Читать книгу What the Judge Saw: Being Twenty-Five Years in Manchester by One Who Has Done It - Edward Abbott Sir Parry - Страница 7

Ah, you have much to learn; we can’t know all things at twenty.

Clough: “The Bothie of Tober-na-vuolich.”

As a great writer says, “I am naturally averse to egotism and hate self-laudation consumedly,” and yet I must tell this story once again, for it seems to me the natural motto of my undertaking. I was passing up Peter Street away from my Court when I heard two railway clerks discussing a case I had just decided. This was their dialogue, with formal parts, as we say in the law, omitted.

“1st Clerk: How the —— did he get to £5?

“2nd Clerk: I don’t know.

“1st Clerk: I think he’s a —— fool.

“2nd Clerk: I think he’s a —— fool (a long pause, then as an afterthought), but I think he did his best.”

In the evening of the day on which I overheard that excellent saying I was at a public dinner with no reporters present—​not that their absence or presence ever worried me very much, for the Manchester reporters were all kind friends of mine, and stacked the wild oats of my after-dinner chatter into very neat sheaves of morning print. The fact, however, enabled Dean Maclure to be expansive. In proposing my health, after many sarcastic and amusing allusions to my varied virtues, he expressed the hope—​alas! not fulfilled—​that, as he alone could do justice to the subject, he might live long enough to write my epitaph.

That was the cue for the story, and I shall never forget the Dean’s genial roar of laughter as I pictured him unveiling in his beloved cathedral a little white marble plaque, on which was cut in severe black letters:—

HE WAS

A —— FOOL,

BUT

HE DID HIS BEST.

I remind my readers of this story here at the beginning of things, because, looking forward to the round unvarnished tale I have to tell, I am very conscious that I shall convince them of the justice of the first part of the epitaph, and if I nothing extenuate and set down naught but what is strictly accurate, I am by no means sure that when the faculty is applied for in the Ecclesiastical Court to erect that little marble tribute to my memory someone will not enter an appearance with these recollections of mine exhibited to an affidavit, and move to strike out the last line of the epitaph as embarrassing and irrelevant.

The first foolish thing I did in connection with my twenty-five years sojourn in Manchester was to come there at all. I remember Henn Collins—​then a leader on the circuit—​telling me, with very clean-cut emphasis, what he thought of my folly only a week after I had settled down. It was the Peter Street verdict, without the adjective, and this was repeated to me by very many of the kind friends I made in the first few months after my arrival. Everyone asked me, “Why had I come to Manchester?” and for the life of me I could not give them a coherent and logical answer.

But there I was, a very junior barrister, with a very junior wife and a still more junior daughter, all desirous of being comfortably provided for; and to my eternal gratitude and surprise, Manchester rose to the occasion and not only—​to use the slang of the tables—“saw me,” but “went one better” than my best hopes in contributing to my career.

What little accidents determine the course of a man’s life! We start like streams from the mountain source, intending to fight our way down into the valleys where our fathers have preceded us. But on the upper slopes at the outset of our career we meet some boulder or bank of earth and are turned west instead of east, and so away into quite other valleys and along towards another sea. If anyone had told me when I was eighteen that I should be County Court Judge of Manchester within fifteen years I should have put a sovereign on the other way or given the long odds in a hopeful spirit.

For there was nothing of Manchester in my thoughts when, after my father’s death, I left King’s College School and gave up for ever those pleasant journeys in the old underground railway, where we learned our lessons by inferior gas-light in an atmosphere of sulphur. Honestly, looking back on that school in the underworld of Somerset House, I have an uneasy feeling that there was no health in it. But there were pleasant companions, and, if you cared for such things, much classical learning and Church doctrine. It did not occur to the boy mind that light and air were necessary to healthy life, and of course it had never entered the thoughts of the pastors and masters responsible for that scholastic warren. Whilst I was there I carried away with me a few prizes and a broken nose, and a knowledge of those portions of the Church Catechism which fitted in with the place in class where I sat of a Monday morning. I was sixteen when I left school, and for the first time in my life began to seriously consider the desirability of studying things. I have been some sort of a student ever since.

