JOHN MORTIMER
Forever Rumpole
The Best of the Rumpole Stories
VIKING
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction by Ann Mallalieu
Publisher’s Note
Author’s Introduction
Acknowledgements
Rumpole and the Younger Generation
Rumpole and the Showfolk
Rumpole and the Tap End
Rumpole and the Bubble Reputation
Rumpole à la Carte
Rumpole and the Children of the Devil
Rumpole on Trial
Rumpole and the Way through the Woods
Rumpole and the Angel of Death
Rumpole and the Old Familiar Faces
Rumpole Rests His Case
Rumpole and the Primrose Path
Rumpole Redeemed
Rumpole and the Christmas Break
Rumpole and the Brave New World
Introduction by Ann Mallalieu
I first met John Mortimer in the early seventies when he was a practising barrister, just before he created Horace Rumpole. We were in the Bar Mess at the Old Bailey, then as now a long gloomy room rather reminiscent of the lounge of some two-star hotel. That is where barristers congregate to gossip, have lunch and innumerable coffee breaks during long trials and to sit anxiously reading old copies of Country Life while waiting for the jury to return with a verdict.
He was then a distinguished QC and playwright and I was to be his junior for the defence in a case under the Obscene Publications Act involving what John was later to describe to the jury as ‘a little spanking mag’.
‘Is there anything I can do for my leader?’ I asked, expecting to be instructed to prepare a schedule of seized documents, a draft detailed argument on the law or to go through the thousands of pages of unused material looking for hidden nuggets which might assist the defence. ‘A little cup of coffee would be nice,’ was the reply.
John Mortimer, like Horace Rumpole, was not really interested in the finer points of law. If he had to conduct legal argument he did so with skill but without relish. What really interested him about being a barrister were the people and jury advocacy at which he truly excelled. There was no help that I could give or that he needed with that.
During our case, the prosecutor made a fatal error of describing our magazine as not depicting ‘upright sex’. John was on to his phrase like a terrier on to a rat. During his final speech a number of jurors were crying with laughter. Even the judge had his fist in his mouth. His portrayal of counsel for the Crown as a man stuck in a Victorian time warp, a literary philistine and probably a tool of the thought police, when contrasted by him with their own modern, urbane, liberal sophistication was totally compelling. After the inevitable acquittal, a number of jurors came up to John outside the courtroom to ask for his autograph!
That case was the start of a friendship, at first professional, then personal, with John and his family which was to last for forty years until his death.
He led me in cases many times after that, always defending. I think John only ever prosecuted once and that case involved a corrupt police officer. Like Rumpole, he did not believe that the rules of the profession should be followed to the letter. The ‘cab rank’ principle which obliges criminal barristers, if available, to accept cases as they come, on whichever side, was not one which attracted John. His heart would not have been in putting people into prisons, which were places to be hated.
Being led in a case by John was one of the great treats of being a junior barrister, though it was often nerve-wracking in the mornings as he would tend to arrive just as the judge came into court. He would have completed several hours writing, having usually begun by 6 a.m. Then during the lunch break we would always repair to one of the local wine bars where John would entertain, with ‘a little glass of champagne’, actors, producers and publishers; people from the other life he was even then leading. At 4.30 p.m., when the court rose for the day, John would often be racing off to what he described as ‘the real world’ of the theatre for a read-through, rehearsal or meeting.
It was at one of those wine bar lunches that I remember a discussion as to whether his new television series should be called ‘Rumpole of the Old Bailey’ or just ‘The Bailey’ as the Bar knew it, then and now. Would a TV audience understand what it meant? The risk was taken, and they did.
Horace Rumpole was John’s best-known and I think finest literary creation – part fiction, part observation of others and part self-portrait.
John was more successful at the Bar than Rumpole ever was, taking silk, being head of chambers, a Bencher of his Inn and instructed in some of the highest profile cases of his day. But the two of them shared many traits. Both were never part of the establishment. John’s left-wing inclinations and his less than total commitment to the Bar and its accepted career path to the Bench made him slightly suspect to his colleagues and, I think, the object of some jealousy.
Rumpole had a thicker skin, less tact and little ability to suffer fools gladly, which no doubt put a brake on his ambition. He was probably frightened of women too, which John was not. John hated criticism, minded intensely if people disliked him, which they rarely did, and had enormous natural charm. What the two men shared most powerfully were a love of literature and a fundamental belief in the importance of civil liberties and, above all, trial by jury.
The early Rumpole stories were written while John was still in practice. He would have liked to stop going to court and write full time but something of his father’s influence kept him at it. The Bar was a ‘proper job’, writing too hazardous, and a wish to earn his father’s posthumous approval seemed to lurk in the back of his mind and prevent his early retirement. When he did eventually leave, he said his only regret was not having done so earlier.
The beneficiaries of this were the Rumpole stories. All the earlier ones were written against a background which John knew intimately because he was a part of it. The criminal law and the way successive governments changed it, usually for the worse to curry favour with popular opinion, was something he saw happening at first hand. Personal experiences provided many storylines, and the characters, in chambers and on the Bench, were drawn so closely from people he encountered that one member of the judiciary threatened legal action. At least two Bailey regulars thought they were Rumpole and many of us recognize descriptions of events in which we played some part reappearing in connection with Miss Phillida Trant, Claude Erskine-Brown, Uncle Tom and the others.
