Averil Deverell On the centenary of her being calledto the Bar, we remember the pioneering Trinity graduate N ovember 2, 2021 was a key anniversary in Irish legal and women’s history – on Averil Deverell embodied and drove the change that was happening in Ireland Deverell lectureship which she established through a bequest in her will. this day a hundred years ago, two Trinity graduates, Averil Deverell and Frances Kyle, became the first women in Britain and Ireland to be for women at the Bar and in the workplace generally Averil Deverell was a pioneer from the start. Born in Greystones, Co. Wicklow in 1893, the daughter of a solicitor called to the Bar. Photos of them in and granddaughter of another, traditional wig and gown made headlines as she attended the local girls Protestant far afield as the New York Times and the Times of French School in Bray. Already a suffragette in India . In London, the legal establishment referred to Kyle her teens, she insisted on going, with William, to study and Deverell ‘donning the horsehair [wigs] with ludicrous law in Trinity and graduated LLB in 1915. In college she effect. It is generally assumed that no such outrage will joined the St John Ambulance VAD unit (her father was occur here’. The Irish Law Times retorted that ‘the effect among the first people in Greystones to own a motor car is far from ludicrous. It is regarded as very becoming to and taught her to drive). After war broke out, she offered the lady wearer.’ her services to the Queen Alexandra First Aid Nursing Deverell subsequently became the first woman to practise Yeomanry. She passed the driving test but failed the at the bar in Ireland (Kyle practised in Northern Ireland) next stage, re-assembling a dismantled engine. When this and was for eighteen months the only woman practising. requirement was dropped, she spent six months from In March 1926 she became the first Irishwoman to write a July to December 1918 driving an ambulance in France. law report and two years later, after appearing as a junior She cut 12 inches off her skirt to stop it getting in the way. before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London (in a leading Irish constitutional law case that provoked the first revision of the Anglo-Irish Treaty), she became the first, and last, Irishwoman to get the coveted red brief-bag. Her twin brother, William, had been called to the bar on the same day, but it was she who built up a long, successful practise until her retirement in 1969, and her legacy lives on in Trinity through the Averil As an LLB, she still had no right to practise at the Bar. There was no formal law excluding her but attempts by previous women, applying to the Law Society of Ireland and the Honorable Society of King’s Inns to enter the profession, had proved unsuccessful - in 1901 the King’s Inns Benchers replied to Miss Weir Johnson that ‘it was not competent for a lady to enter this Inn as a student, or
Download PDF file