When Harry met silly: the case against wigs in court

Harry Mount says that the headgear worn by banisters is nothing more than fancy dress rightly scorned by the public but adored by lawyers as a symbol of grandeur Ive don't take stagecoaches to Basingstoke any more — looking at an old 1830 London-Exeter stagecoach schedule, it took six and a quarter hours to get there. The train takes 40 minutes today. There isn't much point in holding on to slave plantations in Jamaica either, ever since Wilberforce forced a ban on slavery. And no one uses laudanum much for colds these days. Why, then, do lawyers persist in keeping up another ludicrous, outdated 18th-century practice — wearing wigs?

If the public had anything to do with it, they'd get rid of them tomorrow. This week, it emerged, in a survey released by the new Ministry of Justice, that 60 per cent of the public thought court dress was anachronistic, intimidating and antiquated. Lawyers and judges think differently — 70 per cent of them want to go on sticking thick mats of greasy horsehair on their heads, even on the hottest summer days.

Some time over the next few months the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, will announce whether or not lawyers will continue with the practice. He's already accepted that judges hearing civil cases in the High Court and the Court of Appeal will stop wearing wigs from 1 October. High Court judges have five different outfits to choose from — dating back to Edward III — depending on the type of case and the time of year, and they get a £15,000 allowance to pay for them.

Barristers don't get any sort of allowance for their wigs but they still remain attached to the horrid old things, thinking that these absurd anachronisms confer some kind of superiority and solemnity.

They used to defend wigs on the grounds that the public liked them. Wigs made all the lawyers look the same, so the argument went — as a result juries didn't favour the lawyer with the pretty cherubic curls or whatever. Why didn't they suggest putting on a mask while they were at it? And, come to think of it, why not make the defendant in the dock wear one too?

The pro-wig lobby are now left to depend on another dud argument — wearing a wig supposedly means that lawyers and judges aren't identifiable by crooks who want to beat them up. That's always struck me as an idiotic line. Who wouldn't recognise the late George Carman or John Mortimer, wig on or off?

Even if you do find it a bit difficult to recognise a lawyer once they take their wig off, it's the work of a second to track down any particular barrister you want. What other profession lists the names of the occupants of its buildings on large blackand-white handpainted boards next to the front door? And it's not as if barristers are secretive figures in the first place — how many shrinking violets actively choose to spend their life making speeches in public?

I'm not a natural revolutionary; I'm normally pretty conservative. But when it comes to wigs, I'm with the modernisers. Remove the wigs and you will do nothing to affect the seriousness of court proceedings. You will, though, get rid of one of the props supporting the high opinion of lofty otherworldliness that lots of barristers have of themselves.

I wore a wig on a few occasions in my brief career as a libel barrister, and the exercise was pointless, cumbersome and expensive. A full-bottomed judge's wig costs £2,000. For normal court hearings, judges wear a bob-wig, or bench wig, costing about £800. Even the cheapest junior barrister's wig, made of synthetic horsehair, bought off the internet, goes for £299. This one — the one I wore — is called a tie-wig, with a frizzed crown, rows of curls at the side and the back, and a queue, or tail, curling over the collar. The design is from 1822, when Humphrey Ravenscroft (of Ede & Ravenscroft, still masters of the wig trade in Chancery Lane) invented a legal wig made of whitish-grey horsehair that did not need frizzing or curling, perfuming or powdering. Before then, human hair had been used, which had to be powdered by the wig's owner.

When you wear one, it's just how you imagine it would feel to stick a half-inchthick layer of horsehair on your head — hot and prickly. Add in a stiff collar, with white bands worn like a sort of cravat and a black gown — with its little black mourning-hood cast over the left shoulder in honour of Charles II's death in 1685 — and just imagine the heat in Bristol Crown Court on a hot July afternoon Think too of lugging all this stuff down on the train — particularly the wig in its heavy tin case — and the hours wasted in robing rooms. And all for what? To imitate a dress code that has no specifically legal origins at all. The wig is nothing more than fancy dress, a strange hangover from the days when wigs were all the rage in the English court.

At least the first wig-wearers in 1660 — falling for the French wig craze that Charles II brought back from exile in France — had the sense to shave their heads before putting their wigs on. What's the point of having two layers of hair on your head?

Even in the 1660s they were worried about hygiene, and quite rightly so. Pepys got in a terrible panic when he tried on his first wig in 1665 after having his head shaved: Up, and put on my coloured silk suit, very fine, and my new periwig, bought a good while since, but darst not wear it because the plague was in Westminster when I bought it. And it is a wonder what will be the fashion after the plague is done as to periwigs, for nobody will dare to buy any haire for fear of the infection; that it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague.

Two years later, Pepys got a bad infestation of nits in his wig.

Despite these design faults, barristers took up the craze in the 1680s. The fashion lasted for about a century among more goahead people. It started to die out towards the end of the 18th century, particularly when, in 1795, the government levied a tax on wig and hair powder of one guinea per year. By 1800 the wig was dead, except among a few crazy old fogeys with a pathological affection for the past — barristers. Ever since, barristers have run a busy market in inventing after-the-fact rationalisations for their fogeyism.

If barristers do hold on to their wigs — and I bet Lord Phillips rules that they do — they should acknowledge the real reason for their affection: the conviction that the more outdated something is, the grander it becomes.

Harty Mount's My Brief Career — the Trials of a Young Lawyer is published by Short Books at £6.99.