Later, when he had left the Bar, John would often telephone in mid-Rumpole story-writing with questions about new laws and how things were now done. Anecdotes relayed to him would reappear, honed, polished and generally improved but with no acknowledgement of their origins. John was still in touch with the Bar. The public who enjoyed his writing still thought of him as a barrister, but he was no longer part of that world. He did not see at first hand the changes which started creeping into the legal system, steadily undermining the independent Bar of which he and Horace were a part. In addition, a tide of equal opportunities, ethnic awareness and political correctness changed the profession out of recognition in many respects and, in doing so, much reduced the scope for one-off eccentricity such as both John and Rumpole possessed. After he left, for many reasons, both Bench and Bar became less colourful.
John went on writing Rumpole stories until the very end. They were interspersed with autobiography, novels, plays and screenplays and trenchant political journalism. His second career was in fact his vocation. Any day, even on holiday in Tuscany, in which he did not manage to do some writing he regarded as having been wasted. By contrast, Horace Rumpole could not liv
e without the Bar and, after being made to retire by Hilda, he found a way to return.
As a writer John had an endearing lack of self-confidence which was never apparent in court. He was terrified of bad reviews of his work and bore lifelong resentment towards any critic who said his writing was not up to scratch. He needed approval and praise. If he thought them in short supply he would say mournfully, ‘My career is at an end.’ If however, as was more usual, a rave notice appeared, he would say quietly, ‘I think things are going really rather well.’ Life was therefore something of a roller-coaster for those close to him.
Increasingly in demand as an after-dinner speaker, John continued his contacts with the law. Each year the London Criminal Solicitors Association held an annual dinner at the Savoy where leading firms entertained barristers with whom they worked. Known at the Bar as ‘The Touts Ball’, invitations to it were, unsurprisingly, desperately sought by barristers at every level keen to make new contacts and impress their hosts. John’s speech as guest of honour one year broke every rule of the new PC code. As he told a story about the sentencing of a vertically challenged defendant in which the judge had begun his sentencing remarks with the words ‘Stand up, midget!’, barristers and solicitors alike hugged their stomachs with the pain of uncontrollable laughter. Such was the helplessness of his audience that if John had told us to leave by the rear entrance of the hotel and jump into the Thames, to a man and woman we would have done it. To have an audience of over a thousand people in the palm of one’s hand is a gift given to very few.
Smaller audiences were equally captivated. On another occasion, John and his wife, Penny, were present at a small dinner party held in a well-known restaurant, whose chef could well have been the template for Jean-Pierre O’Higgins into whose establishment Hilda once forced Rumpole. To a man who considered a lamb chop the limit of fine dining, it was not a success.
During the evening it was noticeable that diners at other tables at this temple to food spoke to one another not at all. They just listened as John told his stories at ours, pretending not to do so and stifling their laughter in their napkins. John seldom lost his temper, but waiter after waiter that evening interrupted his stories to deliver lengthy descriptions of the gastronomic miracles being delivered to our table. At last the cheese arrived, unfortunately just as he was about to deliver the punch line of his favourite anecdote. With the cheese came an interminable description of what it was, where it came from and how it had been made. Finally John snapped. ‘Just go away!’ he cried. The entire restaurant broke into spontaneous applause. The story was resumed and no further pretence was made by anyone that they were not listening in and loving every moment.
John’s stories were often repeated but grew better and better each time until the original was no longer recognizable. Sometimes they were loosely based on something which had happened to him, but The Truth for John was a very flexible concept. What mattered was to entertain and gain the approval of an audience, however large or small. He loved to please others. Horace Rumpole pleased himself.
It is sometimes said that barristers are frustrated actors. In later years, John became an actor in reality, taking his one-man show Mortimer’s Miscellany, an evening of poetry and prose interspersed with those stories, on the road to theatres, village halls and churches in aid of charities such as the Howard League for Penal Reform, for which he cared greatly.
As he became increasingly frail, wheelchair-bound and with a growing list of painful disabilities, he would say that the only time he was free from pain was when he was on stage performing. He suffered from nerves beforehand as in the old days at court when he would be sick before a big speech to a jury, but once performing at one of his ‘gigs’ as he called them, before an audience, both nerves and physical suffering vanished.
John has gone now and there will be no new Rumpoles. Two champions of liberty, one actual and one fictional, are no more.
In many ways the courts, chambers and the Bar have already changed beyond recognition. Neither John nor Horace used a computer, preferring pencil and paper. They were not required to attend Continuing Professional Development courses each year. Nor would it have been proper for clerks to hand out football and theatre tickets to solicitors to encourage work for chambers as they now do. There were no chambers’ marketing committees or arguments about the chambers’ logo.
Neither saw the extension of rights of audience and repeated legal aid cuts making it increasingly difficult for criminal solicitors and junior barristers to make a living.
