• Swindon & Wiltshire People
• Thursday June 4 2026

Happy birthday Mr Thring – staff help lawyer celebrate 90th birthday

Staff at West law firm Thrings have thrown a 90th birthday celebration for the man with his name above the door.

And with 69 years of legal experience under his belt, Jeremy Thring still consults at the firm of which he was senior partner from 1983 to 2000.

Jeremy has spent his entire working life at the firm, starting his training in 1957 – the same year that Harold Macmillan entered Downing Street, the Treaty of Rome was signed, and Sputnik 1 started the space race.

Before that he even managed to serve two years with the 3rd Hussars in Cold War Germany.

When Jeremy qualified in 1962, the Bath-based firm was a respected but modestly-sized outfit of around 40 employees serving landed estates, farming families and trusts – valued work but, in his words, “the firm really had to change”.

What followed over the coming decades was a period of deliberate and ambitious transformation – with a significant portion supported by Jeremy during his 17-year tenure as senior partner.

“We had a very good portfolio of clients, which was very nice because you got to know the families,” he said.

“But we didn’t do any litigation and very little corporate work. We were just too small.”

His instinct for growth and his eye for talent would prove to be among his most important contributions to the firm.

He pursued mergers strategically, and expansion took place along the M4 corridor over the next three decades, with offices being opened in Bristol, Swindon and London.

“The theory was that the M4 artery was the future. For us in Bath it had to be,” he says. The growth that followed proved him right, with the firm operating out of seven offices across the South and South West of England.

“What the firm has gone on to achieve in recent decades has been a result of it being extremely well managed and full credit goes to the partners, in particular Simon Holdsworth as the current managing partner, for the work they have done.”

Reflecting on the changes he has seen during his long career, Jeremy said: “The law is changing all the time.

“The technology revolution over the past 20, 30 even 40 years has been huge. When I started, the electric typewriter had the ‘wow factor’.”

At 90, Jeremy continues to work at the firm and regularly meets with clients and colleagues in the office.

At his birthday party, which was attended by current and former employees, he said: “The people here are terribly kind, to me and to each other, and they seem to want to do a good job – to keep the clients happy – which is really what I want them to do.”