I thought the caption to the top picture of this piece from Rod Liddle about the sanguinary characters that have occupied both the dock and the bench during the long history of the Old Bailey was rather a laugh. I doubt the caption was written by Liddle; he has his faults but prissiness isn’t one of them. [CORRECTION: “Newshour” points out that it is Rob, not Rod Liddle who wrote this.]
UPDATE: The caption now reads, “Before newspapers, the Proceedings were widely read by the public”. Bo-ring. And not, I think, really true – newspapers really got going at about the same time as the Old Bailey’s Proceedings did. Still, that’s by the by. Back to that changeable caption. The google cache gives the orginal version, namely:
Judges were exclusively male and drawn from the public school system
Hat tips: PaulS and Moonbat Nibbler.
Rob Liddle is not the same person as Rod Liddle – emphatically not!
So they have Liddle in common?
😉
A Liddle goes a long way.
Classic 1930s novel about the Weimar Republic joke:
Liddle man, what now?
The caption to the top picture now reads:
Before newspapers, the Proceedings were widely read by the public
which is unremarkable. Have they changed it?
If so, what was the original?
Google has it cached:
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:9VS8dRTdbQAJ:news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7361701.stm
“Judges were exclusively male and drawn from the public school system”
‘Public schools’ being the only schools open to the public at that time….
It isn’t even news, the site has been up since 2003 according to this article and the copyright on the site itself.
http://www.history.ac.uk/digit/hitchcock.html