My first idea was to study mathematics with a view to trying for a scholarship at Cambridge. I wonder if I had followed that stream into what dead sea it would have carried me. I know as a fact that I was accounted fairly good at the subject, but that is difficult for me to believe to-day, for anything more complicated than very simple addition I always refer in a thankful spirit to the Registrar. Afterwards I fancied I would be an artist, and joined the Slade School and drew in the “Antique” for a few months. I got very little encouragement there. Legros once looked at one of my drawings, and took up a piece of charcoal as if to show me some of the errors of line in my work; but his heart failed him. He sighed, shook his head, grunted a guttural French grunt of despair, and turned on his heel. However, I can boast that I am a pupil of Legros, and if he treasured my piece of charcoal it may yet be a valuable lot at Christie’s—​who knows?

At the end of 1881 I had made up my mind that it was time to commence a career with money in it. I chose the Bar because I knew no other. I went down to the old courts at Westminster, and, finding one of my father’s clerks, got him to take me to Sir Henry James, as he then was. He was a very old friend of my father, and not only signed the necessary papers with pleasure, but introduced me to Sir Farrer Herschell, who was sitting next to him, and he signed as well. With such godfathers, I was cordially received into the ancient house of the Middle Temple, after satisfying two reverend benchers that I knew enough Latin and history to make it unwise for them to expose the amount of their own knowledge of these subjects by asking me further questions.

Thursday, January 19, 1882! More than thirty years ago. And yet the memory of my first dinner at the Temple is here to-day, winnowed out of the myriad happenings of all these years.

I see a thin slip of humanity shrinking among his elders into that historical Elizabethan hall and asking the old mace bearer with whispering humbleness where he may sit. Unknowingly, he chooses the place of captain of a mess—​the arbiter of the feast of four—​and, taking courage from the unwonted gown, brazens out his position until his want of knowledge of the ceremonies concerning the first glass of wine exposes him as a newcomer.

I know that there was plenty of genial talk and laughter at that table, but I remember none of it. For in my heart of hearts I was wondering why I had come there at all, and feeling that the ghosts of all the great Templars of the past were chuckling among the rafters at my folly, and that, truly, I was honest food for their mocks. But among all my hopes and fears and forebodings Manchester certainly had no place. Yet the “writing on the wall” was there, or, rather, he was sitting with his back to it on my left-hand side. His name was Smith, and he came from Manchester.

Richard Smith, who sat next to me on the occasion of my first dinner in hall, was my earliest experience of Manchester, and indeed if I had never met him I cannot suppose that I should ever have joined the Northern Circuit. He had come to the Temple late in life and was nearing his call. I believe he had already been a bleacher, a dealer in pictures, and a clerk to a public body. I know he had been at Oxford, because in an unlucky moment on circuit in a heated discussion after dinner he had called in aid of his argument his University degree, and was ever afterwards known as “Smith, B.A.” But for me it was sufficient that he was the only man I ever met in the Temple who could talk lovingly and intelligently about pictures. He had the square face of a lion, wearing in those days a heavy beard. He barked and growled at you in argument and was cocksure he was right. That is a very Manchester virtue. I write of it with jealousy, for it is an attribute I have vainly striven to acquire. You know the story of one of Manchester’s most eminent sons who was always in the right. Some friend remonstrated with him gently, saying, “Why be such an egoist?”

“Egoist!” was the calm reply. “I’m not an egoist—​I know!”

