"Campbell, Sybil (1889–1977), barrister and first woman stipendiary magistrate, was born on 9 October 1889 in Ceylon, the eldest of the three daughters and a son of Neill Graeme Campbell (1859–1940) of Auchendarroch, tea company agent, and his wife, Maude Georgiana (d. 1950), daughter of Sir William Bovill, chief justice of common pleas. She was educated at home by her mother on postal instructions from the Parents' National Educational Union until 1903, then at a private school at Dunardarigh, Berwickshire, followed by a finishing school at Paris during the winter of 1906–7. She entered Girton College, Cambridge, in 1908, where she took the natural sciences tripos part one in 1911 and the economics tripos part two in 1912. In 1913 she was appointed an investigating officer for the trade board charged to monitor minimum wages in the sweated industries, most of whose workers were women. Her work involved visiting the roughest parts of many cities to inspect working conditions and her parents insisted she carry a gun—which she did, hidden and unloaded. In 1918 she became an enforcement officer in the Ministry of Food.
In January 1920 Sybil Campbell entered as a student at the Middle Temple, and became, in 1922, one of the first women to be called to the bar.
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Sybil Campbell's public profile after 1945 was not that of champion of young women scholars, however, but that of judicial scourge of poor first offenders. Soon after her appointment by the home secretary, Herbert Morrison, on 3 April 1945, as the first British woman judge, becoming stipendiary magistrate at Tower Bridge police court, she was attacked in the South London Press. Her sentencing policy in her first months had almost doubled the national level of recourse to imprisonment instead of fines for first offenders. One man was gaoled for stealing four small Christmas puddings; another given six weeks for stealing three bars of soap. Five thousand factory workers demonstrated in protest at the latter sentence and various south London trades councils, the local branch of the Women's Co-operative Guild, and one ward of the local Labour Party called for her dismissal.
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Sybil Campbell retired to her family home at Lochgilphead, Argyll, with its 8 acres of wild garden, azaleas, and rhododendrons, until crippling arthritis and heart trouble forced her to go into the Bon Secours Nursing Home, 40 Mansion House Road, Langside, Glasgow, where she died on 29 August 1977. She was buried at Lochgilphead."
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