James Morton looks back over his friendship with a colourful lunch companion, who had many of his own stories to tell


The first time I met Louis Diamond, in the late 1960s, he was renting space from a most likeable, if somewhat staid, solicitor called Edgar Duchin in John Street near Bedford Row, London. Some years later, I discovered that Duchin had donated tapes he had made of his childhood days as a refugee in England to the British Library. I had gone to see Duchin mid-morning on some matter and there was Louis in pyjamas and dressing gown sitting on the stairs opening his post. For some unexplained reason – certainly either amatory or financial – he was also living on the premises.



When I was not in court or had clients in an afternoon, we began to lunch regularly. Even then, still in his 30s, he looked like a wise old owl in an illustration in a children’s book and was a font of advice. He reminded me of the carnival operator The Professor, known as The Impossible Possible, in Dan Mannix’s Memoirs of a Sword Swallower. Every time the apprentice swallower has a problem, he goes to The Professor, who sits back in his chair, puts the tips of his fingers together and says, ‘Dear boy, did I ever tell you of…’.



Louis came from an entrepreneurial family. His father either owned or leased the Mile End Arena in the East End. Since it was an open-air venue, it was a hostage to the British weather. I believe it was an uncle who owned one of the first record-making companies in Soho. Certainly Louis had a fine set of their recordings, including one of Sir Oswald Mosley’s speeches.



I am still not sure which of us was less suited to the law, but when I decided to sell my practice and go abroad to write the great English novel, he said he rather fancied it. In those days in the 1960s, provided you did your own advocacy, there was still money to be made out of criminal legal aid work. The best of it was that it provided a good cash flow. The Law Society sent a monthly cheque and Quarter Sessions paid out whilst the jury had retired, often in used notes. There had been an upturn in his finances and terms were agreed – something in the way of a deposit and quarterly payments. He took over my managing clerk and a secretary, and off I went.



I came back six months later, the great English novel still unwritten, and Louis must have smelled my return because he rang me to take me to lunch. He rejected the first three bottles of wine brought on the grounds they were corked and then, when satisfied, asked if I would like my practice back. He had taken on a new managing clerk who, whilst drumming up a good deal of criminal work, was also mugged three times whilst carrying what were in those days largish sums of cash given him by clients. The matters had not been reported to the police because the clerk felt such an act would be grassing and reduce him in the eyes of the clientele. He was not the first to have this happen to him. The great New York lawyer Samuel Leibowitz had his fees stolen back by his first client. The answer was that I did not want my practice back at all but it did not seem polite to decline his gift. I took the practice back but not the new managing clerk.



Over the years, we continued to lunch and we exchanged clients. Sometimes Louis was up and very often down. One lunchtime he announced he was going to Persia (as I think it then was, as we lawyers say), where he and one of his clients were going to open a casino. He promised to send a postcard, but if he did, it never arrived. The next time I saw him, some years later, he was chairman of the British Legal Association, and we resumed lunching.



Over the years to an extent we lost touch, but he popped up occasionally to account for his doings. Once, he came to dinner with his wife, a psychiatrist who told our fortunes with some accuracy; he became the proprietor of another couple of businesses; declined a partnership in Whitechapel; became an insolvency practitioner; was divorced, was remarried, this time to an artist to whom he was devoted; moved to the south coast; went to live in France. A card came, Would I like to attend his wife’s vernissage?



Then, in 2005, I received an email. He had been diagnosed as having a rare cancer and had an eye removed. He was still as chirpy as when I had last seen him, driving a 4x4 with some panache, if rather fast. It was impossible to tell which was his false eye. As far as he was concerned, it had been a nasty experience but it was all over.



Last year I received another email. He had, he wrote, just weeks to live. He was unfazed by the prospect, and over those weeks there was a steady stream of friends and acquaintances, all of whom wanted to hear the old stories one more time. ‘Dear boy,’ he said when I went, ‘did I ever tell you about Muriel Belcher and the Colony Club?’ Of course he had. He’d taken me there. I sent him a tape recorder and he spent some time recording his stories of lost London. I haven’t heard them yet but if they are not too scabrous I’ll see if the British Library would like a copy. Somehow it would seem symmetrical.



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