Bar Jackets and Jabots: unsung heros or soup catchers.

The bar jacket and jabot are the forgotten elements of judicial and legal dress. Their appearance, history and significance minimised as merely ‘associated accessories’ to the wig and robe. But do they deserve any more? And just what is a jabot anyway? Some kind of half-arsed robot. A ineffectual jab. Something worn in the pants. Here is the third part of our series about how barristers dress. Perhaps it will answer these questions but I doubt it.

         The bar jacket has no know legal purpose. It is little more than a black woollen waistcoat with sleeves. Tear away the sleeves and you could imagine the Pot Black champion Eddie Charlton leaning across the felt, cocking an eyebrow and beginning another devastating break. 

      

The jabot is that other ‘associated accessory’. It has no proven practical purpose although when verbose counsel appear it is sometimes said to catch the dribbles. Hence their other names: court bibs or less impressively, neck doilies. It is quite literally a white bib that hangs from a stiff white collar. As for the collar, think Father Ted's, Father Jack Hackett  preparing for a whiskey binge. Others are fancy lace with decorative edges. Still others are a stiff winged collar with two starched white tabs hanging down across the bib. One species only recently documented and said to be native to Mexico is the Poncho Jabot. As the name suggests this is a snow-white poncho with the tabs attached at the neck. This one is favoured by those counsel whose cross-examination begins with a smear and a snarl, and ends with them producing a six-gun and shooting the witness dead.

Perhaps there are more types. One reader recently sent in a photo of something he

discovered in a Melbourne airport toilet. He took it to be some kind of 'disposable jabot', but I wouldn't be so sure.

         Bar jackets and jabots are less uncomfortable than wigs and robes. Still, they contribute to dangerous counsel-warming and worn too tight can cause nosebleeds and dizziness.

         There are other legal accessories even less well known than the jacket and jabot. Robe bags and wig tins for example. These are expensive for what they are: the robe bag little more than a monographed pillow case; the wig tin reminiscent of a large but rather drab Arnett’s biscuit tin.

         I’ve heard more than once of children or grandchildren levering open a wig tin, only to find poxy horsehair instead of the famous family assortment they expected. Imagine their disappointed little faces.

Some counsel know just how they feel and have looked just like then once or twice. Yes, those poor barristers who out of favour or out of sorts, are overlooked each year when the QCs are dolled out.