And so it was with Dick Smith. He knew! But, Micawber-like, he failed to persuade others to take him at his own valuation. His venture at the Bar was not a fortunate one. I like to remember him, full of hope and enthusiasm spending a day or two with me in the summer, sketching on the Thames at Datchet, or playing chess in the common room in the winter and laying down the law on every conceivable subject in his rough, Manchester tongue. When he left the Temple to start his practice in Manchester, the Middle Temple common room seemed to me for some days “remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.” But this was only a passing mood. Dick Smith and his pride of Manchester became a fading memory, and I continued to thoroughly enjoy my three years’ work in the Temple.

I cannot help thinking that men make a mistake in rushing up from the University to eat their dinners and getting called to the Bar directly they leave college. Law is, at least, as uncertain and dangerous a science to the patient as medicine, and the student of law should be compelled to “walk” the courts, as the medical student is compelled to “walk” the hospitals. For my part, I attribute what success I had at the Bar to the fact that I worked at the practical business of the profession for three years before I was called. I read in different chambers, and during the last year of student days had the privilege of reading with my Danckwerts, who was and is, no doubt, one of the greatest lawyers of our day. It is curious to remember that in 1884 the gossip of the Temple was concerned in discussing whether Danckwerts or Asquith would succeed R. S. Wright as Treasury “devil,” so blind are the quidnuncs to the throw of the shuttle of fate.

A junior with such a heavy practice as Danckwerts’s cannot do much more than give you the run of his chambers, but that, as Loehnis said, was like “turning a team of asses into a field of oats.” Loehnis devilled for Danckwerts in those days. He was a shrewd, sound lawyer and a kind-hearted senior to our pupil room, and the Bar lost an honourable and learned brother by his untimely death. Considering the work he did and the hours he worked, it was wonderful how much personal attention Danckwerts gave to his pupils. He would often call one of us into his room and discuss some opinion or pleading we had drawn. I remember on one occasion, having pointed out to me the hopeless errors of the legal opinion I had given, he wound up his remarks by saying: “And suppose, when you are called, you get a case of that kind, what is going to happen to you?”

“When I get a case of that importance,” I replied, “I shall certainly insist on having you as a junior.”

The great man laughingly agreed that I had made a wise resolution.

Bertram Cox was undoubtedly the ablest pupil in my time. He neglected an ordinary career at the Bar and specialised on heavy public legal work, and was rightly rewarded by being appointed legal Under-Secretary to the Colonial Office—​a position which I believe Mr. Chamberlain invented in order that the office might have the benefit of his services. He is now the solicitor to the Inland Revenue. Another pupil was Bartle Frere, who is a legal luminary at Gibraltar. Danckwerts seemed to instil into his pupils the capacity to arrive. Frere was one of the merriest fellows in the world, always doing some careless and amusing thing, on the strength of which Cox and I built up apocryphal stories about him which we insisted upon as traditions of the pupil room. Thus it was asserted to be Frere who, after carefully studying the papers in an action for seduction, had drafted a defence of contributory negligence. I believe, however, there was some foundation for the story that in his early days he wrote an opinion to the effect that, as every step taken up to date on behalf of the plaintiff was useless, the best thing he could do was to drop his present action and commence an action for negligence against his solicitor.

“Excellent advice, no doubt,” said Danckwerts dryly, “but you seem to forget that we are advising the solicitor.”

The last time I met Frere was in Norwich, about 1896. I had gone to sit as judge for Addison, and took my seat in the old Castle Court with great dignity, bowing to the Bar, when I looked up and my eye caught Frere’s.

“Good heavens, it’s Parry!” he cried out in an audible voice, and laughed heartily at the idea of finding me on the bench. The Court did not hear the interruption, but Parry did, and enjoyed it hugely. We dined at the Maid’s Head that evening, and had a pleasant crack together, recalling many stories of the old pupil room in New Court. No doubt memory brightens o’er the past, but certainly no youngsters ever learned their business under pleasanter auspices than we did.

