Well, the reason why legal aid was eventually given for inquests is down to the brilliant actions of the Marchioness Inquest Group and the idea of Iain Philpott and others, which was – and it was something like four days before the inquest was due to start in 1995, it’s all in here, I might give you a copy of this to take away – we still didn’t have any funding at all, and it was me and Mike Mansfield and Terry Munyard who were representing the families at the inquest. And, you know, this was after God knows how many judicial reviews and things, I’ve missed all that out, that went on before the inquest happened, where we’d done – I mean, it’s all in here – but we’d done a whole series of judicial reviews and a private prosecution for corporate manslaughter, and we’d got the coroner, Paul Knapman, disqualified and a new coroner, John Burton, put in place.
And anyway, so Terry Munyard had been involved in one of the judicial reviews, I think. Anyway, yes, so the inquest was due to start at Hammersmith Town Hall on the Monday and on, I think it was the Thursday or the Friday, we still didn’t have any legal aid funding. But what the Marchioness Action Group did, and they did it entirely without asking us lawyers, it was entirely their idea, they went to see the Lord Chancellor – I’ve forgotten who it was at the time, some Tory – and they said to him, if you don’t provide funding to our lawyers, we’re going to represent ourselves, we’re going to sack our lawyers. We’re not having Louise Christian, Mike Mansfield and Terry Munyard. And there are 51 families and so many survivors – I can’t remember how many survivors there are – and we will represent ourselves and each one of us will ask questions and this inquest will take a year. [laughs] Because we all have questions, we’re all going to ask questions, it’s going to be chaos. And the Lord Chancellor caved in.
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They frightened him sufficiently, he caved in and he gave what was called a special grant. It wasn’t legal aid, because there was nothing written in, at the time there was no legal aid for inquests, there was nothing at all. So he gave something called a special grant to fund my firm, Terry and Mike Mansfield to represent them at the inquest so that they didn’t have to represent themselves. But it was literally the Friday before the inquest was due to start on the Monday when we were told we would be funded. Because up to that time we’d been acting pro bono on loads of these judicial reviews and all the other things that went on. And it was after that that the government decided that legal aid should be extended to inquests. So it was nothing to do with the lawyers, it was the Marchioness Action Group that achieved that.
