James Morton recalls the moment he split from his first senior partner and, with a little advice from a client, set up shop on his own

The final split from my first senior partner, Simpson, came in a wholly unfortunate way. We had long drifted apart and now I had two rooms in an office block not a million miles from Fleet Street, to which he never came.


The criminal practice was growing daily. My frequently instructed barrister, Wilfrid Fordham, was having an amazing run in which clients were either acquitted or received non-custodial sentences – which for them was the same thing. I was having a good run obtaining bail, which after a non-custodial sentence was the next best thing.


One fly in the ointment had been with another solicitor employed to help out overall. He had quickly found that crime was to his liking, so much so that he pocketed the fees paid by one of our very few cash clients. He was released without charge, as they say in different circumstances, and joined a very smart firm from which he embezzled a great deal more than he had from us (no one took references in those days). Later he went to prison for four years and then, in a state of alcoholic dependency, died after he set fire to himself in a transients’ hotel in west London. He was one of the best solicitor-advocates I ever heard.


But he did not cause the split from Simpson. It was simply that Simpson finished a conference early one afternoon and unexpectedly came calling only to find no one at home. I had gone to a police station, as had the secretary who had aspirations for articles. He had forgotten to bring a key and could only hear, through the rather thin door, a series of messages being recorded on the primitive answering machine.


It was all over the next morning. I was summoned and told that our nominal partnership was ended. Curiously, he would not let me have the London offices preferring to sell off the lease for himself. I kept all the crime except those cases that the former policeman, Sandy, had introduced. I had a month to find new accommodation and from the time I did so I never saw Simpson again.


Help came from a friend from law school. He knew a man who knew a man, an ex-military gent – Hornchurchill was his name – who had some rooms to let, again not a million miles from Fleet Street. They suited me well and I suited them.


I agreed that if I had any non-criminal work he would do it for me and if – which he assured me was an impossibility – he had any client who transgressed I could handle that. There was a communal reception and my secretary had to share a room, but my office looked over a very fine tree-lined square. It also came with a walk-in safe. Sometimes I stroked its brass handle. ‘What’s that?’ asked Jacky, one of my regular clients, who was in that line of business, the first week I had the room.


‘That’s my safe,’ I said proudly. ‘Well, I wouldn’t keep no money in it. It’s a ten-second job – if that’, he replied derisively. And I never did.


A month or so after I moved in, my safe-breaking client obviously had a substantial touch and decided to invest his ill-gotten gains instead of blowing it on the hostesses at Sulky’s Astor Club. Rather appropriately, he decided to buy a launderette, and, I handed the conveyancing over to Hornchurchill. How it went was nothing to do with me, and since the client wasn’t arrested in the meantime I rather forgot about things. That was until the early evening of the day before completion when Hornchurchill rang me on the intercom.


‘Your man, Morton – he hasn’t brought in the money for completion. You’ll have to get on to him and it’ll have to be a banker’s draft. I’m not accepting a cheque from one of your clients’, he added – a trifle unnecessarily, I thought.


It seemed as though I hadn’t even had time to think about dialling the number when he was on the intercom again. ‘He’s here, Morton’. ‘Good’, I replied. ‘You’ll have to come down. He’s brought it in cash and you’ll have to help me count it’, he squeaked.


Here was a man who dealt daily with transactions worth tens of thousands of pounds, yet had probably not seen more than £20 in cash at any one time. So we sat as Jacky pulled one and five pound notes out of every pocket in his, I have to admit, quite elegant three-piece suit for the next half-hour. No question of reporting things to the authorities in those days.


I noticed that Hornchurchill had a similar safe to the one in my room. Jacky had the manners not to mention his doubts as to its quality. I remembered reading of one of the great US lawyers who was paid in cash and then had his pocket picked on the train back from court, but I didn’t mention that so early in my relationship with Hornchurchill.


I certainly didn’t mention my client’s proclivities to him. That would have been a breach of client confidentiality.


James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist