Forever Rumpole Read online

  I wrote the first Rumpole story as a one-off Play For Today on BBC television. When I had written it I looked around for an actor to play Rumpole and I thought of the magnificent Alastair Sim. However Mr Sim was dead and unable to take on the part. In a happy moment Leo McKern was approached and in an even happier moment he agreed to play the role. He is a superb actor of endless invention and instinctive taste. He brought Rumpole wholly and wonderfully to life, and it would now be impossible to think of anyone else playing the part. After our one-off play the BBC was a little slow to commission the series so we went off to commercial television, for which I have written about thirty-six Rumpole stories. After the initial play, Rumpole’s chambers filled with characters – the opera-loving and susceptible Claude Erskine-Brown; the beautiful Phillida Erskine-Brown, née Trant, the ‘Portia of our chambers’; the accident-prone Guthrie Featherstone, QC, MP, soon to become one of Her Majesty’s most haunted judges; Uncle Tom, the briefless old barrister who practises putting in the clerk’s room and has a head full of legal anecdotes and music-hall songs; Mizz Liz Probert, the fearless young radical lawyer; Henry the clerk and the intolerably pompous Sam Ballard, QC, leading light of the Lawyers As Christians Society and well-trained husband of the ex-matron at the Old Bailey. It has been a great pleasure to weave their stories in with the crimes and the trials and the Rumpoles’ domestic life, but doing so has meant that every Rumpole story has had to have at least three plots, so I must have invented well over a hundred stories. I hope this makes them more enjoyable to read, although it doesn’t make them any easier to write.

  The first Rumpole on the BBC was fairly well received, but nothing prepared me for his long life or, indeed, for his popularity abroad. He is as resolutely English as boiled beef and carrots and yet perhaps his greatest success has been in America and Australia. In the vast Gas and Electricity Building in San Francisco the ever-growing Rumpole Society holds its meetings. Californian judges in ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’ T-shirts serve out Château Thames Embankment in a mock-up of Pommeroy’s Wine Bar. There is a character in the stories called Dodo Mackintosh who makes ‘cheesy bits’ for the chambers’ parties; the proceedings in San Francisco start with a blind tasting of Dodo’s cheesy bits. They also include such events as a Hilda Rumpole look-alike competition and the compilation of a Rumpole cookbook. As I write the stories quite fast, my hero’s address in Froxbury Mansions has appeared in somewhat different forms. This gives the Rumpolians much to speculate about and discuss. Apart from having a number of societies to his name, Rumpole has several pubs, an office building and an excellent restaurant in Brisbane which, however, serves none of his favourite food.

  He also has to suffer the indignity of having me mistaken for him. Criminals I defended often said, ‘That Mr Rumpole could have got me off this one, I don’t know why you couldn’t.’ Passing through Australian airports, I am often greeted with cries of ‘G’day Rumpole!’ When I did my last case, which happened to be in Singapore, I staggered into the robing-room of that country’s Central Court, jet-lagged, hung-over, with no clear idea of what the case was all about, in the usual position of a leading counsel at the beginning of an important criminal trial. This particular oriental robing-room was presided over by an elderly Chinese woman who was busy brewing up Nescafé and pouring out cough mixture for barristers with sore throats. At the sight of me, she called out gleefully, ‘Ah, there you are, Lumpore of the Bairey!’ I knew I didn’t want to spend my declining years trudging around the Far East being called Lumpore, so I gave up my legal practice. All the same, I am not at all ashamed of having been mistaken for the great man.

  It is said that Conan Doyle grew tired of his creation and, for that reason, arranged for him to be pushed off the Reichenbach Falls, although he had to bring him back to life by popular request. I have never felt tempted to push Rumpole under a train at the Temple station. Although I can imagine an author tiring of Holmes’s dry and ascetic character, Rumpole stories have the great advantage, for me, of moving with the times. Whatever’s happening in the world, and needs mocking – the power of social workers, the fallibility of judges, euthanasia, political correctness and the ghastliness of our penal system – can all be dealt with in a Rumpole story. So each one doesn’t only need three plots, it also needs a theme, a basic idea and something, I hope something unsettling, to think about while you laugh.

