Looking back to the 1960s I remember just how cruel (possibly unintentionally) some members of the bar and judges were to those they considered came from the ‘lower classes’. Malapropisms were ridiculed. Lord Goddard told a story of a defendant chewing gum in the dock and told him to stop masticating. ‘And he took his hands out of his pockets,’ quipped His Lordship.
Then there was the juror who asked to be excused from service because his wife was about to conceive. ‘I think you mean to be confined,’ corrected the judge, kindly adding for the benefit of spectators, ‘but whichever it is, I think you should be present.’
Perhaps it was society which was to blame. In the early 1980s one judge wrote in Justice of the Peace that he had recently discovered the criminal classes had an argot of their own with phrases to define the length of a prison sentence. Where on Earth had he been?
But, I think, the most egregious example of class difference and lack of understanding came in a divorce suit when I was articled. Simpson had a client who wished to divorce her husband on the grounds of cruelty: he would not let her bathe by herself and wanted to be in the bathroom at the same time. Simpson obtained a certificate limited to counsel’s opinion and off we went to see a member of a smart set of divorce specialists whom he instructed. The conference lasted about a minute.
‘No, I’m sorry Mrs Smith. I’m afraid you don’t have any grounds,’ he said, adding: ‘My wife and I have a bath together before cocktails every evening.’ Yes, I thought, that’s as maybe. You weren’t brought up in a flat with a shared outside privy and a bath on a Saturday down the local public baths; or in the kitchen in a heated tub with three or four siblings waiting to use the same water. Now, for the first time in her life, this poor woman gets a better flat and wants a bit of privacy.
What was worse, I thought, was that the next month the same counsel, acting for one of Simpson’s paying clients, persuaded a judge to grant a divorce on the grounds that his wife kept tickling him.
James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor
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