John had always longed to create a character like Sherlock Holmes or Maigret,
“to keep me in old age’. That character – larger than life, bold,
vociferous, amiable – came along when the BBC asked John to write a Play
for Today to go out on December 17, 1975. It was called Rumpole of the Bailey.
The name Horace Rumpole conjures up a rum character, a rolypoly, rumpled
figure in threadbare wig and frayed gown, ash on waistcoat, claret stains on
tie. “A crumpled fellow,” John said, “always recovering from hangovers.”
Rumpole was “an Old Bailey hack”, the oldest member of his chambers, who has
never taken silk. Implacably on the side of the underdog, he represents
undeserving miscreants under the legal aid scheme. He has an aversion to
prosecuting and no interest in boring civil cases.
Rumpole fulfilled all John’s hopes: he was not a mere tele-character, however
magisterially embodied by Leo McKern. Five years after his conception he was
fast-tracked into a literary classic, “a national institution”, “our modern
John Bull”. And no matter how strenuously Leo McKern tried to withdraw his
services (even reemigrating to Australia) he returned for six more series
before 1992. Even when McKern could no longer be persuaded to play the old
darling, Rumpole’s immortality was sealed. One evening at a party at
Hatchards (supplier of books to the Royal Family) John was talking to the
Queen when Prince Philip, passing by, said: “Regina meets Rumpole.” Rather
bright, John thought.
In court, John Mortimer, QC, looked increasingly Rumpolian, “like a stuffed
laundry-bag!”: dishevelled, lank-haired, his bands crumpled and his shirt
hanging out, stains on waistcoat. The laid-back approach extended to a
reluctance to study his briefs in advance, “but when the case came up”, his
clerks observed, “he would arrive early in the morning and mug it up at
speed”.
At conferences with clients, John was punctual to start and prompt to finish:
when he’d had enough (or got bored), he would gather his papers into a pile,
place his hands on top and beam “God bless!” – the signal for everyone to
troop out. Sometimes his hazy notion of the details was plain. When Herman
Spielman, a pillar of Manchester’s Jewish community and centre of an
international child-porn ring, pleaded guilty to child prostitution and was
sentenced to six years, John was asked to advise on his appeal.
Down from Manchester came Spielman’s weeping wife, his solicitor, and the
elders of the synagogue, for a conference in John’s chambers. Twenty minutes
before, John rang his junior, Michael Grieve, to come up and give him a
succinct précis of the case. Promptly at 4pm, in trooped the Mancunians.
“Hello!” cried John. “Did you have a good trip from Birmingham?” They stared
at him. “Manchester, Mr Mortimer.” “Manchester! Even worse!”
He was popular in chambers, had time for everyone, never appearing pressured –
“the most easygoing barrister we’ve ever known”, his clerks agreed. At
lunchtimes he avoided the Old Bailey’s fifth-floor canteen – “Urgh! Full of
barristers!” He preferred a local brasserie, where a judge’s daughter, who
had appeared in Confessions of a Window Cleaner, was a waitress, and was
reputed not to wear any knickers.
By the mid-1970s, Mortimer, QC, recoiled from any case that might bore him. In
one of John’s staple stories, at the end of a long trial about VAT evasion,
he had congratulated the jury on “sitting through what was undoubtedly one
of the most tedious cases ever heard at the Old Bailey”. The judge countered
by opening his own speech with: “Members of the jury, it may surprise you to
know that it is not the sole purpose of the criminal law of England to amuse
Mr Mortimer.” (This was a line he later applied to Rumpole and others.) He
seemed less interested in “the whole truth” than in opportunities for jokes
and aphorisms, in his addresses to juries.
In one case, the prosecution called a doctor to say that certain objects,
inserted into the rectum for sexual pleasure, could be dangerous. John
unearthed a medical textbook which listed the various things that had been
discovered in rectums: “Among them a tin of Brasso wrapped in a duster, a
shooting stick, a pepper pot marked Souvenir of Ramsgate and a small bust of
Napoleon III.”
The cases John dealt with in the 1970s, a morally confused decade that started
with the famously entertainingOztrial, vindicate his unserious approach. He
had a genuine aversion to paternalistic legislation which “insisted on
fastening seat-belts in cars and Sikhs wearing crash helmets”. He objected
to interference with the freedom to smoke: “And what for? Another five years
in a geriatric ward in Weston-super-Mare.” He found the climate of the
1970s, as he did the late1990s, illiberal, prone to nanny-stateverbotens.
Like John Stuart Mill, he believed “The law should provide the minimum to
prevent people from destroying or hurting each other”. He was implacable
about freedom of speech, often pointing out that “murder is a crime but
authors are free to describe it; sex is not a crime but authors have often
been jailed for depicting it.”
The vibrant old-stager
“How engagingly he grows old,” wrote Fay Weldon, reviewing John’s last memoir, The
Summer of a Dormouse, “this clever and once notoriously randy young man.”
What still sustains him in his 85th year is performing Mortimer’s Miscellany
at least once a month. “Some writers take to drink,” as Gore Vidal observed,
“others take to audiences.” John, like Dickens, took to audiences. Any
literary festival, speech or TV appearance is a welcome diversion from what
he dares describe as his “lonely author’s life in solitary confinement,
longing for an interruption”.
At the beginning of 2007, as John approached his 84th birthday, the King’s
Head pub theatre in Islington offered him a three-week season, performing
eight times a week. Everyone was aghast. Penny said it would kill him – and
John replied that he couldn’t imagine a better way to go. He thrived on the
nightly exposure. Beforehand, John would sit in the dressing room inert,
like a limp rag. Once on stage he would spring to animate life, and, by the
time he recited Byron’s “So, we’ll go no more a-roving, So late into the
night”, the applause resounded through the house.
Old school gibes
John Mortimer, the incipient socialist, was not temperamentally suited to
Harrow. In later years, he lost few opportunities to make disobliging
generalisations about Harrovians as “dull”, “spivvy”, “destined to become
secondhand car salesmen”.
He would often tell of having once met a butler in Hollywood (“I heard the
words, ‘New potatoes, sir?’ and looked up to see the unmistakable face of
Hugh Derwent, the head boy”) and later a chimneysweep who came to do his
chimneys, remarking: “Harrow didn’t do much for either of us, did it?”