  And in creating Rumpole I did have another purpose in mind. On the whole, lawyers are as unpopular as income tax collectors and traffic wardens. People think they tell lies and make a great deal of money. In fact, old criminal defenders like Rumpole don’t make much money and they stand up for our great legal principles – free speech, the idea that people are innocent until someone proves them guilty to the satisfaction of twelve ordinary members of a jury, and the proposition that the police should not invent more of the evidence than is absolutely necessary. They protect the rights for which we have fought and struggled over the centuries, and do so at a time when jury trials and the rights of an accused person to silence are under constant attack from the government. So Rumpole has always been popular with lawyers, although it’s embarrassing to go into the wine bars round the Old Bailey and see a lot of fat, elderly barristers with cigar ash on their watch-chains drinking bad claret and pretending to be the original Rumpole. Writing Rumpole plays had another great advantage for me when I worked in the courts: if the judge did something especially silly I could always write him into a Rumpole.

  John Mortimer

  Turville Heath

  October 1992

  Rumpole and the Younger Generation

  I, Horace Rumpole, barrister at law, sixty-eight next birthday, Old Bailey hack, husband to Mrs Hilda Rumpole (known to me only as She Who Must Be Obeyed) and father to Nicholas Rumpole (lecturer in social studies at the University of Baltimore, I have always been extremely proud of Nick); I, who have a mind full of old murders, legal anecdotes and memorable fragments of the Oxford Book of English Verse (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s edition) together with a dependable knowledge of bloodstains, blood groups, fingerprints and forgery by typewriter; I, who am now the oldest member of my chambers, take up my pen at this advanced age during a lull in business (there’s not much crime about, all the best villains seem to be off on holiday in the Costa Brava), in order to write my reconstructions of some of my recent triumphs (including a number of recent disasters) in the courts of law, hoping thereby to turn a bob or two which won’t be immediately grabbed by the taxman, or my clerk, Henry, or by She Who Must Be Obeyed, and perhaps give some sort of entertainment to those who, like myself, have found in British justice a lifelong subject of harmless fun.

  When I first considered putting pen to paper in this matter of my life, I thought I must begin with the great cases of my comparative youth, the Penge Bungalow Murders, where I gained an acquittal alone and without a leader, or the Great Brighton Benefit Club Forgery, which I contrived to win by reason of my exhaustive study of typewriters. In these cases I was, for a brief moment, in the public eye, or at least my name seemed almost a permanent feature of the News of the World, but when I come to look back on that period of my life at the Bar it all seems to have happened to another Rumpole, an eager young barrister whom I can scarcely recognize and whom I am not at all sure I would like, at least not enough to spend a whole book with him.

  I am not a public figure now, so much has to be admitted; but some of the cases I shall describe, the wretched business of the Honourable Member, for instance, or the charge of murder brought against the youngest, and barmiest, of the appalling Delgardo brothers, did put me back on the front page of the News of the World (and even got me a few inches in The Times). But I suppose I have become pretty well known, if not something of a legend, round the Old Bailey, in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar in Fleet Street, in the robing room at London Sessions and in the cells at Brixton Prison. They know me there for never pleading guilty, for chain-smoking small cigars, and for quoting Wordsworth when they least e
xpect it. Such notoriety will not long survive my not-to-be-delayed trip to Golders Green Crematorium. Barristers’ speeches vanish quicker than Chinese dinners, and even the greatest victory in court rarely survives longer than the next Sunday’s papers.

  To understand the full effect on my family life, however, of that case which I have called ‘Rumpole and the Younger Generation’, it is necessary to know a little of my past and the long years that led up to my successful defence of Jim Timson, the sixteen-year-old sprig, the young hopeful, and apple of the eye of the Timsons, a huge and industrious family of South London villains. As this case was, by and large, a family matter, it is important that you should understand my family.

