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WHAT THE JUDGE SAW

Being Twenty-Five Years in Manchester by One Who Has Done It

by
His Honour Judge

EDWARD ABBOTT PARRY

Author of “Dorothy Osborne’S Letters,” “Judgments in Vacation,”
“The Scarlet Herring,” “Katawampus: Its Treatment
and Cure,” “Butter Scotia,” etc.






London
Smith, Elder & Co., 15, Waterloo Place
1912

[All rights reserved]




To

MY PARTNER, COMRADE AND WIFE

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED




CONTENTS


CHAP.                                  PAGE

    I. FAREWELL MANCHESTER                1

   II. HOME                              10

  III. STUDENT DAYS                      32

   IV. CALLED TO THE BAR                 49

    V. EARLY MEMORIES OF MANCHESTER      65

   VI. QUARTER SESSIONS                  84

  VII. THE SENTENCE OF DEATH            105

 VIII. JUDGES OF YESTERDAY              125

   IX. FIRST BRIEFS                     147

    X. ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS           163

   XI. THE COMPLEAT CITIZEN             179

  XII. THAT REMINDS ME                  199

 XIII. THE PEARK                        219

  XIV. OVERTIME                         238

   XV. PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS          257

  XVI. THE MANCHESTER STAGE             278

 XVII. QUOTATIONS FROM QUAY STREET      293

XVIII. DEALING IN FUTURES               311

INDEX                                   317




NOTE


_The origin of these reminiscences was the appearance of some papers I
contributed to the_ “MANCHESTER DAILY DISPATCH” _in January of this
year. These met with considerable favour, and many readers seemed to
think that their story was worthy of being set down in a more
permanent fashion. It was to meet this suggestion that I have largely
added to and re-written the original essays and published them in book
form._

                                                   EDWARD A. PARRY.

  SEVENOAKS,
    _September, 1912_.




WHAT THE JUDGE SAW




CHAPTER I

  FAREWELL MANCHESTER

  I go――but God knows when or why
    From smoky towns and cloudy sky
  To things (the honest truth to say)
    As bad――but in a different way.
                       BYRON: “Farewell to Malta.”
                     (_Amended by leave of the Court._)


“Some poet has observed that if any man would write down what has
really happened to him in this mortal life he would be sure to make a
good book, though he never had met with a single adventure from his
birth to his burial.” Even Thackeray does not take the responsibility
for the thesis, but with a light heart lays the burden upon the
shoulders of “some poet.” And for my part I had never any intention of
answering the poet’s challenge until after a quarter of a century of
life in Manchester I found myself back again in my original domicile.
I doubt if I had ever really acquired a domicile in Manchester. There
was residence, but was there intention? I think I must decide that
somewhere at the back of my mind there was an intention if not a
desire to return.

But when I did return, how many changes I found. Of course I had paid
fleeting visits to London during the term of my exile; but here I was
again for better or worse, and my mind made contrast of to-day with
the memories of twenty-five years ago. Where were the familiar faces?
Not all were gone certainly, but those that remained seemed to my eyes
duller, grizzled and less alert than I had remembered them. And no
doubt I was the same to them, and had grown rugged and provincial
during my long absence. For when old friends met me in the Strand or
the Temple they patted my shoulder in a kindly compassionate manner as
if I were a pit pony who had just come to the surface after several
decades of darkness. These Londoners who knew nothing of Manchester
and the North seemed to fancy I was blinking and dazzled with the
brilliancy of their converse, when in truth and in fact I was
wondering why they all――except the Jews――spoke with a tinge of Cockney
accent. When they congratulated me upon my “promotion,” as they called
it, I could not help contrasting the trial of cases arising out of
commercial contracts on the Manchester Exchange with the trespass of
sheep among the turnip-tops, which is the nearest we have to a _cause
célèbre_ in the Weald of Kent.

But what caused me a greater sinking of heart was that, when I spoke
of Manchester men and Manchester affairs, I spoke to deaf ears. Your
Peckham and Surbiton Londoner knows indeed that there is such a place
as Manchester on the map, but intellectually and spiritually he is far
nearer to New York or Johannesburg. The works and doings of these
places interest and amuse him, but the annals of the great cities of
the North are closed books to him. And when I was lamenting on such a
state of things I came across Thackeray’s message and wondered if it
was intended for me. I could not help thinking how many of us would
like to have the reminiscences of the pit pony. How entertaining it
would be to his fellow ponies below to know what the old fellow really
thought of them, and how the story of a life underground would tickle
the supercilious ears of the pony aristocrats who had spent their
lives among surburban milk floats and butchers’ carts, or even let us
say in the polo field. There was the personal pleasure, too, of
remembering and setting down the story of the days that were gone and
describing the highways and byways along which I had travelled so
pleasantly, and the thought that some who were children in those years
might like to know what sort of a world it was they used to live in.

Maybe Charles Lamb is right when he asks himself “Why do cats grin in
Cheshire?” and tells us that “it was once a County Palatine, and the
cats cannot help laughing when they think of it.” For my part as one
who has been a “poore Palatine” in the adjacent county of Lancaster I
confess that the very sound of its name will always induce a smile――or
should I say a purr――at the pleasant memories with which it is
fragrant.

Attachment to places is quite irrespective of their pleasances. The
fields and orchards of Kent, white with blossom in the spring, purple
and golden with the heavy fruits of autumn, can never be as acceptable
to me as the mud building land of South Manchester. The Embankment and
the Strand――even in its debased modern form――and the Temple Gardens
and the fountain will always be home to one who started life as a
Londoner, and was educated in the cellars of Somerset House. But in
solitary thoughts and dreams I shall glide in fancy down the flags of
Oxford Road, and watch the rooks building on Fallowfield “Broo,” or
strike across the fields of Chorlton’s Farm by the cottages with the
old vine on them, and take the train from Alexandra Park to my work.
When I come out of the Lambeth County Court into the Camberwell New
Road it will always feel irksome to me not to be able to stride up
Peter Street and push open the swing doors of a certain club in Mosley
Street and find myself in an atmosphere of tobacco and good
fellowship. You get so attached to the actual place in which you dwell
that though things are better and more beautiful elsewhere your optic
nerves do not respond at their call, or you suffer from a geographical
deafness. I do not defend such narrow patriotism, I only assert that
it exists. The other day I found myself in a fog in London――one which
Mr. Guppy would call a _real_ London particular――saying to a friend,
“Call this a fog? You should see a first-class Manchester fog.” I knew
I was a boaster and a braggart, for Manchester fogs, though tastier in
chemical flavour, have not the real woolly orange blanket appearance
of the fog that rolls up white from the Nore and bronzes with the
London smoke.

I think I have the place attachment――a limpet-like characteristic,
after all――very highly developed. I remember a story of a little boy,
about three years old or perhaps more, who moved with his family and
their furniture into a new house. At first the affair excited him, but
later on he wandered uneasily and miserably about his new quarters
with an idea that he would never smile again, and that the sooner the
world came to an end the better for everybody. Poor, doleful, little
urchin, he climbed up long flights of stairs into a box-room, and
there, finding a pile of old carpets, he selected one that had
belonged to his nursery and laid him down to die. Forgotten in the
turmoil, he cried himself to sleep, and was discovered by anxious
domestics after prolonged search. I know a great deal of the story is
true, because I have heard it from some of my more reliable relations,
and as the hero of the story I believe I can remember hearing an
agonised nurse calling my name in despair, and sullenly refusing to
reply to her calls on the ground that I never wished to consort with
the world again since I had discovered with Zarathustra that “all is
empty, all is equal, all hath been.”

This attachment to places is a very animal virtue, or failing,
whichever it be, and in my experience is not so much a home-sickness
as a nausea of novelty. One erects in one’s mind a standard of what
ought to be, and applies that to the beloved place; and by constantly
asserting to strangers that the place is in all particulars absolutely
perfect, one begins by mere force of the repetition to believe in it
oneself. In this way do myths become religions. There are many
Manchester myths, all of which in my patriotism――the more vehement
because I cannot claim birthright in the great city――I repeat, and
shall continue to repeat, with the accuracy and fervour with which I
still run over on occasion my “duty to my neighbour.” Thus a true
Manchester man will tell you Manchester is musical, whereas, in truth
and in fact, very few of her people care anything about music at all.
Also he will speak with glowing pride of the marvellous municipal
statesmanship of her governors, whereas, though we are very fond of
them personally, we know they are about as ordinary a set of parish
councillors as ever met in a village schoolroom. I myself have often
reproved a mere Southerner for casting aspersions on our climate by
saying “it was not half so black as it is painted,” when I knew that
on oath I should have to admit that no ink could paint it black
enough. These are lawful perjuries, and unworthy of Manchester would
any citizen be who should hesitate to repeat them.

And yet I am not altogether sorry that I left Manchester. It is true
that it was for purely personal and domestic reasons that I came
south. There was no financial gain in my move, and therefore there is
no ecclesiastical precedent for pretending that I had received a
spiritual call to a wider sphere of action. At the same time it is
possible that the dignity and decorum of Lambeth may be perfected by
that “wakkening up” spirit which the apostles of Manchester go forth
to maintain.

I remember when I was moving south, Bishop Welldon asking me on the
steps of the pavilion at Old Trafford, “And where is your diocese?”

“Lambeth,” I replied promptly. “It sounds ecclesiastical, doesn’t it?”

“It did until your name was connected with it,” said the Bishop with a
merry laugh.

And I left him wondering whether that was the reason Providence had
translated me to the Camberwell New Road.

As for myself, I never want my name to be connected with Lambeth; but
in so far as it will ever be remembered at all, I pray that it may
find its way into some niche in those cyclopædias and other mausoleums
of the famous under the title “Manchester.”

And I am not alone in thinking that “Farewell Manchester” is a sad
phrase to utter. For when Charles Edward left Manchester in 1745 after
those pleasant weeks of revelry among the gentry of Lancashire and
Cheshire, the legend is that he rode sadly over the Derbyshire hills
chanting that mournful lament the music of which the old prebendary of
Hereford set down in later years and called “Felton’s Gavot” or
“Farewell Manchester.” But I picture the Pretender cantering along and
rallying his friends about the Lancashire lasses, whose hearts they
had conquered and whose ribbons they wore in their bonnets, and I
believe it was only in after years that the mournful ballad spread
round the countryside and the ballad-mongers sang of the young prince
whose “tear-drops bodingly from their prisons start.”

It would be absurd for modern visitors to Manchester, rushing away
from the city in a luxurious dining car, plunging beneath the Disley
Golf Links and emerging among the picturesque Derbyshire crags, to
throw themselves into the romantic humour of the heroes of ’45 and
mingle tear-drops with their soup. But alone with your thoughts, if
you have lived in the midst of Manchester and her people and
experienced their gracious hospitality to the stranger that is within
their gates, you may find yourself crooning old Felton’s Gavot, and
learn that the song vibrates in a minor key and that the tear-drops
can only be kept back by control.

It is a hard thing to say “Farewell!” in the right key. Many, many
kindly letters I received when I went away, and all were full of
gracious messages; but the one I best remember as saying the just word
of complimentary reproof was a valedictory letter from the Secretary
of the Crematorium, in which he wrote, “our committee feel very
grieved that you should be leaving us in this manner.” I quote from
memory, and of course the wording may not be exactly accurate. But the
idea was beautifully and delicately expressed, and to the hidden
indictment in the letter I plead guilty and throw myself upon the
mercy of the Court.




CHAPTER II

HOME

  It may be a hut with a thatch on
    In a garden where roses grow,
  Or built of bad bricks with a patch on
    Of stucco, and twelve in a row;
  It may be a palace of crystal,
    With a splendid sparkling dome,
  But what does it matter whatever it is,
            It is Home.
                      “Pater’s Book of Rhymes.”


I do not want to anger my readers at the threshold with heraldic
learning of the couching lions and ramping cats to which the Parrys of
Nerquis are by right entitled, but I claim a Welshman’s privilege of
setting down so much of genealogy as is necessary to the understanding
of my story. And truly one of the temptations that lured me to this
task was a desire to write down what I could remember of my father,
John Humffreys Parry――Serjeant Parry――who died more than thirty years
ago, and left so fine a memory among his comrades in the battles of
old in Westminster Hall.

And I often heard my father talk of his Welsh ancestry, though he
himself was a Londoner born in 1816, and he would tell us what he
remembered of his father, John Humffreys Parry, the Welsh antiquary
and writer who was called to the Bar in 1811, and died when my father
was a boy of sixteen. He was the writer of the “Cambrian Plutarch” and
editor of the “Cambro Briton,” a journal of Celtic folk-lore and the
ancient literature and history of Wales. Nowadays he would probably
have been a professor at a Welsh University, but in those days people
cared for none of these things. I remember reading in some Welsh
account of his career――and among Welshmen he is far better known than
my father――how he was educated at Mold Grammar School and articled to
Mr. Wynne, solicitor, of that town, and married a daughter of John
Thomas, solicitor, of Llanfyllin, which is away down in the wilds of
Montgomeryshire. This biographer wound up his story with the
compendious statement that “he went to London, was called to the Bar,
took to literature and dissipated his estates.” But if he had any
estates, which is at least doubtful, he wasted them not in riotous
living, but in the printing and publishing of the Welsh literature he
loved. From the earliest he was an eager and ready writer. I have a
small brown scrapbook, the leaves of which are saffron-tinged with
age, in which are pasted with proud care the author’s letters and
verses contributed to the _Chester Courant_ in the early part of the
century, when he was a youth in Mr. Wynne’s office in Mold.

Some years ago curiosity led me into the land of my forefathers, and I
climbed the steep hill between Mold and Ruthin to reach Llanferres,
going past “The Three Loggerheads,” the sign of which Richard Wilson,
R.A., the landscape painter, is reputed to have painted. It is the old
jest of two heads grinning at you――the third you supply for yourself.
And if Wilson painted it, as they say he did, it was probably done in
his early days, for he came from Mold, and as he died in 1782 the sign
must have been there in my great-grandfather Edward Parry’s time, when
he became rector of the little hill village of Llanferres in 1790. And
doubtless he often saw it as he walked down the hill to visit his
wife’s relatives in Mold, or went across to Nerquis to see his father
Edward Parry, the tanner.

And at Llanferres I searched the church registers, and finding that
the rector was carried home to his native village of Nerquis, I turned
my steps along the narrow roads down the side of the hill where his
funeral must have passed and found a little village church at the
foot-hills on the English side, so much away from the bustle of the
world’s traffic that I think it must be much the same to-day as it was
when my great-grandfather was carried back to his early home. And when
the little churchyard of Nerquis gives up its collection of Parrys it
will relinquish a goodly number who lived and died in this quiet,
solitary place, and from what one reads on marble slabs and the like,
they were a godly, honest and well-doing people. But to my regret I
find that Edward the tanner’s father was the Rev. Canon Edward Parry,
M.A., Vicar of Oswestry in 1763, and his father was Thomas, an
attorney of Welshpool who lived near the bridge, so that as we reach
the seventeenth century it dawns upon me that I do not belong to North
Wales at all, and I cease my researches into the past, in dread that I
should discover after all that I am no better than a South Wales man,
a “Hwntw” in good northern speech, or “man from beyond.”

My very earliest personal recollection of my father was in the days of
my childhood, when we lived at No. 1, Upper Gloucester Place,
overlooking Dorset Square. In the interests of the committee of the
society that busies itself placing decorative lozenges on the
birth-places of the famous it is well to record that I have it on
hearsay evidence that this is where I was born.

I can well remember, and as it were visualise, my father in that
house, but only on one day of the week――the Sunday. On other days I
cannot remember to have seen him at all. But I can recall many details
of the house itself, and well remember that the library window looked
on to New Street, in which lived our chemist and druggist; and of an
evening I would go into the library and climb on a chair to enjoy the
glory of his huge coloured bottles in the window, and then meanly pull
faces at the nauseous shop in revenge for the wrongs I had suffered at
its hands.

My brother and I took our morning walks in Dorset Square. In the early
sixties Dorset Square was a vast jungle. Speaking from memory, it
contained well-accredited lions and bears in its fastnesses. I saw
Dorset Square the other day. It has sadly shrunk. Those giant shrubs
that towered over your head, hiding you securely from a distracted
nurse, are no longer there. Regent’s Park was my other playground or,
rather, that part of it opposite Sussex Terrace called “The
Enclosure,” to which we had a right of entrance and a key. I do not
know that it is a matter of importance now, but it was of the essence
of happiness in those days that our good nurse _ex abundanti cautela_
carried the key of “The Enclosure” in one hand, and my brother and I
contested for her other hand, as a prize of great worth. Regent’s Park
retains more of its size than Dorset Square, but it is not the
illimitable veldt that it was. “The Enclosure” was snobbish, and its
snobbery has been very properly curtailed. I well remember how we
envied the nurseless urchins in their freedom of the real park across
the water. It was on that treacherous lake some forty people were
drowned in a terrible ice accident. I remember being hurried out of
“The Enclosure” past the tent into which they were carrying the
drowned. For many months afterwards there was the draining, levelling,
and then the refilling of the lake. All this work I superintended from
the banks, and at last watched the water come bubbling up from a huge
pipe into the new-made lake with as deep a satisfaction as the chief
engineer himself.

But in all these childhood’s scenes I do not recall that my father had
any part. He was, of course, at this time a very hard-worked man, but
Sunday morning he always devoted to his children. I can picture his
solid, kindly face and see his commanding figure wrapped in a
dressing-gown of many colours――an old friend――as he sat at the end of
the breakfast-table when we were brought down from the nursery. The
only other member of the party was Tiger, a favourite tabby cat of
whom my father was very proud. He had a great love of cats, and at one
time possessed three, which he named Hic, Hæc, and Hoc. The
appositeness of the names came to me with the Latin grammar and years
of discretion. Two journals were his Sabbath reading――_The Spectator_
and _Athenæum_, but he laid down his paper when we arrived, and took
that real interest in our affairs which is the only key to children’s
hearts. One great task was the skilful arrangement of all the animals
of Noah’s Ark on the breakfast-table, which was rewarded with buttered
toast. In a spirit of fairness Tiger was requested to walk among the
animals. This if he did without mishap earned him the guerdon of
cream. Then there was a careful examination on our weekly studies of
the pages of _Punch_, which my father held rightly to be the earliest
nursery text-book of history and sociology for the English child. This
was followed by dramatic recitals of Mr. Southey’s “Three Bears” and
some of Jane and Ann Taylor’s original poems, and other childhood’s
sagas. And then when the nurse’s fateful knock was heard at the door
to take the young gentlemen for a walk, off went my father’s huge
dressing-gown, two wildly excited urchins sprang into the limitless
depths of the arm-chair and were covered up by the garment, and my
father with dramatic breathlessness shouted “Come in!” and was
“discovered”――to use a phrase of the theatre――calmly reading the paper
at the table. The same dialogue was always maintained. The nurse
inquired where the children were; the father expressed his
astonishment at their disappearance; Tiger was asked if he had seen
them, and remained silent. Then an elaborate search with hopeless
ejaculations of the searchers was received with ill-concealed shrieks
of amusement by the hiders. At last they are discovered, and the
curtain falls on the most glorious hour in the whole week. For just as
men and women love the old plays and the old ideas of drama, so
children will have the same game of hide-and-seek or what not, and
play it in the same way with the same absurd ritual religiously
carried out, and he alone is worthy of fatherhood who can take an
honourable part in such affairs with real solemnity and enthusiasm.

But these baby days departed, and the Sunday mornings had to be passed
in Christ Church, Marylebone, surely the most unsociable church I have
ever entered. I used to shudder for fear that after all heaven might
turn out to be something like Christ Church, Marylebone. It still
haunts me in dyspeptic dreams. It was a huge classical building, as
cheerful as a family vault, with one painting over the altar――how many
hours have I spent gazing at it――and no other memorable decoration.
The congregation were penned apart in high boxes. Our box had tall red
hassocks. I used to be allowed to stand on one of these, until I fell
off it into the bottom of the pen audibly and demonstratively. After
that I was consigned to the floor, from which you could not see even
bonnets, and from this limbo I only emerged by gradual growth. The
preacher wore a black gown. My earliest meeting with him must, I
think, have been at the font. I remember his grave tones, clear voice
and dignified presence. I know now he must have preached excellent
sermons, for he was the Rev. Llewelyn Davies. But in those days my
brother and I fully believed he was the anonymous “righteous man” in
the Psalms whose doings and sayings are so carefully chronicled.

From Regent’s Park we moved away to Kensington, and thence to Holland
Park. Here it was that in the seventies, during the last few years of
my father’s life, I heard in snatches from himself and his older
friends something of the story of his career. I was then at King’s
College School, which at that time was situated below Somerset House,
and as I travelled up and down in the Underground――often with my
father――and did my home-lessons in his library and dined with him
nearly every night, and often went to the play with him of an evening,
I had the good fortune to see more of him than I should have done had
I been away at school.

He must have had a keen struggle in his early days to reach the
position he did at the Bar. Born in London in 1816, he was only
sixteen years old when the sudden death of his father made it
necessary for him to earn his own living. He was then being educated
at the Philological School, an old foundation in Marylebone, but he
left school at once and went into a merchant’s office. Edwin Abbott,
the head-master of the Philological School, continued his firm friend,
and years afterwards his daughter Elizabeth married my father, who was
then a Serjeant. But I do not propose to write of my mother in these
pages, since I could not do justice to the grace of her memory, and
the dim vision of it is my own affair.

The Abbotts were, as I understand, an old family of yeomen and farmers
in Dorsetshire. I have seen a pamphlet concerning the great George
Abbott, Archbishop of Canterbury, who bravely withstood James I. in
the matter of the Essex divorce, showing that he was of the same
family. I hope it may be so. My father used to laugh at genealogy, but
for my part I rather like to speculate on pedigrees and family
history. It is pleasant to trace one’s line back to tanners and
farmers and attorneys, even with a dash of the Church thrown in. The
ancestry of the horse and the greyhound is a study for every gambler
on the course, and why should not a student of eugenics be interested
in the evolution of the entries for the human race?

Whilst he was in a merchant’s office my father attended classes at the
Aldersgate Institution, a valuable educational society promoted by
Lord Brougham, and he became a constant attendant at a debating club
held there. He was a great believer in orderly debate as a method of
education, and was always ready to discuss with me the subject of
debate in my School Society. The art of speaking he thought should be
equally a part of elementary education with reading and writing, and
his view was that if such were the case the charlatan and the windbag
would have less chance of capturing the ear of the public.

From the merchant’s stool he found his way to the British Museum,
where he was an assistant for some years, and formed a lasting
friendship with Anthony Panizzi, who was then keeper of the printed
books. I remember Richard Garnett showing me one of the slips in the
catalogue in my father’s handwriting in the days before that great
work was printed. All this time he was reading for the Bar and taking
an active interest in the political movements of the day. George Jacob
Holyoake remembers him as a young law-student at No. 5, Gray’s Inn
Road. He describes him as a stalwart, energetic platform speaker, and
notes that he ultimately acquired two styles like O’Connell, the more
gaseous of which he retained solely to illuminate electors.

In 1842, the year before he was called, he was one of the most active
members of the Moral Force Chartists. Hanging on my walls in a dark,
old-fashioned veneered frame is a large print in many colours of the
famous Charter――a harmless exploded torpedo nowadays no doubt――but in
1842 the symbol of a grave reality. For Chartism, as Carlyle pointed
out, was “the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong
condition therefore, or the wrong disposition of the Working Classes
of England.” With the ring of the true prophet in his words he foresaw
in 1842 that Chartism “did not begin yesterday; will by no means end
this day or to-morrow … new and ever new embodiments, chimeras madder
or less mad have to continue.”

My father’s part at this time was the editing of a magazine called the
_National Associations Gazette_. The problem it set itself out to deal
with was why when all kinds of property were recognised and protected
the property which a man has in his labour was to be unsupported and
unrepresented. The political programme, in the “order of going in,” so
to speak, was (1) the Charter; (2) Universal Suffrage of men and
women; and (3) National Education. I have often heard my father in
argument with other reformers laying down――too dogmatically as I
thought――that National Education before Suffrage was the cart before
the horse. If you educate masses to think and deny them the power of
practically endeavouring to translate their thought into national
action it is bound to break out into anti-national actions. Who shall
say in regard to recent events in England and India that there was not
much good sense in his reasoning.

