Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

by John Mortimer

  When I look back on that Rumpole, the inexperienced and more or less unlearned friend who could suffer nervous attacks, a dry mouth, sweaty hands and a strong temptation to run out of the building before entering the humblest magistrates’ court to do the simplest careless driving, I can scarcely recognize him. Indeed I’m not at all sure that I would like him, at least not enough to spend a whole book with him, were it not for the fact that he gave me some hints, at least, of the Rumpole to come.

  For instance, one evening when I was having a drink with Albert in Pommeroy’s, I said I felt in the mood for a glass of red wine. ‘You won’t get any of your vintage claret here,’ Albert said, and I can remember asking if it were more ‘your non-vintage Château Thames Embankment’. This produced a loud rumble of laughter from Albert Handyside and a name for a wine which seems to have survived for about half a century, and when old Vernon Pommeroy was succeeded by his son Jack the change caused no perceptible improvement in the wine. It was also at Pommeroy’s that Albert offered me one of his small cigars, introducing me to a source of comfort and relaxation when the insolence of office and the law’s delays had become almost too much to bear.

  So, by regular attendance at chambers and in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, I had managed to win a reasonable number of taking and driving aways, actual bodily harms and minor indecencies round a number of fairly unsympathetic courts. I could see myself, in the years to come, as the moderately successful, middle-of-the-road type of advocate of whom we had quite a few in our chambers.

  And then, as I say, the double murder in the Penge bungalows hit the headlines and changed my life.

  3

  I had, for many years, been aware of Penge. My father, the Reverend Wilfred Rumpole, had charge of a church (St Botolph’s Without) in the neighbouring suburb of Croydon. My old father was not entirely happy in his work. He had serious doubts, he once told me, about most of the Thirty-Nine Articles; but his training had not equipped him for any other job, so he was compelled to soldier on at St Botolph’s.

  In my early years I seem to have spent more time in a bleak boarding school on the Norfolk coast or at Keble College than I did in the south London suburbs. When I got a place in C. H. Wystan’s chambers I made a determined bid for independence and took a room in the house of a Mrs Matilda Ruben, who not only let out bedsits but owned a small shop for the sale of trusses and other surgical appliances, including what, in those far-off days, we used to call ‘rubber johnnies’, in a street just off Southampton Row. This was in walking distance of the Temple. There were, I promise you, briefless days when I had to become a walker in order to save on bus fares.

  I had, however, a clear memory of Penge, a small suburb beside the island of parkland surrounding the old Crystal Palace, now burnt down, where I used to go on walks with my father and listen to his serious doubts on the subjects of God’s toleration of evil and original sin. I even remembered the street of bungalows which had sprung up in the 1930s to accommodate the growing population of the families of bank clerks, department store managers and commercial travellers who looked on Crystal Palace Park as their particular and privileged glimpse of the countryside.

  The facts of the double murder in the bungalows emerged from the newspapers which I read, rather as a young man hitchhiking through Somerset might read of a voyage of discovery in darkest Africa, never dreaming that I would come any nearer to the case than the full story in what we then called the ‘News of the Screws’.

  Denis, always known as ‘Jerry’, Jerold was a clerk at the National Provincial Bank when he got married to Yvonne and moved into their bungalow, number 3 Paxton Street. There they had their only child, Simon. When the war started, Jerry joined the RAF and soon became a bomber pilot. His life was less exciting when peace returned him to the bank, but his bungalow was filled with relics of the war: photographs of himself scrambling into his bomber, drinking and laughing with his fellow officers, together with his carefully preserved uniform, the silk scarf always tied at his throat when on a mission, fragments of destroyed enemy aircraft and a Luger pistol taken from the body of a dead enemy officer. Also prominent in the photographs was Charlie (‘Tail-End’ Charlie) Weston, who lived at number 7 Paxton Street. He joined up with Jerry and, by a series of lucky chances, was Jerry’s rear gunner. After the war, Charlie Weston returned to his bungalow and his job at the Happy Home Mortgage and Insurance Company.

  Both Jerry and Charlie survived the war, but Yvonne, Jerry’s wife and Simon’s mother, was killed by a buzz bomb when she was out shopping just north of Oxford Street in the closing stages of the war.

