Barbara Calvert QC (Lady Lowry)

Barbara, Lady Lowry, alias Barbara Calvert QC, the first woman to be a head of chambers, was a vastly popular master of the Middle Temple at the peak of her trailblazing legal career. Yet it was only in her thirties that she even discovered what an Inn of Court was when she went to a new year party. She had spent her twenties bringing up her son and daughter, “feeding the ducks in all the London parks”. Her civil engineer husband, John Calvert, was away, designing the sewers of Baghdad. At the party, she told one of Calvert’s partners that she hankered after a career, and he suggested that she might take up law, adding that she would have to join one of the Inns