CALLED TO THE BAR
――is it not well that there should be what we call
Professions, or Bread-studies (_Brodzwecke_) pre-appointed
us? Here, circling like the gin-horse, for whom partial or
total blindness is no evil, the Bread-artist can travel
contentedly round and round, still fancying that it is
forward and forward, and realise much: for himself victual;
for the world an additional horse’s power in the grand
corn-mill or hemp-mill of Economic Society.
CARLYLE: “Sartor Resartus.”
In 1884 I was appointed by Mr. Justice Mathew to the first legal
office I had the honour to hold, and went with him on the Oxford
Circuit as judge’s marshal. Mr. Justice Mathew was a very old friend
of my father, and was one of the team that prosecuted Arthur Orton for
perjury. Of those five, three survivors now remained; Hawkins, Mathew,
and Bowen, and all were on the bench. A judge’s marshal has one
official duty; he swears in the grand jury. His other duties are to
act as the judge’s secretary, to see that everything in the judge’s
lodgings runs smoothly, and to suffer admonition gladly if anything
goes wrong. At the end of the circuit Mathew said at least this in my
favour――that I was the only marshal he had ever had who could carve a
chicken and open a soda-water bottle without injuring the carpets.
We went the Oxford Summer Circuit. Butt was our brother judge. It was
a delightful and valuable experience. Mathew was an ideal judge in
criminal cases, and I have never forgotten a maxim he was very fond of
quoting and acting upon: “When the prisoner is undefended the judge
must be his advocate.” In altered terms, it is a counsel of perfection
for a County Court judge or any magisterial person who has the poor
always before him. To see him double the part of prisoner’s advocate
and judge was to witness a masterpiece of subtle wit and honesty.
There has been much discussion of late about the bias of judges. To my
thinking a judge without bias would be a monstrosity. Mathew was an
Irishman and a Liberal. But I never remember his bias interfering with
a straight delivery; unless, indeed, it was on the trial of an
undefended Irish poacher at Oxford. There truly the Liberal
disappeared in the judge, but I think the Irishman swerved a little
from the true line. Anyhow, Mercy had her way, and the poacher was
acquitted.
There were many who regarded Mathew with something like terror, and
for the life of me why one with so kindly a heart should have rejoiced
on occasion in appearing as a man of wrath I cannot say. Perhaps it
was that if he followed on all occasions his humane instincts he felt
that discipline would not be maintained, and that he was really, as it
were, taking gymnastic moral exercise in working himself into
histrionic anger about nothing in particular. There was generally a
sense of humour in these displays which the sufferer was often too
agitated to enjoy. I remember on one occasion an unfortunate sheriff
had spelt and printed and published Mathew’s name on the calendar with
two t’s. The judge sent for him and received him in the drawing-room
of our lodgings in grave state. He explained to the High Sheriff, who
stood quaking before him in a yeomanry uniform, that the offence he
had committed might well be regarded not as petty treason, but as high
treason, being in effect an insult through him as Judge of Assize to
Her Majesty herself. He sent for Butt and solemnly discussed with him
whether he was not in duty bound to fine the unlucky sheriff at least
£500. Butt, who was never more delighted than when he could play his
part in a jest, for some time seriously agreed with Mathew, and the
two discussed whether imprisonment was necessary as well. Then Butt
began to think the fun had gone on long enough, and took the sheriff’s
side and begged his forgiveness. But Mathew, who was really vexed at
slovenliness of this kind, dismissed the sheriff and adjourned his
decision until the morning, “for,” said he in Cromwellian phrase and
intention, “the fellow must be taught his place.”
But on another and more amusing occasion he caused grave fright to
Lister Drummond, my brother marshal. Drummond was an ardent
Catholic――a convert, I believe――and of course Mathew belonged to a
very old Catholic family. I fear we marshals must have been somewhat
of a trial to our respective judges, and every now and then Mathew
would put his foot down. One morning we both arrived at breakfast
rather later than usual. Mathew was reading the paper and eating his
bacon alone, and looked at us in a very Johnsonian and surly manner,
and only grunted a reply to our greetings. Breakfast proceeded in
silence until the judge had finished, when he put down his paper and
said:
“Whose bedroom is next to mine?”
