Shubtill v Director of Public Prosecutions

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In the Court of Appeal
R v Langley [2022] JCLR 46

Lord Justice Cocklecarrot M.R.: (Cur adv. vult) London’s National Gallery has stood for 170 years at the northern boundary of Trafalgar Square. Originally conceived by Parliamentary Commission to “give the people an ennobling enjoyment”, the gallery houses paintings which, on any account, are the highest peaks of the grand massif that is the western cultural tradition. Cimabue’s Virgin and Child with Two Angels hangs there. So does Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks. The gallery records the inevitable progress of history: Constable’s The Hay Wain graces a wall not far from Turner’s requiem to the obsolescence of sail and the final, crushing victory of the Industrial Revolution, The Fighting Temeraire. The gallery is just as well endowed with modern art: Cézanne hangs beside Monet, who accompanies Renoir and Rousseau. Accompanying all these French masters is Van Gogh’s Sunflowers a painting whose sister was once the most expensive painting ever sold.

As might any building which has stood in central London for 170 years, the gallery has born witness to great change and momentous events, both fair and foul. The erection of Nelson’s Column. The ushering in of the new Millennium. The area has seen its share of political protests: suffragette bombings of 1924, and Poll Tax Riots of 1990.

So I dare say the goings on of Friday 14th October 2022 will not linger over the aeons: fairer things, and fouler ones, will soon wipe them from the collected consiousness, just as a stout sponge might remove carelessly spilt soup. But alas, these events are on our agenda for todays proceedings, so, tiresome as they undoubtedly are, it falls to me to recount them.

On Friday, just after 11am, two young women entered Room 43 of the Gallery. It was normal Friday towards the end of the holiday season and the gallery was typically busy. It escaped the guards’ attention the women had, concealed about their persons, containers of soup, which without ado they emptied onto Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers. There were gasps, roars and a shout of “Oh, my gosh!” from nearby patrons before the women vaulted a velvet rope and glued themselves to the wall and began shouting. Most patrons stood transfixed. One, a Mr Ernest Shubtill, of Rillington Way, Neasden, did not. Mr. Shubtill exited Room 43, largely unobserved, and at a decent clip. We shall hear more about Mr. Shubtill shortly.

The women continued with their shouting at every one. Before long — inexplicably quickly, I am inclined to think — some media representatives arrived with their cameras and constructed a press gallery. They may have made it harder for Gallery Security to remove the women, for it seems no-one tried to. The glued women warmed to their task. The more loquacious of the two, Ms. Penelope Primrose, of Hampstead, delivered something of a soliloguy.

“What is worth more, art or life?” she asked, rhetorically. “Is it worth more than food? More than justice? Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people? The cost of living crisis is part of the cost of oil crisis, fuel is unaffordable to millions of cold, hungry families. They can’t even afford to heat a tin of soup.”

Sunflowers has an estimated value of £72m, so the answer to Ms. Primrose’s question for most people is probably “the art”,

The soup

It was common ground that the soup was tomato flavoured, and manufactured by the Heinz company of Pennsylvania, but the parties have disagree sharply on the significance of this fact.