  After his wife’s death, according to the News of the World, Jerry moved in, from time to time, a series of girlfriends, but none of them lasted long and for considerable periods father and son were living alone in the bungalow.

  On the night of the murders Jerry and Charlie had been at a reunion dinner of members of the old squadron living in and around Croydon. Some they had known well, some were almost strangers. After the dinner and seeing Judy Garland at the London Palladium, singing and more than a little drunk, they came back to Jerry’s bungalow, where they woke up Simon and the party continued. During the course of it, according to the evidence given at a preliminary hearing before the Penge magistrates, a quarrel sprang up between father and son and young Simon was seen to pick up the German pistol and threaten his father and other members of the party. At that point he was quite easily disarmed by one of the RAF companions, after which he shut himself in his room.

  The party continued for a while, but in the morning young Simon rang the police to say that he had found his father dead, shot through the heart. ‘Tail-End’ Charlie was later found dead in his bungalow. Apparently he’d been shot when answering the door to some late-night caller. Both men were killed by German bullets. The pistol and magazine with two of its bullets fired were found in the dustbin outside the Jerolds’ back door.

  Jerry’s son was arrested and charged with a double murder. As though he weren’t in enough trouble already, he asked to see the only solicitor he’d ever heard of. This was a Penge local who had done a number of civil cases with my Head of Chambers, for whom the solicitor had a surprisingly high regard.

  So Simon Jerold, being just over twenty-one, was old enough for national service and old enough to be hanged. And it was on C. H. Wystan that his life depended.

  4

  There is no point in writing your memoirs unless you’re prepared to tell the truth, and I have to confess to a number of occasions when I have felt stirred by an often hopeless passion and believed myself deeply in love. At Keble I had loved my fiancée, Ivy Porter, who was carried off in the cold snap after the war. When I was a member of the ground staff I was helplessly smitten by an alluring WAAF named Bobby O’Keefe, with whom I enjoyed a brief but ecstatic love affair until she was wooed from me by the then heroic charm of a certain pilot officer, Sam ‘Three Fingers’ Dougherty, who flew Spitfires and had apparently lost one of his fingers in action. I felt hidden longings, many years later, for a Kathy Trelawny, a beautiful if somewhat spaced-out member of the ‘alternative society’ who, ignoring my advice to stay silent at her trial, talked her way into Holloway Prison, where I had to say goodbye to her.

  In the early 1950s, when peace and some degree of prosperity were celebrated by the Festival of Britain, the Dome of Discovery, the Guinness Clock and other tributes to our national way of life, including the Penge Bungalow Murders, I felt my existence enriched by a Miss Daisy Sampson. She was an outdoor clerk in the firm of Mickelthwaite and Nutwell, which was, by then, briefing me in small cases in the magistrates’ courts. She was blonde, cheerful and uninhibited, a girl with a ready smile, slightly protruding front teeth outlined with bright red lipstick and a way with fairly basic jokes, such as ‘I’m always going to give you my briefs, Mr Rumpole,’ which I found, in those far-off years, both provocative and witty.

  So we shared morning coffee and pub lunches round the Uxbridge Magistrates’, Ol
d Street, Bow Street and the Horseferry Road. We spoke disrespectfully of our clients, the chairmen of the benches and the magistrates’ clerks, and were able, more often than not, to pull off some sort of victory. Our relationship had so far advanced that, when I saw a dance for junior members of the bar and their guests announced in the Inner Temple Hall, I decided in a moment of reckless extravagance on the hire of a dinner jacket and tickets, supper included, for self and Daisy Sampson.

  We were waltzin’ together to a dreamy melody When they called out ‘Change partners’

  And you waltzed away from me.

  Although I was slowly gaining some experience as a barrister, I had far less experience as a dancer. Miss Daisy Sampson was so unfailingly cheerful and tolerant, however, that I was able to stroll round the dance floor, keeping my arm around her waist and my feet out of her way, and I imagined myself entirely happy in the early part of that evening.