“I believe mine is, Judge,” I said with hesitancy.
“Hm! Then who on earth was talking to you until two in the morning?”
“Well, you see,” I replied more cheerfully, seeing a mischievous
retreat, “it was Drummond, but I’m sure you will approve of it when I
tell you that he wants to convert me to the Holy Faith!”
“Does he?” roared Mathew, banging his fist on the table and glaring at
Drummond. “Then you may take it straight from me, Drummond, that if
you continue to convert Parry in the small hours of the morning, I
leave the Church.”
He swept out of the room, leaving Drummond as limp as the jackdaw of
Rheims.
Mathew had a considerable power of acting, and could have taken a hand
with the best in the old sport of quizzing or “smoking” the victim,
which is known to the moderns under the name of the game of spoof. I
remember well when we were travelling to some cathedral town I was
specifically ordered to get copies of a ribald and amusing local paper
called the _Bat_, or the _Porcupine_, or the _Jackdaw_, or some such
sarcastic beast or bird. This I did, and the two judges thoroughly
enjoyed an open letter in it to my Lord Bishop of the diocese. The
next evening the Lord Bishop dined with us in state, with other
dignitaries of the city. When we retired to the drawing-room, there on
the table, duly arranged with the _Times_, the _Spectator_, the _Law
Journal_ and other staid prints, were the blatant covers of the
offending papers. They caught the Lord Bishop’s eye. He frowned and
looked gravely on the carpet. Mathew, with his ready observation,
noticed the episcopal uneasiness. He stepped to the table in sudden
anger. He seized the offending copies and turned to me with a look of
grave sorrow, illuminated by a tactful quiver of the left eyelid.
“Isn’t this disgraceful? I can’t hinder you from wasting your money on
such trash. But to bring them into the judges’ rooms and leave them
lying about here――――” He stepped to the fireplace and threw them into
the fire with a sigh. “Surely, Parry――surely you do not need to be
told not to do such things.”
And once more the Bishop smiled a smile of righteousness and peace.
It was only a few weeks’ experience, but it stands out as one of the
times when I learned something of the technic of advocacy. I was only
a “walker on” to the stage of the Court, it is true, but I was on all
the time, and could take note of the courses of the stars. Henry
Matthews, Q.C., and Jelf, Q.C., were doing constant battle in the
Civil Court, and Darling was defending poachers and other offenders on
the Crown side. There was plenty of good example for the apprentice to
study. And in between whiles we rowed our judges down the Wye to
Chepstow and nearly spilled them in the river, and journeyed to
Edgbaston to kiss Cardinal Newman’s ring, and visited under the
pleasantest circumstances the old houses and castles and cathedrals of
the Midlands; as if all the world were playing holidays when you went
the Oxford Circuit in summer.
At the end of 1884 I was married, and in January, 1885, I was called
to the Bar. I determined to go my father’s old circuit, the
South-Eastern, and went down to Cambridge and Norwich and Maidstone to
look round, but came to the conclusion that there was woefully little
to do and plenty of able men to do it. I took a room in Middle Temple
Lane in the old wooden building on the left as you turn out of Fleet
Street. My name was painted on the door, but I doubt if anyone read it
but myself. I wrote some stories for the _Cornhill_, started a law
book that was never finished, and began editing Dorothy Osborne’s
letters. As the Bar did not require my services, and I thought the
country did, I made many excursions for the Eighty Club.
I spoke several times for an old friend of mine, Tom Threlfall, head
of the Salford Brewery, who had come out as a Liberal against the Hon.
Edward Stanhope in the Horncastle Division of Lincolnshire. The
agricultural labourer was coming into his own, and the clergy often
refused us the use of the schools, so we spoke from a wagon in a
field. We had a knot of independent farmers who supported the cause,
and we all drove together in a big brake to the place of meeting. I
shall never forget a serious _faux pas_ of Threlfall’s. We were
passing between two fields heavily manured with the favourite
Lincolnshire dressing, and all the farmers sniffed it up with smiling
approval. It was too much for Threlfall, and he buried his face in an
elegant cambric handkerchief. One of the farmers frowned slightly,
and, by way of encouraging explanation, said: “Eh, man! Pig moock!
