Chortle chortle, scribble scribble: the dying art of the court reporter | Crime
The question is: “Will it make?” A nice murder will make. A crime involving a celebrity will make. Make the papers, Guy Toyn meant. Toyn is the co-owner of the news agency Court News UK, which reports the stories emerging from London’s criminal courts. In the mix this week was the man who had head-butted Roy Keane: that would definitely make. But the gang murders that routinely fill the Old Bailey, where Court News is based, rarely make. No, a nice murder would be a woman killing a man, ideally a middle-class white woman killing a man. Like the recent case of the primary school teacher who buried her partner in their back garden. That would always make.
Toyn – a towering man of 61 with a voice you can hear through walls – was deciding which courts to visit with a teenage intern who was shadowing him for the week. The 18 courts at the Old Bailey, properly known as the Central criminal court of England and Wales, are the setting for the major criminal trials of Greater London. On offer today, a Tuesday in June, was the usual frantic menu of disturbed human behaviour: in court 12, a case of cocaine-smuggling in a shipment of bananas; in court 11, a man appealing against the refusal of a shotgun licence after he had threatened to kill an employee; in courts 6, 7 and 8, a range of stabbings.
Toyn has worked at the Old Bailey with his business partner and fellow court reporter Scott Wilford for the best part of 35 years. The job hasn’t changed hugely over that time. As an agency rather than a publication, the Court News model depends on selling stories to the national press. Wilford will offer up a report on the first day of a murder trial or a high-profile sentencing and the Daily Mail, say, will put in an order. (Court News makes about £130 for a non-exclusive court report and anything up to £700 for an exclusive story.)
In a nod to the low status of the journalist in the court’s hierarchy, Toyn describes court-reporting as “grovelling” – as in: “Let’s go for a grovel round the courts.” Someone once told Toyn to stop calling it grovelling, as it diminished both his self-respect and the status of the job, but Toyn likes to say the word with a charged irony. As young men with “huge chips” on their shoulders, Toyn and Wilford bonded over a dislike of authority. They shared more than a grudge, though. “If me and Scott didn’t think this job was important,” Toyn said, “we would have given up years ago and made a lot more money.”
To reach Toyn at his desk – marked by a sheet of paper taped to the wall saying “Guy’s desk” – you must climb the Old Bailey’s central staircase, walk beneath lush ceiling frescoes, past hand-carved coats of arms, along lobbies lined with Sicilian marble, until you find a heavy door behind which lies the designated space for the press: a suite of rooms in terminal decline, smelling lightly of toast. In corners lie objects that look as if they were unthinkingly put down decades ago and never moved again: a stack of museum-worthy beige laptops; a row of abandoned shoes; two stepladders, both bearing the inscription: “This belongs in press room so FUCK OFF.” To one side, a blue pinboard displays cuttings from a remote tabloid heyday when a different kind of story made the papers: “Wife Burned to Death By a Pan Of Spuds”; “Christian Soccer Thug Preys on Ref”; “Blackmail Victim’s ‘Sweets Up Bum’ Torture”. Toyn considered the nature of that particular experience. “It depends on what kind of sweets they were,” he mused. “If they were nice bonbons …”
Toyn was defensive about the state of the press room. Yes, the paint was peeling and the red carpet swirled with disconcerting yellow stains, but compared to some courts, the Old Bailey was luxe. Had I been to Southwark? “You’d slit your wrists.” He said this cheerfully: decades at the Bailey meant the darkest horrors usually came wrapped in a joke. Here, within the comforting degradation, Toyn likes to be casual: red running shorts, matching T-shirt, muddy trainers. To go into court, however, he has to smarten up. As Toyn is constantly going in and out of court, the day involves multiple costume changes into black trousers, a mauve jersey and proper shoes that he keeps in a plastic bag on a shelf. Sometimes, for speed, he simply puts the court attire over the shorts, so that when he returns to the press room he can whip off his outer layer without having to leave the room, like a low-key superhero.
