This is about the judge who tried the two men found guilty in the London murder. His commitment to civil rights was evident 40 years ago as a college student here in America:
An Englishman in Kansas by Judge Brian Barker QC
(reprinted with permission from the Spring/Summer 2003 issue of Horizons, alumni magazine of the University of Kansas)
(Judge Brian Barker, Q.C. (MA 1968 Political Science) came to KU on a scholarship in 1966 ready to participate fully in the American university experience. According to the Kansas University Archives, it appears that Barker is not only the first but likely the only non-American student to be elected to a KU student body executive office; he served as student body vice president for the 1967-68 academic year. A Queen's Counsel since 1990, Barker now serves at the Old Bailey in the City of London, and he was chairman of the Criminal Bar Association of England and Wales from 1998 to 2000. Barker is married to Anne, also a judge. They have three daughters: Camilla, 22, Edwina, 19, and Felicity, 17.)
It was late August 1966. I was 21 and prepared for anything when I boarded the cheapest flight that I could find at London Heathrow (it went via Iceland) and set off in the rain. We landed in a humidity that I had never before experienced and I soon found myself at the tip of Manhattan looking across at the Statue of Liberty and wondered what the future would hold and why I had left the familiar. I was a recent graduate of the University of Birmingham, England, and felt that now a little ?eye opening? was necessary. Fortune had smiled and I had been awarded a scholarship to the University of Kansas. So the next stop was the Greyhound Bus station. There was no turning back and a significant journey had begun.
Was I prepared? Well not for two days on a bus, but the company and the perspective were fascinating. We finally rolled in to Lawrence and I saw for the first time the red roofs on the hill, my home for the next two years. I certainly needed the orientation and was impressed with the scale of the campus and the size of the international student program ? as I remember more than 80 countries represented.
Registration was a struggle; I did not seem to have the right sort of documents and it took a while to get agreement that despite being a foreign student I did not need to take an exam to demonstrate my proficiency in English. Things quickly got better. Unlike many international students, I opted to live in a hall of residence. Templin was a fortunate choice and as the guy who sort of spoke the same language but with a funny accent, I was made very welcome. One of my early claims to fame in my letters home was to share a wash room with Jim Ryan, already one of Kansas' most famous sons and the world record holder for the mile.
My undergraduate degree had been in law (available as a first degree in the United Kingdom) and I decided to follow a master's degree in political science and international relations.
Professor Eldon Fields was one of a number of inspiring teachers, some of whom quite enjoyed my ?quaint? way of expressing things. My mouth had to be kept firmly shut, however, on a visit into an ICBM (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile) base and silo where the discovery that I was a foreigner, even if an ally, would have left me on the wrong side of the barbed wire rather than inside the command center listening to the principle of requiring two separate keys to launch such a powerful weapon.
New friends introduced me to a new way of life and I enjoyed my visits to the Memorial Stadium to watch Big 8 football and marveled at the atmosphere generated in Allen Fieldhouse when the home team was in action. I was even drafted on to an intramural touch football team as the soccer style kicker and we enjoyed some modest success.
The English, of course, are fascinated by the weather and the seasons and speak of little else. I recall enjoying the campus in all its seasonal guises. Wonderful winter days, with ice on every bough but never really cold for long. But better was to follow in spring as the blossoms and the warmth returned and walking the campus was once more a pleasure.
One of my interests was student politics and administration but not of the protest variety, and a chance discussion in one of my classes found me drafted onto the All Student Council (ASC) as a graduate school representative. I found the meeting surprisingly formal, compared with my experiences in England, with much attention to Roberts' Rules of Order. Issues, though, were very similar: getting better deals for the students, better communications with the faculty and administration, and more efficient committee organization.
By the end of the year I was on the University Party ticket with Kyle Craig and was part of an intense ? and on reflection not very efficient ? electioneering campaign, which by contrast was far freer and informal than those at home. We ran on a platform that included a fairer voting and representative system and the abolition of the university system for doubling the fine on each successive parking ticket! We had something of a landslide victory, the reasons for which escape me, and I became student body vice president and proud to be the first non-American to hold a student executive office at KU.
In the summer I headed west with several friends who knew the ropes to earn money canning peas and beans in Oregon and Washington in what turned out to be 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. Once the harvests were in we set off for San Francisco although we drew the line at putting flowers in our hair. Haight Ashbury in all of its glory could not have been more of a contrast to Kansas but we survived the temptations intact and after various other adventures returned to comparative calm and tranquility.
I spent my second year in an apartment, and as my scholarship had been for a single year I obtained a job as a lecturer and tutor in the Western civilization department and I enjoyed this teaching very much. Meanwhile, the ASC work enabled me to appreciate the qualities of Chancellor Clarke Wescoe and other members of the administration, and on the social side it enabled me to have a very close encounter with Louis Armstrong and his impressive team at the Homecoming Concert.
How much we then appreciated of the growing size of the civil rights protest movement in the South and of the demonstrations against the increasingly draining Vietnam War is difficult now to assess, insulated as we were in the middle of the continent. But in the spring of 1968, two assassinations changed history.
Senator Robert Kennedy died in the back corridor of a hotel in California. A matter of two weeks earlier, we had entertained him on the campus while he was on the presidential nomination campaign trail. He had addressed a spellbound audience of some 20,000 jammed into the Allen Fieldhouse expounding his vision for the future. He was a man of real charisma and a clearly unfulfilled talent. The final victor in November was Richard Nixon.
Then in April the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was cut down in Memphis, which triggered rioting and burning across the nation in the short term and a compete re-evaluation of national attitudes in the longer.
Demonstrations finally hit the campus in a big way in May when a protest group called ?Voice? demanded more student influence on all university committees.
After numerous meetings, it was agreed to form a committee to ensure a greater student voice in administrative decisions, and the threat of violence evaporated.
My biggest regret was not being able to walk down the Hill to receive my degree. I had missed the deadline for the submission of my thesis, but at least I was able to share the graduation delight of many of my friends. Some of them were immediately drafted for military service. The rules had changed for graduate students and I was close to losing my immunity. Even though I was due to enroll in a course in London in October, I was still required to take part in an Army evaluation exercise, a sobering experience. With my thesis finished and approved, I set off for home, far richer for my experience. I, like the Jayhawk, may have flown backwards but I sure enjoyed what I had seen.
I made good friends, some of which I still have. I was shown enormous generosity and tolerance. I benefited from the professionalism of my teachers and the breadth of the facilities; I hope that I gave something in return. The more we share the more we understand and I will always be grateful to those visionaries who set up the foreign exchange program and gave me two years to learn something of a great nation and a little more of myself.
I eventually received my certificate, not from the hands of the chancellor but via the postal service, and I got down to studying for my English bar exams. I qualified as barrister, which entitled me to wear a white wig and a black gown, and practiced as an advocate in courts around the south of England for some 30 years. I was made a judge two years ago and I sit trying serious criminal cases in the heart of the City of London at the Old Bailey court. I welcome visitors, and I have to this day a Jayhawk on my desk.
