Sophie Mills
VOLUNTEER TRUSTEE WANTED

The Auchindrain Trust (SC015528)

TREFOIL SEEKING A NEW TRUSTEE

Grant making charity looks to recruit trustee in 2024

The Board of Trustees of Trefoil House (Scottish Charity No SC013744) is looking to recruit a new trustee in early 2024. Trefoil is a grant-making charity which supports children and young people in Scotland under 25 years old who have additional support needs.  

 

Trefoil provides three types of grants: personal development grants, organisational grants and holiday grants. Trefoil’s trustees consider applications for these grants four times per year at meetings held in the Signet Library. The annual budget for Trefoil is £150,000. Read more about Trefoil here.  

 

Trefoil has a long association with the WS Society. The Society’s Governance and Charities team provide administration services; and several Writers to the Signet have served as trustees. If you are interested in becoming a trustee of Trefoil, or would like more information on the role, please email Sophie Mills (smills@wssociety.co.uk).  

WS CHARITIES CONFERENCE

Bookings now open 

The WS Society’s legal education programme begins on 14 March 2024 with the popular Charities Conference.  The event brings together charity lawyers, charity trustees and charity professionals to explore the latest themes in charity law, governance and policy.  We will be joined by expert speakers from across the UK to explore topics including the motivational drive to legacy through charity and the implications of source of wealth on charity governance, as well as a roundup of legislative and practice matters.  

Speakers: 

  • Gavin McEwan WS, Partner, Turcan Connell (Conference Chair) 

  • Simon Steeden, Partner, Bates Wells 

  • Katherine Crawford, Chief Executive, Age Scotland 

  • Jenny Ebbage, Trustee, Halifax Foundation for Northern Ireland 

  • Kelly Adams, Head of Non-Profit Team, RSM 

  • Dr John Picton, Reader in Law, University of Manchester 

  • Julie Hutchison WS, Charities Specialist, LGT Wealth Management 

 

For conference rates and booking details, please visit here.  

A NEW PROJECT – AND A NEW DISCOVERY

Mapping the WS Society’s early history 

This week saw the beginning of a new project to catalogue the seventeenth and eighteenth century unbound paper archive of the WS Society and Signet Library, with this material being added to the existing online catalogue of bound WS Society and Signet Library archive records created during the COVID years.  

Interesting things are already emerging: bar bills from early Georgian WS Society events; maintenance records giving light onto the still largely unknown first home of the WS Society in Writers Court;  and evidence of early Signet Library donations and acquisitions.  

But perhaps the most exciting is a pair of receipts concerned with the acquisition of the WS Society’s portrait of the writer and donor of the Signet Library’s first book, George Dallas WS of St Martins (1636-1701). For centuries it has been believed that the painting is a copy in oils of an original by the Flemish artist Sir John Medina, who settled in Scotland with his family in 1694. The receipts throw up new information about the picture’s provenance – and raise new questions as to the origins of the original painting. 

2024 CPD - CHARITIES CONFERENCE

Next year’s legal education programme begins with the annual Charities Conference on 14 March 2024. 

The event brings together charity lawyers, charity trustees and charity professionals to explore the latest themes in charity law, governance and policy. Speakers at the conference include Dr John Picton (Charity Law Unit, University of Manchester), Jenny Ebbage (Charity Consultant and Trustee, Halifax Foundation) and Julie Hutchison WS (Charities Specialist, LGT Wealth Management). The conference will be chaired by Gavin McEwan WS (Head of Charities, Turcan Connell). The programme will explore topics such as the motivational drive to legacy through charity and the implications of source of wealth on charity governance, as well as a roundup of legislative and practice matters. 

Save the date and join us for this engaging and popular event. With thanks to conference sponsors, LGT Wealth Management.

ADMISSIONS

At the November Diet of Admission, the WS Society welcomed 25 new members in all categories, Writers to the Signet, Affiliates and Students. New members came from as far afield as Campbletown and Washington DC. New Keeper of the Signet Lady Elish Angiolini LT presided at the ceremony and mingled with the new members and their guest at the drinks reception afterwards.

CELEBRATING STUDENT SUCCESS

The WS Society was pleased to once again support the excellent work of the School Mock Court Project SCIO (SC043342). On 27 November, we welcomed 150 school students, their teachers and families to the Signet Library for this year’s awards ceremony.   The Mock Court Project is a Scottish charity providing equal learning opportunities to approximately 3,000 students every year, working in all areas of Scotland.  Their core mock court programmes provide students the chance to work with legal professionals, visit Scottish Courts and compete in mock trials, presided by current members of the Judiciary.  Congratulations to the 2023 finalists Dunfermline High School and the Edinburgh Academy, and to other schools winning well deserved awards including St Kentigerns, Fernhill School and Royal Irvine Academy.  The competition is an engaging and inspiring first taste of a career in law for children and young people from all backgrounds.  We look forward to continuing this collaboration and support next year.

WS FELLOW NEWS

WS Fellow Amal Clooney was in Malawi last week as part of the joint effort between the Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ], The Obama Foundation and the Gates Foundation to end child marriage within a generation.