From my very earliest childhood I seem to have heard of Chartists and
Chartism and the “Condition of England,” question which, after all,
remains with us to-day turbulently unanswered. Very often of a Sunday
afternoon we would drive over to some obscure lodgings in Paddington
to see Mr. William Lovett. I remember him as a mild, amiable,
white-haired old gentleman who had a wonderful facility for making
models, and whilst he and my father talked of the old days of the
National Complete Suffrage Union and Birmingham meetings, I used to
inspect with ardent curiosity some ingenious model of Windsor Castle
upon which Mr. Lovett was at work. I think my father and some others
assisted Mr. Lovett, and I know that he had a great admiration and
affection for him, which continued until his death in 1877. I stood in
great awe of Mr. Lovett, for I knew that he had been heavily fined for
refusing to serve in the Militia in days long ago, and had suffered
imprisonment in Warwick gaol for his protest against the
unconstitutional employment of the Metropolitan police in Birmingham.
This frail, delicate old man, with the cunning fingers building quaint
models in a back parlour in Paddington, the sweetest and friendliest
of human beings, had been, in the eyes of the government, a
revolutionist. I was always ready to go with my father to see him. I
liked the mystery of him.

The energy my father displayed in his early years at the Bar must have
been considerable. He was much in demand as a lecturer, and as he told
me, for a year or two his main source of income was the delivery
throughout England of his lectures on the Oratory of the Bar, the
Pulpit and the Stage, and another interesting series on the French
Revolution, a subject in which he was deeply read.

I came across a gentleman in Manchester who well remembered his
lecturing at the Athenæum in 1844, and gave him great praise for his
dramatic recitals on the Oratory of the Stage. But his practice at the
Bar must soon have made lecturing tours unnecessary and impossible.
When he was called he said in fun to some friends he was entertaining,
that as soon as he was earning a thousand a year he would give them
all a far better feast. The banquet took place within four years of
the invitation.

His interest in politics never diminished. But when he had made his
great name as an advocate, all invitations to contest a seat in
Parliament were refused. In 1847 he contested Norwich unsuccessfully
against Lord Douro and Sir Samuel Peto, and in 1857 stood for Finsbury
against Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, who was returned by a large
majority. In this election he used to say his chances were seriously
interfered with by a charge――not true, in fact――that he had signed a
petition to open the Crystal Palace and British Museum on Sunday. As
he explained, the only reason he had not signed such a petition was
that he had never been asked.

I have often heard my father speaking in Court, but it was at a time
when I could understand very little of the merits of the dispute or
the quality of the advocacy. He was one of the leaders of the Home
Circuit, a veritable nest of giants, with Bovill, Ballantine, Hawkins,
Lush and Shee. In those days the Home Circuit was a reality. It was
before the abolition of local venue, and every case had to be set down
in the assize town of the county in which it arose. Thus at Guildford,
Kingston or Croydon, all Surrey cases had to be tried, and the lists
took a fortnight or more to finish. My father sometimes took a
furnished house at Guildford in the summer, and we all moved down
there, and on occasion I was taken into Court to hear him speak. In
later years I heard him in several cases, but in no speech of
first-rate importance, and I never heard him defend a prisoner, at
which, I have been told by good judges, he had few equals. I should
say his great asset as an advocate was his honesty and openness. There
is no such thing as first-rate advocacy without a large measure of
frankness. He was very smooth and good-natured in cross-examination,
recognising that to make your way through the defences of the enemy
requires, if the enemy is alert, more strategy than force. He never
indulged in those snappy interjections and quarrelsome interferences
which are but too common, and which, to my mind, are the very badge
and stamp of incompetent advocacy. I fancy to-day his speeches to the
jury would be too ornate, too eloquent and too full of oratory, but in
his own day, and among the juries he had to address, it was more true
of him than of any other that “persuasion hung upon his lips.” Nor can
I be very clear that his style was really too flamboyant, for I was
brought up myself in the school of Russell and Holker on the Northern
Circuit, where there was a passion for business methods, and curt
address and the use of the bludgeon, rather than the rapier, in
cross-examination, which has not even to this day penetrated to the
more leisurely south. For I find that even in southern county courts
advocates are known not only to demand the presence of juries, but to
address them with great complacency on any subject at any distance
from that subject. County court juries are nearly unknown in the
North, where a trial is regarded more as a matter of business than an
affair of display.

When my late brother Judge Willis, K.C., was a junior he was a
constant visitor at my father’s house at Holland Park, and I well
remember him telling a capital story of Holker’s wit as an advocate.
Holker was cross-examining a big, vulgar Jew jeweller in a
money-lending case, and began by looking him up and down in a sleepy,
dismal way, and drawled out, “Well, Mr. Moselwein, and what are you?”

“A genschelman,” replied the jeweller with emphasis.

“Just so, just so,” ejaculated Holker with a dreary yawn, “but what
were you, Mr. Moselwein, before you were a gentleman?”

The answer was drowned in a roar of laughter.

“Capital story, Willis, and very clever,” said my father as he
finished laughing, “always supposing Holker didn’t want to get any
admissions out of the fellow afterwards.”

It is a pleasant and fairly easy thing for an advocate to score off a
witness, but it does not always mean business, and nothing is nearer
to the gospel of the matter than this, that every unnecessary question
in cross-examination is a blunder and every question the answer to
which you have not foreseen is unnecessary.

Affairs of conscience at the Bar and the duty of the advocate were
often discussed between my father and his legal friends, and in the
late seventies, when I was at King’s College School, I heard many
interesting conversations on these themes.

As an illustration of his argument someone told a story of an old
special pleader whose name I forget. Special pleaders, I may remind
the reader, did not address the Court, but drafted the “pleadings,” as
they are called――that is to say, the documents in which the parties
state their respective cases and endeavour to settle the issue. In the
old days these pleas were very technical, and special pleaders who
signed and settled the claim, defence, rejoinder, sur-rejoinder,
rebutter and sur-rebutter made good incomes out of constant but small
fees.

The Pleader was in his chambers in King’s Bench Walk, when late one
night a young Hebrew clerk of a firm of City solicitors rushed in, and
throwing down half a guinea and some papers said, “I vant a plea.”

“But what sort of a plea――what is the defence?” asked the Pleader.

“There is no defence,” said the candid clerk, “but the governor says
he vould like a set-off. He vants to gain time.”

“Hm!” said the Pleader, “a merely dilatory plea to gain time. I don’t
approve of such a thing; but still――――”

He drew out his “Bullen and Leake” and copied out the first plea he
came to, which was to the effect that by agreement made by and between
the plaintiff and defendant, the defendant bargained and sold to the
plaintiff certain Russian hemp, to arrive by and be delivered by the
ship _Sarcophagus_, at the price of £15 per ton, and after further
formalities the defendant sought to set-off the price of this Russian
hemp against the plaintiff’s claim. This he handed to the boy, who
took it away.

A year afterwards the same lad returned with another set of
defenceless papers and another half-guinea, and asked for a similar
plea to be drawn. The Pleader looked at him doubtfully.

“What became of that last case?” he asked.

“Ve proved your plea! Ve proved it!” cried the young clerk in triumph.
“It vos magnificent! Ve vant another. Ve cannot prove the same plea
twice.”

The moral verdict seemed to go against the special pleader, who had
not, it appeared, been properly instructed in the Russian hemp affair,
and it led my father to a curious story of a case in which he had
recently appeared in an inquiry _de lunatico_. I had driven down with
him one Saturday some time before to Dr. Tuke’s private asylum, where
he went to interview his client. The gentleman had great wealth and
was very eccentric, and had recently announced in public that he was
our Saviour. He was certified as a lunatic and had demanded an
inquiry. When we arrived at the house he was playing a game of
billiards with his coat off, but he shook hands very amicably with my
father and put his coat on, and he and the solicitor went along for a
conference whilst I had a hundred up with a young doctor. I had never
seen anyone who was supposed to be insane before and could not
understand, how such a thing could possibly be suggested of the
gentleman I had just met. My father told me on our way home that he
had asked him all manner of questions, which he answered in the most
businesslike manner, and then he said, “I found I must ask him a
question, about his mania. ‘Have you or have you not,’ I asked,
‘maintained that you are our Saviour?’”

“I have,” he said, “and I can give you proofs,” and he proceeded to
ramble incoherently and foolishly. “When he had finished,” continued
my father, “all I said was ‘Well, Mr. X., no doubt you believe in it,
and if you are asked about it you must speak the truth, but in my
humble opinion it is not a strong point in our case.’

“‘You think not?’ asked Mr. X. eagerly.

“‘I am sure of it,’ said my father. ‘Absolutely convinced of it.’ Mr.
X. nodded his head thoughtfully, and so the conference ended.”

When the case came on, Ballantine for the relatives cross-examined Mr.
X., who gave him very admirable, straightforward answers, until the
jury shifted about uneasily and wondered why the man’s liberty had
been interfered with. At last Ballantine came to the conclusion he
must get to grips with him, and suddenly asked him very sternly: “I
put it to you, that on several occasions you have proclaimed yourself
to be our Saviour? Is that so? Yes or no.”

Mr. X. smiled.

“I have consulted my legal advisers on that point,” he replied in a
firm, quiet voice, “and they are all clearly of opinion that it is not
a strong point in my case, and under those circumstances I must
decline to answer any questions about the matter.”

Ballantine could not get him to move from his resolution, and he was
restored to his liberty and his estates.

My father and Ballantine were great rivals at Westminster and on
Circuit, and I remember my father coming home with a capital story
against himself which he used to tell with much glee. He and
Ballantine were engaged in a case before Baron Martin, and he heard a
Scots clerk in whispered tones pointing out to a friend from beyond
Tweed the various celebrities.

“Who is yon?” whispered the visitor, pointing to the judge.

“Martin! Baron Martin,” replied the cicerone. “He’s a grand mon, a
great mon!”

“And the mon that’s speakin’ the noo!”

“That’s Ballantine. He’s a great advocate. He’s a grand mon!”

“And the big mon sitting next him?”

My father pricked up his ears intently. The guide’s voice fell a
semitone to a minor key. “That! Oh, that’s Porry! Serjeant Porry. He’s
a highly over-r-rated mon.”

I wish my father could have lived long enough for me to have heard him
at his best at one of those Garrick dinners, where he loved to get two
or three gathered together in the right place and enjoy pleasant
discourse over the walnuts and wine. Good port and good stories were
his hobbies. There may be better ones, but I doubt it. And anyhow “so
long as a man rides his hobby-horse peacefully and quietly along the
King’s highway, and neither compels you nor me to get up behind
him――pray, sir, what have either you or I to do with it?” But if I had
had the sense or foresight to play the Boswell, what a collection of
good stories even I might have chronicled. Years after he was gone I
was brought up to a London county court to fight an employers’
liability case, and the counsel against me was Mr. Wildy Wright.
Good-natured, obtrusive and antique were his methods of advocacy, but
I was glad to have met him in the flesh, for he recalled to my mind my
father returning from Croydon Assizes bubbling over with delight about
a story of a “certain judge” recently appointed and Mr. Wildy Wright.

The judge had been puzzled by a fierce objection to evidence made by
Mr. Wildy Wright, and reserved his ruling on this point until he had
consulted his brother judge at the adjournment.

During the luncheon interval he put the point to his brother, who was
deeply puzzled.

“And who raised the point?” he asked after a few moments of
complicated thought.

“Wildy Wright.”

“Oh!” replied his brother with a sigh of relief, “Wildy Wright!
Overrule it. And if he makes any other objections, overrule them too.”

The learned judge, much relieved, went back to Court, and in
courteous, silvern tones said, “Mr. Wright, I have carefully
considered the objection you raised before the adjournment and
consulted my learned brother, and we are both agreed that I ought to
overrule it. And I may say for your assistance that if in the course
of the case you make any other objections, I shall feel it my duty to
overrule those also.”

Now I begin to remember those old days and that very happy home, I
feel I should like to try and paint many pictures of its happiness,
but it would be far from my purpose. All I wish to set down is that
from the very first, like Mr. Vincent Crummles’s pony, who, you will
remember, went on circuit all his life, I was brought up among briefs
and the talk of law shop and the traditions of the profession. It was
always one of my ambitions to go to the Bar, but I had very little
hope then that it would be realised. My elder brother, John Humffreys
Parry, who chose afterwards to go on the stage and, after playing in
America with Richard Mansfield, died at the beginning of a brilliant
career, was far better equipped than I was to wear my father’s robes
when he should lay them down. Moreover, in early life, to use a
north-country phrase, I “enjoyed” bad health. I had nearly every fever
known to physicians and fell into the surgeon’s hands twice, breaking
a collar-bone and nearly losing my left hand with an accident arising
out of and in the course of my employment by running a chisel through
it whilst building a toy theatre. In these and other ways my
school-days were often interfered with, and I have been “backward” as
the phrase is ever since.

And how things might have shaped themselves had my father lived, I
cannot say. But that was not to be. For in January, 1880, with little
warning, a tragedy swept away the home that in my young seeming was
the one beautifully permanent, solid fact in the whole world. My
father and mother died within a day of one another and were buried on
the same morning. And there was no home, only a memory.




CHAPTER III

STUDENT DAYS

     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.




CHAPTER IV

CALLED TO THE BAR

     ――is it not well that there should be what we call
     Professions, or Bread-studies (_Brodzwecke_) pre-appointed
     us? Here, circling like the gin-horse, for whom partial or
     total blindness is no evil, the Bread-artist can travel
     contentedly round and round, still fancying that it is
     forward and forward, and realise much: for himself victual;
     for the world an additional horse’s power in the grand
     corn-mill or hemp-mill of Economic Society.

                       CARLYLE: “Sartor Resartus.”


In 1884 I was appointed by Mr. Justice Mathew to the first legal
office I had the honour to hold, and went with him on the Oxford
Circuit as judge’s marshal. Mr. Justice Mathew was a very old friend
of my father, and was one of the team that prosecuted Arthur Orton for
perjury. Of those five, three survivors now remained; Hawkins, Mathew,
and Bowen, and all were on the bench. A judge’s marshal has one
official duty; he swears in the grand jury. His other duties are to
act as the judge’s secretary, to see that everything in the judge’s
lodgings runs smoothly, and to suffer admonition gladly if anything
goes wrong. At the end of the circuit Mathew said at least this in my
favour――that I was the only marshal he had ever had who could carve a
chicken and open a soda-water bottle without injuring the carpets.

We went the Oxford Summer Circuit. Butt was our brother judge. It was
a delightful and valuable experience. Mathew was an ideal judge in
criminal cases, and I have never forgotten a maxim he was very fond of
quoting and acting upon: “When the prisoner is undefended the judge
must be his advocate.” In altered terms, it is a counsel of perfection
for a County Court judge or any magisterial person who has the poor
always before him. To see him double the part of prisoner’s advocate
and judge was to witness a masterpiece of subtle wit and honesty.
There has been much discussion of late about the bias of judges. To my
thinking a judge without bias would be a monstrosity. Mathew was an
Irishman and a Liberal. But I never remember his bias interfering with
a straight delivery; unless, indeed, it was on the trial of an
undefended Irish poacher at Oxford. There truly the Liberal
disappeared in the judge, but I think the Irishman swerved a little
from the true line. Anyhow, Mercy had her way, and the poacher was
acquitted.

There were many who regarded Mathew with something like terror, and
for the life of me why one with so kindly a heart should have rejoiced
on occasion in appearing as a man of wrath I cannot say. Perhaps it
was that if he followed on all occasions his humane instincts he felt
that discipline would not be maintained, and that he was really, as it
were, taking gymnastic moral exercise in working himself into
histrionic anger about nothing in particular. There was generally a
sense of humour in these displays which the sufferer was often too
agitated to enjoy. I remember on one occasion an unfortunate sheriff
had spelt and printed and published Mathew’s name on the calendar with
two t’s. The judge sent for him and received him in the drawing-room
of our lodgings in grave state. He explained to the High Sheriff, who
stood quaking before him in a yeomanry uniform, that the offence he
had committed might well be regarded not as petty treason, but as high
treason, being in effect an insult through him as Judge of Assize to
Her Majesty herself. He sent for Butt and solemnly discussed with him
whether he was not in duty bound to fine the unlucky sheriff at least
£500. Butt, who was never more delighted than when he could play his
part in a jest, for some time seriously agreed with Mathew, and the
two discussed whether imprisonment was necessary as well. Then Butt
began to think the fun had gone on long enough, and took the sheriff’s
side and begged his forgiveness. But Mathew, who was really vexed at
slovenliness of this kind, dismissed the sheriff and adjourned his
decision until the morning, “for,” said he in Cromwellian phrase and
intention, “the fellow must be taught his place.”

But on another and more amusing occasion he caused grave fright to
Lister Drummond, my brother marshal. Drummond was an ardent
Catholic――a convert, I believe――and of course Mathew belonged to a
very old Catholic family. I fear we marshals must have been somewhat
of a trial to our respective judges, and every now and then Mathew
would put his foot down. One morning we both arrived at breakfast
rather later than usual. Mathew was reading the paper and eating his
bacon alone, and looked at us in a very Johnsonian and surly manner,
and only grunted a reply to our greetings. Breakfast proceeded in
silence until the judge had finished, when he put down his paper and
said:

“Whose bedroom is next to mine?”

“I believe mine is, Judge,” I said with hesitancy.

“Hm! Then who on earth was talking to you until two in the morning?”

“Well, you see,” I replied more cheerfully, seeing a mischievous
retreat, “it was Drummond, but I’m sure you will approve of it when I
tell you that he wants to convert me to the Holy Faith!”

“Does he?” roared Mathew, banging his fist on the table and glaring at
Drummond. “Then you may take it straight from me, Drummond, that if
you continue to convert Parry in the small hours of the morning, I
leave the Church.”

He swept out of the room, leaving Drummond as limp as the jackdaw of
Rheims.

Mathew had a considerable power of acting, and could have taken a hand
with the best in the old sport of quizzing or “smoking” the victim,
which is known to the moderns under the name of the game of spoof. I
remember well when we were travelling to some cathedral town I was
specifically ordered to get copies of a ribald and amusing local paper
called the _Bat_, or the _Porcupine_, or the _Jackdaw_, or some such
sarcastic beast or bird. This I did, and the two judges thoroughly
enjoyed an open letter in it to my Lord Bishop of the diocese. The
next evening the Lord Bishop dined with us in state, with other
dignitaries of the city. When we retired to the drawing-room, there on
the table, duly arranged with the _Times_, the _Spectator_, the _Law
Journal_ and other staid prints, were the blatant covers of the
offending papers. They caught the Lord Bishop’s eye. He frowned and
looked gravely on the carpet. Mathew, with his ready observation,
noticed the episcopal uneasiness. He stepped to the table in sudden
anger. He seized the offending copies and turned to me with a look of
grave sorrow, illuminated by a tactful quiver of the left eyelid.

“Isn’t this disgraceful? I can’t hinder you from wasting your money on
such trash. But to bring them into the judges’ rooms and leave them
lying about here――――” He stepped to the fireplace and threw them into
the fire with a sigh. “Surely, Parry――surely you do not need to be
told not to do such things.”

And once more the Bishop smiled a smile of righteousness and peace.

It was only a few weeks’ experience, but it stands out as one of the
times when I learned something of the technic of advocacy. I was only
a “walker on” to the stage of the Court, it is true, but I was on all
the time, and could take note of the courses of the stars. Henry
Matthews, Q.C., and Jelf, Q.C., were doing constant battle in the
Civil Court, and Darling was defending poachers and other offenders on
the Crown side. There was plenty of good example for the apprentice to
study. And in between whiles we rowed our judges down the Wye to
Chepstow and nearly spilled them in the river, and journeyed to
Edgbaston to kiss Cardinal Newman’s ring, and visited under the
pleasantest circumstances the old houses and castles and cathedrals of
the Midlands; as if all the world were playing holidays when you went
the Oxford Circuit in summer.

At the end of 1884 I was married, and in January, 1885, I was called
to the Bar. I determined to go my father’s old circuit, the
South-Eastern, and went down to Cambridge and Norwich and Maidstone to
look round, but came to the conclusion that there was woefully little
to do and plenty of able men to do it. I took a room in Middle Temple
Lane in the old wooden building on the left as you turn out of Fleet
Street. My name was painted on the door, but I doubt if anyone read it
but myself. I wrote some stories for the _Cornhill_, started a law
book that was never finished, and began editing Dorothy Osborne’s
letters. As the Bar did not require my services, and I thought the
country did, I made many excursions for the Eighty Club.

I spoke several times for an old friend of mine, Tom Threlfall, head
of the Salford Brewery, who had come out as a Liberal against the Hon.
Edward Stanhope in the Horncastle Division of Lincolnshire. The
agricultural labourer was coming into his own, and the clergy often
refused us the use of the schools, so we spoke from a wagon in a
field. We had a knot of independent farmers who supported the cause,
and we all drove together in a big brake to the place of meeting. I
shall never forget a serious _faux pas_ of Threlfall’s. We were
passing between two fields heavily manured with the favourite
Lincolnshire dressing, and all the farmers sniffed it up with smiling
approval. It was too much for Threlfall, and he buried his face in an
elegant cambric handkerchief. One of the farmers frowned slightly,
and, by way of encouraging explanation, said: “Eh, man! Pig moock!
Fine!”

The farmers were sorely puzzled at his want of appreciation, and I
could not help feeling that Threlfall was not really cut out for a
Lincolnshire member. Unfortunately, the voters thought so, too; but he
made an excellent fight.

At the end of the year, at an old boys’ dinner at King’s College after
the election Sir Richard Webster, as he then was, proposed my health
as president of the debating society, and chaffed me for belonging to
the wrong camp; but I was able to point out that I had done good work
for both parties, for I had spoken for fifteen Radical candidates and
not one of them had been returned.

The fact was that at that date the followers of Chamberlain and his
“unauthorised programme,” as it was called, were under the grave
disadvantage of working against the ill-concealed hostility of the
moderate Liberals.

I expect when the history of the time is known it will be found that
when Gladstone nominated Rosebery as his successor instead of
Chamberlain he naturally destined his party to their long sojourn in
the wilderness. Certainly in 1885 Chamberlain was as great a name to
conjure with as it is to-day. I was present at Bristol at the Liberal
Colston dinner just before the autumn election, and shall never forget
the enormous enthusiasm with which his name was received.

With the exception of Gladstone, I have never heard a speaker who
could play upon any given audience as a musician upon a great organ,
pulling out first this stop and then another, and winding up with some
diapason of eloquence, some grand swelling burst of harmony, that made
speaker and audience, player and organ, one vast instrument of
triumph.

The most wonderful instance of his magnetic influence and power that I
ever witnessed was when he dined with the Eighty Club on April 28,
1885. It was an open secret that the majority of the club did not want
him to be invited, but a Cabinet Minister could not be passed over.
The audience was apathetic. They laughed awkwardly when he introduced
himself as one “who certainly has never worshipped with Whigs in the
Temple of Brooks’s.” He seemed to get no echo from his audience and
became uneasy. He was speaking from notes piled up on a heap of
oranges in a high dessert dish. Suddenly I saw him drop a page back on
to the heap――he left his notes and his voice rang out amongst us in a
graphic picture of a Birmingham slum and the children crying for milk,
and the shameful contrast of the well-fed, sleek mob in front of him.
Melodrama, perhaps, but rattling good melodrama. It made Radicals for
the moment of every Whig in the room, and when he returned to his
notes and quoted from the “Corn Law Rhymer,” in tones of triumphant
fervour:――

  They taxed your corn, they fettered trade;
  The clouds to blood, the sun to shade;
  And every good that God had made
      They turned to bane and mockery――

cheers echoed and re-echoed, and there was not an ounce of Whig left
in his audience.

Alas! the whirligig of Time brings in his revenges. In a few years
Chamberlain had an entirely new set of politics, and I had none
whatever.

Eighty-six dawned, but the sun did not shine very brightly in Middle
Temple Lane. I had one or two briefs, certainly, but there seemed no
outlook. The South-Eastern Circuit was a far too expensive amusement
for my pocket, and, now that the election was over, there seemed
nothing to do but to write stories that ungrateful editors did not
want and to sit in chambers waiting for unintelligent solicitors who
never came.

It was one winter afternoon. My boy was out at lunch. I was sitting in
that upper chamber in Middle Temple Lane wondering if there would be
more room for my interesting personality in Australia than there
seemed to be in the old country when I heard an eager, heavy footstep
on the last flight. Footsteps generally stopped at the top of the
flight before, where an eminent Old Bailey junior held out. These
footsteps came upward and along; they were unknown and substantial.
Evidently those of a solicitor――of weight. I felt that something
important was going to happen.

