I heard some great (and lesser) solicitor advocates in magistrates’ courts. Getting the latter out of the way, I was standing at the back of No 2 court at Highbury Corner in the days when David Hopkin sat there. A middle-aged man was making a terrible hash of things (schadenfreude), when an usher brought me a note from Hopkin: ‘Don’t laugh, he’s better than you are.’
You had to learn to fend for yourself, and until you did, your clients suffered. You had to own the court for the 10 minutes your case took. To learn, it was better to appear in different courts.
David Napley was possibly the best – calm, clear, logical – but he lacked feeling and emotion. That was something Jimmy Fellowes (a northerner, I think, with a practice in Walthamstow) never lacked. I remember him applying for bail in a murder case. He worked the court so well I’d have given the man bail on the spot. But then I was young.
Adjustments in speeches were often required. I remember Phillip Sive at Tottenham running an ‘abandoned goods’ defence. He tore at a piece of silk, saying, ‘It’s rotten, anyone can see it’s rotten’. The silk refused to be torn, so he tried again. After the third failure, he threw the offending silk on the bench, saying, ‘Well, anyone can see it’s rotten’.
It was, of course, a question of horses for courses. Some stipes still hunted in those days, so it was a matter of ‘fences to be jumped’. Another liked Latin quotations. A third disliked abbreviations and initials. A fourth might address favourites in Italian. Yet another liked youngish women in black fishnet stockings. I knew a chair of a lay bench who was virulently anti-Catholic and also pro-police until, that is, a friend of his was arrested.
The difference in what you could get away with in front of a stipe and a lay bench was enormous. Anthony Blok barnstormed a lay bench at Marylebone. When they retired, one of us said, ‘You would never have got away with that in front of a stipe, Tony’.
‘I wouldn’t have dared try,’ was his reply.
James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor
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