James Morton looks at some of the best and worst counsel of yesteryear – the best including the charismatic Wilfrid Fordham, who combined wit with a razor-sharp tongue in court


One of the problems with practice as a solicitor in the 1960s was finding competent counsel.


Of course, by definition all counsel are equally competent but, like Orwell’s animals, some were more equally competent than others at the time.


My old colleagues Simpson and Sandy generally used a pleasant and able man, who as the months and years went by, became increasingly odd. He only took glycerine and honey, which he sipped in court and he could rarely bring himself to stand when the judge came in. Instead, he burrowed under counsel’s table in an effort to find non-existent papers until the ceremonial moment was over. Nor would he address the judge as ‘my Lord’. It did not endear him to the more pompous whom, I thought, rather took it out on the defendant.


Therefore, I decided I was going to have someone else for my criminal clients. Looking through the papers, I saw that Wilfrid Fordham had made a successful submission of no case to answer at the committal proceedings for one of the alleged receivers in the Great Train Robbery. If he could do that, he was good enough for me.


The immediate problem was that I wasn’t good enough for him – or at least for his clerk. There was no way he was going to saddle the great man with a legally aided housebreaker who was going to plead guilty at Inner London Quarter Sessions. I could have one of the lesser lights of his chambers – and when I produced something worthwhile, then the clerk would see about things.


Things were loucher then, but perhaps there was more style. Some counsel declined to have conferences with clients. Others such as Billy Rees-Davies would have conferences, provided they did not have to go to a prison to conduct them. One silk I knew fell drunkenly from his chair during a discussion on what evidence was to be called but, unfazed, conducted and concluded the consultation from the carpet. Another, who had really come to the end of a career that never had been, opened a consultation defending a Betty Smith with the question to the instructing solicitor: ‘Before we begin, please help me. Who is this Betty Smith who is continually referred to in the depositions?’


Of course not all blame lay with the ‘senior’ branch of the profession. I saw the brief to counsel in a rape case that concluded: ‘Counsel will do all he can to obtain an acquittal because the defendant is a friend of Princess Margaret, although instructing solicitors see with some surprise it is her sister who is prosecuting.’


The day I was finally permitted to instruct Mr Fordham came when I had a bank-robber client who was actually paying cash.


No problems in those days about money laundering, although the client courteously told me the money had been raised in Ireland.



Mr Fordham looked rather like Sydney Greenstreet in ‘The Maltese Falcon’. I do not think I ever saw him without a black coat and spongebag trousers. I believe at one time, like so many members of the bar, he had stood as a Liberal parliamentary candidate but had been defeated. His wife – the red-haired Sunday Times journalist Peta Fordham, who wrote a best seller about the Great Train Robbery – was firmly convinced that one of the men had been wrongly convicted and had a long and unsatisfactory correspondence with the home secretary about corruption in the Metropolitan Police long before the scandals of the late 1960s and 1970s broke.



On his day, Mr Fordham could weave a spell over a jury. One client is said to have commented of a closing speech: ‘The longer you went on, the more I began to believe I was innocent.’ He also had a line in recalcitrant police officers that he had learned from GL Hardie, a top gangland defender of a previous generation. Mr Fordham was particularly fond of the story of how, when he was his junior, Mr Hardie had managed to infuriate a chief constable who was giving evidence by calling him ‘policeman’. ‘I’m a Chief Constable,’ was the dusty reply.


‘Oh, does than mean you are not a policeman?’


‘Of course I am.’


‘Are you ashamed of being called a policeman then?’ asked Mr Hardie blandly.


‘Of course I’m not.’


‘Then why do you object to being called one?’ For his part Mr Fordham used to look at the offending officer in question and say: ‘I suppose if I go on asking you this until I am blue in the face, you’ll go on denying it?’


‘Yes.’


‘Thank you, no more questions.’ It was amazing how effective a tactic it was.


The day came for a conference in Pentonville where a client was serving a short sentence for driving while disqualified, and it did not seem to be going all that well. Mr Fordham was what could be called an old-fashioned gent and did not seem to be able to communicate all that well with this rough-and-ready north London villain.


Ten minutes into the conference, the client whispered something to me, and Mr Fordham rather sharply said: ‘Mr Morton, please tell me what our client has just said; it may be something extremely important.’ Indeed it was. Substituting ‘him’ for ‘the old boy’, I replied, ‘He said, “Tell him it’s double in the bubble if he rings the bell”’.


Mr Fordham did but, as is so often the case, mixing bubbles so to speak, this one faded away and died.


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