But there are still independent barristers who care, as they did, about justice, that an accused should be properly represented because he is innocent until proved guilty and who still regard trial by jury as ‘the lamp that shows that freedom lives’. Thank goodness for them.
Ann Mallalieu
March 2011
Publisher’s Note
In 1993 John Mortimer published a selection of his favourite Rumpole stories called The Best of Rumpole: ‘These are the stories I have enjoyed writing most, those which made me laugh a little when I was writing them (the only reliable test of a successful piece of work) and which drew some laughter from the actors when they read through the television versions.’
This new volume consists of those seven stories chosen by the author himself, together with a further seven stories representing the best of the later work. In addition, there is a fragment of a novel – ‘Rumpole and the Brave New World’ – which he had just embarked upon when he died in January 2009.
Author’s Introduction
About seventeen years ago I thought I needed a character like Maigret or Sherlock Holmes to keep me alive in my old age. I wanted a sort of detective, who could be the hero of a number of stories but whose personality and approach to life were more important than the crimes with which he was concerned. He would have to be a comic character, as well as being courageous and more than usually astute, because I believe life to be best portrayed as comedy.
I spent most of my life following two professions. I was first and last a writer, an inventor of stories. I also practised as a lawyer and I defended many people accused of crimes at the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court. There I was concerned with stories, many of which were too fantastic and improbable for even the most gifted writer to persuade his readers to believe. An English criminal trial is a very theatrical occasion – the barristers and judges wear wigs and gowns, some of the judges are in scarlet and ermine and, on state occasions, carry bunches of flowers (once necessary to protect their noses from prison stench). I often left court to go to a rehearsal of a play I had written and felt I had left the world of fantasy and make-believe at the Old Bailey for the harsh reality of the world of art.
So, when I looked for a character to be my detective I found him very near at hand. I thought of all the old defenders in criminal trials I had known – rumpled, untidy men, fond of claret and steak and kidney pie, who often called the most unattractive judges and the most hardened bank robbers ‘old darling’ but never called their wives ‘old darling’. I thought of my father, who was also a barrister, and his costume, which was rather like that which Mr Churchill used to wear in the war: a black jacket and waistcoat across which stretched a gold watch-chain, often smothered in cigar ash, a stand-up collar and a bow-tie. My father also had Rumpole’s habit of quoting poetry at very inapposite moments. When I was about four when he saw me he would say, ‘Is execution done on Cawdor?’ which, when you’re four, is a pretty tough question to have to answer. Barristers are meant to be polite to solicitors, who bring them work, but when he was displeased with one of them my father often said, ‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon,’ thinking they’d be glad of another quotation from Macbeth.
So, from a collection of characters, Horace Rumpole was born. He is very unlike me, being a far more stoic and single-minded person than I am. However, he has this great advantage – he does say a good many of the things I think and if I said th
em they might sound rather leftish and off-putting, but when given voice by Rumpole they become crusty, conservative and much more appealing. He is, after all, the great defender of muddled and sinful humanity, the man who believes in never pleading guilty. He is, in its most admirable form, the archetypal Old Bailey hack.
Although the defence in a criminal case has a number of rights, many judges tend to favour the prosecution, and old defenders such as Rumpole are often treated as though they were criminals themselves. Some judges do this with great subtlety; others, like Rumpole’s old enemy Judge Bullingham, are given to head-on confrontations. When summing up, judges are bound to remind the jury of the defence case, but there are various ways of doing this. An Australian judge is said to have held his nose and pulled an imaginary lavatory chain after reading out the evidence given on behalf of the accused. His Honour Judge Bullingham and his like content themselves with sighing heavily, raising their eyes to heaven and saying, ‘Of course you can believe that if you want to, members of the jury. It’s a matter entirely for you.’ Over the years Rumpole has learnt to fight this snorting and purple-faced member of the judiciary with the skill of a toreador, sometimes emerging with a figurative ear or a tail. But such days in court are hard for Rumpole.
He also has a number of fights on his hands in his chambers, where his total lack of respect for authority gets him into perpetual trouble with the more pompous legal hacks. Throughout these stories I have been anxious to make it clear that judges and lawyers are not all wise, infallible and trustworthy but as vain, insecure, sometimes as prejudiced and often as foolish as the rest of us.
And then there is Rumpole’s home life, which I wanted to make as testing an experience for him as his days in court. The particular term of endearment he uses for the formidable Hilda – ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’ – comes from She by Rider Haggard, a book Rumpole remembers having read as a boy. The ‘She’ in that story was kept alive in a cave for about a thousand years and may have even once been Queen Cleopatra. Hilda simply calls her husband ‘Rumpole’, but their adversarial relationship springs from a deep mutual need. Although the Rumpoles sometimes feel they can’t stand living together, they couldn’t, I’m sure, contemplate living apart. Their differences may come from the fact that Hilda might not mind a bit of sex but Rumpole’s amorous experiences wouldn’t fill one wet weekend in Weston-super-Mare. In writing about them I have found that any incident in married life, between a large assortment of people, fits easily into the mansion flat in the Gloucester Road where the Rumpoles argue their various causes.
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