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The County Court
I joined Ipswich County Court in 1989 as an administrative assistant, the starting grade of the civil service. I was promoted to administrative officer within two months, left the filing and post franking behind and started learning the interesting bits.
The Court Office was divided into teams which each covered a different area of civil law. Administrative officers were expected to be able to learn all aspects of the work on each team so that they could cover for other people. As a result, by the time I moved on, among other things, I could help you file a bankruptcy or a divorce petition; issue a court summons; swear an affidavit; apply for an adoption order or injunction and help you stop an eviction in progress. All useful skills!
I became known as the 'Bankruptcy Queen' because I set up meetings with the local Official Receiver's office and learned the whole procedure back to front - because it was a complicated area of work, a lot of the admin officers shied away from it, but I really enjoyed it.
During this time I took two A Levels - I retook my sociology and also took English language & literature, passing both.
Who needs sixth form, anyway?
Cambridge County Court & the Trial Centre
In 1993 I moved to Cambridge and transferred to Cambridge County Court where I did much the same thing. I mainly worked on the team that listed the court hearings and was often called on to be Judge's Court Clerk which meant I spent a lot of time in the court room listening to boundary disputes and family cases. Deep joy.
In 1992 Cambridge County Court became a designated trial centre, which meant that smaller local courts would send their longer and higher value cases to Cambridge to be heard. This hadn't been administered properly before my arrival, mostly due to a manager who had an inordinate amount of sick leave, and as I was the one left to deal with the fallout, I volunteered to sort it out. Within a few months I had introduced new tracking systems to make sure that important files weren't 'lost' anywhere and had weeded out all the incomplete cases and files that weren't ready for trial. I also designed some new forms for the parties to fill in so that it was easy to tell what stage a case was at, and avoid listing it before it was ready for trial.
I did this so well that I shot myself in the foot - the lovely, late Judge Sheerin thought I was the bees knees and insisted on asking for me to be his clerk when it wasn't my turn, because he knew that I was on top of the workload.
I managed to get myself temporarily promoted to executive officer, managing teams of four and five people, and in my time at the court my claims to fame are seeing Paul 'Gazza' Gascoine in court on a family case and putting the seal on Professor Stephen Hawking's decree absolute (he signed it with his thumb print.)
By the end of 1994 I'd done all there was to do in the court office, and there was a bar on promotion because the court service was about to become an 'executive agency' and downsize. So I moved on, and found myself working for Cambridgeshire Trading Standards.
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