  And then, even as we danced, I heard a high commanding voice, the bray of an Eton accent, and turned to recognize Reginald ‘Reggie’ Proudfoot, who had been the prosecutor in some of our cases.

  ‘Hey there, Rumpole! That girl’s far too pretty for you to be dancing with.’ At which the egregious Proudfoot advanced on us and, with an arm round Daisy, turned her into the dancing position, a process to which, I was sorry to notice, she offered little or no resistance.

  ‘That’s as may be, Proudfoot -’ I was anxious to keep the proceedings polite - ‘but Miss Sampson is my partner.’

  ‘Not now,’ he assured me. ‘It’s the “Gentlemen’s Excuse Me” and we’re fully entitled to carry off each other’s partners. I suppose you don’t go to many dances? You’ve got a lot to learn, Rumpole. A whole lot to learn.’ At which the abominable prosecutor waltzed away with Daisy while the singer in the band repeated the verse I have quoted above.

  I was walking moodily towards the bar when I heard another voice, clear as a bell but this time female, call, ‘Rumpole!’ I turned to see a fresh-faced and determined-looking young woman of my own age finishing an ice cream. I was, as I was so rarely to be in the future, temporarily lost for words.

  ‘You are Rumpole, aren’t you? I heard Reggie Proudfoot call you Rumpole.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I had to concede, ‘I am Rumpole.’

  ‘I thought so! And you’re in Daddy’s chambers.’

  ‘Daddy?’ For a moment her description of our Head had me puzzled.

  ‘I’m Hilda Wystan.’ She gave a final lick to her ice-cream spoon and put it down on the glass plate. Little guessing what the future held, I said I was pleased to meet her, or made some such neutral remark.

  ‘I like to keep my finger on the pulse of chambers,’ she told me. ‘I often drop in to see how Daddy’s managing you all. Albert tells me you’re always before some Court of Petty Sessions. They must be keeping you pretty busy and you’re not such a white wig after all. Although, come to think about it, you don’t wear wigs in those inferior courts, do you? So your wig’s probably as white as ever.’

  I resolved to get hold of my wig and kick it around the dusty floor of the chambers’ cellar until all its whiteness had gone for ever.

  These thoughts were interrupted by Hilda Wystan. ‘So, Rumpole, if you’re so good at asking for things in front of the magistrates, aren’t you going to ask me to dance?’

  It was less a question than a command and I found myself obeying it. Hilda didn’t laugh so much as Daisy, but she uttered sharp orders such as ‘Left, left and left again’ or ‘We’re coming up to the corner now, so chassé, Rumpole. Please remember to chassé !’

  I saw Daisy Sampson laughing with Reggie Proudfoot’s friends at the far end of the hall as I was steered through several more dance numbers by Hilda Wystan, including ‘Jezebel’ and ‘Jealousy’. As we danced, I caught sight of a couple grasping hands and apparently throwing each other apart before pulling themselves together again. ‘It’s called “jiving”, Rumpole,’ Hilda Wystan, who seemed surprisingly up in these things, told me, ‘but I wouldn’t advise you to try it until you’re better at the basic steps.’

  As the band played ‘Goodnight Irene’, my friend Daisy came over to tell me that Reggie had agreed to drive her back to Dagenham because it was ‘on his way home’ - a statement which I didn’t believe to be true.

  Not much later Hilda Wystan told me that ‘Daddy’ would be downstairs waiting to collect her, as he had been working late on a big brief in chambers. ‘Never mind, Rumpole,’ she said as she departed, ‘we shall meet again. And it may be sooner than you expect.’

  So I was left alone with a glass of dubious claret cup, in which leaves and slices of fruit floated, to wonder what Hilda Wystan had meant by her last doom-laden remark.

  I didn’t have long to wait for an answer. It was only a week or so later that C. H. Wystan came into the room where Uncle Tom was vainly trying to chip another golf ball into the wastepaper basket and I was making a note on yet another careless driving. He said, ‘Would you care to dine, Rumpole?’

  I was about to tell him that I only did so occasionally, when the Legal Aid cheques were paid in, but he went on, before I could interrupt, ‘Just a family occasion. There’ll be no need for you to dress.’