  My father, the Reverend Wilfred Rumpole, was a Church of England clergyman who, in early middle age, came reluctantly to the conclusion that he no longer believed any one of the Thirty-nine Articles. As he was not fitted by character or training for any other profession, however, he had to soldier on in his living in Croydon and by a good deal of scraping and saving he was able to send me as a boarder to a minor public school on the Norfolk coast. I later went to Keble College, Oxford, where I achieved a dubious third in law – you will discover during the course of these memoirs that, although I only feel truly alive and happy in law courts, I have a singular distaste for the law. My father’s example, and the number of theological students I met at Keble, gave me an early mistrust of clergymen, whom I have always found to be most unsatisfactory witnesses. If you call a clergyman in mitigation, the old darling can be guaranteed to add at least a year to the sentence.

  When I first went to the Bar, I entered the chambers of C. H. Wystan. Wystan had a moderate practice, acquired rather by industry than talent, and a strong disinclination to look at the photographs in murder cases, being particularly squeamish on the fascinating subject of blood. He also had a daughter, Hilda Wystan as was, now Mrs Hilda Rumpole and She Who Must Be Obeyed. I was ambitious in those days. I did my best to cultivate Wystan’s clerk, Albert, and I started to get a good deal of criminal work. I did what was expected of me and spent happy hours round the Bailey and Sessions and my fame grew in criminal circles; at the end of the day I would take Albert for a drink in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar. We got on extremely well and he would always recommend ‘his Mr Rumpole’ if a solicitor rang up with a particularly tricky indecent assault or a nasty case of receiving stolen property.

  There is no point in writing your memoirs unless you are prepared to be completely candid, and I must confess that, in the course of a long life, I have been in love on several occasions. I am sure that I loved Miss Porter, the shy and nervous, but at times liberated daughter of Septimus Porter, my Oxford tutor in Roman Law. In fact we were engaged to be married, but the engagement had to be broken off because of Miss Porter’s early death. I often think about her, and of the different course my home life might have taken, for Miss Porter was in no way a girl born to command, or expect, implicit obedience. During my service with the ground staff of the RAF I undoubtedly became helplessly smitten with the charms of an extremely warm-hearted and gallant officer in the WAAFs by the name of Miss Bobby O’Keefe, but I was no match for the wings of a pilot officer, as appeared on the chest of a certain Sam ‘Three Fingers’ Dogherty. During my conduct of a case, which I shall describe in a later chapter which I have called ‘Rumpole and the Alternative Society’, I once again felt a hopeless and almost feverish stirring of passion for a young woman who was determined to talk her way into Holloway Prison. My relationship with Hilda Wystan was rather different.

  To begin with, she seemed part of life in chambers. She was always interested in the law and ambitious, first for her widowed father, and then, when he proved himself unlikely Lord Chancellor material, for me. She often dropped in for tea on her way home from shopping, and Wystan used to invite me in for a cup. One year I was detailed off to be her partner at an Inns of Court ball. There it became clear to me that I was expected to marry Hilda; it seemed a step in my career like getting a brief in the Court of Appeal, or doing a murder. When she proposed to me, as she did over a glass of claret cup after an energetic waltz, Hilda made it clear that, when old Wystan finally retired, she expected to see me head of chambers. I, who have never felt at a loss for a word in court, found absolutely nothing to say. In that silence the matter was concluded.

  So now you must picture Hilda and me twenty-five years later, with a son at that same east-coast public school which I just managed to afford from the fruits of crime, in our matrimonial home at 25B Froxbury Mansions, Gloucester Road. (A mansion flat is a misleading description of that cavernous and underheated area which Hilda devotes so much of her energy to keeping shipshape, not to say Bristol fashion.) We were having breakfast, and, between bites of toast, I was reading my brief for that day, an Old Bailey trial of the sixteen-year-old Jim Timson charged with robbery with violence, he having allegedly taken part in a wage snatch on a couple of elderly butchers: an escapade planned in the playground of the local comprehensive. As so often happens, the poet Wordsworth, that old sheep of the Lake District, sprang immediately to mind, and I gave tongue to his lines, well knowing that they must only serve to irritate She Who Must Be Obeyed: ‘ “Trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home; Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” ’

  I looked at Hilda. She was impassively demolishing a boiled egg. I also noticed that she was wearing a hat, as if prepared to set out upon some expedition. I decided to give her a little more Wordsworth, prompted by my reading the story of the boy Timson: ‘ “Shades of the prison house begin to close Upon the growing boy.” ’

  Hilda spoke at last.