Joined by former First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama and Melinda French Gates at the Ludzi Girls secondary school in the country’s central region, the three women listened intently to the stories of some of the schoolgirls. With 42% of girls married before the age of 18 the rate of child marriage in the country is one of the highest in Southern and Eastern Africa.  Despite Malawi actually having a law to prevent these marriages, there are very few prosecutions. “Waging Justice For Women”, the CFJ’s latest initiative, is funding the Women Lawyers Association of Malawi. As part of their work these lawyers provide aid clinics and free legal advice in some of the country’s most remote places, often miles from the nearest power supply or roads. Amal Clooney participated in one of the first clinics which was attended by over 800 women, where she said “It is a privilege to be working alongside so many inspirational women in the fight to make child marriage history. Child marriage persists because there are inadequate legal protections for millions of girls across Africa”.

Describing the friendship and collaboration between herself, French Gates and Obama. Clooney told the BBC “It’s been a really lovely and very organic partnership”. At the Ludzi Girls school the three heard from Lucy, now aged 26, who avoided her father’s attempt to take her out of school aged 14, and instead became the first girl in her village to graduate from university. Today aided by her degree in education she works for an organisation providing scholarships to vulnerable Malawi girls. Lucy recounted that her father finds it difficult to have an independent daughter and Michelle Obama said “Next time you see him tell him Michelle and Barack Obama are so proud of you, and the woman you have become”, whilst Clooney added, “And tell him you have a lawyer too now”.

As well as in Malawi, the CFJ supports legal aid clinics in Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and continues to grow the model to increase access to justice for women and girls across Africa.

WEST LIBRARY EXHIBTION

Encyclopedia Britannica and its editor and hero of WS Society history Macvey Napier WS are the subject of the December exhibition in the West Library, curated by Principal Researcher James Hamilton, assisted by volunteer Jo Hockey.

From June 1813 until his death in 1847 Macvey Napier WS was the editor and intellectual driving force behind the greatest encyclopaedia in the English-speaking world, ushering into print the Supplement to the 4th, 5th and 6th editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the 7th edition in its entirety. During the same period, Napier was overseeing the construction of the new Signet Library (1809-1815) and transforming the library’s collections from a useful assemblage of 1,800 legal and general works into a 40,000-volume collection famous the world over. He edited the Edinburgh Review, the magazine with the world’s largest circulation, and from 1825 was Professor of Conveyancing, the chair at Edinburgh University endowed by the WS Society, where he had lectured in that subject since 1816.

This exhibition seeks to honour Napier through a display of Britannica volumes and related items from Signet Library collections.

Encyclopaedia Britannica was conceived by printer Colin McFarquson and engraver Andrew Bell in 1765. Bell approached William Smellie (editor, publisher to many Scottish Enlightenment figures, naturalist, and antiquary) to compile, edit, and write original essays for the publication. Smellie decided to group related topics together into longer essays which were arranged alphabetically, and the Encyclopaedia was published in weekly instalments between 1768 and 1771. Instant popularity ensured strong demand for a second edition.

Diderot’s revolutionary Encyclopédie had begun publication in 1751 and, he declared, “was so compendious, so broad in scope and learning, that if a catastrophe were to befall the earth and all the books but his were destroyed, there would be sufficient information in his manuscript for civilisation to survive – even prosper”.  A dedication to George III in the Britannica includes this assertion of national superiority: ‘’The French (Diderot’s) Encyclopédie has been accused, and justly accused, of having disseminated, far and wide, the seeds of Anarchy and Atheism. If the Encyclopædia Britannica shall, in any degree, counteract the tendency of that pestiferous Work, even these.Volumes will not be wholly unworthy of Your Majesty’s Patronage.’’

The Signet Library’s copy of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is distinguished by its magnificent binding. Examination of the tools used in the binding reveals that there is every likelihood that it was the work of William Scott, one of a pair of revolutionary craftspeople who between them broke the mould of Scottish bookbinding design after a century of stasis. As the Society’s James Hamilton puts it, “Scott was the Robert Adam of bookbinding”.

ANNUAL DINNER 2023

This year’s dinner was a sellout and no wonder with the new Keeper of the Signet, Lady Elish Angiolini speaking for the first occasion following her appointment. Invited guests, including the Lord Justice Clerk, Lady Dorrian, and law firms both large and small with their guests and contacts mingled together at the Champagne reception before going upstairs to the upper hall of the Signet Library for dinner. Larger firms represented included Burness Paull, Pinsent Masons, CMS, Burges Salmon, Brodies, Morton Fraser MacRoberts, while more niche players included Vialex, Manolete and Burke Legal. The Law Society of Scotland were also well represented. Deputy Keeper Mandy Laurie was host for the evening and, after dinner, introduced Lady Elish as the guest speaker. Lady Elish reflected on her appointment as Lord Clerk Register and Keeper of the Signet, before talking the audience through her early life growing up near Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow and her first encounter with the legal system when, as a seventeen-year-old volunteer, she helped a woman living in poverty with an appeal before a social security tribunal. That was the first time, Lady Elish said, she realised the power of law to transform people’s lives. It was a wonderful speech demonstrating Lady Elish’s down to earth integrity, insight, humour, and conviction about the role of law in society.