The appearance of the Attorney-General for the Crown in the case was criticized by some, applauded by others. His younger brother was indirectly involved; I say “indirectly,” because the indictment had not a word about James McAuley, but only brought in the specific point of the accusation against Halterton of having given a contract for a consideration; further, it was thought better that the name of the Chancellor of the Exchequer should not be dragged into the affair, though the Chief Whip was not himself averse to the publicity of it.
The etiquette of the Bar had been very strict on these matters in the past, and had more than once prevented a great law officer of the Crown appearing when members of his family were supposed to be, or actually were, involved in any accusation, and might have prevented Sir Andrew McAuley from being seen on those days in Court. On the other hand, there are two precedents—that generally known as the Periscope Case, and the other still more generally known as the Soap Scandal, in both of which the Attorney-General of the day had appeared for the Crown, although in the one case his father, and in the other his son, had been widely mentioned in connection with irregularities involved.
But Andrew McAuley’s main reason for appearing was a simple and, I think, a very fine one. He was determined to stop all these malicious rumours that had been current about his younger brother, and to exorcise them by the power of his name. No other man would thus have sacrificed so much for family feeling. The point has always since been remembered in his favour. Another reason for his action was the very considerable sum which he could give himself out of the taxes for his trouble.
Tartle, his Junior, was not called upon to plead, but did useful work in prompting and acting as a go-between during the trial. Indeed, the work he did was, though not of a public nature, of some effect upon the result. It happened thus:
Sir Andrew McAuley was coming to the conclusion of his great speech, which was to conclude with the historic phrase, “This is a Court of Justice, and I demand Justice.” It was indeed nearly half an hour earlier, at the beginning of the famous peroration, “When I see this man my heart bleeds for him”—a touching allusion to Wilfrid Halterton, which has since passed into more than one anthology of English literature—that Samuel Tartle was discreetly handed from the back of the Court a piece of paper. It was small, and not very clean, for it had passed from one to another on its way to him—a thing which should not have been done, for that piece of paper contained very private information, and the information was such that Samuel Tartle with difficulty concealed his dismayed astonishment.
The information which that piece of paper contained must now be given in all its magnitude.
Each of the political parties, as we all know, is rightly possessed of a large fund—subscriptions given by the public—which is kept in the honourable keeping of some specially designed member of the crew who can be trusted to account for it exactly, and to use it wisely. He gives, of course, no receipts, nor does he keep (if we may believe his evidence on oath) any memoranda of such payments. Indeed, by a constitutional fiction he is permitted, whenever the funds may be alluded to in examination before a committee or even before a judge, alternatively either to deny that the fund exists, or to plead complete ignorance of the amount it contains, as of the names of those who have so generously contributed to it.
Now these funds cannot be allowed to lie idle. They must, like other money, earn their interest and be put to profitable employment while they are waiting to be used for the general purposes of State to which they are assigned—such as incidental expenses of candidates, the persuasion of men not directly engaged in political work but occupying what might be called “key positions” (Joe Billingham, for instance, of Nuneaton, the trainer, and that universal favourite Jerry Cobb, who keeps “The Swan” on the Meddinghurst Road), the payment of gambling debts and many other uses. Numerous are the purposes for which these important funds are used.
They are sometimes very large; in fact, Longpenny House in Longpenny Square was built out of but a fraction of one such fund—which is some indication of their scale.
That is the first point we must bear in mind—that such funds must be made to earn interest. The second point is that Prime Ministers have secretaries.
The Prime Ministership of Great Britain (including the six counties of Northern Ireland, the town of Berwick-on-Tweed, and the Channel Islands—but not the Isle of Man) is perhaps the highest seat of a purely temporal kind to which a human being can aspire; nobly filled at this present moment by the ample form of Mrs. Boulger.
The Secretaries attached to this most exalted of all mortal posts are, as may be imagined, of various kinds. Their number has necessarily increased with the development of the British Constitution since the year 1900, and to the original six of our grandfathers’ time there have been added another thirty-three, which a brief calculation will show to make a total approaching forty. They are housed for the most part in that row of low buildings the encroachment of which upon the Horse Guards Parade has been so much criticized in the Press and the contract for which was given to the Minister of War’s step-daughter’s friend, W. H. Gar … but I have no space to go into all that.
Now among these thirty-nine secretaries there are three of special importance—the Private Secretary, the Confidential Secretary, and the Secretary. The last is a man drawn, nearly always, from the higher ranks of the Civil Service. He is commonly a man of family, as the occasion demands, and it is also consonant with his position that he should have his career all before him and be in the earlier years of his public activity.
The gentleman who filled this position during the session of 1960, and had filled it now for more than a year, was Danver—Teddy Danver—as good a man as could have been chosen for the post, with that mixture of freedom in speech where freedom is admissible and of discretion when discretion is necessary, with all that exact knowledge of how things may be told to fifty people if the fifty people are well chosen and yet never get to the public ear, and also, I ought to add, with all that healthy sense of humour which is invaluable for preserving a man’s sense of proportion in the difficult game of public life.
