Author: Robin Towns (2000)

Robin Towns LL.B   – Solicitor and Sometime Legal Adviser to Lloyds Private Banking
(taken from Isssue No 10 –  January 2000)

How Many Noughts – Two or Three?

Yes, this is, or at least is intended to be, a serious question: it is not simply that I am a lawyer with a less than normal proficiency in terms of numeracy skills. The apocalyptic date 1^st January 2000 has already inspired – and may well continue to generate – a plethora of articles and books, not to mention television and radio programmes, on the coming of the third millennium and the ways in which life today differs from that at the end of the first. Where that is not possible, historians, both professional and amateur, have treated that precise date – whether rightly or not is a debate into which I am not prepared to enter – as the start of a new century and have compared and contrasted current circumstances with those in 1900. The origin of the law of trusts and of the powers and duties of trustees may be so old as to be incapable of precise identification in terms of a commencement date but there is no evidence to suggest that the contemporaries of Ethelred, whether or not ill prepared, or of Canute, no matter how trusting, were trustees in anything other than the general Biblical sense of stewards for future generations. It is thus necessary to look back to 1900, rather than to Y1k, for a meaningful, and hopefully bug-free, comparison – or, rather, ‘at or about’ that date, given that (to misquote Lord David Cecil in his biography of Sir Max Beerbohm) the Muse of History is not so considerate to her servants as to arrange that the successive phases of England’s development should coincide exactly with the start of successive centuries.