Blazing a Trail with the Lethbridge Gloves

Nemone Lethbridge, now in her 90s, smashed the glass ceiling to become a criminal barrister in the 1950s. One of very few female barristers working at the time, she encountered misogyny and was one of the trailblazers for women working in the legal profession who followed behind her.

Her inspirational impact is honoured every year in a unique ceremony initiated by LEH alumna Katie Gollop. King’s Counsel barrister Katie has specialised in clinical negligence actions for over 20 years. Many of her serious medical treatment cases in the Court of Protection attract national news coverage, such as the Shipman public inquiry, the Infected Blood Inquiry and the Charlie Gard court case against Great Ormond Street Hospital. Katie was appointed as a deputy high court judge in 2019.

The anecdote which caught her imagination was recounted by Nemone in her conversation with Lauren Laverne. She told her: “Katie Gollop is a wonderful girl, she’s King's Counsel now, and she was very amused when I told her a story about when I was a pupil barrister.”

Nemone’s pupil master was Lieutenant Colonel Mervyn Griffith-Jones, part of the British prosecuting counsel at the Nuremberg Trials. “He was a very alarming man,” recalled Nemone. “He took me on very reluctantly and was very strict about how I dressed and how I behaved, and I can see him cringe with embarrassment when he took me to the Old Bailey,

“One day I had a nice pair of pink kid gloves on, which my mother had given me. He looked down at my hands and said, ‘Pink gloves, Nemone? At the Old Bailey!’ I had to take them off - only white or black!

“Katie was very amused by this silly story, and later on she got a pair of beautiful white kid gloves, now known as ‘the Lethbridge gloves’. Every year they have a raffle for the new women ‘silks’ [King’s Counsel] and I’m allowed to pick the recipient of the gloves from a barrister’s wig. The new batch of women silks are very impressive, very forward-thinking.”