Opportunities to be theatrical are rarely missed. Wilford, the lugubrious bassist to Toyn’s frontman, sits at the adjacent desk to Toyn, and Toyn often insists on addressing him as “Mr Wilford”, as if they were in a period drama about an old Fleet Street paper, presses clanking beneath them. While Toyn strides around, Wilford rarely moves from his chair, simultaneously managing reporters, editing copy and processing invoices. Wilford talks in a quiet patter. Toyn, asked for his origin story, took a deep breath and boomed: “It was a dark night on a blasted heath. There was a crack of thunder. Ye horrors! Toyn was born.” That voice was Gothic Novel. He has several in his repertoire: Idiot Judge, Pretentious Barrister, Moaning Gen Z, Misc Drunk. Then there are the performative laughs: “AHARHARHAHAR”; “OHOHOHO”; “HA! HA! HA!” His natural accent is Bristolian, which he deploys when he can use the rolling “Rs” to their most entrancing effect, turning certain words, like “pervert”, into an entirely new sonic experience. Perrrrrverrrrrt.
So: the order of the day. Cocaine smuggled in bananas was intriguing, but the shotgun licence appeal was more sellable. The case was fundamentally insignificant – “Mr Snooty wants to go on a shoot with his ra-ra mates,” as Toyn had it – but the man was the millionaire owner of a celebrity-favoured tailoring business and the Daily Mail had run a story on him before and might again. Plus, Toyn had snapped a photo of him when he was last in court wearing a bike helmet with his tongue sticking out comically to one side. Pictures helped: the story might well make.
To be a first-class court reporter, according to Toyn, requires a singular talent: shorthand. Jack Hudson, one of Court News’s three junior reporters, has beautiful shorthand. He also possesses other essential skills: the ability to sift dense legal language for a good news line and to write the story fast, direct from the courtroom. Hudson is “one of the last great court reporters in the world”, Toyn added. Hudson – a tall, quiet, ferociously hard-working man of 25 – smiled uncertainly. “You think I’m exaggerating but I’m not!” Toyn cried.
Toyn’s shorthand was still pretty good as far as I could tell, looping and decorous on his notepad as he made notes in the shotgun case. When I admitted to Toyn that I’d never learned how to do it, he looked disapproving. Shorthand was essential. The old skills were the best skills. He is generally a man for whom things were better before. Murders were better. Judges were better: fiercer, more impressive. Barristers were better – more flamboyant and fun to watch. Before, you could make jokes about anything, say what you liked. A couple of years ago, Toyn lost his media lecturing job in part, he thought, because he’d described a suicide as someone “topping themselves”.
More than anything, though, things were better before the internet. In his professional lifetime, Toyn felt he had seen not just the collapse of court reporting but the entire news industry. When he and Wilford started out in the 1980s as junior reporters at the Central News agency, the Old Bailey press room was packed with journalists from four different specialist court-reporting agencies, who used to race to file their copy first. Back then, Central was at the bottom of an established hierarchy, selling stories to the local and regional press. Toyn and Wilford were expected to do the grunt work of the court-reporting, then share their notes, free, with the grander reporters from the other agencies who supplied the nationals and spent the afternoon in the pub. (Toyn remembered one who kept a bottle of whiskey in his drawer from which he’d take sips while writing his copy, before calling his mother in tears.)
When Toyn and Wilford bought out Central in 1999 and rebranded as Court News, years of resentment at this arrangement were channelled into a counterattack. They stopped sharing their notes and hustled out the other agencies. For a few years, as the only remaining specialist court agency, they made good money, employing at least five reporters and two photographers. But business dried up as local and regional papers began to fall away (more than 320 closed between 2009 and 2019, according to the Charitable Journalism Project). Now, in the press room it’s mostly just Toyn and Wilford. Their three junior reporters rove around the other London courts, and they share the space with a reporter from the general news agency PA, a BBC producer and the occasional national journalist. For a few major trials, journalists will descend en masse. But day to day, it’s a quiet place.
As we walked between the courts, Toyn ran into one of his favourite criminal barristers – an ebullient, passionate character, one of the old school – who was on a break from a gang murder trial. On seeing Toyn, the barrister ran back into court and re-emerged with a taped-up box, marked “Evidence”, which contained a 2ft-long knife that looked so unreal in its design – blood-red, with baroque, curling, lethal edges – that it resembled a theatrical prop more than a murder weapon. The barrister was desperate to impress on us quite how bad the epidemic of knife crime was in London, and despaired at the media’s lack of interest. “People don’t want to talk about this,” the barrister said gloomily. “It doesn’t sell.”
It was a tragedy, said Toyn, as we walked away. The press wanted stories that would appeal to their readers and advertisers, which did not include stories of stabbings too common to be considered newsworthy. As a matter of journalistic duty, Toyn and Wilford would cover the opening or verdict in a gang murder and post the story on their website and social media. But few readers would click. To Toyn, the tragedy was one of civic ignorance. The general population, he said, had no idea what went on in these courts, and therefore no idea what was actually going on in society.
