A POLICE detective who gave birth to triplets while studying part-time to qualify as a lawyer has come top of more than 1,400 students at the country’s biggest law college.
Emma Gilmour, 33, discovered half-way through the course at the College of Law, which involved travelling to London two nights a week from her home near Oxford, that she was expecting Eve, Grace and Lily, who were born seven weeks prematurely in October. She had been admitted to The John Radcliffe hospital, Oxford, two months earlier.
She continued her studies throughout her stay in hospital and a even week before their birth persuaded her husband, also a detective, to drive her from to London to attend a lesson. After the triplets were born she did not miss a lesson for the remaining eight months of the one-year vocational legal practice course to qualify as a solicitor.
In the recently-released results, Mrs Gilmour scored an average of 85.17 per cent, the highest marks among more than 1,400 full and part-time students in London — the first time a part-time student has beaten the full-timers. Her marks were also the highest of all 3,400 students at the college’s branches — Birmingham, Chester, Guildford and York — gaining her a distinction.
Mrs Gilmour said that she had managed to complete the course because of the support of her whole family, especially her husband, a detective sergeant with Thames Valley Police. “I owe everything to Stan, who works shifts as a police officer and looked after the children so I could come on the course,” she said.
Advertisement
For several weeks while she was pregnant in hospital, and even immediately after the birth when she was in a wheelchair suffering from the effects of the Caesarean section, he collected her from her hospital bed, drove her to London, carried her books to the classroom and waited until the lesson was finished.
“He would then drive me back to hospital again. He even used his own leave looking after the babies so I could study,” she said. “When he was not available, my mum Jane would help out. And when she was teaching evening dancing classes then my dad Derek helped. It was a joint family effort. I could have done nothing without them.”
Mrs Gilmour’s father works in telecommunications and her mother is a nursery teacher. The family moved to Belgium soon after she was born and she was educated at the European School in Brussels. From there she won a place at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, to study natural sciences, gaining a 2:1 degree in genetic pathology and virology. She joined the police force and worked her way up from being a bobby on the beat to a detective for the Thames Valley force in Reading. It was there that she met her husband.
Mrs Gilmour said that the worst time was when the babies were small and she was getting up “at least twice a night to feed them all. That would take at least one and a half hours. I was so exhausted in the day I was quite tearful. But luckily they very quickly started sleeping through the night and now it’s fine.”
She also praised the college, the largest postgraduate legal training institution in Europe, for putting her in a separate room near a lavatory when she was first pregnant and feeling sick “so I could take the mid-course exams without distracting other students”.
Advertisement
Mrs Gilmour has resigned from the police force and has already had a couple of offers of trainee places in law firms. “I am thinking about these and hope in the not-too-distant future to return to work.”
She said that it was her work in court while with the police, appearing as a witnesses in trials, that prompted her to start a part-time course at the College of Law. She first took the graduate diploma part of the course two years ago, passing with distinction.
Joanna Wagstaffe, assistant academic registrar at the college, said: “Emma’s performance is remarkable because she is a part-time student. I have never before known a part-time student to do so well in comparison with the full-time students. Her performance is all the more impressive because of the triplets.”