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MORT DE MORTIMER
Sir John Mortimer (1923 –
2009)
 A year on from the death of
Sir John Mortimer, we continue to see new tributes to his fame and popularity
as a writer. Just before Christmas 2009, a JM retrospective was televised on
BBC4. This same channel had earlier televised a re-run of his memorable
autobiographical play ‘A Voyage Round my Father’. Meanwhile, lending libraries
all over the country are reporting no let-up in the borrowing rate of JM’s
ever-popular Rumpole story books.
JM wrote plays, novels, short
stories and various autobiographical works. When young, he wrote poetry too
(although I have never seen any of it published). He was a well known public
figure and raconteur. He published two volumes of illuminating and delightfully
readable interviews with leading post-war personalities from politics,
business, religion and the arts.
Inevitably, though, the mostfulsome praise after his death was reserved for his most triumphant and popular
literary creation: the fictional barrister Rumpole of the Bailey.
Rumpole for the Defence
I have described Rumpole as a
“fictional” barrister, but if like me you have read and enjoyed JM’s
autobiographies you will know that Rumpole was sourced from a real-life amalgam
of JM and his father.
JM and JM senior were
barristers by profession. In the first volume of JM’s autobiography it is easy
to find direct links into Rumpole. Here are some citations from ‘Clinging to
the Wreckage’ (Penguin, 1983):
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JM’s father had a
fiancée who died when young. (So did Rumpole).
-
When JM was a boy
his father would recite Sherlock Holmes stories to him while they were out on
long walks together. (So did Rumpole with his son Nick).
-
When buttering up
his managing clerk Mr Wyvern, in the hope of some extra work coming his way,
the newly-qualified JM would always enquire after Mr Wyvern’s tomato plants and
the health of his begonias. (Cue the frequent instances in the Rumpole stories
of Rumpole similarly asking his instructing solicitor Mr Myers for news of his
beloved prize tomatoes).
-
During marital
rows with his first wife Penelope, a part of JM’s brain would be hastily
memorising the exact words that she was shouting at him, so that Hilda Rumpole
could be given the same dialogue for her verbal bashings of Horace inside their
flat in the Gloucester Road.
-
Some of the
Rumpole stories were modelled upon selected court cases from JM’s real-life
casebook.
The actor Leo McKern was the
television Rumpole. He transformed JM’s written words into a nationally
recognised phenomenon. In households, workplaces and pubs throughout the land,
we all heard the phrase “She Who Must Be Obeyed” come into common and lasting usage.
In addition to providing
superb quality entertainment for readers and viewers, the Rumpole stories and
television serialisations must have helped many of the general public to gain a
better understanding of the hitherto mysterious processes of law in our
country.
JM made national headlines
when he famously – or infamously – defended the freedom of the press in the notorious
‘Oz’ and ‘Gay News’ trials, respectively involving allegations of corruption of
schoolchildren, and blasphemy.
In his old age,
wheelchair-bound and long retired from the bar, JM vicariously relived such
high profile controversy. He wrote new Rumpole stories on topical twenty-first
century themes, inserting his alter ego into court cases where the defendants
were accused of acts of terrorism or of anti-social behaviour requiring the
imposition of an ASBO.
 JM’s autobiographies contain
numerous courtroom anecdotes that illustrate the varied and often absurd
extremes of human behaviour. The stories are variously amusing, amazing, vulgar
or distressingly sad.
Ideally, we all think to
ourselves, the outcome of a trial will depend upon revelation of the pure truth
– the facts and the evidence. JM reveals that the rendering of a “guilty” or
“not guilty” verdict is, inevitably, a much more chancy business. It depends
more often than not upon the skill of advocacy:
“The art of cross
examination,” my father once told me, “is the art of leading the witness
through a line of propositions he agrees to until he’s forced to agree to the one
fatal question.”
JM’s father specialised in wills
and probate, and matrimonial law. While reading JM’s autobiographies I must
admit that I enjoy a nostalgic return to fondly-remembered days when divorce
and adultery cases had to be reported by the newspapers in couched and
euphemistic terms. In our present-day world where crude and explicit language
constantly erupts before our ears and eyes, how I yearn for those delightful
phrases like “intimacy took place” and “falling for a baby” that I used to read
in my parents’ daily newspapers, not knowing at the time what they meant.
Paradoxically, in those
comparatively restrained times, by use of lurid headlines the press could sensationalise
the most drab of suburban marital break-ups. A working-class housewife living
in a two up two down terrace might open the evening newspaper and find herself
stigmatized – in some cases by use of actual words pronounced by the judge – in
torrid terms such as this:
A CATFORD CLEOPATRA,
CARELESS OF HER MARRIAGE VOWS, WHO SINNED SHAMELESSLY
I recently watched a DVD of
the first and second series of Rumpole television episodes (1978 & 1979).
It was many years since I had seen them.