There was no knock at the door, and in a moment who should fling
himself into the room but Dick Smith.

“Not a bit of good living up all these stairs; you should begin on the
ground floor. Time enough to come up here when you are all the fashion
and the solicitors must come after you.”

“What are you doing in town?” I asked.

“M‘Lachlan _v._ Agnew and Others. Rolls Court, before Anderson,
Official Referee. Pankhurst leads me, but he has gone back to
Manchester. Shiress Will, Q.C., and Lewis Coward against us. What are
you doing?”

“Nothing whatever,” I answered somewhat dismally.

“Come along and take a note for me this afternoon.”

I had been feeling like a gambler eternally cut out of the table, and
here was a hand in some sort of game dealt for me to pick up. I caught
hold of my blue bag, and putting a note on my door with some pride to
say I was to be found at the Official Referee’s Chambers in Rolls
Court, followed Dick Smith up Chancery Lane.

There is a geographical secret about Chancery Lane that I have
discovered. It leads straight to Manchester.

M‘Lachlan _v._ Agnew and Others should never have happened at all. It
came about mainly because Lachlan M‘Lachlan was a Scotsman and a
photographer, and knew that he knew everything about art――in which he
mistakenly included photography――whilst the defendants, Sir William
Agnew, Sir Joseph Heron, and Mr. Alderman King, knew that they knew
better than M‘Lachlan.

Each set out to prove his thesis to Mr. Anderson, Q.C., in his dingy
chambers in Rolls Court. Neither succeeded, but perhaps Anderson
learned something about art and the parties something about law.

Lachlan M‘Lachlan’s pet idea was that a camera not only could not lie,
but that it could tell the truth, and even interpret new or historic
truths pictorially. He conceived the loyal and patriotic idea of a
great picture, to be entitled “The Royal Family,” which was to depict
a group consisting of every member of the Royal Family surrounding our
Gracious Sovereign Queen Victoria in one of the rooms at Windsor. Each
individual was to be separately photographed, the room and its
furniture were to be photographed in detail, and then the photographs
were to be enlarged, cut out, and pasted on a huge canvas, from which
was to be painted a picture of great size. When this was done the
camera again came into play. Negatives of various sizes were to be
taken, and the ultimate prints sold to the public.

I have very little doubt there was some artistic value in the original
design of the group, for that was the work of that sincere artist
Frederic Shields, and his sketch group, which was prepared in 1871,
won the approval of her Majesty the Queen, who not only gave M‘Lachlan
several sittings herself, but issued her mandate to the various
members of the Royal Family that they were to be photographed in such
dresses, uniforms, and attitudes as Lachlan M‘Lachlan desired. The
various adventures of M‘Lachlan in pursuit of his Royal victims would
fill a volume. This part of the work took some two or three years, and
the great scheme nearly failed because a Princess who had in the
meanwhile grown out of short skirts refused to put them on again to
satisfy M‘Lachlan’s passion for historical accuracy. This matter
was――so M‘Lachlan used to tell us――referred to her Majesty and decided
in his favour.

In 1874 the first photographs were completed, but the plaintiff had
exhausted his means in working on his great project, which required
new capital before it could be finished. There is, I think, no doubt
that the defendants were actuated in the first instance by the kindest
motives, and through their influence about twenty guarantors found
£100 apiece in order that the wonderful historical picture might be
made.

M‘Lachlan had the faith and enthusiasm of a patentee. No expense could
be too great, no time too long to assure the perfection of his work.
The defendants, on the other hand, regarded themselves as the kindly
patron of the poor artist, ready to lend him some money, but eager to
see it return again with that huge additional interest that is the
modern Mæcenas’s expectation when he deigns to encourage literature or
art. Such a combination could but end in one place――the law courts,
though it took many years to reach its natural destination.

I think it was nearly 1877 before the great canvas picture was
produced. It measured 17 ft. by 10 ft. 6 in., and was insured by the
defendants for £10,000. Even when the picture was finished there were
long delays in producing the negatives of different sizes. More money
was wanted, and deeds and agreements were drawn up, unauthorised
prints were condemned by M‘Lachlan and issued by the defendants, and
meanwhile the portraits were becoming more and more historical, and a
picture that might have had some popularity in 1871 had little chance
of success some ten years later.

It was in March of 1885 that the case was opened at Manchester
Assizes. Dr. Pankhurst was for the plaintiff. No one on the circuit
could have trumpeted forth the wrongs of M‘Lachlan with more eloquent
indignation, and few juniors could have enveloped the court in a
foggier atmosphere of financial complications. In tones of emotion and
excitement the learned doctor’s voice would soar into a falsetto of
denunciation of his opponents’ chicanery, winding up in a cry to
heaven――or whatever Pankhurst put in its place――that their villainy
might be punished. It was not, indeed, wholly without justification
that some wild circuit rhymer wrote in Falkner Blair’s “Lament on
Going to India”:

  When I hear in the midst of the jungle O
    The shriek of the wild cockatoo,
  I shall jump out of bed in my bungalow
    And imagine, dear Pankhurst, it’s you.

It is, of course, easy enough to make fun of a great man’s mannerisms,
but Dr. Pankhurst, as a witty conversationalist, an eloquent speaker
who could keep his subject well before a mixed audience on a high
plane of thought, and a man of earnest convictions in moral and
political affairs, was honestly admired by all who had the pleasure of
his friendship. But it must be admitted that at the Bar he was not at
his best. He could not readily sink to the mundane problems by solving
which so many disputes are decided. I remember on a Local Government
Board inquiry, presided over by Colonel Ducat, the engineer of the
Board, I appeared for one district and Pankhurst for another. We were
opposing inclusion into a larger district. Pankhurst, as senior,
started the harangues by throwing up his arms and shouting out on a
top note, “I am here to justify the opposition of the down-trodden
minority of the Stand District. I say I am here to justify the
opposition of the down-trodden minority of the Stand District.”

And justify it he did in passages of great eloquence, close reasoning,
and apposite quotation from history and literature, which were a
pleasure and privilege to listent to. When it was all over, and his
adherents’ applause had died away, Colonel Ducat looked up from his
notes and said: “I’ve listened very carefully, Dr. Pankhurst, but I’m
not clear even now whether you are in favour of the 12-inch drains or
the 9-inch drains.”

I should like to have heard Pankhurst open M‘Lachlan’s case. Mr.
Justice Hawkins listened to it for three days. At the end of that time
figures were mentioned, and Hawkins got frightened, and promptly
referred the matter. What a waste of time and money to have started it
at all. It was a year afterwards, in the middle of the reference, that
I found the case rolling heavily along, a mass of negatives and
photography and correspondence and confusion. Pankhurst was unable to
continue in the case, and they gave me a junior brief to Richard
Smith. I never really understood what the quarrel was all about, but I
do not think anyone else did, unless it was Smith, who made an
excellent reply for the plaintiff.

I only remember one smile during the many weary hours we spent in
those dingy chambers in Rolls Court. Sir William Agnew was being
examined. He was always somewhat pompous and well-to-do in his manner,
and Smith did his best to annoy him. A question arose as to the
authenticity of a letter written by the plaintiff on Agnew’s Bond
Street letter paper.

“I suppose,” said Smith, “if any customer in your shop――I beg your
pardon, emporium――were to ask one of your servants for a sheet of
notepaper, he would give him one?”

“I hope not, sir,” said Sir William, with expansive dignity, “I hope
he would hand him two or three.”

Old Anderson looked at Sir William in Scot’s surprise, and said in his
broadest accent, “Do you really mean that, now?”

I do not think I ever saw the ultimate written judgment of the
Official Referee. I believe both sides appealed from it, and no appeal
was ever heard. It was, from the point of view of English litigation,
one of our failures. There ought to be a compulsory conciliation court
for troubles of this nature, at least to sift out what the quarrel and
dispute really is. But I look back to the case with pleasure. I don’t
think the result left M‘Lachlan worse than it found him, and it
certainly did me a good turn. During those days I heard from Smith of
the wonderful possibilities of the Bar in Manchester, and I made up my
mind I would at least join the Northern Circuit. This I did without
delay, and before the summer I had taken a little house in Heaton
Road, Withington, and turned my back on London for ever.

Just to show what a lot I knew about Manchester, I moved down in
Whit-week――or tried to. For Manchester has an excellent and sacred
custom in Whit-week. Nobody does any work.




CHAPTER V

EARLY MEMORIES OF MANCHESTER

     I see the huge warehouses of Manchester, the many-storied
     mills, the great bale-laden drays, the magnificent horses.

                       “Towards Democracy.”


And by moving down to Manchester in Whit-week I found myself indeed
plunged into a new world. For Whit-week, as I said, is a universal
holiday among all sorts and conditions of people, and every man, woman
and child has his or her share in the feast. For the shops close, the
workman goes to Blackpool or the Isle of Man, and the employer to
Paris or the West Highlands, or St. Andrews, or North Berwick as the
mood suggests, and Lancashire and Yorkshire play cricket at Old
Trafford and the races are run, and the children dressed in white,
carrying their banners, move in procession through streets thronged
with admiring parents. And that all may be at peace and good will the
Protestant children “walk”――that is the Manchester word――on one day
and the Roman Catholics on another, for fear the good Christian
parents of either denomination should batter each other’s skulls
whilst their little children are singing “Lead Kindly Light.” And if
you want to see one of the prettiest sights in the land, go and see
the children “walking,” the little Catholics for choice, because their
frocks are daintier and their banners more picturesque, and their
parents in the crowd, among whom you should stand, are more Irish,
enthusiastic and full of epigram. But by no means go to Manchester in
Whit-week if you want to buy or sell. And if you have to move into a
new house it is obviously not the right season to make the attempt,
for at this season no money or entreaty will save your vans from being
held up, and you may make up your mind to lay your carpets yourself.
When you become a citizen of Manchester you recognise the sanity of
the Whit-week festival. It comes at a time when days are long, weather
favourable, the despair of winter behind you and the joy of summer at
your feet. Some day all England will acquire the Whit-week habit, and
it will cease to be the special luxury of Manchester.

As there was no possibility of work or any kind of progress in
domestic affairs, I had ample leisure to survey the city and study its
geography. My earliest impressions were not prepossessing. The town of
Manchester seemed to consist of one long street――Market Street――which
was far too small for the trams and lurries and men and women who
wanted to use it. All the other streets seemed half empty, and this
one was overcrowded. The costumes of the inhabitants struck me as
grotesque. Men’s gloves were only to be seen in the shop windows, and
I wondered why they were there at all, but discovered afterwards that
the devout carried them to church or chapel on Sundays. Top hats were
worn, certainly, but generally with light tweed suits. Frock coats
were surmounted by boating straws, and I remember the shock
experienced by my Cockney mind when I met a native clothed in correct
black coat and silk hat in Albert Square ruining his chances in life,
as I thought, by the added blasphemy of a short pipe. It must not be
thought that I sighed deeply for the Babylonish garments of the
Temple, for I soon learned that in Manchester, of all places, you
might

  Gi’e fools their silks, and knaves their wine,
      A man’s a man for a’ that.

And, for myself, I cared for none of these things, and no doubt
Charley McKeand――whose outspoken comments on men and manners were the
joy of the circuit――was fully within the truth when he insisted, as he
always did, that I was the worst-dressed man on the circuit.

But truth compels me to say that my memory of the first aspect of
Manchester was a scene of hustle, roughness, and uncouthness rather
depressing to a stranger in a strange land not to the manner born. I
discovered before long the kindness of heart and the real sense of
independence that underlies and is the origin of the Manchester
manner, but I still think that there are many natives who mistake
incivility for independence, thereby lowering their fellow-citizens in
the esteem of mankind.

I could quote many instances of what I mean, but one will suffice. An
eminent Withington butcher, having delivered meat of exceptional
toughness, my wife remonstrated with him about it, when he blurted
out, “Nay, missis, it’s not my meat――if anything’s wrong, more laikely
it’s your teeth.”

It is this kind of greeting that puzzles the softer races of the
South.

And if there was one thing more than another that impressed me as
having the real spirit of Manchester abiding within it, it was the
lurry. I use the word lurry with the true Manchester spelling as
though it were an English and not merely a Manchester word. The lurry
is symbolic of the city and the dwellers within its walls. The lurry
incarnate in wood and iron is a cart or wagon, what you will, a
four-wheeled, oblong, flat tray, cumbersome yet capable of bearing
great burdens. There is a stern largeness about its aspect, a
straightness about its course――it is never at its ease in turning
corners――which always suggests to me an ancient Roman origin, though
there is a noble catholicity about it which is quite the reverse of
Roman, for it will carry anything for money. I have seen a two-horse
lurry marching slowly down Market Street bearing only a solitary blue
band-box. But its chief and usual burden is a load of bales of cotton
cloth. From the upper windows of narrow streets heavy pieces of cloth
are flung accurately and rapidly on to the lurry waiting below, and
the driver, moving within an ace of destruction on the floor of the
lurry, stacks them solidly together until the load is complete. Then
when the sun shines――as it has been known to on occasions even in
Portland Street――the lurry, with its two magnificent horses, strolls
proudly away to station or steamer, no tarpaulin covering its snowy
burden――the harvest of Lancashire――and when your stranger’s eyes
follow it with admiration, you begin to learn something of the spirit
and character of the city whose symbol it is. For the lurry is a
carrier of goods from man to man, a four-wheeled middleman, moving in
a straight, dogged, obstinate course, shoving lighter affairs aside,
disputing its right to all the street even with its own municipality
and their trams, caring little who goes down beneath its hoofs and
wheels so long as the cotton bales and pieces arrive and are sent
forth, and that the loads are pressed down and shaken together and
running over, and that business is good.

And the lurry horses, like the Sunday School children, have their
feast day also, which is the first of May, when, bedecked with ribbons
and caparisoned in gleaming harness, they parade the streets. Who that
has seen them will ever forget the splendid teams of Robert Clay, the
bleacher, as they swing round into Albert Square on a sunny first of
May and gladden the hearts of Manchester man, woman and child, with a
vision of strength and wealth and beauty and business?

For the first idea of Manchester is business, and the second idea of
Manchester is business, and the seventy times seventh idea of
Manchester is business, and the outward and visible sign of the
Manchester idea is a lurry laden with cotton cloth. And had I had a
hand in the emblazoning of a coat of arms, instead of a beehive――whose
denizens are, after all, but a dull set of socialist fellows, fond of
rural pursuits and little embued with the Manchester ideals――I would
have set aside that _terrestrial globe semée of bees volant on a
wreath of the colours_, and instituted a lurry――not _rampant_ or
_courant_, but _passant_――day and night constantly and eternally
_passant_, until the last Manchester contract is fulfilled and the
last load of cotton goods is delivered.

I do not say I learned all this about Manchester in one Whit-week. On
the contrary, it took me a quarter of a century to find out what
little I have learned, and even now I recognise that I am only outside
the veil of a great mystery. For the heart and life and being of
Manchester and its surroundings is a human study worthy of a sane and
honest philosopher, if such a one exist, and I am only attempting to
set down a few traveller’s notes, as it were.

Now, at first, no Courts were sitting, and I sat in my chambers, which
were up two flights of stairs in 41, John Dalton Street――where I
remained even in the days of my prosperity――and there I settled to
work on my edition of Dorothy Osborne’s letters, and only heard the
blurred rattle of the lurries over the stone setts through the double
windows which all Manchester offices must have to preserve the sense
of hearing of their inmates.

And though I think it is a good thing for the fledgling barrister to
write a book of some sort, so that he may have an occupation to keep
him in his chambers, and be there ready to greet that first great
cause which is going to bring him fame or fortune, yet he should never
miss a meet of the profession at sessions or assizes, even though he
is well aware he is merely going to sit at the receipt of a custom
that is not there.

The Manchester Assize Courts, where most of our local courts were
held, are very handsome and convenient buildings. Any other city but
Manchester would have approached them through something better than a
slum. But there is not a single entrance into Manchester that can be
described as either comely or decent. The individual public buildings
of Manchester are, many of them, of exceptional beauty. How fine the
Town Hall would look――if it were washed! The streets of Manchester are
by no means badly cleansed. Why should Manchester wash her feet and
not wash her face? Why should Manchester fail to appreciate what other
cities of Europe seem to understand, that you do not only want fine
buildings, but worthy roads and streets to see them as you approach?
It is the approach shot that Manchester has to learn in architecture.

I shall never forget my first walk down Strangeways towards the
Courts, and the despair that entered into my soul as I thought of the
Embankment and my beloved Temple, with its pure fountain and its
memories of Tom Pinch and Ruth. How dismally I compared these with the
filthy, black, oily river, the grimy cathedral, the ancient
four-wheeled cabs, and their miserable horses bending their knees and
drooping their heads as if in worship of the graven image of Oliver
Cromwell, and then a plunge underneath clanging railway bridges and
along a mean Yiddish street, to encounter a glad surprise when the
glorious vista of the Law Courts swam into my ken. As a practical joke
upon the stranger within your gates――excellent! As a piece of
municipal town planning――rotten!

But if I seem to dwell too much on the deficiencies of Manchester as a
great city, it is only because I am trying to recall as honestly as I
can the first impression it made upon my little Cockney mind, for
to-day when I return to its flags and setts I pace them with as much
of the pride of a real citizen as my modesty will allow. And though
the outward aspect of the streets was somewhat forbidding, the
kind-heartedness of the inhabitants was soon made manifest. It was a
wild venture I had made, but I had one introduction that I presented
without delay, and that was addressed to Mr. C. P. Scott, of the
_Manchester Guardian_. Of all Manchester people Mr. and Mrs. Scott had
the true Manchester instinct of hospitality. It did not matter that
the people introduced were young, unimportant and of no account, that
made it the more necessary to entertain them and introduce them to
others. It was not many weeks therefore before dining at Mr. Scott’s
we met his chief assistant editor, W. T. Arnold.

The world knows Arnold as a writer and historian. I can only speak of
him as a kind friend and my master in journalism. That I should ever
have commenced journalism at all in Manchester rested in the main on
one of those accidental foundations upon which the world seems mainly
to be built.

At that first dinner-party at Mr. Scott’s house my wife went in with
Mr. Arnold. I can remember the occasion well because the whole idea of
the gathering was so new to me. For instance, in London if you dined
with a judge there were leaders of the Bar, a dull stranger and two
old solicitors who had briefed the judge in earlier days. If you dined
with an artist there were patrons, and if possible a critic. If you
dined with a professor, it was all professors, if with a doctor, all
doctors. But here were barristers, journalists, specialist doctors,
members of Parliament and merchants all round one table, and the talk
never degenerated into any one special “shop.” Manchester is exactly
the right size for a dinner-party, and there are enough of all sorts
and conditions of workers in it to bring together a really interesting
company. Moreover Manchester knows how to entertain. It happened,
then, that my wife began to talk to Mr. Arnold about the Seine. We had
had a very interesting trip up the river that summer with an artist
friend, taking over a half-outrigged boat from Oxford, starting from
Caudebec and rowing up to Paris, camping out _en route_. Arnold was
enthusiastic about France and all things French. Moreover he knew Les
Andelys and Chateau Gaillard and Pont de l’Arche. I think my wife
claimed that we were the first English folk to row up the Seine,
except, of course, Molloy and his four on French rivers――for had we
not camped on the Ile St. Georges below Rouen where they were wrecked,
and learned all about their adventures from Madame, the grandmother of
the farm.

But Arnold was sure that he had read something recently about it――he
remembered he had cut it out――it was in the _Pall Mall_.

“That was our trip,” replied my wife.

Arnold bunched up his black eyebrows and had a good look at me across
the table. After dinner he said in that off-hand, desultory way that
hindered him getting to the hearts of some Manchester men――Oxford has
its drawbacks, after all――

“Do you care to write for the _Manchester Guardian_ occasionally?”

Did I care to write? What a question to ask a young man with a wife
and daughter and rent and taxes and no hope of an old age pension.

The bargain was struck, and the next week I commenced dramatic critic.
Arnold approved, and I remained.

I never caught the _Manchester Guardian_ manner, and I know I was too
enthusiastic and unacademic, but I wrote on all sorts of subjects, and
shall always remember the kindness of Arnold, who was my immediate
chief, and all the staff, from the highest to the lowest. Generally
Arnold’s blue pencil was rightly wielded, but now and again, of
course, enthusiasm scored.

I remember among a lot of books to review I had singled out the “Auld
Licht Idylls,” by J. M. Barrie. I am glad to say for my reputation as
a reviewer that it captured me and I enthused. I came into Arnold’s
room in the office after the theatre. I can see him now, sitting
wearily in the midst of proofs and papers. He looked up at me as I
entered with an amused smile――he regarded me, I think, as an
irrepressible, journalistic infant.

“That Scots’ book, you know,” he said, pulling out a proof――“Walter
Scott and Bret Harte and Mark Twain rolled into one. Really, Parry,
when will you grow up?”

I defended my point of view earnestly, and after listening a while he
shrugged his shoulders, saying, “Good night; it’s not badly
written――except for the adjectives. I’ll see to it.” He did see to
it――with the blue pencil. For Arnold did not believe with the moderns
in discovering a new literary genius once a week and canonizing him on
the spot. He was a high priest of letters, and his literary saints had
to be thoroughly tested in the pure fires of his critical insight
before they were consecrated. But months afterwards he was just enough
to say as I brought him in a theatre notice, “By the way, Parry, that
Scots’ book. I’ve read it. We might have left in all that about Mark
Twain and Bret Harte――and even Scott. But mind you don’t do it again;
you won’t find another Barrie in a hurry.”

I have not; nor indeed have I found another Arnold, so patient,
cynical, learned and full of kindliness to those who worked under him.
He was indeed a great loss to Manchester and the English Press. He too
was, like myself, a stranger within the gates. He came to Manchester
in 1879 from Oxford, where I think he had been a coach, and he had
certainly brought from Oxford the best she has to give. For nearly
twenty years he was a hard-working journalist, but he never lost his
love of scholarship, and he was a scholar without pedantry. In his
old-world house in Nelson Street, the site of which is now, I think,
covered by the Infirmary buildings, he loved to greet newcomers and
cheer them on their path with good-humoured, sane and helpful
thoughts. He knew the best of Manchester, for he, too, loved to
explore on foot or a wheel the moors and lanes and woodlands which lie
within such tempting adjacence to the city. “I see him,” writes one
who knew him best, “alert and vigorous, his broad shoulders somewhat
over-weighted by the strong intellectual head, his dark eyes full of
fun and affection.” The picture is by a great artist, and it cannot be
bettered.

The stage lost a real friend in Arnold. His criticisms were not the
fretful, carping essays of the moderns. He had the capacity to do
common-place work earnestly, and gave of his best to the task of every
day. Moreover, he loved good acting, and knew it when he saw it, and
was catholic in his tastes. Like all men, he had his mannerisms. As he
said of himself, “It is the pedagogue in me which needs subduing,” and
in the main he kept it under. Yet I think I could trace his unsigned
writings in the Press by his love of a French phrase. The French were
always with him, and in season and occasionally out of season, like
the great Mr. Wegg, he dropped into French. Some of these adjectives
were well chosen. Thus Irving’s humour in the grave-digger’s scene was
_macabre_; Pinero understood the use of the _mot de la situation_; and
the English opinion of the French classical writers was _sangrenu_――I
have but a hazy notion of the meaning of the word, still it sounds
satisfying. These words are expressive, but on occasion he would, to
show he was a mortal journalist, descend to _déclassé_ and _tour de
force_ like the lower infusoria of the reporter’s room.

I remember in his French enthusiasm he gave me to read a criticism in
a French paper――by Sarcey, I fancy. “Why cannot we do work like that?
Why can’t that be done in England?” he asked.

“I think it might be,” I replied. “Indeed, under proper conditions, I
think I could do it myself. All I should want is the same conditions
as the French fellow――half the first sheet of the _Manchester
Guardian_ once a week to print my criticisms on, and, of course,
Sarcey’s salary, and my name at the bottom of the page.”

The ribaldry of demanding half the first page of the _Guardian_ for
anything but advertisements was too much for Arnold, and the gathering
rebuke of flippancy dissolved in laughter.

