James Morton looks back at some of his spectacular gaffes Both in and out of the Courts




Years ago there was a fashion – there still may be – for seaside shops to have little wooden plaques bearing humorous legends such as ‘She wears mink by day and fox by night…’ and ‘She offered her honour; He honoured her offer; All night long it was Honour and Offer…’



The wife of a client in my days as a criminal law advocate in London once took these to an extreme by turning them in to poker work samplers and, after one acquittal I was rewarded with, I thought a trifle unnecessarily: ‘Before opening mouth, engage brain’. On reflection, I think she was right. Far too often I opened my mouth far too soon.



One of the earlier moments came at a local law society ladies’ night dinner when the guest of honour was a lawyer from the French town with which the suburb was twinned. When introduced I offered a few words in my execrable French and found he attached himself to me like a child shoe cleaner in Tangier to whom the unsuspecting tourist has given a few dirhams.



After ten minutes of failing to shake off the Frenchman and a determination by the lawyer not to speak to any of the other worthies – such as the chairman of the local justices or his clerk, or an elderly county court judge – in desperation I introduced him to my employer’s wife, Mrs Simpson, swathed in purple silk, wearing a tiara and of German origin. She, never a woman to hide her first marriage under a quilt, began to expatiate on her former husband who had flown for the country’s airline, believing, possibly correctly, that a man who had commuted between Frankfurt and Melbourne was of more interest than one whose professional parameters were London’s South Circular Road and the Bloomsbury County Court.



‘My ‘usband was a pilote,’ she said. Fifteen years in the country had not, completely corrected the ravages of an intermittent language course, taught by a fugitive American who considered the principles of grammar inferior to vowel sounds and taught as the conjugation of a verb, ‘I gonna, I gorra, I gotta.’



‘A pi-lote?’ queried the Frenchman. ‘Yes,’ I interposed helpfully, ‘a pilot, aeroplane.’ And in the acknowledged British fashion of dealing with a recalcitrant foreigner I began to speak louder and, waving my arms, I both simulated the wingspan and committed one of the gaffes that from time to time bedevilled my court appearances. ‘Yes,’ I said loudly, ‘Luft…’ and inexplicably, unless the sweet sherry may be taken into mitigation, added ‘waffa’ instead of ‘hansa.’



‘Ah,’ said the French lawyer, raising his hands in the form of a machine gun. ‘Eheheheheheh. I hunderstand now.’ Which, when my salary came up for review the following week, was a pun I could have well done without.



In court I could do just as well. I was appearing in the committal proceedings of a useful burglar arrested by one of the local detectives and a favourite of the bench. ‘May I see your notebook?’ I asked and flipping through the pages went on: ‘When did you make this up?’ There were squeals from my client who had, as they say, more form than Shergar. ‘Compile it,’ I amended quickly.



It was in front of JD Purcell at Clerkenwell that I again opened my mouth a little too widely. My client had a string of convictions for dishonesty (didn’t they all?) but on this occasion he was merely being done for ABH.



‘Well,’ asked Purcell. ‘What have you got to say, Mr Morton?’



‘As Joe Louis said, when he took up all-in wrestling, “At least I’m not stealing”,’ came my pithy response.



There was a horrid silence and I thought I’d pushed my luck too far. Getting on the wrong side of a stipe was professional death in those days. Eventually he picked up his pen. ‘Well, that’s one way of putting it,’ he replied.



It never does to make rash promises. ‘Will you get bail?’ asked the wife of one client. ‘If I don’t it’s time I retired,’ I responded. After all, every one else in the case had done and the police weren’t objecting.



I must have rubbed the lay bench up the wrong way because they remanded the man in custody. I left court muttering about judges in chambers but the wife was not appeased. ‘When they giving you the watch then?’ the woman demanded.



On the other hand, my legal hero Billy Rees-Davies was a man who could dig himself out of an embarrassing position. In the days when there were peremptory challenges that had to be jealously guarded, I instructed him and another barrister in a two-handed robbery, and as the jury was being sworn, the second man looked up and muttered, ‘My God, Billy, I’ve been to bed with this woman. What am I going to do?’



Billy put his hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘Don’t you worry, Bobby. I’ll do it for you. So have I.’ His objection for cause was delicate if perhaps unflattering. ‘My Lord, my learned friend and I believe we have met this lady socially. We can’t quite recall the circumstances but perhaps it would be better for everyone if she were to stand down’.



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