ROSC Aibreán 1973

Why Mrs. Davies, Magistrate, Quit

le Pól Ó Duibhir
Mrs. Margaret Davies was a magistrate on the Swansea bench until last April when she resigned in response to a threat from Lord Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor, to dismiss her. Her "crime" was to dissent from the verdict of her two co-magistrates in a language case, and then pay the offender's fine herself.

Pól Ó Duibhir interviewed Mrs. Davies for ROSC at the 1972 Eisteddfod.

ROSC: How did you become in­volved with the Welsh language issue?

MRS. DAVIES: I have always supported the Welsh language, but I became more involved in it after becoming a magistrate. I could see the conflict between the courts and the Welsh Language Society deve­loping, and I could see a gap, I could see alienation, because you must remember that in anglicised areas of Wales, and Swansea is one of these, there are people who are completely anti-Welsh language movement. I have been concerned to bridge this gap, being convinced at the same time that these young people had justice on their side. When I became a magistrate I be­came very concerned about jus­tice; I felt that it was my job to do justice. I have always been in­terested in the Welsh language and have brought my own son up bi-lingually because I hadn't had that opportunity myself as a child. I feel very much a Welsh person, and I have made a very deliberate effort to learn it. I don't want to see it die.

ROSC: What exactly was your "crime"?

MRS. DAVIES: Five or six benches elsewhere in the country have given unconditional dis­charges for non-payment of TV licences. The defendants pleaded guilty, were found guilty and then given the unconditional discharges. Now, in my case, I didn't even do as much as that. My boy actually went to prison overnight, I couldn't save him on the bench be­cause I was outvoted two to one. In fact what I would have done would have been to keep him in the courts for the rest of the day; that would have been quite enough. What I did was to pay the fine. I satisfied the law, all the law wanted was for the fine to be paid, and he had gone to prison, he had been punished. I just saved him from a sentence I thought was un­just.

ROSC: What do you feel you have achieved by this?

MRS. DAVIES: Well, you see, the non-Welsh speaking Welshman has no positive doctrine; he has no pole onto which to hitch his star. All the intellectual activity, all the energy is on the pro-language side. He wonders if the Welsh language is going to be pushed down his throat. Also it's bound up with the political situation. Does this Welsh language thing mean that he is going to be cut off from England? And, of course, as the Welsh Lan­guage Society do everything through the medium of Welsh, there is that gap; there is a lack of communication. I feel, if I have done nothing else, I have bridged that gap for the people of South Wales. That is why I went through all the publicity. I hate publicity. I was on TV and radio explaining in English what this was all about.

ROSC: Was this your "first of­fence" so to speak?

MRS. DAVIES: I have been trying to bridge this gap I referred to for some time past with my fellow magistrates in Swansea. Then there was the Swansea conspiracy trial. After that I got so concerned because all these cases were com­ing up in the Swansea magistrates' court. So I sent copies of "The Magistrate's Dilemma", a pamph­let analysing the dilemma facing the magistrates on the language issue, at my own expense, to my fellow magistrates. Well, that started the hostility towards me; you see I was really not playing the game as a magistrate. Some of them wrote back and thanked me and said it was very interesting, but the more senior members of the fraternity really took excep­tion to this. They thought I was spreading a sort of propaganda.

ROSC: Could we clear up a this stage just what your judicial func­tion was, what exactly you resigned from?

MRS. DAVIES: In Wales, Jus­tices of the Peace, in other words magistrates, are all lay people. They are chosen by a local com­mittee. I don't know how I was chosen; this is all very hush hush. The system is self-perpetuating be­cause it's normally magistrates who nominate other people to be magistrates; it tends to become a sort of a club. There are no for­mal qualifications for becoming a magistrate; if you are the wife of, perhaps, an eminent person. A lot are political appointments, and this is the humbug of the whole situation. I had no political affilia­tions whatsoever, but I was now "political" because I had involved myself with the Welsh Language Society, and yet the whole system is riddled with politicians. So many of the local councillors in Swansea are magistrates. It's done on the basis that you have a bal­anced bench politically, but of course you won't have the Nation­alist Party, Plaid Cymru. They labour under the delusion that the status quo is non-political, and they just can't see it.

ROSC: This surely puts the police in an awkward position?

MRS. DAVIES: The police have a job to do, but when they know that a court is hostile, then they bring them up and they get more convictions

ROSC: How exactly did you see your own role in this process?

MRS. DAVIES: When you accept the offer of office your name is forwarded to the Lord Chancellor, but he knows nothing about you; this is just done through a local committee. You then take this oath and the oath says that you promise before Almighty God to do right to all manner of men ac­cording to the laws and usages of the Realm without fear or favour, affection or ill will. You don't swear to enforce the law at all costs. All you swear to do is to do right to all men according to the laws. Now my interpretation of that is, and this is how I think it works very often, my first duty is to do right; you use the law as a framework.

ROSC: When you resigned, had you already decided how you would publicise your action?

MRS. DAVIES: I didn't know what to do at that stage, whether to make it public or not. Welsh Wales knew that I'd paid this fine, and my husband said you cannot just resign from the bench and not make a statement to the press. Then one evening, after I'd re­signed but was still deciding how best to publish the stuff, HTV rang and asked would I take part in a programme about the Bangor bench. I had to be perfectly hon­est and say: "Well, I cannot come as a magistrate because I have re­signed." Well, what surprised me then was the speed with which that news ran round the public media. The interest was there be­cause of the baboons speech and politicians had made a fuss about the decisions of the other benches, so this was a real live hot potato. What amazed me was the interest in me. Suddenly the whole thing seemed to be turned on me; it quite shattered me. I then had to go through all this business about these programmes, so I prepared a statement. I didn't want the papers to make their own version of it. So I released it to a man from the Press Association who was looking for it and it went right through the world - it was in the Irish Times, I think. It was was in all the British newspapers published in Canada and then it appeared under various headings like JP MARGARET QUITS; that was in the Daily Mirror, I think. The Times put out it very good report, and so did the Guardian; the Tele­graph got it a little bit wrong.

ROSC: Having got all this pub­licity, what was the public's re­action?

MRS. DAVIES: The mail that I received was fantastic. It was all support except for one letter which was unsigned and written in the most terrible Welsh, from Carmarthen. And another one, someone had cut out a photograph of me from the Western Mail and the piece about me and had written all over it "Traitor" and "when Wales becomes a Northern Ireland you'll be first to get the sniper's bullet"; you know, cranks, real cranks, and that too was from Carmarthen, so it might have been the same person. Those were the only two. Immediately after my TV appearance I received about twenty telephone calls, all support. And then I met so many people who said, "I'm sorry I didn't write; I think what you've done is great."

ROSC: What was the reaction to your publishing your correspondence with Hailsham?

MRS. DAVIES: I published the correspondence in PLANET and I believe Ned Thomas sold a thousand more copies than he normally sells. Since then, the Times, Guardian and New Statesman have all had leading articles or large articles on it, and the editorial in a recent issue of the New Law Journal was terribly critical of Hailsham. Hailsham has really no answer to my argument and he's had to contradict himself in order to justify his position. He's really a politician and he enjoys it, but he's bringing far too much politics into his role as Lord Chancellor.

ROSC: You don't think he's reformed, then?

MRS. DAVIES: I think it is significant that he has now asked Lord Justice Edmund Davies to have an informal inquiry into the working of the Welsh Language Act.

ROSC: And the future?

MRS. DAVIES: I don't know what is going to happen. Another case came up before the Bangor bench recently and the same chairman was sitting and they fined. So it looks as if they are going to toe the line and listen to Hailsham.