Law Society’s Gazette, April 1980

Letter to the editorWe have rather an eccentric client who recently failed to keep an appointment. She wrote apologising and the first paragraph of her letter went as follows: ‘Time is so full that yesterday when I was supposed to call (yourselves) I had a gas representative come and he had an accident with his coffee and I had to take his trousers to my neighbour, to iron dry, and it was too late.’

We wondered what happened to the gas representative whilst his trousers were being ironed!

Charkham, Marcus & Co, London W1

Law Society’s Gazette, April 1960Arthur Caradoc Prothero, a Council Member, argues that the study and practice of advocacy should become part of the syllabus for the Solicitors’ Final Examination: How well I remember my early days as an advocate. I suffered the pangs of the tortured; the butterflies in my stomach were larger than the prize specimens netted and pinned out in any collector’s showcase. Even today that feeling is ever present, although the butterflies are much smaller.

If, during my articles, I had had to attend a course covering advocacy and the preparation of cases for hearing before all courts in which solicitors have a right of audience, the horrors of that first awful appearance before the Stipendiary Magistrate at West London, when I was so tongue-tied that the prosecuting solicitor had to tender my client’s plea of guilty and voice the mitigating circumstances on my behalf, would surely have been tempered.