Alida Baxter

Renowned London journalist and author

View from Soho,

Your Correspondent

in Court

Years ago I used to write features for General Practitioner magazine. Mostly they were humorous, looking at illnesses, doctors and the GP/patient relationship from the patient's point of view. Or sometimes I'd be commissioned to write a piece about particular products or issues.

These latter assignments weren't necessarily glamorous or even comfortable like the time I was asked to do a survey of London VD Clinics, and write up how I rated them and the way they dealt with me, prompting my mother to say miserably she'd never thought my being a writer would mean anything like this.

Neither had I, and, sweating, I got out of that one, but I had no hesitation when the Medical Editor rang me with a list of clinics and services offering pregnancy testing. (In those days you couldn't just buy a little kit from a chemist's, you had to go to people who did the checking for you.) He told me what was wanted were my impressions of the various places, specifically how I was treated and advised, and exactly what happened. All very straightforward this was typical consumer research. Except that it wasn't, exactly, as I later discovered.

In total ignorance of any particular plan, however, I worked through the list: amongst them a nation-wide pregnancy advisory service, a private clinic, some postal services nothing extraordinary. And with a menstrual cycle so erratic it would have puzzled Nostradamus, I could give everybody I contacted honest information that would still make it credible I might think myself pregnant.

In every case I had to provide a urine sample, and what happened after that did seem to depend on whether you were paying, and if so, how much. Every single set-up was totally accurate in saying the tests were negative, but at a private clinic I was talked to in discreet luxury, my method of contraception was discussed and suggestions were made about my general health and regulating my periods. At a national organisation I was given my results without any further advice or particular sympathy for my having been worried, and the people who ran postal services were just very short and to the point, with no inaccuracies but no frills or charm either.

I wrote all this up for publication, and only later did the reason for the services being chosen emerge.

It wasn't that I'd been living under a rock, but before the combination of the Internet and rolling news, it was possible for something contentious to be going on without hitting your brain and everyone else's in the next five minutes, particularly if you were a lay person. I didn't know that two journalists, a man and a woman, were making allegations which ended up in a certain notorious Sunday newspaper. Their contention was that when they went to the places I visited or used, they submitted samples of urine that could not possibly result in a positive result, but were told that the tests were indeed positive, and encouraged to proceed to abortion. The scandalous conclusion was that there was a very lucrative business in getting women to spend money on abortions whether they needed them or not, and the people running such services were involved in a racket.

My experience absolutely contradicted this, which was more than interesting, particularly as my irregularity alone had been frightening the life out of boy friends ever since I'd had any.

Kept an eye on by General Practitioner magazine, whose Medical Editor had suspected dirty work from the beginning, the organisations and clinics, all of them reputable, banded together to begin an action for libel. And my testimony was important. Unaware of the situation, I'd been set my assignment to establish whether what happened to me tallied in any way with the horrendous allegations, and it hadn't not in a single instance. I was summoned to a lawyer's office to give a statement, and thought it would be only a matter of time. But when it comes to the law, time is the whole problem, because every minute costs money. As the late Bernard Levin, a famous journalist, once pointed out, it's a rare man who's a rich litigant.

So as the months passed and one year turned into another, the solicitor's fees mounted and the band lost one member after another, until eventually only a single individual was left someone whom I'd only dealt with by post, and who decided to fight on not only alone, but without the legal team neither he nor anyone else could continue to afford.

By this time I must admit I no longer felt very strongly, since the people who'd treated me best and the national organisation I deeply respected were no longer taking part in the action. Plus, I was working sixteen hours a day on other writing and journalism. But at long last the case came to court, and not just any-old-where but at the Law Courts in the Strand !

Suitably dressed in dark blue and the cleanest white blouse I could find, (a solicitor friend told me courts liked that), I leapt out of a traffic-blocked taxi to be rushed up the steps and through corridors to be called before the judge. Only then did I realise that even some of those who'd given up for lack of money were attending the hearing, because victory for one might mean vindication for all.

The man demanding damages for libel and calling me in his defence couldn't even pronounce my name properly, but the judge hearing the case wasn't a bit like one of the monsters John Mortimer describes in the Rumpole stories. He wasn't inhuman, but kindly, and extremely patient with the amateur before him struggling his way through the labyrinth of the law.

And the amateur needed that helpful patience, because he was up against a formidable barrister hired by the newspaper. But nobody treated me aggressively. I was asked to repeat my evidence, read out the article I had written and restate my opinion of the veracity of everyone I had seen and dealt with All correct, all negative, I stated to a hushed audience. Even the opposition's barrister was so polite and courtly that when I left the witness box somebody hissed, My God, he's after you!

But the crucial evidence had been that describing how the journalists who'd written the defamatory words had obtained their results. It was written up in General Practitioner afterwards: by a complex sleight of hand, they had managed even under seemingly impossible conditions to swap samples of urine from one person for another's, so that every organisation or clinic would report the tests as positive. The racket in giving false results and urging abortions on women who weren't pregnant didn't exist, and the organisations and services were completely innocent.

The man won his case, and very, very hefty damages, whilst I'd enjoyed being a witness so much that I hadn't wanted to leave the box. Those wigs and gowns are tremendously theatrical, and giving evidence to the court had been like a stage performance where everyone had a turn at being the star.

I've given loads of TV and radio interviews when my books were being published, and had a very good time during some of them, but nothing as simple as an article about some clinics has resulted in such a dramatic conclusion. And it left me with a great affection for the law and that helpful, patient judge. He took pains to see that the determined litigant before him navigated the intricacies of British justice to clear his name, even though he hadn't the money for a lawyer or barrister, and I was enormously impressed.

But perhaps what impressed me most was the involvement of General Practitioner, because nobody else commissioned an article like the one I wrote, or investigated what was really going on. I've had a varied experience of doctors themselves, but their magazine was, and I'm sure still is, simply marvellous.

© Alida Baxter

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