On the morning of the second day of the trial, towards the end of the morning, at the moment when, far off at the Old Bailey, Sir Andrew McAuley was beginning his great peroration, the two minor Secretaries who sat beyond the green baize door in the outer office, ready to attend Danver’s whistle at the speaking tube whenever it should sound, were startled by a maniac noise from within.
They each looked round with sudden fear that their chief might have been seized with some temporary affliction. Loud roars and shrieks and interrupted coughings, followed by the bellowing of their names— “Bill! Ha-ha! Ho-ho! Bill, Garry, come here! Garry! Bill! Oh, my God!” and then more laughter, louder and louder, explosive, cataclysmic, as Bill and Garry rushed through the green baize door. They saw, within, their respected superior leaning back in his chair with his mouth so wide open as to be cavernous, roaring, bellowing, and shrieking with laughter— laughter that shook the whole of his considerable frame. He was just reaching the stage of exhaustion when they broke in.
“You can’t guess!” he whispered, spluttering and hoarse with the effort he had just gone through. “You’ll never guess! No, you’ll never guess! You couldn’t! Oh, my God!” And he tried to laugh again, but it hurt him so much that he checked himself with an effort. “Oh, it’s too good to be true! What do you think they’ve done now?”
“Who?” said Garry and Bill together in anxious astonishment.
“Why, the Heavenly Twins!” (The Heavenly Twins, I should mention, was the slang term in that office for the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Chief Whip, those gentlemen who had been very justly remembered by the Attorney-General at breakfast some little time before in the matter of the Television Contract.)
“Oh, God be praised!” went on the Head Secretary of all, the Very Secretary himself, in panting tones and with hardly any breath left in his body, “G
od be praised, Who has allowed me to live to see this day!”
“What have they done?” said Garry.
“Which has what done?” said Bill.
“What has which of them done?” said Garry again.
“Oh, you’ll never guess!” repeated the Chief, with dancing eyes delightedly. “No one’ll ever guess! This kind of thing only happens once in a million years! They have been using the secret party funds to rig the market for Billies!”
Garry, who was very young indeed, and still preserved some middle-class illusions on the nature of public life, whistled. Bill burst into laughter louder than his chief’s, but out of respect to his chief, less prolonged.
“Well, they’ve got to be told, you know.”
“Who?” said Garry.
“They,” answered the Chief, with a nod.
And then to Bill, “You know.”
“Yes,” said Bill, “I know.”
“You’d better take it yourself, there mustn’t be too many people seeing it.”
Bill was at the Old Bailey about a quarter of an hour later. He had jotted the information down simply and clearly enough upon a sheet of paper, and folded it in two; he did not put it in an envelope. He was determined that it should be appreciated immediately.
When he got to the door of the Court he remembered too late that he had nothing on him to show who he was. He only hoped that the official guardian of that portal would believe him.
“I have come from the Prime Minister’s secretary,” he said. “Would you let me in? I want to pass a note up to the Counsel for the Prosecution.”
He was believed, and entered. As the door opened upon the dense throng within, above the heads of which he heard the loud booming of Andrew McAuley’s majestic eloquence, he saw that there wasn’t a dog’s chance of getting through.
“Would you pass that on, to one of the Counsel for the Prosecution. There. That man there. Mr. Tartle. Do you think you could get it passed up to Mr. Tartle?”
The man thus addressed took it from him and handed it to another before him in the press. That other passed it on to another, crumpled somewhat but still intact. Tartle took it, opened the fold, read the dozen words or less boldly scrawled in pencil, and it had on him the effect I have mentioned.
What was he to do? He must show it to his chief, but he could not interrupt this final passage in which the jury were being reminded of the black-hearted Butler’s admission that he had no evidence, that he depended wholly upon the wretched tittle-tattle of Fleet Street public-houses, as it had been conveyed to him by his disreputable friend. He had admitted —having chosen to go into the box himself in spite of his Counsel urging him not to do so—that he had gone by nothing but common sense and common knowledge, and other clap-trap of that kind.
While Sir Andrew was proceeding to shed tears of blood over the sufferings of Wilfrid Halterton, while he recalled to the jury the picture which that great statesman had made standing with bowed head, his sensitive honour touched to the quick, by the mere mention of the foul accusations that were made, Samuel Tartle was in an agony to make known the contents of that note. He had to wait till the last famous phrase was pronounced— “this is a Court of Justice, and I demand Justice”—until the Attorney-General, at a blood-pressure dangerous for his age, sat down again in a cloud of forensic glory.
But Mr. Samuel Tartle, that distinguished Junior, who had been so happily spared the trouble of opening his mouth, and had the more easily earned his money, need not have been so worried. The Secretary’s message had been carried up by the Secretary’s deputy secretary to higher quarters still in that discreet fashion which deputy secretaries well know.
