His Honour Graham Boal
Barrister and judge who helped to defend Jeremy Thorpe and worked to free the Birmingham Six
HIS HONOUR GRAHAM BOAL, who has died aged 79, was a successful criminal barrister and later Old Bailey judge whose parallel struggles with clinical depression and alcoholism were vividly recounted in a candid and engaging memoir, A Drink at the Bar (2021).
Boal appeared in several of the biggest criminal cases of his time, none perhaps bigger than the trial of Jeremy Thorpe, the former Liberal Party leader who was acquitted of conspiracy to murder in 1979.
At what was dubbed “The Trial of the Century”, Boal was junior counsel for the defence, led by George Carman QC, the most gifted, if mercurial, advocate of modern times – while also, in Boal’s estimation, a fellow alcoholic.
The night before beginning his masterly cross-examination of Peter Bessell, the key prosecution witness, Carman had been sitting at Boal’s kitchen table in Holland Park, drinking large quantities of whisky and rather aimlessly discussing how best to approach the next morning’s task.
“I felt that his thinking was so scattergun and unstructured that I feared for the morrow,” Boal recalled. They eventually called it a night at about 2am, when Boal remembered Carman “shambolically packing his papers into a plastic bag and thinking what a horrific hangover he would have in the morning”.
Thorpe’s acquittal projected Carman into the first rank of the Bar, and for some years afterwards he would ask his instructing solicitors to brief Boal as his junior. They worked together on several subsequent high-profile cases: the defence of Dr Leonard Arthur, the paediatrician accused of murdering a Down’s syndrome baby, whose acquittal gave Boal the greatest satisfaction of all his trials; the defence of Kagan Textiles Ltd; and the inquests into the death of Roberto Calvi (“God’s Banker”), who had been found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge.
Boal was often openly unhappy with the unethical strategies employed by Carman (hitherto predominantly a civil practitioner), who in turn relied heavily on Boal’s tactical expertise in criminal cases as treasury counsel – something Carman would often refer to if he thought it might give him some advantage over an opponent. “I also think that George rather relished having as a junior an enthusiastic drinking companion,” wrote Boal in his memoir.
Besides his cases with Carman, Boal’s main practice at the Bar was prosecuting at the Old Bailey as junior treasury counsel until 1985 and senior treasury counsel thereafter. Occasionally he also led for the defence, but he always felt more at ease prosecuting, which above all demanded fairness and a commitment to see that justice is done – not always top priorities for the defence. Defence work he found far more stressful and more liable to bring on episodes of depression, anxiety and imposter syndrome.
Boal was first referred by his GP to a psychiatrist in the 1980s, “when I first realised that my workload was causing sufficient anxiety and depression to need treatment”. Eventually he was admitted to the Charter Nightingale Hospital in Lisson Grove, where no one objected to his keeping a bottle of Scotch in his locker, the connection between alcohol and depression having not yet been established.
He soon continued with his demanding practice as First Senior Treasury Counsel, representing the Crown in 1991 at the final successful Birmingham Six appeal, at the outset of which Boal submitted that new doubts about the forensic evidence rendered the convictions “no longer both safe and satisfactory”.
He took Silk in 1993, but shortly afterwards suffered another serious bout of depression and was admitted to the Priory at Roehampton. It was there that a doctor extracted the truth about how he had been “treating” his depression with large amounts of whisky.
He enrolled on an addiction recovery programme at Galsworthy Lodge, where his therapy group included the author Charlie Mortimer, with whom he became friends.
Save for one night in 2005, Boal never drank alcohol again.
An only child, John Graham Boal was born on October 24 1943. His father Jackson Graham Boal was a surgeon in the Royal Navy before retiring in 1947, aged
61, and taking a job as the school doctor at Eastbourne College, which his son attended from the age of 13.
Another doctor in Eastbourne at that time was John Bodkin Adams, who was charged and sensationally acquitted in 1957 of murdering several of his patients. Boal’s ambition to become a criminal barrister was fired by watching one of Dr Adams’s first court appearances, and the fact that his father’s signature was one of those Adams had forged in a bid to cover his tracks.
Graham’s father died shortly after the Adams trial, leaving his son in the sole care of his very protective mother, Dorothy. As a teenager, he was prescribed Roaccutane for his acne, a drug that was later found to cause serious depression.
After leaving Eastbourne, he read Law at King’s College London, and was called to the Bar by Gray’s Inn in 1966. He did his pupillage at 3 King’s Bench Walk, paying 50 guineas to his pupil master Roger Frisby, one of the ablest advocates at the criminal bar – but also a heavy drinker.
Boal’s own drinking had begun as a boy, surreptitiously “lapping up the remnants” of the powerful cocktails mixed by his father. But it only started to become a problem as his caseload increased in the early 1970s, when he was “burning the candle at both ends” in his work and social life.
He was convicted of drink-driving after being breathalysed one evening on his way back from dinner with his future wife, whom he married in 1978, and remembered having a bad hangover on the day in 1974 when Ian Ball was sentenced for attempting to kidnap Princess Anne.
But his problems with alcohol and depression were never very apparent to his colleagues at the Bar, where his ready wit, clubbable nature and sense of the absurd made him a popular figure. He later became a highly regarded Old Bailey judge after his appointment in 1996, which he recalled as one of the happiest periods of his life.
But in 2003 he was again plunged into deep depression by the breakdown of his marriage, a crisis that culminated in his swallowing several sleeping pills with a large glass of whisky in a serious attempt to take his own life in 2005. Though he failed, he decided that he could not realistically continue sitting as a judge, and retired from the bench the same year.
There was a happy ending to this part of his story, however, in that the next year he and his wife Lizzie (née East) were reunited, and they remained together for the rest of his life.
Graham Boal was founder of the Old Bailey Judges Golfing Society, and a member of the MCC, the Garrick Club and Royal West Norfolk Golf Club.
His autobiography was dedicated to the Westminster Drug Project, where he was a trustee and board member.
He is survived by his wife and their son.
Graham Boal, born October 24 1943, died December 30 2022