsen and Arthur Miller amongst others. Even Becket had to wait a little longer for Godot while the Lord Chamberlain engaged in moral deliberation.

However it is another, largely invisible, personality who turned out to be the most famous litigant of all time on the law's stage.

She preferred to be known as Mabel Hannah.

Her remarkable role in one of the world's most influential cases is considered with fresh eyes in the Vancouver Bar Association's journal, The Advocate and the insight is flagged anew by the excellent website of the Scottish Council of Law Reporting. 

What is particularly interesting for anyone with an interest in Donoghue v Stevenson (because Mabel Hannah was the preferred name of May Donoghue) is that the SCLR provide a photograph of Mabel - the most famous litigant of all time:

http://www.scottishlawreports.org.uk/resources/dvs/most-famous-litigant.html


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