By Dr Caroline Derry10 May 2021
On 25 May 1921, The Times published the bar final examination results. For the first time, the list of successful candidates included a woman: Olive Catherine Clapham. The newspaper marked this milestone with a short article highlighting her achievement, headlined ‘The First Woman Barrister’.
Dr Caroline Derry
That headline was of course inaccurate. The exams were only one step towards qualification, though an important one. Clapham still had to keep six more dining terms at her Inn of Court, Middle Temple (pictured), before she could be called to the bar, which would take at least 18 months. However, The Times was not alone in being carried away. The Law Coach, a publication for law students, whose editor Edgar Hammond had tutored Clapham for the exams, pointed out The Times’ error but added one of its own: Clapham ‘will no doubt be the first woman barrister in the course of a week or two’.
Illustration of burnt ruins of the US Capitol after the Conflagration of the 24th August, 1814. [Source: Library of Congress]
In the weeks following the attack on the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021, as the nation tried to make sense of the insurrection that it had just collectively witnessed, experts drew comparisons between this modern mutiny and the small yet significant list of past attacks on the Capitol. The clearest comparison was that of the burning of Washington, DC by British troops in 1814. Beyond the symbolic similarities of the attacks on the seat of American democracy, perhaps the most stark parallel between the two events was the lack of proper preparations made to defend the District.
CBS News
The 1814 burning of Washington, D.C.
Two centuries ago this past week, smoke and ash lingered in the air of what remained of our nation s capital. Mo Rocca takes us back to that fiery night:
Two hundred years ago this month, 4,000 British soldiers lay siege to Washington, D.C., and set fire to the U.S. Capitol and the White House.
A drawing of the White House after the fire of 1814. Library of Congress
And the burn marks on the White House walls are still there. We now have evidence of the char marks, the scorching that would have happened when flames were drawn out through open windows and doors and licked up around the tops of the stone, said William Allman, the White House curator.
Washington is Burning
Graeme Garrard describes the events that led to the torching of the new US capital by British troops in August 1814 and considers the impact of the ‘greatest disgrace ever dealt to American arms’ on the US, Britain and Canada.
When James Madison, fourth President of the United States and ‘Father of the Constitution’, signed a declaration of war against Britain on June 18th, 1812 he could scarcely have imagined that two years later he would be fleeing from his burning capital before the invading enemy. At the start of the ‘War of 1812’, the first the US had declared on another nation, his friend and predecessor as president, Thomas Jefferson, had smugly declared that the war against Britain’s colonies in what is today Canada would be ‘a mere matter of marching’. As Madison abandoned the White House on horseback with his entourage and raced towards Virginia on August 24th, 1814 he stopped and looked back as he beheld the ruined city of