My love child should get nothing, says the £800,000-a-year QC

For three decades, the story of the QC, his former trainee and the love child they battled over has scandalised the inns of court.

Now the feud has taken a new twist, with millionaire lawyer David Cocks trying to cut off maintenance payments for his son, once and for all.

Mr Cocks, who is the sixth-highest earning barrister in Britain, wants to stop paying £10,000 each year for the education of his 31-year-old disabled son, also called David.

He never wanted the child he fathered with Felicity Hammerton in the mid-Seventies.

But with a salary of £800,000, the former Criminal Bar Association chairman and retired Old Bailey Recorder can hardly plead poverty, according to his ex-lover.

Miss Hammerton, who has struggled to raise their child on incapacity benefit, said: "He is the sixth-richest prosecuting counsel in the land, yet he wants to get out of paying what is only nickels and dimes to him.

"He has acres of land, yet my son has never even had a garden. He loves his studies and yet David Cocks wants to destroy this."

She was speaking outside Wells Street Magistrates Court in London, where the maintenance hearing took place.

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"I want to say to the man who has fathered a human being, who then asked me to abort it, and has only paid me £16.24 a week - that he has lost track of the morality of what it means to be a father," Miss Hammerton added.

Their affair began in 1973 when Mr Cocks invited Miss Hammerton, 14 years his junior and a barrister of great promise, to become his pupil.

The girl and the married QC, whose thick black hair earned him the nickname "the Prince of Darkness", soon became lovers.

After dinners, weekends away, and a holiday in Wales, Miss Hammerton discovered she was pregnant. She claims that she was then thrown out of his chambers for refusing to have an abortion.

In July 1975 she gave birth to her son in a London hospital while, less than a mile away, Cocks threw a summer champagne party for his chambers.

A year later she launched legal proceedings for maintenance, after the QC appalled his colleagues by trying to deny paternity.

For ten years, her son received just £16.24 a week maintenance, despite Mr Cocks's flourishing career, while Miss Hammerton worked night and day to make ends meet as a barrister.

In the early Eighties, she applied to the court for the maintenance to be increased to £10,000 a year, which allowed David to attend private school.

Since then, Mr Cocks has made numerous legal attempts to reduce the payments.

The 71-year-old has three grown-up children by his first wife and lives on his 173-acre country estate in Devon.

For the past decade, Miss Hammerton has survived in a dingy flat in London on incapacity benefit, after suffering a thrombosis which travelled to her brain.

She claimed yesterday outside court that rejection from his father had left her son with deep emotional scars.

David, who has suffered anorexia and depression, has taken refuge in academia - studying to be an archaeologist at a London university.

Now Miss Hammerton hopes to persuade a court that Mr Cocks should continue paying maintenance until their son leaves further education.

She has also presented a 100-page report to the Law Commission arguing that a mother should receive pension rights from the biological father who abandons her.

A preliminary hearing to determine whether maintenance payments should be cut off was held in private.

The case continues.