Arnold was disabled at forty-four and died in 1904, at the age of
fifty-two. Bravely and unselfishly he bore his weary years of
sickness, using every available hour for scholarship and study. I last
saw him in Manchester some time before his death. He was then very
weak and ill and in great pain; but I remember this of it at least
with pleasure, that when I came to say farewell at his bedside the
word he whispered, at which I proudly caught, was “friend.”

And it was through the kindness of Mrs. Scott, too, that Miss Gaskell
and her sister became aware of our existence and collected us into
their fold, so that whenever some actor or doctor or artist or
musician or writer or thinker came to Manchester there was an
invitation to meet him or her at their historic house in Plymouth
Grove. It is hard to say whether these pleasant dinner-parties were
more refreshing to the body or the soul. One reads of the Parisian
_salons_ of the reign of Louis XV., but one cannot believe that the
privilege of attending Madame Geoffrin or Madame Necker could be
compared to the honour of an invitation to Plymouth Grove. Art,
literature, music, and drama were impersonated by the greatest
artists, though they were not there as lions to gaze at, but rather as
friends of the home. The hospitality and elegance of the entertainment
would have been a happy memory for Lord Guloseton himself, and as he
came away he would have sheathed his silver weapons with content.
Though these were things other houses could give you, the real
treasure casketed in the shrine of Plymouth Grove was the homely
welcome which great and small received from the high priestesses. It
was a _salon_ of Louis XV. conceived in the spirit of Cranford.

And if, as we are promised, there are to be many mansions in the
realms above, I trust it is not impious to hope that one will be
situated in some Elysian Plymouth Grove, exact in every detail to the
dear original. For it must have the same semi-circular drive
approaching its old-fashioned portico, and the steps must be a trifle
steep by which you reach the shuttered door, and I must be permitted
to be young again, unknown and obscure, and to drive up in a heavenly
hired four-wheeled cab, so that when the door is opened by some neat
angel maid-servant I may feel fully again the honour that is done me.
Everything must be in its place in the beloved drawing-room, for each
book and picture, and piece of furniture had its own welcome for you,
and though, of course, I should like to meet the shade of Charlotte
Brontë as well as some of those noted men and women who were visitors
in my day, yet all I shall really wish for is the Manchester welcome
the good ladies gave me twenty-five years ago. For if heaven is to be
a success, there must be kind hostesses to welcome shy, awkward,
unknown, youthful persons like myself, and make us at ease and at home
in the presence of the great ones. And though I write this as a
nonsense dream, I do it because I find it easier to express truth in
that form. And it is certainly true that the good ladies of Plymouth
Grove made Manchester for me and mine as they did for so many toilers
of all degrees, a holier and better place.

Falkner Blair was another kind friend who discovered me when I first
went to Manchester, and helped by his kindly greeting to make its
skies blue for me and its sun to shine on me. He was the leader among
those juniors who practised mainly in the Crown Court, and was
afterwards a judge in India. He and Arnold were good friends, though
they had little but Oxford in common――Oxford has its advantages――and
Blair called Arnold “the Don” and Arnold nicknamed Blair “the
Agreeable Rattle.”

For I remember feeling very lonely wandering about the Courts in those
early days, when Falkner Blair came up to me and said, “Is your name
Parry? Well, come up and take the dogs for a walk and have some
dinner.” It appeared I had met some relations of his, but any pretext
was good enough for Blair to open his house to a newcomer and see what
he was like, and he was a real friend to his juniors.

Blair was a great character. He was a fine cross-examiner, an eloquent
speaker, and a better lawyer than many supposed, but he was
undoubtedly indolent. Full of fads and enthusiasm, he was an excellent
talker, the remains of a classical billiard player, a most redoubtable
gourmet, and a great lover of dogs. The three collies of those days,
Bruce, Vixen, and Luath, were well known in the neighbourhood and
greatly admired by the “doggy.”

Blair had a ready wit. I remember him escorting some ladies round the
law courts during the luncheon hour when they came across the antique
spears of the javelin men piled in a corner of the corridor outside
the judges’ room. “Whatever are those used for?” asked a lady, gazing
at them admiringly.

“Those, my dear madam,” said Blair with prompt decision, “are used by
the Judge in the Crown Court when he charges the grand jury.”

The ladies looked at them with reverent awe and shuddered.

Just as I was beginning to do a little work I was invalided, and the
doctor wanted me to go to the Riviera in January. As I could afford
neither time nor money for this I decided on Barmouth. I was very
depressed about having to go away, and, meeting Blair, told him my
trouble. He was overjoyed. There was nothing doing, and he and Mrs.
Blair and the dogs would join us. He would go ahead and get rooms with
his friend Mrs. Davis, at the Cors-y-gedol. I wonder how many remember
that fine portrait of the dear old lady that her son-in-law, Phil
Morris, R.A., painted.

Blair in an hotel became a kind of proprietor of it and chief guest
rolled into one. The first night we were nearly all awakened by a
horrible noise of clashing bells. It ought to have been a fire, but
nothing had happened, we were told. What really occurred Blair
explained at breakfast without a notion that there was any reason for
apology or regret.

“I sat up till about half-past twelve, and went up to bed and said,
‘Where’s Vixen?’”――the beloved dogs always slept with him. “There was
no Vixen. I went downstairs and looked everywhere, and then heard poor
Vixen whining outside the front door. I tried to undo the chains and
things, but couldn’t manage it, and couldn’t find a soul about, and
there was the poor dog whining outside. Luckily”――what an adverb to
choose――“luckily I found a broom lying about, so I just swept the row
of bells in the passage backwards and forwards until quite a lot of
people came, and we let the poor dog in.”

The late Bishop of St. Asaph, who had come for the rest cure, left the
next morning, but Mrs. Davis only laughed. If Blair was in an hotel it
mattered not who came or went.

Blair was full of hygienic fads, and one of them was a very huge
sponge, which was placed on the window-sill of his second floor
bedroom, and much admired by passers-by in the street. Blair would
discourse at length on the properties of the sponge, and how it soaked
in ozone all day and gave it forth in the morning tub. One afternoon
we were standing at our sitting-room window, which was directly
beneath his bedroom, and Blair called our attention to two little dogs
having a tug-of-war in the street with what looked like a long rope.
Blair cheered on the smaller dog, leaning out of the window and
shouting, “Go it, little ’un! Two to one on the black one. Stick to
it! Stick at it! Hurrah! No! What! Good heavens! It’s my sponge.” The
next we saw was Blair with an umbrella separating the combatants and
swearing vigorously. The hygienic properties of the rescued morsels
were never afterwards referred to.

I learned in that visit the wonderful qualities of Welsh air. I came
down scarcely able to walk from the hotel to the station; I finished
up in a fortnight with more than a twenty-mile tramp. Blair was a
great hill walker, and knew Wales and the Lake District in and out.
The younger generation of Manchester will find as they grow old that
they have lost many of the pleasures of memory which might have been
theirs, because they have spent their holiday hours on crowded tees
and in arid bunkers when they might have been learning something of
what Coleridge meant when he wrote of

  “The power, the beauty and the majesty
   That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain,
   Or forest, by slow stream or pebbly spring,
   Or chasms and watery depths.”

For these things are to be found in Yorkshire and Derbyshire and
Cumberland, and, of all places, in Wild Wales. And one who has lived a
quarter of a century in Manchester and made good use of his time can
at least say this in its favour with all truth and honesty, that it is
the best city in the United Kingdom to get away from.




CHAPTER VI

QUARTER SESSIONS

  SECOND CITIZEN: Marry, we were sent for to the justices.
  THIRD CITIZEN: And so was I: I’ll bear you company.
                       SHAKESPEARE: “Richard III.”


The quarter sessions courts are some of the oldest criminal courts in
the kingdom. Some time in the reign of Edward III. their quarterly
sittings were ordained by statute, but long before that they were a
general court of justices for the maintenance of the peace, though not
sitting quarterly. Henry V. appointed them to sit in the first weeks
after Michaelmas Day, the Epiphany, Easter and the Translation of St.
Thomas à Becket, which is July 7. These dates are but slightly
modified by modern statute.

It is curious how through the ages the clever ones of the world have
gibed and jeered at justices and justices’ justice. And yet at the
bottom of the heart of English folk there is a feeling of love for
these old institutions, and after all――fair play to them――they work
well and make no more blunders in the administration of justice than
any other courts, as the statistics of Appeal Courts will testify. But
when you have on the bench a large number of laymen, many invested
with a power the attributes of which they do not understand, you are
bound to get character and comedy, and that is what to my mind
attracted the writers of various ages to the justice of the peace
rather than any burning desire for legal reform.

And well it is that it has been so, for otherwise we should never have
met Cousin Shallow――Robert Shallow, Esquire――“In the county of
Gloster, justice of peace and _coram_. Ay, cousin Slender and
_cust-alorum_. Ay, and _rato-lorum_ too.” And these allusions to-day
only tickle the fancy of the antiquarians. But on their own first
night every playgoer must have known the difference between a mere
justice, and one of the _quorum_, and knew too, that the Custos
Rotulorum was the principal civil officer of the county. I wager the
play opened with a roar when Shallow stamped himself on his entrance
as an absurd boaster who did not even know the titles of the dignities
he claimed to have held. One can forgive Fielding his laughable
account of Squire Western and his justiceship, which “was indeed a
syllable more than justice,” for Fielding was a stipendiary
magistrate, and I never met a stipendiary who had not a low opinion of
the lay justices, the reason being, I suppose, as Montaigne tells us,
that “few men are admired by their servants.” Dickens was a reporter,
and no doubt had come across the actual justice of the peace who sat
for the portrait of Mr. Nupkins, but I think he would have agreed that
Sam Weller’s judgment that “there ain’t a magistrate goin’ as don’t
commit himself twice as often as he commits other people” is to be
taken in a Pickwickian sense. Lay justices no doubt do commit
themselves individually, but is this not true even of justices of the
King’s Bench Division? For instance:――But forbear! Who am I that I
should suddenly become presumptuous and self-willed and begin to speak
evil of dignitaries.

And looking back quite honestly at the work done by justices at
quarter and petty sessions, I think the outcry that arises over
individual instances of mistake, though good as a tonic for the bench,
is not a fair thing if it is the only comment that fellow citizens
have to offer to the wide amount of useful and honourable work that is
done by the lay magistracy.

But as a beginner at the Bar, I did not go to quarter sessions to
study the interesting social problem of the value of a lay magistracy,
but because it was in these courts I first attained not only the right
of audience, but the thing itself. There were many sessions to attend,
the most important being the sessions of the county holden at
Lancaster, Preston, Salford and Kirkdale. Then there were the city
sessions for Manchester and Liverpool, and borough sessions at Wigan
and Bolton, the last-named being genially presided over by that good
friend of the circuit, Sam Pope, Q.C. Even if you had no work when you
got there, the jaunt into new surroundings and the social meeting when
you arrived, and the feeling that after all you had a place in the
pageant of some kind, was a pleasant relief from the dreariness of
sitting in chambers. I suppose the racehorse who walks in after the
race is over prefers being out on the heath to standing in his stall
all day, and so it is with a junior barrister at quarter sessions. It
is good to be in the race at all. And then as now, and I suppose as
always, there was the same moaning about the want of work and the
overcrowded state of the profession. But in the nature of things a
profession, to be worth anything at all, must be overcrowded, the
struggle for existence must be strenuously fought, many must be called
and few chosen or a high standard of work will never be maintained.

There is no doubt at all that the most difficult thing to do at the
Bar is to begin. For years you go round the links without a golf ball,
as it were, unless you have the luck to pick one up somewhere.
Gilbert’s classical receipt, namely, to fall in love with the rich
attorney’s elderly, ugly daughter, is scarcely available to the
married man.

I remember a disappointed cynic on the Northern Circuit, watching a
third-rate encounter between two barristers of different religions,
saying to me: “Parry, if I had my time over again I should start the
Bar as a Jew or a Roman Catholic.” And certainly if you look among the
list of those who have done well in the profession the members of
these bodies are not unnumbered among the upper dogs.

Another way to success is to start with plenty of money. As Falkner
Blair said of a wealthy young junior, who was keen about getting work,
“What a pleasant thing it would be to have £5,000 a year to buy briefs
with――only why not buy something jollier?”

But money and friendly solicitors are not alone sufficient. Indeed, I
have known men who were injured at the opening of their career by
having briefs thrust at them which they were not equipped to deal
with. Many of us, however, would have taken that risk willingly, no
doubt.

If, however, you know no solicitors and belong to no community
specially interested in your welfare, and have no money, the only way
is to show yourself at quarter sessions in the hope that you may be
discovered by some enterprising solicitor.

The quarter sessions of the city of Manchester, holden at Minshull
Street, are run by the city authorities. There is a list of the
members of the Bar present, and as counsel have the sole right of
audience, each prisoner has to be prosecuted by counsel, and the minor
cases are “souped” or given out in rotation among the junior bar.
After this ceremony was over those of the juniors who had drawn blanks
made off to lunch at their clubs, and were seen no more.

I found it sufficiently entertaining to sit in court and listen to
Blair and Shee, and Byrne and McKeand, defending prisoners, and my
first glimpses of Manchester clubs were so pleasant that I
deliberately did not join any for some time, so that I should not be
tempted to be away from chambers in working hours. There were
generally two courts at the Manchester Sessions, and it was not long
before I was asked by some of my seniors to hold their briefs in one
or another.

At that time our recorder was Henry Wyndham West, Q.C. Manchester and
West had very little in common. He was a typical Whig aristocrat, born
and bred in London, impartial, honest, and fearless in his
administration of the law, but apparently wanting in sympathy for, and
certainly lacking in knowledge of, the working class in the north of
England. It is said that in 1865, when he was appointed to the
Recordership, he startled a Manchester jury by some strange comments
on the evidence as to the time of a theft. “Then, gentlemen, we are
told that this happened at the dinner-hour. I think learned counsel
for the Crown should have asked the witness to state the time more
definitely, for, as we all know, the dinner-hour may mean any time in
the evening between 6.30 and 8.”

West, in his day, had had a great practice in the Yorkshire West
Riding Sessions in cases as to the “settlement” of paupers, but these
were all dead and gone now, and, except in a few important
prosecutions, he did not do much work on circuit. For some reason
unknown, he and the late Lord Coleridge did not love one another.
Falkner Blair used to tell a story of Lord Coleridge coming on circuit
in the early days and asking him about West.

“I never see him at Westminster. What does he do?” asked Lord
Coleridge in his suavest and most silvery tongue.

“He’s Recorder of Manchester,” replied Blair.

“Ah!”

“And Attorney-General for the Duchy of Lancaster.”

“Dear me!”

“And judge of the Salford Hundred Court of Record.”

“Is he really?”

“And prosecuting counsel for the Post Office.”

“You don’t say so!” said Coleridge, throwing up his head in
astonishment. “What a lot of outdoor relief the fellow has!”

West, however, certainly had his revenge in a case at Liverpool. He
was defending some men for assault upon a woman. The jury had
disagreed at Manchester, and Lord Coleridge, who was eager to get a
conviction――probably for good reason――tried them again in Liverpool.
Louis Aitken――who held a junior brief in the case with West――used to
give a graphic account of the scene as one of the most polished, yet
deadly encounters he had ever witnessed between Bench and Bar.

West had put up some men in the court, and asked the woman questions
about them. He did not call the men as witnesses. After West had made
his speech to the jury, during which there had been several skirmishes
between Coleridge and himself, the Lord Chief Justice began the
summing-up and West went out of court. The Chief commented severely
upon West omitting to call the men who had been shown to the jury.
Nash, one of West’s juniors, jumped up to remonstrate, but Lord
Coleridge swept him aside. Aitken went out for West, who returned and
made an endeavour to interrupt the judge, for which he was sternly
rebuked, and the summing-up continued to the end and the jury retired.
Then West, with aristocratic humility, but in the tone of a
schoolmaster who is going to administer punishment at the end of the
lecture, began:

“My lord, I understand your lordship commented unfavourably on my
action in not calling as witnesses the men who were put up in court
for identification by the prosecutrix.”

“I did, indeed, Mr. West,” replied Coleridge in his silkiest manner.
“Very unfavourably; indeed, I regretted to feel compelled to make such
strictures on the conduct of counsel.”

“I feel sure your lordship would, and it is with equal regret, and
only because it is my duty to the prisoners and your lordship, that I
must call your lordship’s attention to the case of the Queen against
Holmes, reported in 1871 in the first volume of the Law Reports Crown
Cases Reserved, at page 334. This case overruled the case of the Queen
against Robinson, which doubtless your lordship remembers.”

“And what does the Queen against Holmes decide, Mr. West?”

“It decides that such witnesses cannot be called,” said West, handing
up the volume with a grave bow. “Your lordship will find that the
Court of Crown Cases Reserved had exactly the same point before them,
and overruled your lordship’s learned father for the same error that
your lordship has fallen into this morning.”

Coleridge did not lose his head, but replied with a charming bow and a
sweet smile, “I am much indebted to you, Mr. West.”

West bowed low, and the duel was over.

Coleridge had to send for the jury and tell them his mistake, which he
did, of course, amply and thoroughly, and the men were acquitted.

To my thinking West was a valuable asset to Manchester citizens, and
they should have accounted it a privilege to have the constant example
of a righteous aristocrat before them, if only to remind them that the
Manchester ideal of men and manners is not the only ideal in the
world. In nothing did these two ideals clash with greater sound and
fury than in relation to commission cases, many of which came before
the Court of Record. The commission sought to be recovered in that
court was generally about as mean and low a commercial transaction as
could be well imagined. On the sale of the goodwill of a public-house
or a business some tout would get hold of seller or buyer, and if he
refused to be squeezed into paying a commission there would be a
speculative action.

In one of these cases relating to a public-house I was addressing the
jury, and our best point, I remember, was that up to now no one had
paid a commission of any kind, and therefore it was very reasonable my
client should have one. I was expatiating on this when West
interrupted in his biting way:

“Is it a crime in Manchester to sell a public-house without paying a
commission?”

“Not a crime,” I replied, “but exceedingly bad taste.”

The Manchester jury nodded approval.

After I had won the case West and I walked up Strangeways together. He
never wore a greatcoat, and in the summer sported a white hat. I can
see his upright figure striding along with hands behind his back and
hear the comedy of indignation in his voice as he turns round to me
and says, “I tell you what it is, Parry. If a Manchester man sold his
soul to the devil, some fellow-citizens would sue his executors for a
commission on the transaction.”

“Very likely,” I replied, “and, after all, there are several members
of the Northern Circuit we could spare to go down and take the
evidence.”

But one would give a wrong impression of West if one left it to be
understood that he was an indifferent judge. He was most earnest and
painstaking in the discharge of his duties, and though he never sought
to gain popularity by sentimentalism, he was very ready if he felt he
could honestly do so to extend clemency to youths and first offenders
and to the weak who had fallen through temptation. The heavy sentences
he gave to the “scuttlers”――gangs of young hooligans who used to
terrorise the back streets――were the subject of much comment. But they
stamped out the disease, at all events temporarily, and left the
ground clear for the more permanent cures of social reformers. The
scuttler of the eighties finds a more wholesome outlet for his energy
to-day in the boxing competitions at the lads’ club or in the
battalions of the Boy Scouts. On all occasions where West had to deal
with questions having a moral and social as well as a legal aspect,
his judgments were always healthy in tone and liberal and enlightened
in policy. I remember well in a prize-fighting prosecution how clearly
and wisely he drew the distinction, difficult to define in legal
language, but easily understood in the common-sense light he threw
upon it, between boxing as a wholesome and desirable sport or pastime,
and prize fighting as a brutal and degrading spectacle or
entertainment.

In all affairs that came before him he expressed the views of a
moderate, sensible English gentleman who brought sound instincts of
right and wrong to bear upon his interpretations of the law. Those who
knew him personally will long remember the charm of his somewhat
old-world courtesy, and recall with pleasure the wealth of his
reminiscences and anecdotes of early Victorian years. And now he is
gone we may openly remember his charitable deeds. Harsh and stern as
he was generally accounted, some of us could have told of cases where
he had personally assisted the relatives of those whom in the course
of his duty he had been obliged to sentence to imprisonment. But had
one written of these things in his lifetime, one would have forfeited
his friendship, so careful was he to hide his good works before men
and to leave his left hand in ignorance of the doings of the right. To
those who knew the man as well as the judge, he will always remain an
example of the aristocrat at his best.

The quarter sessions of the county, holden at Preston and at Salford,
were, when I first went to Manchester, very thriving and busy
institutions. They were both presided over by William Housman Higgin,
Q.C., a Lancashire worthy of an old-fashioned type. He took great
pride in the orderly administration of justice at his sessions, and
conceived the Lancashire county justices to be ideal managers of
county affairs. It was, indeed, generally admitted by the enemies of
the system that Lancashire gained very little from the practical point
of view by the institution of a county council, so excellently had the
magistrates done their work. It grieved Higgin as years went on to see
the new borough sessions of Oldham, Salford, Blackburn, and Burnley
carved out of his district and diminishing the prestige of his most
ancient jurisdiction, and he argued from a public point of view that
as the leaders of the junior bar could not attend at these minor
sessions, the work would never be done with its old efficiency. Be
this as it may, it is certain that there is to-day no school of
advocacy comparable to Higgin’s quarter sessions when they were led by
Shee, Falkner Blair, and Charlie McKeand in the criminal cases, and
Sutton, Bradbury, and Yates in the rating and licensing appeals.

Higgin wore a beard, and his movements were greatly impeded by gout.
There was, perhaps, no great outward appearance of dignity in his
presence, but, sitting in court when he was on the bench, I always
felt that I could realise the phrase “the majesty of the law.”
Everything, however trivial, was conducted in the grand manner, and if
Higgin was not without humour outside the court, within its walls he
did not allow this to escape even by the twinkle of an eye.

I remember at Preston a little juryman of a fussy nature claiming to
affirm instead of taking an oath. The matter was referred to Higgin,
who bowed gravely and said, “By all means, let the gentleman affirm.”

This did not satisfy the little juror, who, with impudent insistence,
called out in a shrill voice, “But I claim a right to affirm. I claim
it as of right.”

“Oh!” said Higgin, suavely, looking down on the unfortunate little man
as a dignified cat might look at a mouse. “Oh! you claim it as of
right. And on what ground, may I ask?”

The little juror flushed with pleasure. Higgin was giving him the
opportunity he had been looking for.

“Because I am an atheist,” he blurted out: “I do not believe in a
God.”

Higgin gave him a withering look and waved him out of the box with his
gouty hand, and another juror was chosen and sworn. Even then,
outraged as Higgin’s feelings were, I think nothing would have
happened, but the pertinacious juror jumped up and said, “I suppose I
may go.”

This was too much for Higgin’s patience, and with all the solemnity at
his command Higgin delivered the following sentence: “No, sir, you may
not go. You are summoned here as a citizen to take part in these
proceedings as a juror. If I am to believe your word――and,
unfortunately, I see no reason to doubt it――the oath that has been
offered to you would not be binding on your conscience, and there is
no law enabling you to qualify yourself for your duties. At the same
time, you have been rightly summoned here, and it is your duty to be
present from the sitting of the court at nine-thirty until the court
rises for the day. Go into yonder gallery,” continued Higgin, pointing
up to a solitary gallery opposite the bench, “and continue there,
under pain of fine and imprisonment, until the sessions are concluded,
from which place it will be your privilege to watch the proceedings of
twelve honest Englishmen who do believe in God.”

I think at the end of the harangue, so impressively did Higgin deliver
it, that the juror expected to hear that he was “to be hanged by the
neck until he was dead.” He slunk away to his lonely gallery, and
Higgin never failed to make him a special bow of recognition every
time he entered the court.

The sentences given by Higgin seemed to me terrible and almost brutal,
but, as a matter of fact, the class of criminal dealt with is a very
difficult proposition. Parliament provides no other way of keeping him
out of mischief than penal servitude. If he is constantly in and out
of prison he is a source of anxiety and wretchedness to his family and
a dangerous nuisance to the public. Higgin’s view was that when a man
insisted on living by theft, society ought to keep him out of
mischief, and, though it is a rough and perhaps cruel method of doing
it, the sentimentalist would probably be better employed in
instituting some kinder form of asylum for the hopeless cases than in
vainly clamouring for their release from prison. There is at least as
much to be said for the judge who put the Dartmoor shepherd in prison
as for the statesman who let him out.

