2
A Brief Life
Once a television set had eventually been installed in 73 Naylor Road in the mid-1950s, I found the small silver screen in the corner of the living room completely seductive, and later one of the programmes I watched most avidly was an American drama series called The Defenders. Every week a father-and-son team took on seemingly hopeless legal cases, all of which contained a strong social or moral theme. Winning was rare, and the real point of it all was ensuring that people got the best representation possible and were able to air and explore their grievances in the face of institutional indifference.
Even at a very young age – and doubtless influenced by my mother’s victory concerning the parking summons – this idea was immediately attractive to me, and provided a constructive channel for my feelings of anger over various forms of social injustice, being a tangible, concrete service with a clear goal.
Once I had begun to consider the law seriously, even before I went to Keele, the odds appeared to be stacked against me. Before he died my father had told me that, in his view, no progress could be made in that profession unless I became a Freemason – and since he thoroughly disapproved of everything that Freemasons stood for, he felt I should stick to trains. Others thought that to succeed in law you needed to be a member of the landed gentry, or at least know someone who was. Above all, you could not survive without some kind of family stipend to get you through the lean years, which in my case was a mountain altogether too steep and too far to climb.
So when I went up to university I had put all these thoughts on the back burner. Fortunately for me, they did not stay there long because I met (at a dance class: Mother was right once again) and fell in love with Melian Bordes, a tall, handsome and striking young woman. We both had a strong interest in sport, and her father, Commander Breon Bordes (like my own father) had Huguenot roots. She was reading French and maths, subjects in which she has maintained an interest throughout her life.
The first summer after we met I went, on my own, to Florence on a British Council arts course. I missed Melian deeply, and when I returned to England we discussed our future together. I mentioned my ambition to go to the Bar, and it so happened that one of her uncles, Andrew Monroe-Kerr, was a barrister practising on the Western Circuit. He gave me invaluable advice, mainly to the effect that I should not be put off by all the paraphernalia, if it was something I really wanted to do.
I started to read up on what was involved. First, join one of the four Inns of Court – Middle Temple, Inner Temple, Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn – which back then contained all the sets of chambers in London. I chose Gray’s Inn because it seemed more off the beaten track (by about 200 yards) and because it had a strong Irish student intake, and I really liked the Irish.
All the Inns were much the same, ancient foundations shrouded in mystery and mystical ceremony – I could see why my father thought membership of a Masonic Lodge might help – and they have survived by means of their insular and inscrutable cloistered confines. Their traditions are jealously guarded and preserved, and if you walk into one of them off the street you are confronted with another age. Scratch the surface and you discover a thoroughly British substratum that is reflected in all the major public schools, Oxbridge colleges, Sandhurst, the Foreign Office, the Church and the monarchy. For someone like me, well outside the magic circle, it required a markedly deep breath as well as a blind eye for me to join this pillar of the Establishment.
My saving grace, I thought at the time, was that Melian (who had become my wife in 1965) and I intended to emigrate to Australia, where I could practise law and see a bit of the world. There was an interesting scheme, euphemistically called ‘Assisted Passage’, whereby successful candidates would have their journey subsidised for a down-payment of just £10. Since the Australian Government was very fussy about who it took, this could be regarded as a form of middle-class deportation, and our idea was therefore for me to pass the Bar exams after my degree and then we’d set off.
Besides the weighty task of trying to get through all these exams in time, I had not allowed for the fact that you are also required to eat your way to professional status: thirty-six dinners had to be consumed prior to qualification. Fond though I am of food, this was quite a challenge, so I started the ‘eatathon’ while I was still at university. A student friend, Maureen Ritchie, who had a mossy Morris Traveller and returned to London regularly to see her parents, kindly took me to Gray’s Inn every term for the purpose of attending these dinners. Without her help I would never have made it, because my grant did not even cover the barest expenses and my vacation jobs working ‘on the dust’, and then delivering new cars, merely provided money which I gave to my mother.
My fellow workers ‘on the dust’ in Finchley could not fathom why on earth I was refuse collecting. They thought I was an undercover toff gaining experience for some kind of magazine exposé, so they presented me with a cup and saucer for my tea instead of a mug. They simply couldn’t believe I really did need the money.
One of the most revealing experiences of the job was the weekly collection at the Friern Barnet Mental Hospital, a vast asylum built like a Victorian prison. Up until then I had never encountered anyone suffering from serious mental illness and, like many people, I was afraid because of my ignorance. Some patients were allowed into the grounds where the bins were and often sat on them awaiting our arrival, at which point we engaged in extraordinary and entertaining conversations about what was going to happen to the rubbish we removed. My fear was soon displaced by a realisation that they were probably saner than I was.
