When Miss Hamlyn signed her will on 12 June 1939, less than three months before the Second World War began, the world was on the brink of radical change. But she was secure in her Britishness, confident in the superior virtue of the law developed in these islands. So, when bequeathing the residue of her will, she wished what she called ‘the Common People of this country’ to be instructed by lectures or otherwise in ‘the Comparative Jurisprudence and the Ethnology of the chief European Countries including our own and the circumstances of the growth of such Jurisprudence’, but she did so for a very specific purpose: ‘to the intent that the Common People of our Country may realise the privileges which in law and custom they enjoy in comparison with other European Peoples and realising and appreciating such privileges may recognise the responsibilities and obligations attaching to them’. Thus Miss Hamlyn sought to promote responsible, law-abiding citizenship, and to do so by impressing on her British fellow-citizens the advantages their national law conferred on them as compared with their less fortunate European counterparts. So the jurisprudence of the chief European countries was firmly marked ‘Not for import’. As Lord Hailsham once observed, ‘Abroad is for hols.’

As the daughter of a solicitor practising in the West Country, who also sat as a Justice of the Peace for some years, Miss Hamlyn no doubt grew up with some knowledge of legal matters, and she is said to have studied the law herself, although little or nothing is known of her progress as a student. She was, however, described as ‘very intellectual’ and may therefore have warmed – unlike many practitioners – to the more philosophical aspects of the subject. Be that as it may, she clearly regarded our law in this country as something quite separate and distinct from the law of other countries. Her mental picture was of British (more probably, in truth, English) judges administering a body of indigenous, home-made law, some of it statutory, some of it made by the judges in case after case decided over the centuries, some of it customary, but all of it ‘Made in Britain’.