Higgin had a very considerable practice in arbitrations, both as
counsel and umpire or referee. He was popularly said to have killed
the arbitration system in Lancashire by the length of the arbitrations
and the height of his fees.

Certainly the old days of fat arbitrations, with short hours and long
lunches, did not survive into my time, though I was engaged in one or
two important arbitrations which I thought were fought out with
businesslike dispatch. Indeed, I think a good arbitration is the very
best tribunal for a business dispute, always assuming that it is the
interest of everyone connected with it to get it done at reasonable
speed.

In Higgin’s day, alas! it was otherwise. I remember a good story Gully
once told me of a Manchester arbitration. Two business men, brothers
and partners, had very serious disputes, and agreed to dissolve
partnership. Under their deeds of partnership the dispute had to go to
arbitration. Arbitrators were chosen on each side and Higgin was
appointed umpire. The tribunal sat at the Mitre, a favourite home of
Higgin, and on the first day of the case Gully appeared for the
defendant and Leresche――afterwards County Stipendiary――for the
plaintiff. Neither brother had spoken to the other for many weeks, and
the whole dispute was rather a painful one. About 11 o’clock Higgin
arrived, and having greeted everyone with friendly but dilatory
courtesy, opened a few letters which his clerk had brought, and
replied to them after obtaining leave of counsel to do so.

Mine host then brought in the menu, and general consultation as to
lunch took place. The hour was fixed at 1.30, the hot-pot ordered, and
the brand of wine decided upon. The two brothers glared at each other
during these strange proceedings with the uneasy feeling that this was
to be a funeral feast and they were the corpse. To their rough
Lancashire minds it had somewhat that appearance. And now it was
nearing 12, and Leresche proceeded to open the case. Leresche was not
a man of few words at any time, and his methods of obtaining full
value out of an arbitration were expensive and peculiar. He started
off by reading some Scots deeds. They were deeds, he said, referred to
in the partnership deed, and were deeds of trust and settlements and
wills showing for some generations where the partnership moneys had
come from. Gully protested that these were not relevant, but Higgin
gravely shook his head and said he never interfered with counsel in
his opening, and away sped Leresche through a bewildering maze of
incomprehensible Scots law, continuing each deed to the end of its
jargon, and then folding it up and placing it reverently in the middle
of the table in front of Higgin. There was a leisurely and social
lunch, all enjoying themselves except the two brothers, who sat silent
in sulky gloom. Leresche, duly refreshed, went at the deeds again
until about half-past three, when he suggested an adjournment.

“For now,” he said, putting his hand on the goodly pile before him, “I
have read every deed, and, subject to what you may say, sir, and what
my friend, Mr. Gully, may have to say, I really cannot, for my part,
see why it should be necessary during the course of the arbitration to
refer to these deeds again.”

“I cannot see how it would assist us,” said Higgin, gravely, “unless
Mr. Gully――――”

Gully assured him he never wanted to see or hear of the deeds again.

“Very well, then, Mr. Leresche, about to-morrow? Eleven o’clock?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Leresche, “and then I hope to begin to open the
business part of my case.”

“By all means,” said Higgin, “eleven o’clock, gentlemen.”

As the two brothers were going downstairs the elder tapped the junior
on the shoulder.

“Come and have a whisky with me, Donald.”

“I will, Ronald.”

“I tell you what it is, Donald. We’re being had on a bit here.”

“I’m thinking the same, Ronald.”

They retired into the snug bar, and spent a friendly hour together.
The next morning at eleven all met except Ronald and Donald. Their
solicitors with blank faces produced letters from their clients that
the litigation was over, and would they each send in their bills.

“Ah!” said Higgin, smiling pleasantly at the disconsolate Leresche.
“To hear you read those Scots deeds would take the fight out of the
most litigious. I ought to have stopped you. But, never mind, we have
one consolation. Blessed are the peacemakers.”

And though both West the aristocrat and the Whig and Higgin the stern,
unbending Tory were both sound judges, kind-hearted men and honest,
upright, conscientious administrators of the law, yet it is easy to
see that their usefulness was limited by their education and
environment, and that it would be untruthful to deny that in all human
beings――in judges no less than in smaller men――there is a class bias
drawing their minds to certain conclusions and points of view. And no
one can certainly blame those whose bringing up has been less
fortunate and whose University has been the factory or the pit, from
recognising very clearly that the judicial mind does not readily
coincide with the views and thoughts and aspirations of their own
class. And this must remain so as long as the official places in the
law are the appanage of the upper and middle classes.

I have often wondered why more of the clever younger men of the
working class do not grapple with the study of the law. A few years
ago I addressed a labour audience in Manchester on this subject and
listened to an interesting firsthand discussion of the matter.
Although not expressed in so many words, I think there was an idea at
the back of many speakers’ minds that an individual selected to be
educated and equipped for the profession would in the end break away
from service to his order and seek to make good a great individual
career. But I am not sure that this would of necessity be the case. I
cannot imagine, for instance, that Charles Bradlaugh if he had been at
the Bar would have utilised his sound and ingenious legal mind merely
in the making of money. And the experiment should certainly be tried
in the interests of the whole community, for the Labour Party will
never be able to express its thoughts articulately and clearly until
it has its own Attorney-General who can advise its Cabinet on the
legal aspects of the measures they have to consider.

And one reason why I should not like to see the ancient lay office of
Justice of the Peace abolished is because there and there alone men of
the working class are brought on to the bench as actual ministers of
the law. No doubt as time goes on and education advances we shall find
the circle widening out. There should be far more working men sitting
on juries, and paid for their services, there should be more
representatives of all branches of trades and industries sitting on
the bench and taking part in quarter sessions, and the amalgamation of
both branches of the profession would, I feel sure, lead to less class
origin in judicial appointments.

But looking at the administration of the law in this country in
comparison with others, I cannot but think that the court of quarter
sessions――especially the larger county sessions, where the lay element
is strongly represented upon the bench――is a court wherein an innocent
man desiring an honest verdict may take his trial with a real sense of
security. And though no sane and reasonable citizen doubts the honest
administration of the law in our country, yet perhaps words have
fallen of late years from the lips of those in high places not
unnaturally misunderstood in the lower places where they fell. For
there are judges who make little effort to put themselves in the place
of the poor folk whose affairs they are dealing with, and forget to
obey the fifth law of Nature according to the statute of Thomas Hobbes
of Malmesbury. And “the fifth law of Nature is Compleasance; that is
to say, that every man strive to accommodate himself to the rest.” Or
as St. Paul wrote to the Galatians――but you remember that.




CHAPTER VII

THE SENTENCE OF DEATH

     The more attention one gives to the punishment of death,
     the more he will be inclined to adopt the opinion of
     Beccaria――that it might be disused.

                       JEREMY BENTHAM: “Theory of Legislation.”


I have long gone about with a conviction that Sir Henry Wotton was
right when he said that “hanging was the worst use man could be put
to.” Not that I think he ever thrashed out the pros and cons of the
matter in his mind, but being, as Dr. Ward says, a man of noble
purposes and high thoughts, whose qualities united into “the amalgam
of a true English gentleman,” he knew instinctively that the thing was
repellent to his nature, and therefore it followed that it was
economically unsound and morally wrong. Being a courtier, he pretended
that the sentiment was that of the Duke of Buckingham, and being a man
of humour he invested his Grace’s thought in an epigram. And for my
part, though the judgment is some three hundred years old it is the
last word on the subject. Dr. Johnson, who, whatever greater qualities
he possessed, was not a gentleman――or to be more accurate, perhaps,
was on occasion “no gentleman”――was wont to express himself wittily on
the subject of hanging, for, as he said, “Depend upon it, Sir, when a
man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind
wonderfully.” In like manner, in the true conservative spirit, he
inveighed against the abolition of the good old days of Tyburn. “The
age is running mad after innovation; all the business of the world is
to be done in a new way; Tyburn itself is not safe from the fury of
innovation. No, Sir, (said he eagerly,) it is _not_ an improvement:
they object that the old method drew together a number of spectators.
Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw
spectators they don’t answer their purpose. The old method was most
satisfactory to all parties; the publick was gratified by a
procession; the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be
swept away?”

Of course the old fellow was only pulling young Boswell’s leg. These
were not his real opinions at all. Thanks to Dr. Birkbeck Hill, one
can always study the varying philosophy of Dr. Johnson with his pen in
his hand, and Dr. Johnson with his tongue in his cheek.

Johnson, the man of letters, “the strong and noble man” in an essay in
the _Rambler_, gives us his real, earnest, sincere thoughts on the
sentence of death. “It may be observed that all but murderers have, at
their last hour, the common sensations of mankind pleading in their
favour. They who would rejoice at the correction of a thief are
shocked at the thought of destroying him. His crime shrinks to nothing
compared with his misery, and severity defeats itself by exciting
pity.”

In that last phrase it seems to me that the great man puts his finger
upon the real objections to the death sentence from the public point
of view. The pity that should be bestowed upon the victim is poured
out in muddy sentimentalism at the foot of the scaffold. The sentence
of death, “of dreadful things the most dreadful,” surrounds its victim
with a halo in the morbid, popular mind that blacks out the sense of
the crime and cruelty for which the murderer is to be punished.

It is curious how little interest is taken in the subject of the death
sentence to-day. On many a question of sociology the best that has yet
been said has been said many generations ago. When Cesare Bonesana
Marchese di Beccaria published his “Dei Delitti e delle Pene” in 1764
the world was thirsting to read what was to be said scientifically
about crime and punishment, and the book actually caused the abolition
of many death sentences in several European countries. For a book to
cause any reform whatever sounds to-day like a miracle.

And, indeed, it almost seems as though since the eighteenth century
the pendulum has swung back again towards the Old Testament view of
things. In this matter of capital punishment the modern authorities
are more disciples of Moses than of the Apostles. They cry out, “Eye
for eye, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe;” yet
the student of Asiatic folk-lore might well remember that Cain was not
sentenced to death, but, on the contrary, was purposely protected from
execution.

That the death sentence is a deterrent is commonly said, yet the
evidence seems to me unconvincing. The fear of death is a weakness;
but, in fact, death is not a subject widely thought of. A murderer no
more contemplates death on the scaffold than he thinks of any other
form of death. As to the disgrace of such an end, that is more than
compensated for by the opportunity of bravery and display so dear to
criminal conceit. No sooner is a man condemned to death than the whole
attitude of the official mind changes towards him. He is treated with
exceptional humanity. His gaoler becomes full of charity towards him.
The clergyman assures him of divine forgiveness. He dies in the odour
of sanctity, with pious sentiments upon his lips. Time is not perhaps
necessary to repentance, but surely as a test of repentance, time is
of the essence.

That there is a real human sentiment against hanging comes out, I
think, in the odium and horror with which the actual hangman is
regarded. Mr. Marwood, of Horncastle――from whom as a boy I used to buy
shoe laces, which were regarded with religious awe by my class
mates――felt this very deeply. He was an amiable, kindly man, as I
remember. Indeed, why there should be any special prejudice against a
hangman if his office is so necessary and worthy, it is hard to
understand. The race is a tender-hearted one, if records may be
believed. Mr. James Berry, to whom Mr. Marwood handed over his rope
and pinions, tells us in that naïve and excellent autobiography of his
“Experiences of an Executioner,” that before his first execution, when
his dinner arrived consisting of “rice pudding, black currants,
chicken, vegetables, potatoes, bread and the usual teetotal beverages,
I tried to make the best of it, but all that I could do was to look at
it, as my appetite was gone.” Is not that even more convincing than
all the philosophy of Beccaria? The prisoner eats a good breakfast,
the hangman starves, the prisoner in the dock is calm and reasonable,
the judge breaks down and weeps. What mean these portents?

Some day it will dawn on rulers that it is not a wise example to the
mind of murderous tendency to deliberately do the very thing which the
State professes to regard with feelings of grief and indignation. When
a low-class ruffian runs amuck, shouting “I’ll swing for you!” and
murders his victim, he is proving the corollary of the Mosaic
proposition. If the law is to be a life for a life, it is fair for him
to take a life when he is ready to give his own in exchange. It is
rough, brutal logic, but not wholly fallacious.

And what will bring governments to a really grave consideration of the
subject is the increasing difficulty in obtaining a conviction for
murder, and the still greater difficulty in carrying out the sentence
afterwards. In the Habron case the sentimental public was right and
officialdom wrong, and the former saved a life. Since then the
sentimentalists back their opinion against officialdom on every
sentence that is pronounced. Scarcely any murderer outrages the public
mind so greatly but petitions are widely signed by the hysterical
against the fulfilment of the law. True we have abolished Tyburn and
the bellman of St. Sepulchre’s, and the apples and ginger-bread and
the fighting and bawling and gin drinking. No longer does Lord Tom
Noddy invite his friends to supper at the Magpie and Stump “to see a
man swing at the end of a string” in the morning sunrise. But have we
not something of the same degradation in the highly spiced, detailed
accounts of every moment of a murderer’s life from the day of the
crime, through the excitement of the chase, up to the dramatic
capture, and then along the close verbatim of the evidence until we
reach the grand _dénouement_ of the sentence of death. Some there are
still faithful to eighteenth-century tradition, huddling in the cold
streets round the gaol gates to watch the gaoler put up a notice of
the end, for the old black flag dear to this little band of stalwarts
has been hauled down, alas! for the last time. Of all the blessings of
the Education Acts none is taken greater advantage of, I should say,
than the privilege of reading the diligent and accurate reports of
murder trials in the Press of to-day. Personally, I prefer the ballads
and broadsides and last dying speeches and confessions of the older
race of criminals, but some of the picturesque articles of the
imaginative――or, as he prefers to be called, descriptive――reporter of
the more saffron-coloured Press have the true eighteenth-century
brush-mark, and I confess that they give me a momentary second-hand
thrill of horror quite acceptable to my coarser nature. I do not wish
to do these excellent writers any injury, but I am steadily hardening
in the opinion that they are the only persons in the community who
derive any benefit whatever from the death sentence, and we must
really run the risk of injuring their livelihood.

Personally, I never sat through murder trials unless I had a business
interest in them, nor to me are they――merely as trials――of greater
interest than many other trials. But the overhanging sentence of death
gives them a colour that stamps them very vividly in the memory.

What a curious drab, unentertaining drama was that of Mrs. Britland,
but for the sentence of death at the fall of the curtain.

Yet perhaps if Dumas had had the handling of this chapter he would
have spun you a wonderful and mysterious story out of the web of it.
Though I doubt after all if he would have deigned to write about such
a humble practitioner in the art of poisoning. He must have his most
noble Marquise de Brinvilliers and her elegant accomplice, Sainte
Croix, before he can transpose squalid crime into profitable romance.

Mary Ann Britland is a figure in Manchester history as being the only
woman ever hanged for murder in Strangeways Gaol. For myself, I think
that nothing could have saved her from the ultimate penalty of the
law, though I recognise that there are distinctions even among
evildoers, and that there was sense in the “bull” of the Irish
barrister when he was asked his opinion about the Maybrick case, and
said: “After all, you can’t expect an English Home Secretary to hang a
lady he might meet out at dinner afterwards.” The trial was
interesting to me as being the first murder trial I had ever sat
through, and the closing scenes of it, horrible as they were,
impressed me very strongly with the inadvisability of a Crown Court
sitting late into the night on the trial of prisoners, and went far to
convince me that capital punishment enshrined the wickedest criminal
in a veil of mystery behind which the crime itself and its victims
were too often lost sight of.

Mary Ann Britland was a factory operative about thirty-nine years old,
living with her husband and daughter in Turner Lane, Ashton. On March
9, 1896, her daughter died very suddenly. On May 3 her husband died
equally suddenly. She then went to live with some neighbours named Mr.
and Mrs. Dixon. She and Mr. Dixon had been on very friendly terms, and
the evidence showed that Mary Dixon, her friend’s wife, invited her to
her house out of compassion. On May 14 Mary Dixon died very suddenly.
Upon this the Ashton police began to bestir themselves. A post-mortem
was held on Mary Dixon, revealing the fact that she died of strychnine
poisoning. Mrs. Britland was arrested. The bodies of her daughter and
husband were exhumed, and the evidence showed that they, too, had died
of strychnine poisoning. Thomas Dixon was now arrested, and an inquiry
begun before the magistrates. Falkner Blair defended the woman, and
Byrne appeared for Dixon. There was little or no evidence against the
latter, and an eloquent speech by Byrne secured his discharge before
the magistrates. Although no doubt he was innocent, it was to this
piece of advocacy he probably owed his life, as unless a judge on the
trial had withdrawn his case from the jury on the ground that there
was no evidence against him it is almost certain he would have been
convicted, so hopeless is the position of a man whose only apology is
that the woman tempted him and he fell, when he comes before a
tribunal of twelve fellow-sinners. Dixon’s only chance would have been
a jury of women.

The trial came before Mr. Justice Cave in July of the same year.
Addison, Q.C., and Woodard prosecuted, and Blair and Byrne defended. I
had made a précis of the case for Blair at his request, and I took a
note for them during the trial. The case lasted two days, and at the
end of the second day Blair addressed the jury. The evidence was
overwhelming. The three deceased persons had been poisoned by
strychnine. Mrs. Britland had purchased “mouse powder” in sufficient
quantities to kill them all, and there was no evidence of any mice on
whom it could have been legitimately used. The case of the poisoning
of Mrs. Dixon was the one actually tried, but the deaths of the others
were proved to show “system” and rebut the defence of accident. Even
if there had not been sufficient evidence to secure a conviction, Mrs.
Britland had had many indiscreet conversations about “mouse powder”
and poisoning, and had been anxious to discover whether such poisoning
could be traced after death. Blair’s task seemed hopeless enough, but
he made an eloquent and cunning address to the jury.

It was one of those cases where anything like reasoned argument would
have been useless. The only chance for the advocate who loved his art
as Blair did was to endeavour to instil doubt into the receptive minds
of the jury, that by good hap the prisoner should gain the benefit of
it. This he did with great skill, touching lightly upon the
possibilities of accident or of poisoning by some other hands, or even
of self-administration. And in those days when the guilty one was safe
in the dock and could give no evidence, there was greater scope for
the art of advocacy――for is it not an art, as Master Izaak tells us,
to “deceive a trout with an artificial fly.” And Blair was a great
artist at the raising of haunting doubts, which followed the jury when
they retired to their inner room, so that he almost seemed to be the
thirteenth man on the jury, he and his doubts remained so present to
their anxious minds. And I remember no advocate who could handle a
hopeless case more cleverly within the honest rules of the game,
unless it be Sir Edward Clarke himself. The result was extraordinary.
Mr. Justice Cave summed up in a businesslike and sensible style,
expecting a conviction in a few minutes, and at twenty minutes to six
the jury retired. The judge waited some little time, but, as they did
not return, he went across to his lodgings, then in the same building,
and we went upstairs to the Bar mess. At a quarter to eight they
returned. The wretched prisoner was put up in the dock. The foreman
explained that they were not agreed. They handed a paper to the judge,
who told them to retire and consider the matter further.

Blair left the building and Byrne remained to see what happened. It
was well after 10 o’clock at night before they returned into court. I
suppose the clerk of assize knew that they had not agreed upon their
verdict, and for humane reasons did not send for the prisoner. Then
began a conversation between the judge and the foreman. The judge told
the jury that he must direct that they be taken to the hotel for the
night, and then said, “Is there any legal difficulty in which I can
assist you?”

“Only the paper I gave you, my lord.”

“Yes, but is there any legal difficulty in your way?”

To which the foreman replied, “Nothing, only that you have there.”

Upon which the judge again told them he must direct them to be taken
to the hotel.

There was a pause. No one had any doubt what the trouble of the jury
was. They wanted in their wrong-headed way to acquit Mrs. Britland
because they could not convict Mr. Dixon.

Cave thought for a moment, and then turning to the jury made a short
summing-up, tearing up any shreds of evidence there might have been
against Dixon, and putting the case against Mrs. Britland in true and
convincing colours, winding up by saying, “And now, gentlemen, you had
better go and consider it, and to-morrow morning I will hear what you
have to say.”

The jury held a brief consultation and begged a quarter of an hour in
which to escape the threatened hotel. The judge granted this, and
again the jury retired.

I am far from saying that modern judges permit wretches to hang that
jurymen may dine, or that they are actuated by any but business
motives in sitting late hours, but I have my doubts whether justice is
as well administered in the late hours of the night as in more normal
business hours, and it is at least noticeable how this takes place
more in the provinces, where the judges live in lodgings, than in
London, where their lordships are in reach of their clubs and their
homes. I do not think the jury in the Britland case would have agreed
but for the threat of the hotel made to them at 10 o’clock at night,
but it was certainly in mercy to the wretched woman in the dock that
the affair was ended, for there were two other indictments for murder
hanging over her head.

I said the woman in the dock, but the late hours were, I fear,
responsible for a very curious blunder in procedure.

Whilst Mr. Justice Cave was giving his last instructions to the jury,
of which Byrne and I took notes, I added to my note, “During this
direction of the judge the prisoner was absent.” I called Byrne’s
attention to this fact, and he decided to make a note of it and say
nothing.

Blair afterwards considered that if he moved for a writ of error the
fact of the prisoner’s absence might be held to invalidate the
verdict, so jealously is the right of a prisoner to be present during
his trial guarded by the English law.

Nothing was done in the matter because of the two further indictments.
Still, had the trial been concluded in normal working hours, such a
blunder would not have been made by judge or clerk of assize.

And now the jury return and answer to their names. The gaslights flare
up. Doors swing backwards and forwards as counsel and officials come
hurrying into court. From behind the javelin men crowds press eagerly
forward at the back of the court, and tired faces peer through the
darkness of the gallery, whence you hear murmurs and sighs of relief
that at last the moment waited for is at hand. The wretched woman,
tottering to the front of the dock, is the colour of the parchment
upon which her crime is indicted. She is asked why sentence should not
be pronounced. She clings to the rails and begins slowly and firmly,
“I am quite innocent. I am not guilty at all,” and then breaks into
piteous sobs and tears, and the female warder holds her in position as
if she were being photographed. The judge’s clerk, who is stifling a
yawn, has placed the black cap on his master’s wig. The judge in his
nasal, solemn tones gets to the sentence in as few personal words as
may be. The woman shrieks out “I never administered anything at all to
Mary Dixon! Nothing whatever!” And when the judge reaches in resolute,
mournful syllables the formal death sentence, the human voice that
utters it seems to toll like a harsh metal bell hopelessly and
inevitably beating out the last official message of the law: “And that
is that you be taken from here to the prison from whence you came,
that from thence you be taken to a place of execution, and that there
you be hanged by the neck until you be dead, and that your body be
buried within the precincts of the prison――――” But the final prayer
that the Lord may have mercy on her soul is lost in the wild,
terror-stricken cries of the woman for mercy as they unfasten her
fingers from the rails and carry her down the stairs towards the gaol,
and her shrieks and sobs come echoing out of the stone passages below
into the darkening court from which her fellow-creatures are slinking
away in horror.

The only other murder case in which I was engaged, and in which the
sentence of death was passed, was in 1889――a case in which I
prosecuted as junior to Falkner Blair――and the facts remain vividly in
my memory.

Reg. _v._ Dukes, or the Bury murder, as it was called, attracted
widespread interest. Dukes was manager of one of a series of furniture
shops belonging to the Gordon Furnishing Company, the central shop of
which was in Strangeways, Manchester. The business was owned by an old
man named Gordon, who had two sons, Meyer and George. The family were
Jews. George Gordon visited the Bury shop every Tuesday. There seems
no doubt that Dukes had been stealing the takings, and for a month
before the murder he kept on sending to Manchester bogus letters and
telegrams about business with the intention of keeping George Gordon
away from Bury. For three or four Tuesdays he had not made his usual
visit, and when he did come on the morning of Tuesday, September 24,
Dukes was not there, but, as we learned afterwards, was lying hid and
drinking in a neighbouring public-house. Gordon examined the books and
waited for Dukes, and then returned to Manchester.

There he seemed to have consulted with his father, and returned to
Bury. Meanwhile, Dukes had followed George Gordon to Manchester,
called at the central shop, and made a statement that he had been in
Manchester on business all day, that he was returning to Bury, and
would take a message from the father, which he did. At Bury he now met
George Gordon. The shopboy was sent off by Dukes with some furniture
to an address that proved to be an empty house. When he left with the
cart about 2.30, Gordon and Dukes were alone in the shop together. He
heard them talking as he drove away. Within a few minutes Dukes had
killed Gordon with a hammer, striking him on the back of his head.

