8 - Staff and buildings

Summary

REGISTRARS

Appointment

The 1846 Act required each court to have its clerk, but it empowered the Lord Chancellor to sanction a joint appointment where business was unusually heavy and allowed a judge to appoint the same man to several of his courts, with assistant clerks to look after the less important ones. Many judges found this convenient. Pluralism became widespread and could also be lucrative; Burrows was clerk both to Brompton and Brentford and to Marylebone, and apparently continued to run a flourishing private practice as well. But it quickly fell out of favour with officialdom, perhaps because of doubts whether the registrar's supervision could really be effective where, as in West Wales, he controlled ten courts, nine of which he visited only on court days from his base at Carmarthen. The County Courts Further Extension Act 1852 restricted it to exceptional cases authorised by the Lord Chancellor, and gradually the pluralists died out.

The rule of one court, one registrar led to a rapid growth in numbers. There were 498 in 1874, and this remained practically unchanged until the Great War. However, the principle had been adopted without full consideration of its implications. The small courts could not yield enough to induce a respectable solicitor to abandon his practice, so part-time registrars were common, yet the desire to make the registrar into a judicial officer sat uncomfortably with his being a local practitioner.