Fine!”
The farmers were sorely puzzled at his want of appreciation, and I
could not help feeling that Threlfall was not really cut out for a
Lincolnshire member. Unfortunately, the voters thought so, too; but he
made an excellent fight.
At the end of the year, at an old boys’ dinner at King’s College after
the election Sir Richard Webster, as he then was, proposed my health
as president of the debating society, and chaffed me for belonging to
the wrong camp; but I was able to point out that I had done good work
for both parties, for I had spoken for fifteen Radical candidates and
not one of them had been returned.
The fact was that at that date the followers of Chamberlain and his
“unauthorised programme,” as it was called, were under the grave
disadvantage of working against the ill-concealed hostility of the
moderate Liberals.
I expect when the history of the time is known it will be found that
when Gladstone nominated Rosebery as his successor instead of
Chamberlain he naturally destined his party to their long sojourn in
the wilderness. Certainly in 1885 Chamberlain was as great a name to
conjure with as it is to-day. I was present at Bristol at the Liberal
Colston dinner just before the autumn election, and shall never forget
the enormous enthusiasm with which his name was received.
With the exception of Gladstone, I have never heard a speaker who
could play upon any given audience as a musician upon a great organ,
pulling out first this stop and then another, and winding up with some
diapason of eloquence, some grand swelling burst of harmony, that made
speaker and audience, player and organ, one vast instrument of
triumph.
The most wonderful instance of his magnetic influence and power that I
ever witnessed was when he dined with the Eighty Club on April 28,
1885. It was an open secret that the majority of the club did not want
him to be invited, but a Cabinet Minister could not be passed over.
The audience was apathetic. They laughed awkwardly when he introduced
himself as one “who certainly has never worshipped with Whigs in the
Temple of Brooks’s.” He seemed to get no echo from his audience and
became uneasy. He was speaking from notes piled up on a heap of
oranges in a high dessert dish. Suddenly I saw him drop a page back on
to the heap――he left his notes and his voice rang out amongst us in a
graphic picture of a Birmingham slum and the children crying for milk,
and the shameful contrast of the well-fed, sleek mob in front of him.
Melodrama, perhaps, but rattling good melodrama. It made Radicals for
the moment of every Whig in the room, and when he returned to his
notes and quoted from the “Corn Law Rhymer,” in tones of triumphant
fervour:――
They taxed your corn, they fettered trade;
The clouds to blood, the sun to shade;
And every good that God had made
They turned to bane and mockery――
cheers echoed and re-echoed, and there was not an ounce of Whig left
in his audience.
Alas! the whirligig of Time brings in his revenges. In a few years
Chamberlain had an entirely new set of politics, and I had none
whatever.
Eighty-six dawned, but the sun did not shine very brightly in Middle
Temple Lane. I had one or two briefs, certainly, but there seemed no
outlook. The South-Eastern Circuit was a far too expensive amusement
for my pocket, and, now that the election was over, there seemed
nothing to do but to write stories that ungrateful editors did not
want and to sit in chambers waiting for unintelligent solicitors who
never came.
It was one winter afternoon. My boy was out at lunch. I was sitting in
that upper chamber in Middle Temple Lane wondering if there would be
more room for my interesting personality in Australia than there
seemed to be in the old country when I heard an eager, heavy footstep
on the last flight. Footsteps generally stopped at the top of the
flight before, where an eminent Old Bailey junior held out. These
footsteps came upward and along; they were unknown and substantial.
Evidently those of a solicitor――of weight. I felt that something
important was going to happen.
There was no knock at the door, and in a moment who should fling
himself into the room but Dick Smith.
“Not a bit of good living up all these stairs; you should begin on the
ground floor. Time enough to come up here when you are all the fashion
and the solicitors must come after you.”
“What are you doing in town?” I asked.