Finally, it was cocaine bananas time. We happened to enter the courtroom as a police officer began to deliver a presentation on the subject of banana ripening, the science of which was apparently essential to the prosecution’s case. Toyn’s face lifted with joy. Bananas had to be harvested green. He laughed audibly, noting fast. They had to be stored at a temperature of 14.5C. Chortle chortle, scribble scribble. A slide compared bananas with peaches, apples and melons. Toyn shook his head with delight.
This is why the job never got old. Behind every door of every court was something you had never seen or heard before. The place was like a kaleidoscope, Toyn said: he couldn’t take his eyes off it. Once upon a time, Toyn had dreamed of a bohemian life in Paris, drinking absinthe, writing novels. But nothing in his imagination could compete with the courts. He was the kind of person, he admitted, who would happily sit in a coroner’s court all day and find out how people died.
Back in the press room, Hudson filed his report from the shotgun case. The judge had made his decision: the millionaire would not have his licence renewed. “He must have money to burn, that bloke,” Toyn said, noting that the millionaire had hired his barrister privately. “I must have my shotgun licence!” Posh Git voice.
The next morning, Wednesday, a new murder case was opening – possibly. Hudson went to find out. Whether something is or isn’t happening in the courts is impenetrable to the outsider, and sometimes to the insider, too. Every afternoon, the court list for the following day is posted online and on large noticeboards on the ground floor of the Old Bailey, but the list only contains the names of the defendants and the court numbers, with no details of the charges. Clerks must be chased down to fill in the gaps and last-minute alterations often occur: cases are delayed, there aren’t enough judges, defendants don’t show up or are hours late.
Years ago, Toyn and Wilford used to write campaigning articles about the chaos in the courts, but they had to stop, not having the time or resources to write stories that didn’t sell. Now, said Toyn, there was only one court reporter left in the UK with a conscience: Tristan Kirk at the Evening Standard. Kirk has been running a long campaign challenging the single justice procedure, which fast-tracks low-level criminal cases through magistrates courts with such speed and lack of transparency that the Magistrates’ Association recently called for its reform.
“So much of legal proceedings are effectively concealed from reporters,” Kirk told me. The digitisation of the court system, a process that has accelerated since a 2016 government reform programme, has had mixed results. Cases can now be streamed online by those directly involved and accredited press. But court documents, such as summaries of the barristers’ arguments, are sometimes shared privately online between barristers and the judge without ever being heard in court. After the event, it’s even harder to find out what happened. Transcripts of trials can only be obtained through expensive court-approved legal transcription services. In a recent House of Commons debate, the Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Olney told the story of a rape victim who had tried to access the transcript of her case and been quoted a figure of £7,500. (In the US, by contrast, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system allows access to federal court documents at a maximum price of $3 per document.)
Even when they are present, the press can meet resistance. Toyn told me that in some of the smaller magistrates courts the staff were so unused to the presence of journalists that his reporters would sometimes have to explain that they were allowed to be there. He’d had experience of barristers at the Old Bailey refusing to tell him their names. “One of the things that I like about this job is that you have carte blanche to be extremely rude to snooty barristers,” he said. “You don’t have to take any shit from these people at all, with their Oxford fucking degrees.” He paused, and attempted a conciliatory tone. “I don’t mean walking in and saying: ‘Hey, arsehole.’” It was more a case of reminding a criminal barrister that if they were publicly funded, they were open to scrutiny. (Toyn was, he admitted, an abrasive character. “My mother used to say to me, God rest her soul, ‘Guy, why are you so hostile?’”)
At the end of the morning session of the murder trial, Hudson filed his copy from the courtroom. In the press room, Wilford and Toyn read it simultaneously.
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” said Toyn, with relish.
The defendant, aged 19, was accused of killing a drunk man in a park with a vodka bottle.
The chances of selling the story were slim. “Back in the day, this is the kind of thing that would have got an order from the Wembley Observer,” Wilford said. “Who’s going to use it? No one, now.” Still, after a quick edit on their ancient, pre-Word software, which requires them to do a manual spellcheck, they would post it on the Court News website. Even if it wasn’t picked up, it would at least enter their archive of court reports going back to the mid-1980s. Writing up the story was a matter of maintaining the public record: left unreported, the story would be forgotten, as if this man’s death had never happened at all. (The defendant was found not guilty at the end of June.)
“Now what I’m going to do,” Toyn declared, “is send it over to Mr Wilford who is going to send it to the national papers, who will not reply.”