The Gray’s Inn dining experience was both breathtaking and nerve-racking. One moment I was living and studying close to the Pottery towns – immortalised by Arnold Bennett in such novels as Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) and Clayhanger (1910) and an area seared by economic deprivation – and the next minute I was thrust into a highly privileged and exclusive club.
The walls of the Inn were bedecked with portraits of illustrious and famous legal luminaries, such as Bacon, Cecil, Holt, F. E. Smith and Atkin. An ornate carved screen had been presented by Elizabeth I, and fine examples of heraldic stained glass filtered daylight into this historical domain. The dining hall contained long mahogany tables with wooden benches; raised slightly above these was another table for the elders of the Inn, otherwise known as Masters of the Bench, or Benchers. Against this backcloth it’s easy to see why I never expected to be joining their number – which I did, however, when I was elected in 2007.
Each student was robed, and we dined in a group of four (a mess); one took the role of senior and another that of junior within the mess; the plates had to be passed round one way and the wine another. You were obliged to toast, by name, each member of your mess, followed by those in the mess above you and below you on the table. What I found to be complete anathema were the penalties incurred for minor infringements of dining etiquette. Somewhat like a forfeit, the culprit was required to stand up and perform a recitation or song. No doubt it was thought to be all jolly good fun and not to be taken seriously, but for most of us it was nothing short of public humiliation, particularly for the women students, whose numbers were small and who had to suffer the usual round of sexist comments.
There was, however, a far more important activity promoted by the Inn, which I found invaluable: the Moot. This was a mock trial prosecuted and defended by students in front of real, experienced judges, and it provided precisely what the law courses did not, namely a practical exercise of advocacy skills. A brief was prepared outlining a set of facts, which then required analysis to establish what legal liability arose. You were judged not only on the content of your submissions, but on other qualities, notably presentation. The tips handed down by eminent High Court judges such as the Lords Edmund Davies and Donaldson were all sound and necessary, although I can’t say that I’ve always managed to stick to them: be clear, concise and non-repetitive. One of the judges, the Honourable Sir William McNair, kindly took the trouble to write to me after each Moot suggesting improvements: watch your posture; look the court in the eye; don’t doggedly read out texts of legal authorities; speak with conviction; observe the general reaction; adjust your tone and tenor; listen intently to questions and queries and address them directly; be wary of the judicial seduction that begins, ‘Well, Mr Mansfield, isn’t this what you really mean?’ Receiving encouragement of that kind was worth its weight in gold.
The Inn also provided other much-needed practical help, in my case money. I was awarded an Exhibition (a bursary) for three years following a written examination in jurisprudence, which was just up my street because I saw this as a natural extension to the philosophy degree.
Meanwhile, as far as the Bar exams themselves were concerned, I was not doing so well. Melian had taken a year out to teach in France as part of her French degree, which meant that I had finished mine before her, so I decided to remain in the Potteries while she completed her final year and take a correspondence course for the Bar. This was somewhat unconventional and more than a little mind-numbing: so far as I could see, the endless notes which I was sent in grubby brown envelopes were no more than sophisticated shopping lists. When I eventually managed to attend some lectures in London, which weren’t much better, I wondered what the point was.
No lawyer worth his salt wanders round with all this information – Roman law, Equity law, company law, all very Byzantine – in his head. Surely, I reasoned, they should be teaching me about where to find the law you need to know and how to apply it; but the answer from the examiners was a resounding ‘no’, and so I had to keep doing retakes until I felt like a crammed parrot.
By the summer of 1967 that parrot was hanging on to his perch by one leg, having scraped through all the exams except one: land law. I think it was a case of three strikes and you’re out, and I had failed twice, so I had to make it this time or it was curtains.
The result of my final shot would be published at the end of August, and at the beginning of that month, on the 7th, Melian gave birth to our first child, Jonathan – a wonderful, but unplanned arrival. At the same time we had got through the screening process at Australia House, and our passage to Adelaide was booked for November. If I managed to pass the exam, I could be called to the Bar just before departure. Everything was becoming rather tight, and I felt very edgy. Maybe I’d taken on too much; maybe I wasn’t cut out for the law anyway; maybe emigrating for four years (the minimum we had agreed on) was mad. Wasn’t that what had happened to the Tolpuddle Martyrs?
Instead of trying to ease the pressure by cutting something out, I seem to have a natural response that does quite the opposite. Prepare for the worst, but hope for the best – and now preparing for the worst entailed thinking about alternative careers.
