James Morton reminisces about some colourful king-pin advocates who worked the magistrates’ courts


Forty years ago, there was a long-standing tradition whereby most London magistrates’ courts had a firm of solicitors who were known as the ‘attorney generals’. Often they had offices opposite or next door to the court.



A hundred years ago, the talented and crooked solicitor, Arthur Newton, was the ‘King of Marlborough Street’. He invariably wore grey silk gloves because, he said, ‘it stops me getting my hands dirty’. However, his hands did become dirtier as the years went on and in 1913 he ended with a spell inside for fraud in a land swindle. It did not harm him that much because he set up a matrimonial agency and, on and off for the next 20 years, he wrote up the stories of his famous cases for a variety of newspapers.



At that time, police court was still a better name than magistrates’ court. MP (standing for Metropolitan Police) was often laid out in the mosaics on the hall floor and there was a more or less irrebuttable presumption that the police were telling the truth.



In those dear dead days before grilles were erected and, because of the Truck Acts, wages were paid in cash, money deliveries to banks took place at 11 o’clock every Friday morning. Clients were always pleased to make appointments for early Friday mornings and bring their friends with them to provide alibis. The moment 11 chimed, they were out of their chairs and off about their work.



In those days, evening newspapers carried a stop press and invariably there was a report of a raid in King’s Cross or Greenwich or Mile End. For the police it was a question of rounding up the usual suspects because teams rarely worked outside their own areas. If a robbery went off in Woolwich, then you knew the clients belonged to the bearded solicitor Arthur Prothero, or if it went off in Edmonton, it was down to those of the urbane Ernest Fairbairn, or in Walthamstow to those of Jimmy Fellowes, who once allowed the robber Frank Fraser, when he was on the run, to sleep in his offices. An early form of security guard, you might think.



The local king-pin solicitor had his cases taken in the order in which he wanted and was given every courtesy. Although I was never a king, years later, when I appeared in front of David Fairbairn at Horseferry Road Magistrates, as I went into court, without seeming to look up he would say, ‘Good morning Mr Morton, we shall take your case next, if you would like’. In fact, I would not have minded a few minutes reading the new Dick Francis and being paid waiting time. It must have been because much of my informal advocacy training came from his father.



Advocacy was very much hit and miss; no courses, no lectures, get on and do it. So, of course, some advocates were better than others and one of the kings was decidedly diffident. On one occasion he went into court to find a stipe whom he had not anticipated sitting that day on the bench. Naturally his case was called immediately and the poor man said, ’Oh, I didn’t know it was you. May I have five minutes to change my mitigation?’ His wish was granted but the stipe never allowed him to forget it.



I once went into court where one of the more ferocious stipes was listening to an interminable and repetitive mitigation when the usher handed me a note from the magistrate that read: ‘Stop smiling. He’s better than you are.’



A regular attendee at both Marlborough Street and Bow Street courts was Norman Beach, an indefatigable little man who had a big practice in north-west London, but whose clients seemed to stray far and wide into the West End. He had a theory that under the Magna Carta all arrests without warrants were wrongful and from time to time he would try out this supposition on some of what many of us thought to be the less-promising audiences. One was St John Harmsworth, who sat at Marlborough Street.



Beach was acting for a major criminal and he had contacted both the head of the Flying Squad and the Commissioner for the Metropolitan Police to advance his theory. He sought a dismissal on the grounds that his client was apprehended without a warrant. His clincher was: ‘A magistrate who committed a man in custody under those circumstances could be liable for damages.’ He didn’t get very far.



‘Is this some sort of threat?’ stated – rather than asked – Harmsworth. Beach was undeterred and, in another big case, he tried to enlist my support when putting his theory, this time to the no-nonsense Geraint Rees, who sat at Bow Street. Not surprisingly, Rees looked uninterested and Beach asked, ‘Can you hear me, sir?’ Then came the biggest put-down of the day: ‘I have to listen to you,’ replied Rees, ’but I don’t have to hear what you’re saying.’ Application refused. I was rather pleased that I had declined to support him in that line of attack.



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