“M‘Lachlan _v._ Agnew and Others. Rolls Court, before Anderson,
Official Referee. Pankhurst leads me, but he has gone back to
Manchester. Shiress Will, Q.C., and Lewis Coward against us. What are
you doing?”
“Nothing whatever,” I answered somewhat dismally.
“Come along and take a note for me this afternoon.”
I had been feeling like a gambler eternally cut out of the table, and
here was a hand in some sort of game dealt for me to pick up. I caught
hold of my blue bag, and putting a note on my door with some pride to
say I was to be found at the Official Referee’s Chambers in Rolls
Court, followed Dick Smith up Chancery Lane.
There is a geographical secret about Chancery Lane that I have
discovered. It leads straight to Manchester.
M‘Lachlan _v._ Agnew and Others should never have happened at all. It
came about mainly because Lachlan M‘Lachlan was a Scotsman and a
photographer, and knew that he knew everything about art――in which he
mistakenly included photography――whilst the defendants, Sir William
Agnew, Sir Joseph Heron, and Mr. Alderman King, knew that they knew
better than M‘Lachlan.
Each set out to prove his thesis to Mr. Anderson, Q.C., in his dingy
chambers in Rolls Court. Neither succeeded, but perhaps Anderson
learned something about art and the parties something about law.
Lachlan M‘Lachlan’s pet idea was that a camera not only could not lie,
but that it could tell the truth, and even interpret new or historic
truths pictorially. He conceived the loyal and patriotic idea of a
great picture, to be entitled “The Royal Family,” which was to depict
a group consisting of every member of the Royal Family surrounding our
Gracious Sovereign Queen Victoria in one of the rooms at Windsor. Each
individual was to be separately photographed, the room and its
furniture were to be photographed in detail, and then the photographs
were to be enlarged, cut out, and pasted on a huge canvas, from which
was to be painted a picture of great size. When this was done the
camera again came into play. Negatives of various sizes were to be
taken, and the ultimate prints sold to the public.
I have very little doubt there was some artistic value in the original
design of the group, for that was the work of that sincere artist
Frederic Shields, and his sketch group, which was prepared in 1871,
won the approval of her Majesty the Queen, who not only gave M‘Lachlan
several sittings herself, but issued her mandate to the various
members of the Royal Family that they were to be photographed in such
dresses, uniforms, and attitudes as Lachlan M‘Lachlan desired. The
various adventures of M‘Lachlan in pursuit of his Royal victims would
fill a volume. This part of the work took some two or three years, and
the great scheme nearly failed because a Princess who had in the
meanwhile grown out of short skirts refused to put them on again to
satisfy M‘Lachlan’s passion for historical accuracy. This matter
was――so M‘Lachlan used to tell us――referred to her Majesty and decided
in his favour.
In 1874 the first photographs were completed, but the plaintiff had
exhausted his means in working on his great project, which required
new capital before it could be finished. There is, I think, no doubt
that the defendants were actuated in the first instance by the kindest
motives, and through their influence about twenty guarantors found
£100 apiece in order that the wonderful historical picture might be
made.
M‘Lachlan had the faith and enthusiasm of a patentee. No expense could
be too great, no time too long to assure the perfection of his work.
The defendants, on the other hand, regarded themselves as the kindly
patron of the poor artist, ready to lend him some money, but eager to
see it return again with that huge additional interest that is the
modern Mæcenas’s expectation when he deigns to encourage literature or
art. Such a combination could but end in one place――the law courts,
though it took many years to reach its natural destination.
I think it was nearly 1877 before the great canvas picture was
produced. It measured 17 ft. by 10 ft. 6 in., and was insured by the
defendants for £10,000. Even when the picture was finished there were
long delays in producing the negatives of different sizes. More money
was wanted, and deeds and agreements were drawn up, unauthorised
prints were condemned by M‘Lachlan and issued by the defendants, and
meanwhile the portraits were becoming more and more historical, and a
picture that might have had some popularity in 1871 had little chance
of success some ten years later.