Outside the pupil room there were lectures to attend, scholarships to be read for, dinners in the old hall, and debating clubs meeting on several evenings in the week. Mindful of my father’s advice, I had always kept in touch with an old boys’ debating club at King’s College School, and now I joined the Hardwicke and a very pleasant and more social club, the Mansfield. The Hardwicke was a conservative institution, and I remember startling the ancients of our benches by raising a debate on the effect of the Pre-Raphaelite movement on the art of the country. Everyone spoke on it, and the frank expressions of dogmatic ignorance and the enthusiastic denunciations of the works of the school were thoroughly healthy and entertaining. Still, we mustered a stalwart minority, and a little later gained a practical victory over the Philistines. I was elected on the committee of the Hardwicke, on which Clavell Salter—​now a K.C. and M.P. for the Basingstoke division—​was an important official. The society was in funds, and we resolved to spend them in creature comforts; not in olive draperies and sunflowers, perhaps, but in reasonable luxuries. Our meeting room was at that time floored with boards, the door opening from the road banged violently whenever anyone entered, and the uncovered gas-jets in the centre glared and hissed at you distressingly during your oration. Without a word of our purpose to the general body of members we adorned the room with a carpet, a screen to hide the door, and some glass globes for the gas. Incensed with indignation and breathing fire and war, the hosts of the Old Bailey came down upon us in wrath. Geoghan the eloquent, Cagney the persuasive, and the subtle Burnie closured our debate, carried the suspension of the standing orders, and on a motion to surcharge the upstart members of the committee rent the air with denunciations of our malversation of the funds and our want of patriotism in destroying the ancient amenities of their beloved Hardwicke. It was with difficulty that our side continued the debate, which was of an earnest and fiery nature, until the hour of the adjournment. By next week we whipped up our supporters, who were base enough to prefer comfort to tradition, and we remained in office. The prophecies of decadence and disaster came to naught. The Hardwicke survives in prosperity. Long may it flourish.

This habit of debate and discussion naturally led us to desire to try our strength in a wider field of battle. Some took one side and some another, but for myself, from hereditary example perhaps, I have always been fond of belonging to a minority; and now that I have been a total abstainer from politics for many years, I may freely admit that in the eighties I was an ardent Radical, and, naturally, a disciple of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, who in that day was preaching the reforms that Mr. Lloyd George is now putting on the Statute Book. I was a member of the Eighty Club, then a Whig institution, and as Radical speakers were greatly in demand I got many opportunities of political speaking all over the country. As a very young Radical in a minority among many superior persons, it was, of course, part of my duty to criticise my elders and betters whenever I got the opportunity. As an artist friend said of me, I had an unfortunate habit of “getting out of drawing,” even outside the studio, and I remember very well an instance of this at a dinner given in the autumn of 1895 to Trevelyan. It was the custom of the club for a senior to propose and a junior to second a vote of thanks to our guest. On this occasion Haldane was the senior and I was the junior. I had made up an eloquent little speech, but in accordance with my usual habit—​then and now—​I made another. Haldane had—​as I thought rather unnecessarily—​made a great many allusions to the “nephew of Lord Macaulay,” as though Trevelyan bore no other claim to fame. When my turn came I got a round of applause for welcoming our guest as himself, a personality far more interesting to the working politician of to-day than the mere nephew of a Whig peer. Trevelyan himself seemed to enjoy the joke, and wound up the proceedings by an appeal to the younger members for missionary work, in which he referred very pleasantly to some of my father’s Radical fights of old days, and congratulated me on belonging to the true faith.

I was naturally rather elated as I walked home along the Embankment with our energetic honorary secretary, J. A. B. B. Bruce—​the Busy Bee, as we called him.

“No doubt, Parry,” he said in his quiet, thoughtful way, “you think you’ve been jolly clever, but what I’m wondering is when Haldane is Lord Chancellor, and you want a County Court judgeship, will you get it?”