I remember going with Blair and the police to the scene of the murder.
It was a little mean shop in a main thoroughfare, about a hundred
yards from the Bolton Street Station. It was a building of two stories
and a cellar, and if the under floor of the cellar had not been cement
the murder might not have been discovered for many years. For we saw
the chips in the edge of the flags, where Dukes had removed one for
experimental burial purposes.

The first thing Dukes did to cover up his tracks was to send a
telegram to the elder Gordon as from George to say he had gone to
Liverpool and would not be back that night. The next day old Gordon
consulted the Manchester police, and the Bury police were communicated
with, but nothing was known against Dukes, and the official view
laughingly communicated to the old man was that he would see his son
again when his money was spent and he was tired of Liverpool. As far
as we could reconstruct his story from the evidence before us, Dukes,
having bought a pick and failed to dig a grave with it, wasted a whole
day without any further move. Then he hit on the idea of putting the
body into a wardrobe which he was going to cart over the hills to
Rochdale, intending probably to throw the body out behind some stone
wall on the moors to the north or dispose of it in some solitary
place. For this purpose on Thursday afternoon, two days after the
murder, he had hired a cart which was waiting at the door.

Wednesday, September 25, was the New Year in the Jewish calendar, when
it is the custom of Jewish families to gather together in the
synagogue. “Let us wait until the night of Wednesday,” said George
Gordon’s father, “and if George is alive he will be with us, and if he
be not here, then we shall know he is dead.”

On Thursday morning there was no news of George. The old man and his
son Meyer went to the Manchester police, and were referred to Bury. At
Bury they insisted that George was dead, and the old man expressed his
belief that his body was in the shop in Central Street.

The police, more to pacify the distressed father than from any belief
in his fears, agreed to make a search of the house, and thus it was
that as the cart stood outside waiting to load up the wardrobe which
Dukes was taking away, Sergeant Ross and two constables with old
Gordon and Meyer entered the shop.

A thorough search was made, and the police for the first time noticed
signs of recent disturbances in the cellar. Whilst the search was
going on Dukes made an exit down a side entry, and was brought back by
the police. Sergeant Ross began to take a deeper interest in him.
Nothing more serious, however, was found, and they all stood in the
little shop around the wardrobe. It looked as if the business of the
police was over.

“What is this wardrobe lying here for?” asked old Gordon.

“It’s going out to Rochdale; the cart is waiting outside for it now,”
replied Dukes.

“Open it,” demanded the old man.

“I cannot. A lady bought it. She packed some things in it, and locked
it and took the key.”

“Then burst it open. It’s mine. Burst it open.”

There seemed no doubt what the old man expected to see. A police
officer prized the door. It flew readily upward, disclosing its
horrid, huddled contents. Meyer flew at Dukes’s throat, crying, “You
have murdered my brother!” But the police pulled him off, and saved
Dukes for the law.

Early in December the case was heard, and we pieced together by a
large number of witnesses the story of the murder. The prisoner made a
statement to the effect that he had been attacked by Gordon and killed
him in self-defence. It was a lame effort, and even Cottingham’s
eloquence could not endow it with probability. It was a callous and
brutal murder, almost excusing the brutal comment which I heard as I
passed through the crowded hall where the result was being discussed.

“Well, ’e won’t get any Christmas dinner, chuse ’ow.”

Dukes was hanged at Strangeways Gaol on Christmas Eve.

I agree that there was little pity shown for Dukes, who was a sodden,
heartless creature, and a criminal of the most degraded type. But the
interest in the trial swept away any sympathy or thought for the
victim and the unfortunate relatives who had been plunged into sorrow
by the act of the criminal.

Just as I have no doubt that the sentence of death for theft and other
offences, well and reasonably and sensibly defended by the more
cautious property-owning minds of the eighteenth century, was
ultimately abolished in deference to the sentiments of the
weaker-minded of the community and the real necessities of society
that they understood better than their opponents, so I have no doubt
the sentence of death will pass away from our administration of the
law altogether before many years are past. I do not suggest the
question is a very burning one from the point of view of criminal law,
but from the point of view of education and the evolution of right
action and conduct in the community, it seems to me to be of
importance. I am certainly far from believing that anything I may say
or write will hasten matters, nor, indeed, is there any hurry about
the affair. It is only some three hundred years since that good
Christian gentleman, Sir Henry Wotton, laid down the principle that
the hanging of men was an uncitizen-like act. True, the principle has
long been accepted by the majority, but we are a cautious and
conservative race. I have long ago ceased expecting to see reforms
come about in my own day. I hear the statesman calling upon me to
“Wait and see!” and although I shall certainly wait as long as I can,
I shall not worry if it is not my lot to see. I have very clear
visions from my own little mountain of the promised land that my
great-grandchildren and their youngsters will live in. It will be as
far removed from us as we are from the days of Sir Henry Wotton, but
what was good common-sense in his day will be good common-sense in
theirs, as it is in ours, and ever shall be, world without end.




CHAPTER VIII

JUDGES OF YESTERDAY

     “You did, sir,” replied the judge with a severe frown. “How
     could I have got Daniel on my notes unless you told me so,
     sir?”

               DICKENS: “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.”


Peter considered those bad bold ones who spoke evil of dignities were
merely “presumptuous,” but I am on the side of Jude, who roundly
assessed them to be “filthy dreamers.” Happily, to an Englishman, evil
speaking of judges is impossible. Indeed, the English attitude of mind
towards the Bench, if one can conceive the English mind capable of
finding itself in an incorrect attitude, has a tendency towards
idolatry. The infallibility of the Pope we smile at as a superstition,
but the infallibility of the Court of Appeal is an article of faith
upon which we issue execution, unless, of course, it is surpassed and
overruled by the more infallible infallibility of the House of Lords.
Only the will of the people and the great inquest of the nation can
alter a decision of the House of Lords, unless there happens to be a
Government in office with a will of its own and the capacity to act
upon it――and you never know what may occur some day. And really we so
love and worship our judges that when we tell stories of their quaint
humours we do so much as a good Italian Catholic will scold his patron
saint or tell some anecdote of the holy ones more lively than
respectful. For we know that judges are only human, and we have seen
many grow froward from age, their faculties become dim, their
qualities rust, until at length they lose the one essential attribute
of judicality, they are no longer able to suffer fools gladly, and the
public and the Bar become uneasy of their continuance. And, on the
other hand, what patience and loving-kindness are shown by the
advocate towards the judge. No hours are too long, no time is misspent
in preventing him from error, or leading him thereto, as the case may
be. I love to hear that phrase trundled out with unblushing
sycophancy, “Your lordship will remember the case of Crocks and the
Wapping Corporation, in fourteen ‘Meeson and Welsby.’” Every one in
court――except perhaps some loafer in the gallery――knows that his
lordship never heard of the case before, and if he had would have
forgotten it. Indeed, the learned Counsel himself only had it shoved
into his hand an hour ago by little Smithson, who devils for him, and
it was I who met the disconsolate little man in the Middle Temple
Library and told him――but that is outside the frame of the picture.
You have the whole subject-matter set out in one phrase “Contempt of
Court.” This is a feeling that must be closeted strictly within the
heart――otherwise seven days.

I remember an irate Scotch draper saying quite seriously to me at the
end of a case, “I have an utter contempt for this court.”

“My good man,” I said thankfully, “you have saved me from a most
painful duty. Had you expressed a mere contempt of court I must have
sent you to Knutsford Gaol, but an utter contempt seems to me to save
you. But do not say it again, I may be wrong. Go outside as quickly as
you can.”

He disappeared. Had I been a Plowden I should have added “and utter
contempt there.” But I only thought of that going home in the tram.

And when I think of the judges of yesterday I think first of all of
the great and honest services they rendered to the State, and then I
recall them through some quaint story, or maybe some trick of speech
or manner, just as you may remember a great cathedral both as a mighty
and noble building and as the edifice from which sprang some grotesque
gargoyle whose humours have always haunted you when the name of the
building was sounded.

Of the many judges that came the Northern Circuit during my short
career at the Bar some few are still, I am glad to say, judges of
to-day, and several have but recently passed away. And the figure that
is perhaps in the foreground of my memory is that of Mr. Justice
Grantham, who, less than a year ago, vigorous and popular as ever,
celebrated his silver anniversary on the circuit. I was present at the
banquet given to him by the circuit, and as he stood before us,
four-square to the winds of criticism and popular――or perhaps I should
say unpopular――disapproval, what human sympathy and enthusiasm rang
out in our cheers. We knew him only as a hard-working, conscientious
judge, as a clean, honest man, and as that _rara avis_, a south
country man who understood and admired the bracing atmosphere of the
north. He told us how, when he was junior judge and the circuits were
chosen, that every circuit was taken by his seniors except that
containing Manchester and Liverpool, for which he had to start out
with the condolences of his brethren. Now when he was senior judge he
had the first choice, and despite his years he came back to Liverpool
and Manchester because he liked the straight, manly business methods
in which the work of the Northern Circuit is done. And what he said
was no mere after-dinner compliment, it was as honest and true as the
cheers of those who welcomed him back. I have seen Grantham at his
very worst sitting on the bench, trying a political libel action; I
have seen Grantham at his very best standing in an old Sussex wagon
and judging a Bar point-to-point steeple-chase, and I have seen him
presiding as judge in many different cases with varying success, but I
have never seen him do anything but what he believed to be the only
straight, honest thing to do. That is why he was so exasperating and
lovable. He not only had strong, simple English ideals, but he acted
up to them in open daylight. Any man of his ability and without his
sincerity could have steered a safer and easier course. Grantham could
only steer the straight course――once his course was set, he followed
it with dogged fidelity. Small wonder, therefore, that sometimes he
ran on the rocks. But when he did he bore no malice to the
rocks――indeed, so optimistic and full of good humour was he that he
scarcely knew that there had been a collision.

A little while ago Grantham made a speech to the Liverpool grand jury
which attracted much attention. A few days afterwards I was present at
the banquet given to the judges at the Town Hall, and the Lord Mayor
of Liverpool called upon me to propose the toast of the grand jury.
There were no reporters at these festivities, so it was not
inconvenient to make some humorous remarks at the learned judge’s
expense――if one dared. I recall the shudder of aldermanic apprehension
when I started, and its quick change to purple laughter when it was
seen that Grantham was thoroughly enjoying it all. I remember as we
left the banqueting hall his friendly pat on the shoulder and his
kindly laugh as he said, “Very good fun, Parry! Just like old times!
But I was quite right, wasn’t I?” And there you had the man at his
best. There was no meanness or littleness about him. He was honest,
simple, outspoken, cocksure, keen to do right and English to the
backbone. There was no policy or finesse in anything that he did, and
he was out for work and business. That is why he was so welcome and
beloved on the Northern Circuit.

But his slackness in finesse often cost him tricks in the Court of
Appeal. Here is an example of what I mean.

I appeared for a small carpenter whose shop had been injured by the
pulling down of adjoining buildings to clear the site of a new
infirmary. The defendants were trustees of the institution. The claim
was £175 11_s._ 2_d._――or some such figures――and I got a verdict for
every pound, shilling, and penny, in spite of Gully’s eloquence.

Grantham started his summing-up as follows――I quote, of course, from
memory:――

“Gentlemen of the jury, if you are as heartily glad as I am that this
is the last case at the Manchester Assizes, and that, after this, we
shall be able to get away into pleasanter surroundings, you will not
be long in doing substantial justice to the plaintiff.”

I shall never forget how strange the words sounded in the cold, grey
light of the Court of Appeal, and how Lord Esher roared out an encore
to Gully when he read them to the Court. We did not keep that verdict.
Smyly, Q.C., led me, and Esher, in one of his wild humours, romped
round the court with him in playful savagery. One gem of Grantham’s
was in reference to Gully’s defence: “Then, gentlemen of the jury, Mr.
Parry is told he should have sued the contractors instead of the
trustees, and the contractors would have said ‘sue the foreman,’ and
the foreman would have said ‘sue the hodman,’ and so it would have
been like the house that Jack built.”

“Which house is that, Mr. Smyly?” said Lord Esher.

“Really, my lord――――”

“Is it on either of the plans you have put in?” continued the Master
of the Rolls, waving them about impatiently.

Bowen smiled like a benignant Cheshire cat.

“I am not certain,” continued Smyly, cautiously, “that the house in
question is in any way connected with the case.”

“It must be,” said Esher, “or why did Mr. Justice Grantham tell the
jury about it.”

I was tugging away at Smyly’s gown, and he turned round and asked what
on earth the house that Jack built was all about.

“A nursery rhyme. Don’t you know it? This is the house that Jack
built. This is the malt――――’”

“Oh, of course,” interrupted Smyly, turning round to the Court with
great seriousness. “I have consulted my learned junior, and he agrees
with me that the house that Jack built is not set out on the plans,
and that the house referred to by the learned judge is in the nature
of a literary allusion.”

Lord Esher laughed loud and long, and Bowen’s smile broadened even
more benignantly. The appeal was lost, and we went to the House of
Lords with no success. Lord Hannen shook his head at me sympathetically,
saying, “Of two evils, I had rather have a judge dead against me than
strongly in my favour.”

Lord Justice Vaughan Williams, who is now a pillar of the Court of
Appeal, used to come on circuit a great deal. He began as a
Commissioner, and we stood greatly in awe of him, for he was a very
learned lawyer, and rather insisted on things being done in legal
decency and order. Some of the business short cuts of the Northern
Circuit he did not appreciate.

I remember winning an important bankruptcy case before Judge Heywood
in Manchester. On appeal we came before Vaughan Williams and R.S.
Wright, J.J. The other side had Sir Robert Finlay, Q.C., and Yate Lee,
afterwards the Stockport judge, a great bankruptcy expert. Sir Horace
Davey, Q.C., was to lead me. The case came on in the morning, and Sir
Horace Davey was down at the House of Lords. Finlay, seeing his
advantage, opened the case in twenty minutes as an obvious mistake in
the court below, and Yate Lee said nothing. I was called on to hold
the fort against a hostile court until reinforcements in the shape of
Sir Horace Davey arrived. I had several cases to quote, but the judges
would not have them at any price, and Vaughan Williams kept putting
wonderful legal conundrums to me, which I tried to answer or evade as
seemed the safer course at the moment.

When Davey came in about half-past three, I think I had won Wright
over to see there was something in the points I had raised. Davey told
me to sit down, and he started at once. In his thinnest, most arid,
and contemptuous tones he explained to the judges that it really did
not matter which way they decided, because the case would have to go
to the Court of Appeal. Still, it was a more convenient thing that
their lordships should decide rightly, or, in other words for him, in
accordance with the authorities.

It is a great and rare gift to be able to talk like that to High Court
judges, but I felt we were seeking trouble. Vaughan Williams listened
for a while, then looked sternly at Davey, and began very quietly:

“Sir Horace, I have put a proposition to your learned junior which he
is utterly unable to answer, and it is this――――”

The proposition was put.

Davey heard him with theatrical impatience and weariness, and replied:

“My lord, I can understand my learned junior not replying to your
lordship’s proposition. Your lordship’s proposition has nothing
whatever to do with this case. As I was saying when your lordship
interrupted me,” &c.

Of course we lost that appeal. The two judges laughed Judge Heywood’s
decision out of court, and a few weeks afterwards the Court of Appeal
restored Judge Heywood’s decision, with appropriate astonishment at
the reasoning of the Divisional Court. Such is the glorious
uncertainty of the law.

Mr. Justice Hawkins was often on circuit in the earlier days. In the
Crown Court he was painstaking, but in the Civil Court anything like
figures or business details he found irksome. In one business case,
counsel began discussing the question of the fall of 1-16d. in the
price of yarn, when Hawkins indignantly interrupted him by asking
whether the time of her Majesty’s judges was to be spent in dealing
with fractions of the smallest coin of the realm. Finding that in the
result it came to a goodly sum, he referred the case, and spent the
rest of the day elucidating a slander action, which resulted in a
verdict for another fraction of a penny.

Mr. Justice Cave very often visited the Northern Circuit. He was a
stout, heavy, round-faced man, spoke with a nasal twang, and
occasionally slept on the bench, but in spite of his peculiarities he
was a straightforward, useful lawyer, and a not unkindly judge. He
treated the junior Bar with good-humoured toleration, but I cannot say
he suffered them gladly. Louis Aitken, who was the most scrupulous
prosecutor on circuit, was one day prosecuting a thief before Cave at
Lancaster, and finding that a statement of a policeman on the
depositions was made in the absence of the prisoner, and therefore not
evidence, properly and carefully omitted it. Cave, who was following
the depositions with his thumb and a blue pencil, pulled him up:

“Ow now. Ow now, Mr. Aitken,” he said, in his snarling voice. “This
won’t do, you know. You’re garbling the evidence. That’s what you’re
doing, garbling the evidence.”

Aitken was too stunned to say anything, and Cave took the policeman
through the whole statement. When he had finished, he snapped out:
“Any other questions, Mr. Aitken?”

“Only this, my lord,” said Aitken, who had recovered his equanimity.
“Was the prisoner present during that conversation?”

“No,” replied the officer.

“Ow,” grumbled Cave, as he took his blue pencil and scored it out of
his notes. “Remember, gentlemen of the jury, to forget all that. It’s
not evidence. Go on, Mr. Aitken.”

A few days after Aitken was dining with the judges, and Cave nodded
across the table to him and said, “Lucky we spotted that evidence
point at Lancaster, Mr. Aitken.”

I remember, too, in a small libel case the perfect sang-froid with
which he transferred the blame of his proceedings on to the shoulders
of Lancaster Woodburne, one of our most serious juniors who had
something of the south country style. On a hot summer afternoon
Woodburne had opened a very unimportant case in a highly impassioned
speech, and when he had finished was horrified to find that Cave
really was fast asleep. We had often seen him make the attempt, but
this was the full offence. The weather and the luncheon hour were
accessories before the fact.

“What on earth shall I do?” he muttered to me. I suggested he should
call a witness, but Woodburne objected that the judge would not hear
his evidence. As I was on the other side this did not seem to me to be
very material. The judge’s clerk was out of court, the Associate, well
knowing the state of affairs, was busily writing below the bench with
his eyes glued on to his papers. The jury, indeed, were smiling
broadly. There was no doubt that it was a painful moment for Lancaster
Woodburne. Suddenly a pile of books near my elbow upset on the floor.
Cave opened his eyes and shouted angrily at my opponent:

“Now then, Mr. Woodburne, why are you wasting the time of the Court?
Are you going to call a witness, or am I to sit here all day doing
nothing?”

How different again in manner and manhood was Mr. Justice A. L. Smith.
We were all glad to hear that he was coming the circuit. “A. L.,” as
he was affectionately called, had a strong, breezy business manner of
doing his work that suited Manchester admirably.

Sir Charles Russell once said to a new County Court judge, “Better to
be strong and wrong than weak and right.” It is a counsel of
perfection to all judges of first instance. “A. L.” understood the
idea and acted upon it, and went one better by being seldom wrong. The
main reason of his popularity and success as a judge was that he knew
his own mind and was always ready to take responsibility promptly.

One of my earliest recollections of “A. L.” was in 1887, when a man
named Thomas Leatherbarrow was put in the dock and charged with the
murder of a woman. The prisoner had been very violent in the police
court, and the chief witness against him was another woman he had
tried to kill. He came into the dock, a powerful giant, surrounded by
three or four warders. He lurched forward to the rails and gazed
wildly round the court like a savage animal looking for prey.

Mr. Shuttleworth, the Clerk of Assize, read the indictment.

“Guilty,” growled the prisoner.

“Do you understand what you are pleading guilty to?” asked Mr.
Shuttleworth.

“Yes, I understand.”

“It means killing intentionally.”

“Yes,” said the man with a burst of passion, “and I would have killed
the other, too, if I could have got at her.”

“Have you anything to say?” asked the Clerk of Assize.

“Not a word,” answered the prisoner carelessly.

“A. L.,” who had been thoughtfully watching the scene, assumed the
black cap and passed sentence without comment.

The prisoner nodded to him, picked up his cloth cap from a chair, and
said, “Thank you, sir.”

“A. L.” and the prisoner were perhaps the only two men who at the
moment were clear and contented that the right thing had been done.

But it was in the County Courts that one learned one’s first lessons,
and as more and more those courts are becoming the elementary schools
of advocacy it becomes increasingly important that the judges who
preside should have had some sound experience in the business
themselves. We youngsters in Manchester were greatly to be
congratulated on the presence of Judge Russell, the learned author of
a well-known treatise on Mercantile Law, who presided in the
Manchester County Court. Russell sifted out his advocates very
rapidly. At first when you knew little or nothing about it he did the
case more or less for you. If he found you had any initiative capacity
at all he allowed you to flutter your wings on your own. But if you
tried to soar to absurd heights he non-suited you on the wing, as it
were, to prevent more serious accidents in the course of your
aviation; indeed, he was if anything too fond of the non-suit,
regarding it as a very present help in time of trouble. But though
somewhat strict in technical matters, he was a good lawyer and a
useful judge for a junior to practise before. If you could do your
work to his satisfaction you need not fear making your bow in the High
Court. He was an autocrat, but his autocracy was beneficial to
business and justice. Anything like trickiness or ill-faith was
abhorrent to him. On one occasion a very learned but rather artful
counsel read a correspondence to him and omitted a damaging letter,
hoping, no doubt, to deal with it later on. When the letter came out
Russell looked very black.

“Is that letter in your bundle of correspondence, Mr. X.?” he asked.

“Yes, your Honour――and I was going――――”

“Were going――――” repeated Russell sarcastically. “Judgment for
defendant.”

It is wonderful how easily a good or bad reputation is made, and how
careful the young advocate should be to keep his shield unspotted. I
remember having a very bad class of insurance claim which was tried
before Lord Coleridge. Some Blackburn people had insured an old
gentleman, described as an egg merchant, who died very shortly
afterwards. It appeared that the deceased’s employment in recent years
had been leaning against the door of a public-house and falling in
when it opened. He had not merchanted any eggs since 1862. These
things and the rascality of the whole proceeding, which was little
short of a conspiracy to defraud, became so apparent as the case went
on that at last I said I could not believe in the truth of my
evidence, and refusing to call any more witnesses told Lord Coleridge
my reasons, and retired from the case.

Lord Coleridge smiled somewhat sarcastically, as I thought, saying, “A
very candid expression of opinion about your clients, Mr. Parry, and I
have no doubt the jury will agree with you.”

A few weeks later I was supporting a counterclaim in a weary,
complicated case at Liverpool, the last in the list before Coleridge,
without a jury. I felt sure that if he would adjourn to the next day I
could make him see there was something in it. Addison, who was for the
other side, ridiculed it, and I quite thought Coleridge would cut it
short and run up to town. About 6 o’clock, however, Coleridge said, “I
haven’t the least idea what Mr. Parry’s counterclaim is about, and you
think it is all nonsense, Mr. Addison; but I am sure he believes in
it, and, as I know he wouldn’t continue a case unnecessarily, I shall
adjourn.” We had the best part of next day at the details, and my
client got a substantial verdict.

Judge Hughes, when he was appointed, was expected to do wonderful
things, and so, in truth, he did, but the authorship of “Tom Brown’s
Schooldays” was not a particularly good apprenticeship for the rough
and tumble of the County Court, and his short cuts to ideal justice
were seldom successful. One of his earliest exploits, when asked to
decide who had won a race and was entitled to the prize, was to order
it to be run again, with himself as referee! Apart from the judgment
being without legal sanction, the point at issue was not who could
win, but who had won the race. On another occasion, during the trial
of the disputed ownership of a dog, the animal came into court, and
the learned judge had him up on the bench. He then ordered the
defendant to go to the other side of the court and call the dog. This
the defendant did, and the dog came to him. Immediately judgment was
given for the defendant, but the plaintiff complained that he had not
been allowed a similar experiment, which very likely would have
resulted in a similar way.

Chancery law was supposed to be a speciality with Judge Hughes, but I
doubt if he had any real grip of any kind of legal principles. For
instance, Byrne and I had a case before him in which a lady claimed
specific performance of an agreement. It was a home-made agreement
about the transfer of furniture, and it contained, among other things,
a promise to marry. Judge Hughes in his kind-hearted, impulsive way
espoused the lady’s cause most warmly. “Why did my client refuse to
marry the lady? It was abominable conduct.” For the defendant I tried
to urge legal difficulties about decreeing specific performance to
marry, but Judge Hughes only shook his head indignantly and kept
muttering to himself, “I shall see that agreement carried out――every
line of it! Every line of it!”