Outside in the passages men who professed to understand the inner things of public life were giving each his opinion, not upon the verdict, for there could be no question on that, but upon the sentence. One bald-headed old boy of sporting character, who had often come out on the right side of the ledger about these things, said it would be two years. The more general opinion varied between one year and six months. A fool remarked that they would not make a martyr of Butler. Another fool said they would certainly make an example. A third fool, who seems to have been rather less of a fool than either of those two, said that it would depend upon what they thought would be best. No one, anyhow, went below six months, and as I say, the favourite was twelve, with something like five to three against eighteen months, and higher odds against two years.
Those who listened to the summing up would, at the beginning of it, have leant to the severer conclusion; for the noble, dignified, religious face of Mr. Justice Chasible had been full of that awful severity which the occasion demanded.
He began by telling the jury that the law had ordained the institution of Criminal Libel for the terror of evil-doers and as a substitute for the degraded practice of the duel, which still obtained, he was sorry to say, among nations less civilized than ourselves, but which had here happily disappeared. He told them how the law was chary of using this last drastic weapon, but that there were occasions when nothing else would serve. All governments would be thrown into confusion, and all the high traditions of our public life would fail, if it were thought that men might with impunity spread, not in the heated criticism of a moment nor through the pardonable exaggeration arising in the violence of political debate, but deliberately, such malicious falsehoods against the statesmen whom Providence had chosen for the conduct of this mighty country. “Upon the purity of whose public life,” he added, “and upon the standard of whose morals, all the civilized world has modelled itself”—and here the Judge made a passing allusion to our identity in this matter with our dear cousins of the United States, an obiter dictum which men of Sir Henry’s standing are permitted to pronounce, to the great advantage of the foreign relations of the Commonwealth.
“As a terror to evil-doers,” repeated that great and (may I say?) holy Judge, “As a terror to evil-doers” —in a stern, rising voice. Then, as though conscious that restraint would be of even greater effect than the giving of full rein to indignation, he checked himself, and added in colourless but strong tones:
“You have, gentlemen of the jury, to judge of the facts and the law. It is in this that an action for libel, even for criminal libel, differs from any other.” And he briefly quoted the provisions of Fox’s Act: “If in your judgement the prisoner had good cause to say what he did, it being substantially true, and to the public advantage that he should say it, you will then bring in a verdict of not guilty. But if you, etc. … etc. … You will then … etc. … etc… bring in the contrary verdict.”
With these words the solemn voice was still.
The jury, without leaving the box, proclaimed their decision through the mouth of their foreman, a man with a tenor voice, a cockney accent, and a flourishing public-house at the corner of Leadenhall Street; an admirable specimen of that sound common sense which makes our jury system the envy of the world.
Then it was that a great hush fell upon the Court, to hear the Judge’s admonition of the poor wretch behind the spiked railing—and the sentence.
The admonition was short. The judge emphasized the heinousness of the crime, and above all its lack of adequate motive. He was willing to believe that fanaticism had pushed the miserable creature before him beyond the point of sane judgement. But the law could take no account of that. It was its duty to protect His Majesty’s subjects of every grade, and particularly those who had undertaken the arduous and thankless task of government, from such poisonous falsehoods as those which the prisoner had quoted and disseminated. Under the circumstances he should not be doing his duty if he did less than inflict upon the culprit a fine of fifty pounds.
Oh, the wisdom and the power! And to this day there are perhaps not more than two thousand five hundred men in England who remember what had been done on that occasion with the Party Funds.
. . . . . . .
Reginald Butler left the Court a free but friendless man—friendless unless we a
dmit as friends three or four base and insignificant fanatics, the out-at-elbows Rashdell, of the Oriflamme, another who was one of Rashdell’s drunken satellites, and a third poor tub-thumper in whose eyes the now broken Reginald was still a hero.
He was called upon by his Committee to resign his seat. He refused, but after a week of returning to the House and suffering from the silent contempt which such men are justly condemned to suffer, he despaired, and gave way. He resigned.
The literary work by which he had hitherto supported himself, tolerated so far on account of his amusing reputation for extreme views which no one until now had taken seriously, fell from him as suddenly as the conversation of his acquaintance. At last, some said from the generosity of Halterton himself, some through the influence of Lady Papworthy, he got a small but regular place on one of the Desportes papers to write on the current drama. He owed the post neither to the woman he had served nor to the man that he had maligned, but to the action of an editor whose dramatic critic had died of delirium tremens. This editor had been harshly ordered to get the next one at half the price. He had almost decided that such a person was unfindable, when Butler was proposed to him as a man now starving, who would work for anything. It was thus that Reginald got just the wherewithal to pay for the poor lodging and insufficient meals as dramatic critic to the Gaper, which he is to this day.
He was not, of course, allowed to sign his own name. He was given a pseudonym “Dr. Johnson”; and pitiful as was the pay, they worked him hard.
He has continued to try and do his duty there, poor fool, though he finds that constant attendance at innumerable plays of great similarity blunts the dramatic sense, and would take all savour from his life if any savour were yet there. He has a fault, which is that very often he misses the earlier part of the performance. May I take this opportunity of saying that he is not to be blamed? His frequent late appearance in the stalls is simply due to the fact that he cannot always raise in time the money to take out of pawn that evening uniform which is insisted upon by managers.
The Postmaster General Page 15