I was surprised at the slow
pace of the action. However, the essential delight of the characters and
dialogue was intact. My biggest memory lapse was the character Claude
Erskine-Brown. In the intervening years I must have morphed him into the
diminutive Clive, who is always outsmarted in the Alex cartoons in the Daily
Telegraph. I was to discover that in the Rumpole television series
Erskine-Brown was much taller and more assertive than I had remembered him to
be.
Patricia Hodge remained
impossibly delicious in the role of Phyllida Trant – “the Portia of our
Chambers” as Rumpole privately referred to her.
Lessons in Life, Lessons
in Love
In his autobiographical works
and musings, twice-married JM wrote with self-candour about his vices, though
not necessarily all of them. His early autobiography ‘Clinging to the Wreckage’
makes mention of him giving a poetry reading at a local village hall near the
home of the playwright John Osborne, who was organising and hosting the event:
We drank a great deal of
champagne and then Mr Osborne, wearing a boater and striped blazer, made a long
introductory speech in which he referred to what he suggested was the
immorality of my life.
As he drifted into his dotage
JM seemed perversely to make a virtue of Growing Old Disgracefully. I think
that the jury must be out (if you’ll pardon the phrase) as to whether he gained
any admirers, or lost them, in his adopted persona of a wheelchair-bound champagne-swilling,
braying bore of the “I can be as rude and disruptive as I like” persuasion.
Ultimately, however, the
quality of the written word is always the trump card. I have heard it said of
JM that his championing of the underdog, his sympathetic understanding of human
frailties, and above all his own earnest desire that people would genuinely
like him (not just his books), made him an endearing figure who the British
public took to their hearts. His wit triumphed over his weaknesses.
I have certainly found
humour, comfort and inspiration in JM’s latter-day autobiographical musings. In
life-teaching books such as ‘Where There’s A Will’ (Penguin, 2003) he delivered
some precious gems of wit and wisdom.
To put it another way, when
someone older and more experienced than you wants to pass on some tips about
life, it is surely worth listening and taking heed. JM was an erudite man and I
judge him to have been eminently well qualified to tell me the following things
about literature and world history:
It can be argued that no
writer had clearer insight than Shakespeare, and he managed to achieve this in
a world without refrigeration, Darwin, Freud, Bill Gates, e-mails, television
or the mobile phone. The characters in the plays of Euripides are no less
capable of revealing universal truths than those created by Eugene O’Neill or
Harold Pinter.
… And what is true of
literature may be true of history also, The contemporary holy wars of Islam are
as wrong-headed but, so far at least, less deep in blood than the Crusades. Ireland is
endlessly re-enacting the days of Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange. Yugoslavs were
murdering each other as a result of divisions in the Roman
Empire.
And yet we are busily
closing our eyes to all these valuable clues. Shakespeare is dying out in
schools. No one learns poetry by heart, and literature seems to have begun with
‘Animal Farm’, ‘Lord of the Flies’ and ‘The Hobbit’. History begins, in most
schools, with the Russian Revolution or the origins of the 1914 war.
Although I have not needed JM
to tell me that seeking the social companionship of women can be a rewarding
use of some of my spare time, I am still most obliged to him for the ‘Lessons
in Love’ that he lucidly and amusingly imparts in ‘Where There’s a Will’:
Women have a greater gift
than men, I think, for friendship. It’s true that girls in school can be
extraordinarily bitchy to each other, but both at school and afterwards they
are capable of forming great networks of friends to spread news and gossip and
cheerfully discover the inadequacies of their husbands.
… So it is always betterto sit in a restaurant with a woman. Fantasies can wander freely. There are
always vague possibilities hovering over the table, however young or old the
couple. Perhaps it’s more restful if they have been lovers in the past, if that
is over and done with and perhaps seems, in retrospect, even better than it was
at the time. Whatever the relationship was, is or might have been, you can be
sure that the woman will eat and drink more and smoke more vehemently between
courses than men, but they will be more full of shared secrets, astute
observations, anecdotes to be treasured and opinions to be expounded than men
at a restaurant table. You are soon lulled into the belief that you are the
only person in the world they would ever say half of these things to.
It was a surprising but I
suspect deftly knowing touch by JM in his late-written Rumpole stories that he
conceived a third-age clandestine romance between Hilda Rumpole and her
husband’s former arch-enemy in court, the irascible Judge Bullingham.
Delightfully played in the
television series by the actor Bill Fraser, who I shall always think of as
Snudge in ‘The Army Game’, Judge Bullingham was one of many endearing and
enduring comic characters to grace the Rumpole stories.
Whilst we are left in no
doubt that the “Mad Bull” and “She Who Must Be Obeyed” engage in mutual
heart-fluttering and a prolonged exchange of flirtatious correspondence, the
pen of JM mercifully halts on the right side of dignity.
I should not have liked to
know, and neither I hope would you, that (as imparted by JM senior after
concluding one of his real-life cases): “really the only evidence we had of
adultery was a pair of footprints upside down on the dashboard of an Austin
Seven motor car parked in Hampstead Garden suburb.”
Jerry Dowlen
January 2010
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