The intern, emboldened on his second day, suggested some ideas involving TikTok. Toyn was all ears. Over recent years, he has tried to drag Court News into the digital present, or as he put it, to “build a community”, but it hasn’t been easy. If Toyn puts up a story about rape or sexual assault, using any of those words, the story will be buried by Google. To ensure his stories remain visible, he has to word many crimes euphemistically. As a lover of language in its specificity and extremity, and as a journalist who believes in reporting what actually happens in society, Toyn finds this outrageous. “What are we going to say, rape doesn’t exist?”
More broadly, Toyn was faced with a conundrum. Every room in the Old Bailey seemed to contain a potential Netflix true-crime docuseries, but he had yet to find a way of packaging the stories for a mass audience hungry for true crime. The ban on the press filming or recording cases in British courtrooms was a better system than the televised American trial, he felt, but it did limit the possibilities. (So far, the only concession was the broadcasting of judges’ sentencing remarks, allowed since 2022.)
For now, Court News has a YouTube channel (623 subscribers), a decent following on X (72,000), a Substack newsletter and two podcasts. One, Fresh From the Old Bailey, is made with a freelance producer, Gavin Haynes, who winkles the best stories of the week out of the team. The podcast hadn’t quite become the hit they had hoped for – especially frustrating given the success of the Daily Mail’s podcast The Trial, which follows high-profile cases such as Lucy Letby, Constance Marten and the plot to kidnap Holly Willoughby.
Still, Toyn wasn’t about to give up. He knew there was money to be made and he had no time for high-minded distaste at the idea of criminal justice being turned into commercial entertainment. On the ground floor of the Old Bailey he showed me a row of glass cabinets containing fragments of the building’s history. For centuries, public hangings of criminals had been held in front of crowds of thousands. “A good view of the scaffold,” stated one of the display panels, “could be purchased in advance.”
Early on Thursday, things were looking up, story-wise. A verdict was expected in the Roy Keane case, which all the papers would run. A woman nicknamed Al Capone, who’d once caused havoc in Worthing and claimed links to Russian royalty, was due in a magistrates court. The Old Bailey had a hearing in a case involving one of the notorious Kinahan cartel, an organised crime group about whom the Irish press ran stories almost daily. Hudson had been dispatched to Westminster magistrates court, so Toyn would be covering the cartel: a lovely opportunity for a voice (Irish Gangster).
In court, it was one of Toyn’s favourite judges, a frank old-timer called Philip Katz who seemed to find the proceedings absurd. So did Toyn: at least two of the barristers and one of the defendants were called Tom, which fuelled a barrage of jokes. To Toyn’s glee, Katz rapidly lost patience. The defendants were refusing to identify their phone numbers or handles on EncroChat, the encrypted smartphone service used by organised criminals until police infiltrated the network in 2020. By now, judges were well-versed in EncroChat cases and had no time for defendants’ evasion – it would not help their case when it came to sentencing, Katz made clear.
Later, in the press room, Toyn regaled Wilford with the scene. “Shall we call him Judge Big Phil Katz? Phil the bruiser Katz?”
Toyn turned his attention to the intern, who needed a project, something to show for his week in the office.
“I don’t care what you write,” Toyn said. “If you want, you can write the word ‘shite’ and walk away.”
For a moment, he became deadly serious. “You said you had an idea though. What about: ‘The future of court reporting.’”
“What future,” Wilford muttered.
Toyn and Wilford. You could make a TV series about them: Only Fools and Horses meets All the President’s Men. Haynes compared them to Statler and Waldorf, the elderly pair of grumpy Muppets. Wilford is the realist, Toyn the optimist. Wilford wondered if Toyn, being older, could afford to be more positive, as he had fewer financial worries. Toyn was also in charge of “the more optimistic side of the business”: the Substack, podcasts and social media – the future, in other words.
Neither seemed sure that the business would make it. “We’re always close to the edge,” Toyn said. In recent years, both men had been forced to reduce their salaries and borrow money to keep the business alive. (Numbers were elusive: Toyn was bracingly candid on all subjects apart from money.) Wilford declared that only a “drastic turnaround” would allow them to raise their pay again. But neither had any intention of quitting. Toyn had various ways of expressing his long-term commitment to the job. They’d have to carry him out of the Old Bailey in a casket; he loathed the thought of retirement, which to his mind meant sitting in a pub drinking frothy ale and talking about Nigel Farage; he was not going to grow carrots on an allotment. “I’m not going to do that! It’s shit! I’m not going to fucking do that! I’m not going to watch YouTube videos on how to grow carrots!”