  I had, I confess, a momentary temptation to ask, ‘A naked family occasion?’ but again I resisted it.

  So I found myself, far earlier than I expected, ringing the front door bell of a grey house on a street of similar grey houses in Kensington. The door was opened by a maid as colourless and tidy as the house, with its grey wallpaper, framed etchings of views of the Swiss Alps and central heating kept economically at a low level. Without any preliminary drinking time, I found myself facing the joint and two veg together with Wystan and his lady wife, a large anxious woman who seemed to be continually worried about the arrival and quality of the dinner.

  ‘Oh, do stop worrying and calm down, Mother!’ exclaimed Hilda. She clearly had little tolerance for her female parent. To her father she was far more patient, although she was noticeably better informed about the business of chambers than he was.

  ‘It’s true, isn’t it, Daddy?’ She seemed to be calling on his support as a mere formality. ‘Albert likes the cut of Rumpole’s jib? It’s so important to get on well with the clerk.’

  ‘Of course it’s important.’ C. H. Wystan was prepared to give a carefully balanced judgement on the subject. ‘That doesn’t mean that you have to join the clerk in the saloon bar or anything of that nature! That would not be in the fine tradition of the bar. Rumpole understands that, I’m sure.’

  ‘Do you, Rumpole?’ It was Hilda who asked the question.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I was craven enough to agree. ‘I understand it perfectly.’ Youth is full of such small acts of betrayal. I promised myself to make it up to Albert the next time we met in Pommeroy’s, a place of refuge from a harsh world.

  When we had polished off the pudding (baked jam roll), C. H. Wystan gave a brief nod to his wife, who gathered up her daughter to depart. Before she left the room, Hilda said, ‘Daddy’s got some good news for you, Rumpole,’ and she went off with what I can only describe as a smirk. I was surprised that what always seemed to me the barbaric custom of leaving men to port and dirty jokes after the pud had then survived, even in the family circle, as one of the finest traditions of the bar.

  Dirty jokes, of course, there were not. Port has always seemed to me a sickly sort of a wine, and I would have been happier with a glass of Pommeroy’s Plonk with Albert than vintage Cockburn’s with C. H. Wystan. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t have given you Uncle Tom as a pupil master.’ He seemed in an apologetic mood. ‘He doesn’t get much work.’

  ‘He certainly doesn’t.’

  ‘All the same, he’s a safe pair of hands.’ It was then that I decided that, whatever became of me at the bar, I wouldn’t be known simply for the safety of my hands.

  ‘We had a fellow once in chambers. I never liked him. Name of Denver. Well, Denver had a pupil from whom he extracted the us
ual £100 fee. And do you know, the very next day after he’d got it, Denver and our junior clerk legged it over to France! We never saw hide nor hair of either of them again. Horrible business, this Penge Bungalow affair, don’t you think? Pure evil. A fellow shooting his father.’ His small beady eyes peered out in horror as though amazed at such examples of the wickedness of the world in both cases. They were definitely not in the finest traditions of the bar.

  However, there was one of these traditions that, although I was young, insecure and drinking his port wine, I felt I had to recall to C. H. Wystan’s attention. ‘We don’t know that your client in the Penge Bungalow affair shot his father, do we? I mean, we shan’t know that until the jury comes back with a verdict of guilty.’

  Hilda’s daddy looked at me and his expression was pained. As though to cover his embarrassment, he said, ‘Things look very black against him. Very black indeed.’

  ‘That’s before you’ve tested the evidence.’

  ‘I shall go through all the motions, Rumpole, in the best tradition of our great profession. But I can’t hold out any high hopes for the wretched boy, I’m afraid. I can’t hold out very much hope for him at all.’

  ‘I haven’t read the evidence.’

  ‘No, Rumpole. Of course you haven’t. Perhaps you will have that opportunity at some future time. At the moment all we can say is that public opinion - that is, the opinion of any jury - is likely to be dead against young Jerold.’

  ‘So he’s a client who desperately needs defending brilliantly, ’ was what I should have said. Being young and, as I say, craven, I only managed, ‘I’m sure you’ll have difficulties. ’