During the adjournment I chaffed Byrne about his agreement――of course,
he had not drawn it――and asked him how the judge was going to carry
out his order to compel my client to marry. Both our clients were very
obstinate, but in the end Byrne and I made a full and fair settlement
of all matters in dispute, though I shall always believe that my
client was the more easy to deal with, because he believed that Judge
Hughes intended to have him locked up, and only released when he
consented to go quietly to the altar. When we returned into court and
announced the settlement the learned judge was very vexed with Byrne,
and waved us away, saying, “I wasn’t frightened at Mr. Parry’s law,
and you needn’t have been. I’d have had that agreement carried
out――every line of it! Every line of it!”

As a Druid under an oak tree or on some island far from the Court of
Appeal, Judge Hughes would have administered his own equity to
perfection, and the suitors would have had an honest, righteous and
sporting tribunal. But the administering of laws made by others was
altogether beyond his imagination. He was stone deaf to common law,
and his equity dated back to a period before the discovery of the tree
of knowledge of good and evil.

Coventry, the judge of the Blackpool Circuit, was a different type of
man altogether. Silent, reserved, and patient, he listened at too
great length to both advocacy and evidence, but his decision when it
came was sound in judgment and of few words. Charles Costeker, of
Darwen, who loved a sporting litigation, once instructed me to defend
a most unusual case before Coventry in the Blackburn County Court. The
defendants were the vicar and churchwardens of a Darwen church. It
appeared the plaintiff had taken a dislike to hearing the curate
preach, and used to walk out in order to avoid doing so. This insult
to the curate the churchwardens resolved to avenge, and one Sunday
morning, when the plaintiff tried to leave the church as usual, they
locked the door and sat near it and prevented him going out. He,
therefore, sued them for damages for false imprisonment. The vicar
knew nothing about it, but as far as the churchwardens were concerned,
there was really no answer, though I discovered a canon of the Church
that makes it one’s duty to stay and diligently hear the sermon.
Coventry, however, was not having anything to do with such an obscure
affair as canon law, and the common law was clearly against us. I am
afraid the judge, who was of Quaker origin, and some of the advocates
were woefully at sea over the details of the Church service, and an
old Lancashire verger amused us greatly with one of his replies to
Coventry. He was asked when he first noticed the plaintiff come into
the church.

“It was during Venaite!” he replied.

“How long after the service began?” asked Coventry.

“It was during Venaite,” he replied.

“I don’t want to know anything about the Venite,” said Coventry, who
hadn’t an idea of its liturgical position. “What I want to know is was
it ten minutes after the service began, or when?”

“It was during Venaite.”

“I don’t understand what you mean by that,” said Coventry, putting
down his pen in despair. The verger thought the word Venite was
puzzling the learned judge, and with great friendliness and a pleased
smile of superiority turned round and said to him, “I’ll tell yer
about Venaite. It’s like what you an’ me if we were talking to
ourselves ’ud say: ‘O coom, let’s sing to the Loord.’”

Crompton Hutton, a very learned man of a curious, cantankerous
character, held sway over the Bolton and Bury district. He had had a
large practice in London as a junior, and though his methods were
irregular they did not lack common sense. He never wore robes, and I
was told it was an offence to appear in his court in robes. The first
time I went before him was at Bury, where he sat in a club-room
adjoining the court. I was very frightened, and he glared at me in a
way that did not make me less nervous. I and the solicitor against me,
Mr. Anderton, sat on each side of him at a long table with the fire
opposite the judge. I found out afterwards that if you could get one
of your opponent’s witnesses to stand between Crompton Hutton and the
fire he was dismissed the room, and his evidence was never heard. I
did not know these and other rules of the court then. The judge
pointed to a seat, and I sat down.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Parry,” I replied.

“What does he say his name is, Mr. Anderton?” he asked my opponent,
turning his back on me.

“Mr. Parry,” replied Anderton.

“H’m. How do you spell it. I never heard such a name,” he grumbled.

This made me very angry, and I retorted, in much the same tone: “Of
course you’ve heard it constantly. I’ve seen your name in the law
reports with my father’s, Serjeant Parry, many a time.”

Crompton Hutton rose in his chair and spread out his arms as though he
was going to hug me.

“What, are you a son of the dear old Serjeant? Really, now. And what
are you doing in these God-forsaken parts? Sit down. Delighted.” And
he wrung me by the hand in the most friendly fashion.

The case was about a milk float and a lurry. I was for the lurry, and
we won, mainly, as far as I remember, because an imaginative office
boy of Anderton’s had drawn his client’s milk float galloping up the
road on the wrong side of the way with the driver waving his whip, and
Crompton Hutton regarded it as a conclusive admission of facts.

Anderton was a big, heavy, red-faced man of the elder Weller type, and
quite as kind-hearted and straightforward. As we walked across to the
Derby Arms for some lunch when the case was over:――

“I tell you what it is,” he said to me, “you’ll do very well with
Crumpy, but you’ll have to do what he tells you.”

“About what?” I asked.

“About wearing that toggery. He won’t stand it.”

However, he had to stand it, and, fair play to him, though he used to
tease me about it, we never quarrelled over it. I went before him
often, and much pleased him by persuading the Divisional Court to
uphold him on appeal in a building case.

I became quite a favourite of his, and he would always take a case of
mine first when he could. I remember once two Chancery men with long
affidavits and witnesses to cross-examine were ahead of me, and
Crompton Hutton as soon as they were seated turned round to the
defendant’s counsel and said, “Call your client.”

“Call my client?” said the astonished advocate. “I want to
cross-examine the plaintiff’s witnesses first.”

“I know you do,” said the judge with a sneer, “but we don’t waste time
that way here. You will be asking for further consideration next, but
you won’t get it here.”

“But I’m entitled to――――”

“Certainly, but not at other people’s expense. Now, Mr. Parry.”

And the Chancery protests were unavailing. I got heard and sent away.

I just caught the beginning of the Chancery case. The defendant’s
counsel was again asked to put the defendant in the box, and refused.

“And I’ll tell you why,” said Crompton Hutton. “I’ve read those
affidavits, and unless the defendant swears the necessary additional
facts you’ve no case, and if he swears the necessary additional facts
I’ll commit him for trial for perjury. That’s all!”

There was a lot of common sense about Crompton Hutton.




CHAPTER IX

FIRST BRIEFS

  At last the golden orientall gate
  Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre.

                       SPENSER: “Faerie Queen.”


I suppose in early days the “stranger” must have been a sadly
persecuted individual, else why should there be so many texts
persuasively commending him to the care of the righteous. Even now
there are some communities and clubs where to be a “stranger” is to be
set apart and treated like a leper. Those out-houses in which guests
are housed in some of the pre-historic London clubs are examples of
what I mean. In earlier cannibal times no doubt the “stranger” was
merely a welcome addition to the larder, but even then there seem to
have been ceremonies and rites in the fattening and final presentation
of the guest which students of folk-lore would regard as the early
manifestations of hospitality. However that may be, there is no doubt
that in the treatment of the stranger within the gates the north
country is farther removed from barbarism than the south. In London,
for instance, every man is a stranger. I have met fellow-countrymen
from the Colonies who found the welcome secured by introductions to
London to be an entirely formal and cold-blooded affair compared with
that extended to them by a similar class in the north. Not only in
London, but taking its anti-social note from London, the surrounding
south is chilly and aloof towards its fellow-man, especially if the
fellow-man talks broadly with an open accent, and has not attained
that weary, blurred, mincing tongue which serves the southerner in
lieu of speech. It is not so much that in these sunny latitudes we
have forgotten our duty to our neighbour, but rather that we have
never had any neighbours, that we have made it a religion not to have
neighbours, and continue to live for years and years in our
semi-detached surburban villas without exchanging a word with the man
next door, whose ties and trousers do daily offence to such creeds as
we still possess. Whereas the gospel seems to have taught the
uncultivated men and women who live on those wild stretches of railway
beyond Rugby and Crewe that everyone is a neighbour, and must be
treated according to the text in that case made and provided.

I have already spoken of the kindness of my first friends in
Manchester, from which sprang many other pleasant friendships. No end
of folk seemed to take an interest in our small household. I think
some came to look at us out of curiosity. The impertinence and
absurdity of an unfledged stranger settling down among them in this
way seemed to amuse them. I remember taking in to dinner the wife of
an eminent professor who made it her duty to know the inner household
affairs of all those tenements and hereditaments situated or adjacent
to the Oxford Road, between Nelson Street in the north and the White
Lion in the south.

Turning to me as the cloth was removed, she said in a tone half of
entreaty, half of command, “Tell me, Mr. Parry――I have heard so many
different accounts and I really must know――what did you marry on?”

I had the presence of mind to answer, “Nothing, madam, absolutely
nothing!”

The romance of it touched her tender heart, dear soul, and she was for
ever asking us to dinner under the firm belief that we were starving.

Certainly no strangers ever had a kinder reception than we had in the
north, and it seemed to make the months of waiting for those first
briefs pass very smoothly and pleasantly. And what made life more
joyous than anything I had experienced was the professional
comradeship of those among whom one’s work had to be done. There were
still many circuit wanderers domiciled in London who followed her
Majesty’s judges when they went their rounds, but there were also a
large number of local barristers who dominated the Quarter Sessions
and did the work in the County Courts. All those were, of course,
members of the Northern Circuit, and in the absence of the assizes,
upheld in their daily struggles the spirit of sympathy and
good-fellowship for which the Northern Circuit is justly famous. Even
the Chancery men who made vast fortunes in the Palatine Court joined
the circuit, and became less sterilised and better humanised under the
fragrant influences of Bar mess.

How curious it is that the common law mind always thinks of a Chancery
man with pity mingled with a certain distaste. Pity which is sworn
servant unto love springs from our admiration of the Chancery man as a
human person; the distaste is engendered spontaneously, and arises, I
fancy, out of and in the course of his occupation. He wears to all
appearances a similar gown, his wig is of the same iron grey, he
quotes from somewhat fatter and duller books perhaps, but they are
written in much the same joyless jargon――I never met a jolly, breezy,
merry, law book――and yet there is something in the flavour of him that
you find in professors and schoolmasters, the drier sort of vicars and
policemen. Is this shrinking from the Chancery man some prejudice
atavistically reproduced from the days of “Jarndyce v. Jarndyce,” or a
manifestation of eugenic instinct? It is difficult to say, but I know
that it is not a merely personal prepossession. The old court-keeper
at Strangeways acknowledged to the feeling, and he saw more of the
Chancery men than he did of the common law men, for the Palatine Court
he had always with him. I asked him once to explain to me the reason
of it, but it was beyond his powers of analysis. He had the same
instinct about Chancery men that was inspired in the mind of Tom Brown
by the late Dr. Fell, but the reason why he could not tell. I
discovered this quite accidentally and it became a bond of union
between us. It happened in this way.

A small light and air case had――like some seedling weed――got blown
into the assize list from across the corridor where the Palatine Court
droned along, and with it came Astbury. Yes, Astbury――even Astbury was
once a junior and sat in the back row. I was against him. I think it
was the fault of Stephen, J., who did not understand plans, or the
superior cunning of Astbury, who built up a model of the buildings
with volumes of “Barnewall and Alderson,” and by the kindergarten
methods of Froebel captured the judgment of the Court; or maybe, as I
told my client afterwards, we never had a leg to stand upon, and
Astbury had the right end of the stick――he was often attached to that
end. Be all that as it may, Chancery defeated Common law utterly and
with costs.

I can see our good janitor’s gloomy face as he leaned over the carved
end of the seats and gazed wearily at us. We were the last non-jury of
the assizes, and he was waiting with the charwomen in ambush to do the
washing up. “Eh! Mr. Parry,” he said with a deep sigh, almost a groan,
“and to think of you being beat――and by a Chancery man.” It seemed a
thing hard to bear at the time and likely to be fraught with ruin, but
it was forgotten, and now I recall it more as a story of misfortune
than disgrace. For it is easier to remember the ill turns of fortune’s
wheel than the lucky ones. How meanly we bluster over memories of
ill-luck, and never give a thought to the briefs that leaped the
bunkers and the points of law that holed out from the edge of the
green. The other fellow’s good fortune we remember sneeringly well,
but our own――well, it is a common failing, and certainly I am not more
free from it than another. But I suppose every one who has had any
fortune at all at the Bar could tell some amusing stories of accidents
that have helped him to success. Certainly in my short round――I only
played nine holes, as it were, for within ten years of my call I was a
judge――I cannot grumble at my luck, and some of the early chances
which brought me briefs were as unexpected as they were entertaining.

It must have been within a year of my coming to Manchester that I was
met by a glad surprise when I went down to the Assize Courts to my
usual occupation of sitting in the back row and listening to others do
cases in a manner that made me feel really sorry for them, their
clients and myself. Wandering along the corridor in a weary and
somewhat melancholy way, feeling that I had no real part in this
hustling crowd of excited litigants and lawyers that the first day of
assizes brings together, I was suddenly handed――a brief. If it had
been a writ or a County Court summons or――but it was a brief. And
there I was charged with the responsibility of defending a tradesman
who, with his servant girl, was indicted for conspiracy to conceal the
birth of the latter’s child. The papers were marked “15 and 1. With
you Mr. Addison, Q.C.” I had never heard of the solicitor, and he took
occasion to let me know that he had never heard of me, and had had
some trouble to find anyone who had. However, there was the brief, a
very fine specimen of that _rara avis_, and I promenaded with it under
my arm or left it lying about in prominent places in hopes that it
would act as a decoy. Towards the end of the sittings Addison defended
the prisoner with great success――I had really nothing to do but look
on――and both he and McKeand, who defended the girl, obtained
acquittals. The case created some sensation in the local town where
the prisoners came from, and I heard that the prisoners and their
counsel were burnt in effigy on the evening of the trial.

I never learnt the solution of that mysterious brief until years
afterwards. What had happened was this. I had been defending some
prisoners for McKeand in the second court at Salford Sessions, one
being the case of a man charged with assault on a woman, in which, to
my own and other people’s surprise, there was an acquittal. The
prisoner in the assize case was on the jury in that case, and when his
own turn came, having seen no other counsel defending prisoners than
Parry, he came to the conclusion that Parry was essential to his
liberty. Nothing that his solicitor could do could alter his
determination, so the sensible solicitor obeyed his client’s
instructions and with some difficulty discovered Parry, and then in
order that his client might have a really good run for his money he
gave Addison a leading brief.

One solicitor came to me for elaborate opinions on difficult points of
law, and always marked the brief Dr. Parry. I found out that in a
local list of the Bar, my name being next Pankhurst’s at the bottom of
the page, the printer had repeated the Dr.――really it is quite as good
a way of obtaining a degree as any other――but my practice as a doctor
of law ended after six months when a new and correct list was printed.

I had a visit once from a solicitor from Burnley with his client, a
bookmaker. They had some talk outside with my clerk and then came in.
The bookmaker nodded and said, “That’s him,” and appeared to be very
satisfied. His great anxiety about his case, which was a summons for
keeping a betting house, is best expressed in his own instructions,
which he repeated to me several times. “I ain’t partickler what I
pays, but I want yer ter see that at the end of the case there ain’t
no going down stairs.”

The county magistrates let him off with a fine of £80. He was a
well-known and not unrespected character, and perhaps had met some of
the justices in another place. He seemed to think the magistrates
pocketed the money, for he took it very philosophically, and said as
he crumpled up the receipt for the fine: “After all, it’s quite
natural they should try and get a bit of their own back to-day, but
I’ll have my turn presently.”

I learned afterwards that the bookmaker was an admirer of my style of
advocacy. His solicitor, a broad Lancashire man, told me the story of
it. “He comes to me and says ‘I want that two-year-old I sees at Bury
County Court last week.’ What’s his name? I asked. ‘Hanged if I know,’
says he, ‘but he’s a long, lean, lanky beggar, and he puts one foot on
the desk and just talks to the judge like ’as if he was his feyther.’
With that I came to Manchester, and I was talking to one of Cobbett’s
clerks and I repeats the description, and before the words were out of
my mouth he says ‘Parry!’ So we comes round to your chambers, and sure
enough he was right.”

Had one the pencil of Sir Thomas Overbury, how pleasant it would be to
draw the outline portraits of the worthy characters of my comrades of
the Northern Circuit. Looking back on my short sojourn among them, two
men seem to stand out as types of the genius of the circuit, Gully and
Charley McKeand. Both were ideally honest and full of consideration
for their opponents, and it is in these qualities that I think the
Northern Circuit is pre-eminent.

But though they shared these good attributes they had little else in
common. Charley McKeand was as rough and blustering in his advocacy as
Gully was smooth and polished. Gully wounded his victims with a
rapier, McKeand with a bludgeon. All advocacy ought to be
straightforward, and the bulk of it is. Certainly, the standard of
honesty and open dealing on the Northern Circuit is a very high one.
But Gully and McKeand were the Quixotes of the Bar, and when a junior
like myself had to appear against either of them he realised what a
refreshing thing it is in advocacy to be concerned in a case where,
however powerful is the frontal attack, there are to be no ambushes or
ambuscades.

Charley McKeand had not anything of the appearance of a leader of the
Bar, yet he developed rapidly into a very clever advocate, and would
have done big things but for his untimely death. The first impression
of him was of a big, jolly, careless Englishman, rather stout and
easy-going, fond of sport and sporting companions. But give him a
brief, and his attitude towards life changed. He was never a learned
lawyer, but he knew the law of evidence well, and would get some
junior to “devil” the legal circumstances of any case that had any law
in it, and quickly picked up all that was necessary to his purpose. He
began his advocate’s career in the right way, by defending prisoners
from the dock. If, with a copy of the depositions in front of you and
an oft-convicted thief in the dock behind you, the verdict is “Not
guilty,” you may know that you are qualifying for an advocate. Charley
McKeand did it――not once, but again and again. There was no apparent
art in his style, but he thundered out the most absurd suggestions of
a hopeless defence with an energy and enthusiasm that often inspired a
belief in them in the minds of an inexperienced jury. He soon became
the fashion, and no criminal would be without him if he could possibly
afford his services.

He was one of the most popular figures in Manchester, and the mob, who
always take the side of the unfortunate nobleman in the dock, called
him in their good-natured adoration “The People’s Charley.” When he
defended a cabman at the police court who had got into some trouble
with the authorities over hackney coach bye-laws and defeated the
police, the cabmen of St. Anne’s Square cheered him as he drove his
phæton down to court with his bull-dog by his side, and held a mass
meeting and sent a deputation to his chambers to present him with a
handsome gold-mounted malacca.

It was about this time that he was pressed to stand for municipal
honours. Certainly no Nonconformist conscience could have stood a
chance against “The People’s Charley.” He greatly enjoyed the first
invitation he received. A few of the inner circle of the politicians
of a certain ward came to visit and ask him to stand as a Conservative
candidate at the next municipal election.

“But I heard Mr. X. was going to stand,” said McKeand, naming a very
respectable citizen.

“Nay, Mr. McKeand,” said the spokesman, dwelling lovingly on three
syllables of his name. “Nay, Mr. McKeand, we don’t want Mr. X., we
wants you. Mr. X. ain’t anything to the likes o’ us. You know our
ward, Mr. McKeand. It’s full of bookmakers and thieves and
rat-catchers――you knows the sort and they knows you――and they’ll vote
for you like one man.”

However, McKeand had no ambition for a seat on the City Council and
stuck to his work in court, of which he was really fond.

His readiness and resource were extraordinary and he said and did the
most startling things without offending the most straight-laced
judicial persons. Hopwood was presiding in a third court at the
assizes, trying some of the minor prisoners. An old woman indicted for
larceny had given McKeand a dock defence, and he rushed in at the last
moment to make a speech on her behalf. It was clear he had not had
time to study the depositions, but a few words from Ernest Jordan, who
was devilling the case, put him on the right line, and he was soon in
the middle of an eloquent harangue. Coming to the end of it he
exclaimed, “And what, gentlemen, did the poor woman say when the
magistrate’s clerk asked her for her defence. I will read you her very
words, and I think you will agree with me that they bear the stamp of
conscious innocence.” Ernest Jordan tried to stem the torrent of his
eloquence here, feeling sure he was remembering another set of
depositions, but it was no use. McKeand seized the papers and turned
them rapidly over. “Let me read you her exact words. Ha! Here we are.
Oh! H’m!” He faltered a little when he saw them. “Well, gentlemen,
this uneducated woman does not put it as you or I would put it, but I
said I would read her words, and I will. What she says is: ‘How the
hell could I have the ―――― boots when he was wearing them?’ And,
gentlemen,” continued McKeand in a concluding burst of eloquence, “I
ask you, with some confidence, how the hell could she?”

Charley McKeand must have been seriously thinking of taking silk when
the end came, and a terrible end it was both to himself and his
friends. After the summer vacation I went round to his house to see
him, and found him on the eve of a visit to London to see Sir
Frederick Treves.

The Manchester doctors had told him that he was suffering from cancer,
and that they feared it was hopeless to operate. He was very calm
about it, and did not expect any better verdict, but he thought it
satisfactory to take another opinion. The opinion went against him,
but he returned to his work, and for three months, though in great
pain and under sentence of lingering death, continued his work with
cheerfulness and energy. It was a noble example to those of us who
fret over small troubles, and I do not think it was lost on any who
witnessed it. In December he became too ill to continue work, and gave
up his chambers. I last saw him at Brighton. We dined together, and I
sat telling him old circuit stories and recalling cases we had fought
together until late into the night. He came to the door to see me off,
and I said I would look him up at home when he returned. He shook his
head, and said with his delightful smile, “Not a bit of it, Parry. We
have had an excellent evening, and this is the time to say good-bye.”

He died a few weeks afterwards, having been spared long enough to see
his only child. Until the tragedy happened I do not think any of us
had fully understood what a force of quiet bravery there was in
Charley McKeand.

I suppose I ought to remember Gully as Lord Selby, but for the life of
me I cannot. As Gully we loved and admired him, and as Gully he will
always remain to those of us who are proud to have been his juniors.
Undoubtedly he was one of the best and most inspiring leaders that a
band of advocates could honour.

There were those who said that Gully had had all the life hammered out
of him by Charles Russell, but there was no truth in this at all. For
years he had stood up against Russell in case after case, and it must
be agreed that anyone who came in contact with that forceful genius
had to stand a fair share of hammering. But Gully was chosen for the
part because he was the fittest to enact it, and when Russell “went
special” Gully naturally took his place as leader of the circuit, a
position he held until he retired to a more honourable office. I was
both with and against Gully in many cases. A barrister, like an actor
or a sailor, is dependent for his happiness on his companions, and
especially his superiors. Gully was peculiarly courteous and
considerate to his juniors, Russell was often the reverse. The latter
would turn round to a junior and, not getting the immediate answer he
wanted, say, “What on earth are you doing?”

“Taking a note,” one junior replied with conscious rectitude.

“Don’t,” said Russell with an explosive interjection; “attend to the
case.”

It must not be thought that Russell was only rude to his juniors. Let
us remember with pleasure that he was the advocate who, when asked by
a Law Lord for some authority for a proposition, called out in his
most rasping voice, “Usher! Go into the library and bring me any
elementary book on common law.”

But just as Russell’s manner cannot be reproduced in print because it
was unprintable, so the charm of Gully’s presence eludes you in words
that give an effect of weakness and softness which was not really his
quality.

I once heard a Lancaster juryman coming out of court say “I likes Mr.
Gully, he speaks so gentlemanlike.” This word does not quite convey
its meaning in the printed form, you want the burr of the North
Country in its pronunciation and the affectionate tone in which it was
uttered, and the smile of content that lighted up the speaker’s face
as he thought of Gully. One secret of Gully’s success as an advocate
was conscience. I doubt if any advocate is worth his salt without a
highly developed conscience. With Gully it was not only there, but it
worked automatically, and he never argued with it. He did the straight
thing naturally. And Gully was like Charley McKeand, a great comrade.
He had a high ideal of circuit life, as those who went the circuit
under his leadership can testify. I think of him as a gentleman in the
real old English sense of the word, such as Master Izaak Walton knew
in the friend he describes as “learned and humble, valiant and
inoffensive, virtuous and communicable.”