Most people thought I’d lost it when they heard that I had taken up devising weird inventions. There was the knife-cutting fork, handy for those parties where you have to eat standing up, trying to juggle a glass, cutlery and a plate. I managed to persuade Viners, a well-known cutlery firm in Sheffield, to consider a prototype, and even took out a provisional patent. At the same time I thought it might be useful for the plate to be designed with a notch cut into its circumference to accommodate the stem of a wine glass. Then there was the electronically operated self-opening umbrella, which popped out of a small pack strapped to your back like a parachute. Finally there was a bed which gently raised itself into the vertical position in the morning, so that you could step out of it and then hide it away in a cupboard. (Wallace and Gromit went a step further in the film The Wrong Trousers by contriving a chute down which Wallace was propelled from the bed through the floor into a pair of waiting trousers.) The world was saved from these mechanical machinations because the examiners finally took pity. I passed.
Hoping for such an outcome, I had made some other preparations. Once you’ve secured your exams and eaten your dinners, there is a further stage of training called pupillage, which took twelve months and which had to be paid for. I thought I might complete at least six months before going to Adelaide, not having realised that you weren’t supposed to start your pupillage before you were called to the Bar, let alone before you had passed all the exams. On top of this I did not know quite how you obtained a Pupil Master. Nowadays it’s all highly regulated and centralised, but back then I set off using my well-tried method of walking around till I found the right door.
Opposite the Royal Courts of Justice there is a large black door on the Strand, which leads into the Temple. So I went through there, believing this to be the heart and hive of legal activity. I asked the porter where I could find pupillage, and he directed me to the Treasurer’s office, where the person I saw had an obvious military demeanour: perfectly polite, but plainly astonished that anyone should come in and ask for a pupillage as if it were a loaf of bread. He probably thought that the easiest way to deal with someone so naive was to palm me off on a nearby friendly barrister, who would put me straight.
Within minutes I was sitting in a tiny room in Crown Office Row in front of a bespectacled P. G. Wodehouse-style figure called Quentin Edwards, and I soon came to respect the enduring humanity with which he had embraced my unannounced arrival. There could not have been many who were prepared to take in someone like me without further thought. He had a remarkable legal practice, which embraced everything from ecclesiastical tree-root damage to licensing applications for pubs and clubs, while in his spare time he acted as a Nonconformist lay preacher. Like Professor Flew, Quentin was a strict disciplinarian and expected me to be in the office from eight in the morning until six in the evening, and was rigorous about the briefs I was allowed to read, ensuring that I knew them inside out. Once I had mastered the instructions, he would then set me a series of questions that would require further research (which is what I thought the Bar schools should have been doing). All this made me realise that presentation depends on preparation, and that I had a very long way to go before reaching even the foothills of the television scenarios I’d so eagerly consumed.
Weeks before I was due to embark on the voyage to Australia, Quentin suddenly suggested that I might like to reconsider going at all, as he had a friend and colleague in a top criminal set who might be prepared to give me a second six months’ pupillage straight away. I am a firm believer in not only looking for opportunities, but taking them whenever they come along: they hardly ever occur when you want them to, so you have to be flexible and receptive when they do.
Melian and I spent a weekend pushing Jonathan around Hampstead Heath, weighing up what we should do. We’d already said our goodbyes to numerous friends (many of whom had never thought we’d go anyway), but the chance I had been offered seemed too good to miss. After a great deal of heart-searching we decided to forfeit our £10 and stay in England.
Five Paper Buildings was a very different set-up from Quentin Edwards’s practice. It was a high-profile prosecution set, where the lawyers were housed in large rooms with leather-backed chairs and beautiful views across Temple Gardens to the River Thames, and where a pupillage was like gold dust. The engine room of the set was an old-school senior clerk called Tom, who divvied up the work and kept a beady eye on everyone.
My Pupil Master was Brian Leary, a slick, super-confident prosecutor with a generous spirit. In your second six months you are allowed to take on small cases on your own – and as he thought the best way of learning was to jump in at the deep end, within days of my arrival I was sent to Hampstead Magistrates’ Court to prosecute a shoplifter. I hadn’t been to any criminal court by this time and was completely terrified, but Brian told me not to worry and just get on with it, a lesson that has remained with me throughout my professional career.
He wrote out exactly where to go, where to stand in court, when to get up, what to say – and, crucially, not to forget to ask for costs – and it all worked like a dream. The shoplifter was convicted, and to Brian’s amazement the case even found its way into the local newspaper, the Ham & High.
Mind you, the defendant had pleaded guilty . . .