A 'fearless' solicitor who drove round Manchester in a double-decker bus telling Donald Trump to go home has died, aged 74.
Mary Monson passed away last Saturday, March 26, in Spain, after a short illness. Born in London to two Irish immigrant parents, Mary moved to Manchester in 1975 to begin a career in law, quickly finding herself the object of “old-fashioned sexism”.
As soon as she’d completed her legal training Mary founded her own firm, despite not having any experience running her own business, to break away from the men asking why she didn’t “dress sexy” in the office and to kick start her career in her own way. She was quickly plunged into the world of Salford Magistrates Court, becoming struck by the sheer poverty and doing her best to tackle it.
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Mary always fought for her clients and their right to a fair and honest hearing, often going up against police officers and local authority groups to ensure the people she represented were given fair hearings with all the facts on the table so they could be judged for their actions alone, and regularly seeing cases dismissed after uncovering the full story behind situations. According to her son Joseph, Mary battled the court system to stop many young people from Salford being sent to adult prisons, and fought for their right to be listened to and punished appropriately, often arguing with police who insisted they shackle young black boys within the courtroom without need.
“I’d meet people and they’d tell me to look after my mum,” recalls Joseph. “They’d say ‘your mum saved me from the police’ and tell me about what happened. Mum once drove round Ordsall trying to find this guy before the police so he didn’t get beaten and it was clear she’d been kind of a second mum to these people and they wanted me to not take for granted what I had.”
Mary’s tireless work quickly garnered a name for herself, and she represented a lot of defendants in the city’s “Gunchester” history, as well as one of the lead co-accused in the Strangeways Riots. Her notability even saw defendants seek her out for national-level cases, with Mary becoming involved in the Cambridge Analytica case after the COO sought out a defence solicitor he could trust.
Despite her success, Mary didn’t let her career interfere with her home life, temporarily quitting work to care for her husband after he was tragically diagnosed with cancer, before returning to restart her own firm after his death in 1996. Both her sons, Joseph and Liam, joined the firm as lawyers to follow in their mum’s footsteps.
As the firm grew, Mary liked to give back to the area, setting up a canteen-like kitchen behind Salford and Eccles Unemployment Centre for the homeless or those facing poverty to get some proper food, but it was her action against former US President Donald Trump that most will remember her for. When the ex-leader visited the UK in July 2018 Mary hired an open-topped double decker bus to drive around Salford with anti-Trump messages on, telling him to go home. She firmly stated the action wasn’t political, but another moral stand against right and wrong.
Joseph said: “She started her Christmas address to all the staff one year and said ‘what we’re doing is so important, standing up for people’, and then she just announced she was going to get a double decker bus when Trump comes to England and we were all going on it. The plan was to put a big sign on it and then drive round all the places in Manchester and Salford that people like Trump would love to imagine didn’t exist. This wasn’t political for her, it was about what was right and wrong. She was making a very simple statement against bullies and people who want to divide us, that’s the enemy.”
The bus toured the Salford Unemployment Community Resource Centre, Eccles Mosque, and the Windrush Millennium Centre, seeing a few people make rude gestures in support of the message, before parking up to be part of a demonstration against Trump’s visit in Albert Square. Although it was completely unrelated to her work, son Joseph said the Trump bus and her canteen work were true summaries of the kind of person Mary was, and represented what she aimed to do in the world.
He added: “She had a wicked sense of humour and an almost pathological need to tell the truth. So many of the messages from people have been about the kindness she showed them and those messages are the hardest to read. People talk about her legacy and being a trailblazer and it so happens that she would now be regarded as a feminist icon, the first woman to have a major law firm in Manchester, but she wasn’t thinking about that she was thinking about survival and doing her job and the time that she gave to people, she always tried to help.”
Mary is survived by her two sons and a stepdaughter, alongside dozens of lawyers at her firm, Mary Monson Solicitors, whom she helped to train to have the same beliefs she did. Her family has asked for donations to be made in Mary’s name to Emmaus Salford, a charity supporting those who have been homeless, instead of flowers.