  ‘Rumpole, you’re not talking about your son, I hope. You’re never referring to Nick …’

  ‘ “Shades of the prison house begin to close”? Not round our son, of course. Not round Nick. Shades of the public school have grown round him, the thousand-quid-a-year remand home.’

  Hilda always thought it indelicate to refer to the subject of school fees, as if being at Mulstead were a kind of unsolicited honour for Nick. She became increasingly businesslike.

  ‘He’s breaking up this morning.’

  ‘Shades of the prison house begin to open up for the holidays.’

  ‘Nick has to be met at 11.15 at Liverpool Street and given lunch. When he went back to school you promised him a show. You haven’t forgotten?’

  Hilda was clearing away the plates rapidly. To tell the truth I had forgotten the date of Nick’s holidays; but I let her assume I had a long-planned treat laid on for him.

  ‘Of course I haven’t forgotten. The only show I can offer him is a robbery with violence at the Old Bailey. I wish I could lay on a murder. Nick’s always so enjoyed my murders.’

  It was true. On one distant half-term Nick had sat in on the Peckham Billiard Hall Stabbing, and enjoyed it a great deal more than Treasure Island.

  ‘I must fly! Daddy gets so crotchety if anyone’s late. And he does love his visits.’

  Hilda removed my half-empty coffee cup.

  ‘Our father which art in Horsham. Give my respects to the old sweetheart.’

  It had also slipped my mind that old C. H. Wystan was laid up with a dicky ticker in Horsham General Hospital. The hat was, no doubt, a clue I should have followed. Hilda usually goes shopping in a headscarf. By now she was at the door, and looking disapproving.

  ‘ “Old sweetheart” is hardly how you used to talk of the head of your chambers.’

  ‘Somehow I can never remember to call the head of my chambers “Daddy”.’

  The door was open. Hilda was making a slow and effective exit.

  ‘Tell Nick I’ll be back in good time to get his supper.’

  ‘Your wish is my command!’ I muttered in my best imitation of a slave out of Chu Chin Chow. She chose to ignore it.

  ‘And try not to leave the kitchen looking as though it’s been hit by a bomb.’

  ‘I hear, oh Master of the Blue Horizons.’ I said this with a
little more confidence, as she had by now started off on her errand of mercy, and I added, for good measure, ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’.

  I had finished my breakfast, and was already thinking how much easier life with the Old Bailey judge was than marriage.

  Soon after I finished my breakfast with Hilda, and made plans to meet my son at the start of his holidays from school, Fred Timson, star of a dozen court appearances, was seeing his son in the cells under the Old Bailey as the result of a specially arranged visit. I know he brought the boy his best jacket, which his mother had taken specially to the cleaners, and insisted on his putting on a tie. I imagine he told him that they had the best ‘brief’ in the business to defend him, Mr Rumpole having always done wonders for the Timson family. I know that Fred told young Jim to stand up straight in the witness-box and remember to call the judge ‘my Lord’ and not show his ignorance by coming out with any gaffe such as ‘your Honour’, or ‘Sir’. The world, that day, was full of fathers showing appropriate and paternal concern.

  The robbery with which Jim Timson was charged was an exceedingly simple one. At about 7 p.m. one Friday evening, the date being 16 September, the two elderly Brixton butchers, Mr Cadwallader and Mr Lewis Stein, closed their shop in Bombay Road and walked with their week’s takings round the corner to a narrow alleyway known as Green’s Passage, where their grey Austin van was parked. When they got to the van they found that the front tyres had been deflated. They stooped to inspect the wheels and, as they did so, they were attacked by a number of boys, some armed with knives and one flourishing a cricket stump. Luckily, neither of the butchers was hurt, but the attaché case containing their money was snatched.