Black barrister's double first

Lincoln Crawford QC scored a double first yesterday as he was named as the first black chairman of the Bar Council's race relations committee, which also makes him the first black barrister to chair any major barristers' committee.

The appointment of the highly regarded 49-year-old QC is a boost to the efforts of leading advocates to make colleagues introduce genuine equality of opportunity. He came from a rural working-class family in Trinidad, arriving in the UK when he was 18, and supported himself through O-levels and A-levels before studying law at Brunel University.

He said yesterday: "Exam results continue to show a disproportionate number of black students failing. Equally, pupillage [the barristers' practical training] remains difficult to obtain, with some evidence that very few ethnic minority pupils are given tenancies in the larger sets of chambers, and those securing tenancies still finding problems in getting access to good quality work." Patricia Wynn Davies