BEST WISHES TO TRIXIE

BEST WISHES TO TRIXIE

THE TIMES.

2^nd JUNE , 1983.

Farewell to unseen 'voice of the Bailey'

 

The glittering, gold-plated statue of justice above the Central Criminal Court in London took second place yesterday to a woman who for 35 years had kept the most famous criminal court in the world on its toes.

Mrs. Trixie Daw, an outsider because she works for what is now British Telecom, had been the one person with the inside knowledge of that vast judicial complexity since candlestick telephones graced the press room.

Mrs. Daw took a more resounding farewell from the scene of her years of service than is customarily given by any Queen's Bench judge. No one said it, but each of the hundreds of people who attended felt it the court might often have ground to a halt without her.

Like the statue of justice above the building, she was mainly "blindfolded", working from a switchboard where she saw few people. But she memorized over those years thousands of voices.

She was open-handed in her remarkable talent for solving all the problems only such an important switchboard must handle. Judges blessed her. But so did the relatives of guilty defendants sent down.

 She could be cryptic and comforting but it was always to one end, to keep the vast turnover moving.

The change from candlestick telephone extensions to a public address system was a short step for one of her competence. She rapidly became not only the communications expert of the vast building, but also the unseen voice of the "Old Bailey".

 Her summons on the public address system had people scurrying all round the building to get to those courts where they were urgently needed. She had a computer-style memory for the outside telephone numbers where counsel, police officers and journalists could be found, in time to permit the high dramas of the court to flow without delay.

When the Common Serjeant, Judge David Tudor Price, handed her a farewell present from the hundreds of staff employed in the building, he joked: "Many people have wondered why the statue of justice has recently been shrouded in scaffolding. I can reveal that a statue of Trixie is taking her place."

Such was the importance of Mrs. Daw, who also worked blindfolded, that many of her guests wished it were true.

She was presented with a Post Office long-service medal authorized by the Queen. She had been with the Post Office for more than forty years.