I hope it is not lese-majeste for me to repeat this story to-day, when at length the hopes of the Temple have been fulfilled and the double event which Bruce foresaw has come to pass. It was a commonplace of Temple talk that some day Haldane would be Lord Chancellor, but it required the deep foresight of Bruce to hazard the suggestion that I should ever be in a position to apply for a judgeship of the County Court.

And I cannot look back on those old days without seeing the figure of one dear friend—​the bravest and kindest of men, Archie Stewart. I know this, that no one who came within his sway can have forgotten his memory, and there must yet be many in the Temple who will be glad to recall it. Tall, handsome, broad-shouldered and erect, swinging with a curious gait across the courts of the Temple, one could not but be attracted by his presence. His frank, engaging smile, his cheery voice all alike evidenced the joy of life. And yet when he entered the library and the attendant stepped up to him and lifted off his coat with its heavy cape, you saw at a glance the tragedy that his brave heart never acknowledged. Both his arms were paralysed and deformed from childhood and were practically useless. He could write slowly and with difficulty, pushing the pen by a movement of the shoulder, but in nearly every ordinary movement in life, in eating, dressing, carrying and lifting, he required assistance. And yet he would start away from Kensington in the morning and come down to the Temple, leaving his servant at home in the knowledge that throughout London he would always find someone to help him. When you got used to his movements you did not seem to notice his deformity, so little did he make of it himself, and so cleverly did he use the little strength and capacity there were in his hands and arms. The things that he could do were wonderful. A light wineglass he could lift with his lips, drink from it and replace it almost gracefully, and he could pick up a weighted chessman—​it was his favourite game, and he played above the ordinary—​in his mouth and hurl it accurately on to any square on the board. His favourite method was to steer the men along with his pipe, but in moments of triumph and enthusiasm he seized them in his lips. He was a constant speaker at the Hardwicke—​clear, shrewd and learned. How he read so much and had conquered his enormous difficulties it is hard to understand. Among other things achieved, he had learned to swim, and he could cast a bowl from his instep with cunning, skill and accuracy. In due course he was called to the Bar, and whenever I came to town I used to turn into our old chambers in Pump Court, and find Stewart smoking like a furnace and laying down the law to some junior in large practice who had come round to have a few words with him about a difficulty. It was curious how many men accounted learned in the law were well pleased to have their views ratified or reformed by Archie Stewart. I remember hearing him hold at bay a Divisional Court, consisting of Coleridge, C.J., and R. S. Wright, J., with a learned argument about a demand for rent at common law, in which he gave them an interesting dissertation on the legal history and archæology of the matter, with few notes and, of course, without books, for he was unable to hold them. The Court rightly complimented him on his performance, and thinking ahead in those days I used to imagine what a great judge my friend would have made, with his bright logical Scots mind and his deep sympathy with human nature down to the lowest, which he had learned from the respect and kindness shown to his misfortune. He told me that in all his wanderings about London day and night alone no one had ever offered to rob him, though he was in the habit of asking any stranger to take his money out of his pocket to pay railway or other fares. I was not the only one who predicted for Stewart some position of honour in his profession. But it was not to be. Very suddenly one summer holiday he was taken. It was at his home at Rannoch. He belonged to an ancient race of Stewarts, and in his quaint way used to boast that if he were to sue for the Crown in formâ pauperis there would be flutterings in high places. Some years afterwards I made a pious journey to his resting-place. In his ancestral park, on which the blue peak of his beloved Schiehallion looks down, there, surrounded by grey stone walls and tall fir trees, he lies among cross-legged knights in armour, tall well-limbed warriors of his race, but among them all there is not one who fought the fight with a braver heart than the last comer.

It begins to dawn upon me that all these beckoning shadows and calling shapes which throng into my memory when I begin to write of my student days in the Temple are keeping me too long from the main purpose of my story, but in my next chapter I will at least get called to the Bar, and then, as there will be no work for me in town, I shall have to pack up my bundle and go into the wide, wide world to seek my fortune.