It was in March of 1885 that the case was opened at Manchester
Assizes. Dr. Pankhurst was for the plaintiff. No one on the circuit
could have trumpeted forth the wrongs of M‘Lachlan with more eloquent
indignation, and few juniors could have enveloped the court in a
foggier atmosphere of financial complications. In tones of emotion and
excitement the learned doctor’s voice would soar into a falsetto of
denunciation of his opponents’ chicanery, winding up in a cry to
heaven――or whatever Pankhurst put in its place――that their villainy
might be punished. It was not, indeed, wholly without justification
that some wild circuit rhymer wrote in Falkner Blair’s “Lament on
Going to India”:
When I hear in the midst of the jungle O
The shriek of the wild cockatoo,
I shall jump out of bed in my bungalow
And imagine, dear Pankhurst, it’s you.
It is, of course, easy enough to make fun of a great man’s mannerisms,
but Dr. Pankhurst, as a witty conversationalist, an eloquent speaker
who could keep his subject well before a mixed audience on a high
plane of thought, and a man of earnest convictions in moral and
political affairs, was honestly admired by all who had the pleasure of
his friendship. But it must be admitted that at the Bar he was not at
his best. He could not readily sink to the mundane problems by solving
which so many disputes are decided. I remember on a Local Government
Board inquiry, presided over by Colonel Ducat, the engineer of the
Board, I appeared for one district and Pankhurst for another. We were
opposing inclusion into a larger district. Pankhurst, as senior,
started the harangues by throwing up his arms and shouting out on a
top note, “I am here to justify the opposition of the down-trodden
minority of the Stand District. I say I am here to justify the
opposition of the down-trodden minority of the Stand District.”
And justify it he did in passages of great eloquence, close reasoning,
and apposite quotation from history and literature, which were a
pleasure and privilege to listent to. When it was all over, and his
adherents’ applause had died away, Colonel Ducat looked up from his
notes and said: “I’ve listened very carefully, Dr. Pankhurst, but I’m
not clear even now whether you are in favour of the 12-inch drains or
the 9-inch drains.”
I should like to have heard Pankhurst open M‘Lachlan’s case. Mr.
Justice Hawkins listened to it for three days. At the end of that time
figures were mentioned, and Hawkins got frightened, and promptly
referred the matter. What a waste of time and money to have started it
at all. It was a year afterwards, in the middle of the reference, that
I found the case rolling heavily along, a mass of negatives and
photography and correspondence and confusion. Pankhurst was unable to
continue in the case, and they gave me a junior brief to Richard
Smith. I never really understood what the quarrel was all about, but I
do not think anyone else did, unless it was Smith, who made an
excellent reply for the plaintiff.
I only remember one smile during the many weary hours we spent in
those dingy chambers in Rolls Court. Sir William Agnew was being
examined. He was always somewhat pompous and well-to-do in his manner,
and Smith did his best to annoy him. A question arose as to the
authenticity of a letter written by the plaintiff on Agnew’s Bond
Street letter paper.
“I suppose,” said Smith, “if any customer in your shop――I beg your
pardon, emporium――were to ask one of your servants for a sheet of
notepaper, he would give him one?”
“I hope not, sir,” said Sir William, with expansive dignity, “I hope
he would hand him two or three.”
Old Anderson looked at Sir William in Scot’s surprise, and said in his
broadest accent, “Do you really mean that, now?”
I do not think I ever saw the ultimate written judgment of the
Official Referee. I believe both sides appealed from it, and no appeal
was ever heard. It was, from the point of view of English litigation,
one of our failures. There ought to be a compulsory conciliation court
for troubles of this nature, at least to sift out what the quarrel and
dispute really is. But I look back to the case with pleasure. I don’t
think the result left M‘Lachlan worse than it found him, and it
certainly did me a good turn. During those days I heard from Smith of
the wonderful possibilities of the Bar in Manchester, and I made up my
mind I would at least join the Northern Circuit. This I did without
delay, and before the summer I had taken a little house in Heaton
Road, Withington, and turned my back on London for ever.
Just to show what a lot I knew about Manchester, I moved down in
Whit-week――or tried to. For Manchester has an excellent and sacred
custom in Whit-week. Nobody does any work.