The hypothetical carrot endgame animated him for a while, until sincerity crept back in. This job mattered. It was important, he believed, that people knew what was happening in these courts, in all its variety and ugliness, because people should know what was happening on their streets, in their towns, in the darker recesses of society. The cocaine bananas and shotgun millionaires and street stabbings. The endlessly strange and awful things that people do, the lies we tell, the judgments and mercies we receive. These things should not go unseen or unheard.
Late morning on Thursday, Wilford had word of a sentencing in the case of a man who had sexually assaulted a woman on a train. Like the opening of a trial, a sentencing was always worth attending. Beginnings and endings made the best stories, and Toyn liked to see crimes met with punishment. (“Oh absolutely,” he told me. “We want the bad people locked up.”) Also, it would be a good experience for the intern’s last day. Tomorrow, Friday, everyone would be out of the office apart from Toyn. “I’ll be on my own in that room,” he said, “shouting abuse at the computer.”
In court, the defendant, a skinny man of 60, had not dressed up for the occasion. He walked into the dock in jeans and a waterproof coat, unsure whether to sit or stand. The judge, from her elevated position, guided him through the necessary movements like a teacher with a new child in class.
The judge asked the prosecuting barrister if he felt the facts of the case needed to be heard again before sentencing. The barrister did not. Toyn winced. No facts meant no story. Sure, he knew it was the sexual assault of a woman who was a member of the train’s staff, but he didn’t know her precise job, nor which train she was on, nor where the train was going. To write it up, he’d have to convince a barrister to share their documents or tell him the facts, which they weren’t always willing to do.
The defence barrister made her case for leniency: her client had been sober since the offence, which had been committed, like most of his previous offences, when drunk. He was willing to continue rehabilitation. He was not a threat to society, she insisted, and time inside would not help. The judge then read out the victim’s impact statement. After the assault she had experienced anxiety and sleep loss. Her job, which had always been a source of confidence, had become a place she felt insecure.
The judge announced her decision. Over two years, the defendant would perform community service and continue in a rehabilitation programme. She looked at him sharply: he must stay out of trouble. The man, admonished, left the court.
After delivering her sentence, the judge turned her attention to the back of the room where Toyn, the intern and I were sitting.
“Sorry,” she said, unapologetically. “I don’t know who you are.”
Toyn got to his feet. “Members of the press, m’lady.”
She looked a little quizzical. Had we been in court for the sentencing? Yes, confirmed Toyn. Fine, she replied, but she didn’t think she had anything else of interest for us. She smiled firmly. Her meaning was clear: we should let her get on with the rest of her business, unobserved.
Outside in the hall, Toyn was annoyed. Why did the judge question his presence? And how was he going to write the story? He wasn’t sure it was worth tracking down the prosecuting barrister, as he didn’t have a picture of the defendant. Perhaps he should run out and take one as he left the building.
Was it fair, I wondered, that a man who was going to pay his dues to society in a two-year community sentence should for ever have his face on the internet associated with a crime? I muttered something about second chances. Toyn looked at me as if I were mad. His voice climbed up the register, eyes flaring with righteousness. That man had ruined that woman’s life. She’d gone to work, done her job and been assaulted. What right did he have to protection of any kind?
Toyn didn’t take the photo, but he found the barrister, got the details. The woman had been serving drinks and snacks from a trolley when the man had touched her on the bottom. It had happened on a train going from Glasgow to London. Back in the press room, he posted the story: “Groper on the Avanti Express.” Four likes on X. Never mind: the story now existed in the public domain, recorded for posterity, if nothing else.
Afterwards, Toyn told Wilford about the judge. It was embarrassing, he said, having to stand up and say who he was. He’d been sitting in these courts for more than half his life. Watching Toyn explain himself to the judge with all the formality the court demands, the “M’ladys” and little bows, the acts of grovelling that he somehow performs with both deference and irony, I’d imagined a volley of “Fuck offs” passing through his mind. He could sit in that courtroom all day if he liked. He could listen to every single thing that went on and report whatever he was legally permitted to report. He was doing his job – a job he felt, with some justification, was an essential if unappreciated structural element of society, a load-bearing wall. A judge could not eject him from a courtroom for no reason. In fact, after her suggestion that his presence was no longer necessary, Toyn had sat down and waited a little while. He would leave the court exactly when he chose.