I went into the corridors of the Strangeways Courts the other day, and
ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my early days. Very few were
the familiar faces. I have no doubt the old circuit is as full of
laughter and good fellowship as ever it was, but to me it is a memory,
and in the foreground of the memory stand the figures of two dear
comrades, Gully and Charley McKeand.




CHAPTER X

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS

     Whether in the biography of a nation, or of a single person,
     it is alike impossible to trace it steadily through
     successive years.

                       RUSKIN: “Praeterita.”


I suppose in a certain sense every brief or retainer or notice of
motion or summons for directions is an alarum, or alarm, or call to
arms; and each appearance in Court is in the nature of an excursion.
But I had in mind in choosing my title some of those occasions on
which I was called away from the usual routine of my work to take up
other affairs in some different part of the world.

And casting my glances back to my early days at the Bar, I remember,
as though it were a fact in another person’s life, that I could never
keep away from an election if there was one about, though I can be
honestly thankful to-day that my young ambition to be one of the
principals in such a contest was never granted to me.

One of the most stirring elections I played a part in was in the
autumn of 1886, when I went down to Bristol to help Mr. Joseph Weston,
to whom I acted as a sort of political secretary during the three
weeks preceding the election. I am not sure that I was not a corrupt
practice or at least an illegal expense within the meaning of the Act,
for no return was made about me in the election expenses. But I was
really not a fighting unit, being only a personal intelligence
department for Mr. Weston, and I sat in his drawing-room, which was
papered with sketches and drawings of William Müller, many of which
are now in public galleries, and there I watched the progress of the
game, made notes of speeches, wrote letters, held conferences with my
chief, and in leisure moments studied the methods of one of the
greatest water-colour painters of the English School.

Sir Joseph Weston, as he afterwards became, was a well-known and
popular citizen. Born in 1822, he had, with his father before him,
been engaged in the hardware and iron trades. He was connected with
big concerns in his own city and Birmingham, such as the Bristol Wagon
Works and the Patent Nut and Bolt Company, and politically might be
described as a sound but not an advanced Liberal. His life had been
business not politics, and he had not given any great amount of
thought to the questions of the hour. He had been Mayor of Bristol for
four successive years, and always treated every class and creed of
citizen with lavish hospitality. It was rumoured that he would have
been member for the city before its division into districts, but for
an untoward incident arising during his mayoralty, which, though
merely prompted by his natural hospitality and kindness of heart, was
misunderstood by those who had to consider its legal parliamentary
bearings. Mr. Samuel Morley, who had been member since 1868, was
desirous of retiring for reasons of health, and the local association
interviewed two candidates. The first was an eminent counsel of the
Western Circuit. He, with Gladstone bag and the true faith in him,
came down from London, gave the deputation a sound political oration
at his hotel, and with incorruptible correctness bade them good
evening. The deputation then walked across to the Town Hall, where
they were received by Mr. Weston, who told them in a few words his
short and simple creed. This over, he said with a sigh of relief:
“Now, gentlemen, politics are done with, and I am once more the Mayor
of the City, and as I have never allowed any deputation to go away
from the Town Hall without entertainment, I can make no exception of
yourselves.” The doors were thrown open and they sat down to a
princely supper.

Sad to say, when this reached the ears of the eminent London counsel
and his legal friends in high places in the party, their formal minds
saw in the kindly Mayor’s thoughtful hospitality the possibility of
future trouble in Election Courts. The fact that the same evening or
early next morning the association had unanimously selected Mr. Weston
as their candidate, did not seem to weigh with them against his
dangerous act of playing the good Samaritan to possible voters. A way
out of the difficulty was found by persuading Mr. Samuel Morley not to
resign, and in 1885 Mr. Weston’s chance came, when he was assigned the
South Division of Bristol, rightly regarded from a Liberal point of
view as the one doubtful proposition of the election.

Mr. Weston was certainly one of the most generous of men. There was
nothing grudging or of necessity about his donations, he was in heart
and aspect a cheerful giver. He had a special secretary to investigate
cases of distress and keep the accounts of his subscriptions, and it
was really a matter of sorrow to him that during the election he had
to keep his hands out of his pockets and close his ears to local
appeals for fear of committing some breach of election rules. He had
always been in favour of Disestablishment, and though this was not
really an important issue at this election, the drum ecclesiastical
was beaten through the streets of Bedminster, and a serious clerical
campaign was entered upon against him. With priestly tact a sermon was
preached against Mr. Weston in one of the churches which had been
enriched by his gift. If I remember right, the present had been the
very pulpit from which the clerical election bomb was hurled. The
incident created a good deal of stir. It is curious what small things
influence the course of an election. That sermon, the output of
sincere, weak-minded, unbusinesslike enthusiasm, preached probably to
a regular Tory-voting congregation, where there was no possibility of
gaining votes, became a valuable electioneering asset to Mr. Weston’s
friends. He himself got many letters from fellow-citizens opposed to
him in politics regretting the affair, but I do not recall that he
ever referred to it in public himself.

And when I look back on those nights and days of anxious work, the
crowded meetings, the weary conferences, the dull round of
deputations, and then the final shoutings, booings, or applause of the
result, followed by speeches of triumph or manly resignation, I wonder
there are men always forthcoming to face the cost and trouble of it.
What reward did Weston get from it other than vanity and vexation of
spirit? But when we were in the thick of the thing on Wednesday,
November 25, 1885, no thoughts of the triviality of the affair ever
entered our minds. The eyes of Bristol were upon us and the eyes of
the Empire were on Bristol, and we were all intoxicated by the
unwonted limelight. Men, women and children, horses, donkeys and dogs
wore red or blue favours, and one gallant Tory paraded the streets in
a sky-blue suit, and to the delight of all parties had dyed his dog
the same colour. It was after half-past twelve at night before the
result was announced. We were waiting on the first floor of a little
greengrocer’s shop opposite the local police station. There had been
many false alarms. A huge crowd surged beneath us, cheering and
groaning other results. At length our figures flashed out in a
transparency across the street:

     Weston    4217
     Hill      4121
               ――――
                 96
               ――――

One half of Bedminster went mad with joy, the other half booed and
groaned as though hope had departed from their lives. Mr. Weston was
whirled away in his brougham to make a round of his constituency and I
went forth to see the fun, for Bristol on an election night had in
those days something of the Eatanswill spirit left. There was
window-breaking going forward in one of the main streets and a few
police sallies, and later on, well after one o’clock, when I reached
an open square, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach or one of his friends was
addressing a large and enthusiastic mob from the windows of the Royal
Hotel. “Who’s in for the South?” shouted someone. “Weston,” came the
answer from hundreds of voices, and prolonged groans followed the
announcement. There were but few police in the streets, and the mob
was orderly enough and well content to shout over its solitary
Conservative success, when a sound of counter-cheers approached from
the south, and as it came nearer the cry went up “Weston! Weston!” He
was boxed up in his neat single brougham. I could not see him from
where I stood, but I could see the stalwarts of his party, a lot of
sturdy fellows who had tied ropes to it, and were pushing and pulling
it along or sitting on the roof and cheering as they rocked their way
into the square. It was the brougham’s last night out, but it was a
glorious one. As it neared the Royal Hotel this delirious procession
became a cause of offence to the rival crowd. As if with one movement,
they turned on the advancing carriage, and it looked as if there would
be a faction fight worthy of the Emerald Isle, in which Weston was
bound to be injured. But a wonderful manœuvre prevented it. From some
ambush sprang to light about a hundred police. They made their way to
their beloved Mayor, surrounding his carriage and sufficient men to
pull it. This solid wedge of police drove itself through the crowd to
the bottom of Clifton Hill, and there the carriage was sent on its way
with a few police, and the main body suddenly turned across the street
and blocked the crowd back. It was a smart piece of work, and the mob
gave the police a most complimentary groan when they saw how they were
outwitted. In this way, in November, 1885, Weston, M.P., came to his
house in Clifton, full of the joy and glory of victory. But in the
summer of 1886 it was entirely the other way, the cheers were for our
opponents and the tears were ours. Then Mr. Weston received a
knighthood from Mr. Gladstone for his services to his country, and his
political career was at an end.

But the alarum came to me from another part of the world altogether at
the next general election. I was at Lancaster Sessions when a telegram
called me to Aylesbury to act as agent for Mr. C. D. Hodgson, who had
pluckily gone down to fight a Rothschild for Gladstone and Home Rule.
We had only a fortnight to do it in――but what a fortnight! I travelled
right up from Lancaster to Willesden, and across from there to
Westbourne Park, catching the last train to Aylesbury, and found
myself late at night in command of a big empty house with tables and
chairs and pens and ink, and a fine band of voluntary workers. It was
many nights before I got a sleep in bed. It was real campaigning.
Everything had to be done in no time. It was a big straggling division
without any railway, but we planned to have a meeting in every village
and carried out our plans, pushing our forces over the Chilterns to
the little village of Totternhoe, the rural silence of whose common
was for the first time disturbed by political speech. Indeed, we were
a thought too active. For our only hope of any success――and that a
slender one――lay in the fact that at the last election feeling had run
so high between the supporters of Liberal and Conservative that open
fights had taken place, and the Conservatives had declared they would
never vote for a Rothschild. If the Conservatives had held aloof it
would have been an interesting fight. However, the Union had to be
saved, our rebellion was taken seriously, a four-lined whip went out
to all the blues, and they flocked to the ballot against us and we
were routed.

It was during this election that I first learned something of the
iniquity of imprisonment for debt. I was told that in a certain
village a tradesman could command some two hundred votes, and that it
would be well to appoint him a chairman of a local committee. I went
over to interview him. He was very shy, and seemed diffident about
Home Rule and afraid of the Catholics, but after a lot of talk he said
he would vote for Hodgson and use his influence in the village in our
favour if he took the chair at our meeting. All this was arranged, but
I could not imagine why such a miserable, mean, uneducated,
narrow-minded little person should be a leader of enlightened thought,
even in a Buckinghamshire village. I was asking one of our supporters
in Aylesbury, a shrewd, keen man of business, about my little friend,
and he opened my eyes as to the nature of his influence.

“Oh, he’s all right,” he said. “He’s got the votes right enough. He’s
two hundred of them on his books.”

“On his books,” I said in surprise, not understanding what he meant.

“Yes. He gives pretty wide credit. The whole village is on his books,
and half of them are under judgment summonses. He don’t put them in
prison, of course, but they know he could do.”

I expressed my view about the iniquity of such proceedings, which I
scarcely credited.

“I don’t see anything wrong in it,” continued my friend. “It’s
checkmate to the parson. The parsons about here threaten a labourer
with hell in the next world if he votes Liberal, and our friend
threatens him with hell in this, if he votes Conservative, and then he
votes as he likes. It seems to me reasonable enough.”

It is curious how far removed this neighbourhood was from London and
the political world. The workers listened eagerly to speeches from
wagons and in schoolrooms, but the questions discussed were evidently
new to most of the hearers. Many strange questions were asked you, and
curious ideas of the position of affairs put forward. One of the
strangest politicians I ever met was an old farm labourer tramping
towards Hughenden. I jumped out of my pony cart and walked with him up
the hill.

“Are you a voter in the Aylesbury Division?” I asked.

“Aye, that I be,” he replied with a grin, in a chanting voice.

“I hope you are going to vote for Mr. Hodgson.”

“Aye, I be going to vote for Mr. Hodgson right enough, fur he be
Gladstone’s man.”

“Right you are,” I said, “he’s Gladstone’s man.”

“We know a bit about them politics down here,” he continued, in a
monotonous sing-song. “You see Disraeli he lived down Hughenden way.
They made him Lord Beaconsfield, and he’s buried over yon. We was very
proud of him, we was.”

I began to think there was a blunder somewhere, and said: “But Hodgson
is Gladstone’s man, you know.”

“All right, I understand, I understand,” he said, rather testily. “I
told you we know all about them things here. When Disraeli was alive,
why, him and Gladstone lived like brothers, didn’t they? And I say now
one’s dead, vote for t’other.”

It seemed useless to disturb the comfortable and convenient myth that
the old gentleman had built round the only two names in the political
world he had ever heard of. We were at the top of the hill, and our
ways parted. I once more assured him that Hodgson was Gladstone’s man,
and bade him farewell.

And I call to mind a very different excursion from these political
ones, for I little thought when I went down in early life to the
assizes at Norwich that I should ever have the honour of presiding in
the wonderful old court there. It is certainly one of the least
convenient for its purpose of any that I have ever seen. There are the
most mysterious collection of pens and pulpits in its interior, which
from the crow’s nest in which the judge sits seem to have been
designed specially to prevent anyone getting from one to the other
when it is necessary to do so. It took twenty-five minutes to get a
jury collected, seated in the right pen and duly sworn. To my
Manchester mind this was a long pause in my day’s work, but there is
more time to the hour in Norfolk than in most places, and once you get
there, there really is no hurry. The witness-box in that court is of
very peculiar design. It is built like a sentry box. The witness
enters it from behind; a special verger or usher shuts him in, and he
stays there until released. I watched a quaint comedy or rather farce
in which a jovial horse-dealer of very ample proportions played the
leading part. With great difficulty he was got into the witness-box
and the door closed by a clever wrist movement of the usher. It is
true some of him overlapped the bar in front, but the rest of him was
actually in the box and the door closed. All would have gone well if
counsel for the defence had not made him laugh――when he must have
expanded, and click! bang! the door flew open, and we had to wait
until the irate usher slowly awakened, strolled down the corridor, and
got him pressed in again and shut the door. This went on two or three
times, to the great discontent of the usher, who at last set his back
to the door and kept the fat horse-dealer in by sheer force. What
would have happened if the back door of the box had been left open I
do not know, but I think it might have hurt the usher’s feelings to
suggest it, so I kept silence.

I was sitting there for my brother, Judge Addison, K.C., who had
recently been appointed, and was ill and had asked me to sit for him,
which as I had a holiday I was very ready to do. It was my first
experience of travelling to little country towns, and in those days,
when there were no motors and the railways were very slow and
inconvenient, it was anything but a pleasant task. I remember in the
County Club, which gave me a kindly hospitality, a genial, well-built,
jolly squire, who knew what my job was, asked me how the working class
of the North compared with the men I met in the courts round Norfolk.
I made answer to the effect that the Northerners were quicker and
sharper, perhaps, but, then, the Norfolk people had a quaint mother
wit. “But,” I added, “either of them can tell you what isn’t true
occasionally.”

“Oh,” he cried, “liars! Of course, they’re liars! That’s nothing. They
are all Radicals and Dissenters about here!”

I have often wondered how my good friend Judge Willis, K.C., got on
with the Norfolk squire when he was appointed to that circuit.

The difference between the Manchester ways of thought and those of
Norfolk were very marked, and so were their methods of business. At
one place a solicitor began quoting some law from a book, when his
opponent got up indignantly and said it was a well-understood local
custom that if a solicitor was going to bring a law book, he should
give notice to the other side. I agreed that it was a very proper
custom, and impounded the law book, feeling strongly that if there was
any advantage in the possession of the law book it should be with the
Court.

The case went on very well without any law, as it was a running-down
case and a not unamusing one. A local ruffian had hired a pony and
cart and gone to Sheringham to collect his father’s rents. He took two
friends with him, and they seemed to have drunk the rents and smashed
up the trap and lamed the pony. The ruffian was a humorist, very
stolid and slow, with an added falsetto of his own to the long,
drawling Norfolk speech which seemed to amuse the people in court
greatly. Neither solicitor could make anything of him, so I thought I
would try my hand on him.

“Now, how did the accident happen?” I asked sternly.

“Nay, I doan’t know. I was ’elping to put pony back i’ sharves. I
doan’t know how ’e got out. I think belly band broke.”

“But you must know something about it.”

“Na――ay,” drawled the witness. “I worn’t driving; Bill wor driving.”

“Then if you remember nothing about it, were you drunk?”

“Me drunk?” asked the witness in pained surprise. “What, me drunk!
Na-ay, I wor no more drunk nor your lordship.”

There was a titter, promptly suppressed, but the witness stared
blankly at the crowd without a twinkle in his eye.

“Well, what was Bill doing while you were putting the pony in?”

“Bill!” A long pause of thought. “Oh, Bill! ’E wor sittin i’ ’edge
looking on.”

“Was Bill drunk?”

“What, Bill drunk? Na-ay, ’e wor no more drunk nor your lordship.”

A second and more prolonged titter.

“Well, what was the other man doing?” I asked.

“Oh, you mean Jim. Let me see. Jim wor lying on ’is back in the road.
Some boys got ’old of ’im and began draggin’ ’im by the ’eels round
the common. ’E wor a bit drunk, ’e wor.”

“Very drunk, I should say,” commented the Court severely.

“Na-ay,” dissented the witness with deep seriousness. “Na-ay, I doan’t
think so. It was sea air that upset Jim. ’E’d been to Sheringham, and
Jim ’e ain’t used to sea air.”

Everyone in court laughed loud at this excuse, except the witness and
the Court, and of the two the witness was far the better actor at
keeping an impassive face.

Many strange stories were told of Addison’s predecessor, the late
Judge Price, who seems to have been a second Crompton Hutton in his
methods of administering justice. I got a vivid glimpse of his system
at one of the courts I visited. It was held in a little country town
in a big barn-like building. The judge robed in a caretaker’s house.
Then we formed a procession, the judge and the registrar being
preceded by a policeman and a yellow dog, his property. It was rather
like going to be hanged without a chaplain. We crossed a brick-paved
yard and walked up the centre of a crowded building. A conjuror had
been there the night before, and the judge sat on a daïs of packing
cases covered with green baize. These keggled whenever the witnesses
came up. The plaintiff stood on an auctioneer’s rostrum, and the
defendant sat on a common Windsor chair. Whenever a case was called on
the Registrar got up and called out, “All witnesses leave the court.”
No one moved, and the policeman and the dog strolled round the
building and selected witnesses. These he threw out with very little
trouble, but it was an undignified proceeding, and wasted a lot of
time. I could see that I should spend the rest of the day in the
place, and probably miss the last train if I did not move. So I sent
for the Registrar, a worthy gentleman of the old school, and told him
my views.

“I don’t want all the witnesses out of court,” I said.

“The late judge always had them out of court, your Honour.”

“I dare say, but I don’t think it’s necessary, and it wastes time.”

“Yes, your Honour, but the late judge always had the witnesses out of
court,” repeated the Registrar.

“Well, I must ask you not to order them out of court to-day. It takes
a long time to get them out, and longer still to get them back again.”

There was a note of contempt in the Registrar’s voice as he replied,
“The late judge never had the witnesses back, your Honour.”

I felt that I was in the presence of a procedure invented by a
judicial genius.




CHAPTER XI

THE COMPLEAT CITIZEN

     _Question._ What is thy duty towards thy Neighbour?

     _Answer._ My duty towards my Neighbour, is to love him as
     myself, and to do to all men, as I would they should do unto
     me.

                       A Catechism. “Book of Common Prayer.”


Until each of us faithfully fulfils the first clause of his duty to
his neighbour it seems unlikely that we shall see in the flesh a
manifestation of the compleat citizen. I prefer the old-fashioned
phrase to the modern slang of super-citizen, but I take it the idea of
our seventeenth-century fathers was much the same as ours, only they
knew enough English to express it in their own tongue.

And one naturally goes back for a motto for citizenship to Dr. Nowel,
sometime dean of the cathedral church of St. Paul, who, “like an
honest Angler, made that good, plain, unperplexed Catechism which is
printed with our good old Service-book.” For, if anyone wished to
study the evolution of citizenship in this country, he would, I think,
for past history read the records of that ancient community of
citizens that dwelt in the old days east of Temple Bar, though for the
modern evidence of the continued existence of citizenship he would
have of necessity to journey towards the rugged north. For if there is
one thing that stands out as typical of the north countryman of
to-day, it is his pride of citizenship. Just as Paul boasted of Tarsus
when he was away from his native Cilicia, so the Manchester man, away
from Lancashire, the Leeds man far from Yorkshire, or the Newcastle
man dreaming of his beloved Northumberland, can always remember that
he too is a citizen of no mean city.

There is no widespread sense of citizenship in London. It exists
sporadically, no doubt. The germs of it must be there, but the thing
itself fell with the City walls, and passed away with the destruction
of the last gate. No doubt it will grow and flourish anew, and perhaps
the foundations even now are being laid on the south bank of the
Thames opposite Westminster. But even in Doctor Johnson’s day the
thing itself was not. Lover of London as he was――and not even Boswell
had a finer _gust_ for the great city――you find him claiming for his
beloved that she was pre-eminent in learning and science, and that she
possessed the best shops in the world, but he does not assert these
things with the pride of a citizen. No! London to the great man is a
“heaven upon earth,” and in those very words he negatives the idea of
citizenship, for to be a citizen is to be a part proprietor, having a
voice in the management of the concern and a responsibility for its
industry and good behaviour. Citizenship means freedom and the
exercise of a franchise and the privileges belonging to a peculiar
city. Pious visions of heaven give no hint of such things. And though
London was and is all that Doctor Johnson claims, it is as much the
property of the foreigner as of the denizen. Boswell had as great a
share in it as his friend, and in truth neither had more than an
equitable title to be called Londoner.

There is indeed no possibility of a citizen in London being in any
real sense a compleat citizen. The pictures in his galleries, the
trees and flowers in his parks, the statues in his streets, are not
really his at all. In London if a new road is cut across the grass of
the park a few murmurs may reach the ears of some remote official
through the pages of the Press, but they cause him no uneasiness. Did
such an affair awaken the indignation of the citizens of Manchester,
meetings would be held, debates raised, and in the City Council the
head of the official would be demanded by the malcontents, or at least
a resolution moved to disallow his salary on the estimates. People who
have not been citizens of any of the great towns of the North can have
but little idea of the keen interest taken in municipal matters. In
London day by day one scarcely reads a word in the Press of the great
problems of civic administration which are so important to health and
happiness. Gas and water are regarded with light-hearted contempt
unless the services break down, when the simple Londoner engages in
futile summer correspondence dear to the heart of editors in want of
copy. The gas and water and electricity, like the pictures and parks,
are not his to manage. But the citizen of no mean city sees the great
committees of his parliament fighting as to who shall serve him at
least cost and at the same time make the noblest contributions towards
the rates. When the New Zealander rediscovers this island and digs up
the engineering works of our time to read papers about them to his
historical society, he will find the great cities of the North
bringing their water from the mountains of Cumberland and Wales,
Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham linked to Thirlmere, Vyrnwy and
Rhayader; but he will have to peck about in the clay a long time
before he finds any vestiges of the little troughs in which they store
their water hereabouts. That Thirlmere scheme was, I think, typical of
Manchester and north-country citizenship. There you had up against you
the whole sentiment of the indolent holiday makers, the landed
proprietors and the average man in the street who is of no city,
headed by that honest prophet and champion of lost causes, John
Ruskin. But citizenship was there, and citizenship won. And it is
always to me one of the crosses of life that John Ruskin never had a
good word for Manchester, though Manchester returned good for evil by
gathering together, after he had gone, the most beautiful and
thoughtful collection to illustrate his works and days. No one asserts
that Manchester is the Good and the Beautiful exemplified, but the
author of “Fors Clavigera” ought to have seen a sense of beauty in a
community manifesting itself in the perfection of outward and visible
cleanliness, comfort and health, and a daily raising of the standard
of living. The purity of life is higher in the great cities of the
North than in many rural villages which look so peaceful and
beautiful. Slum conditions are not unknown in the background of the
garden of England, where life seems on the surface to be roses, roses,
all the way. And the only antidote to all these evils that I can
foresee is the growth of that spirit of citizenship which is of so
little account in the South either in town or country, but which seems
to be struck out of the very granite setts by the hoofs of the lurry
horses when they haul the cotton bales along the Manchester streets.

And although I can only lay claim to have been a citizen by adoption,
yet on one or two occasions I got whirled into the midst of a local
fight, and as Yuba Bill would say, “waded in with the best.” And it
was one of the curious features of Manchester that, in the very
shortest period, she finds a place for the foreigner and whistles him
on to her deck, and there he is pulling the ropes and working the
windlass like a native born. Yiddish, German, Greek, Albanian, Turk,
Spaniard, Scot, Irish, and even the intractable Celt or Silurian from
remote Wales may live in Manchester and even continue to speak their
native tongues, but surely and by no means slowly, they are kneaded
into the citizen mass of municipal dough, and may even be chosen as
plums for the pudding or be selected as that decorative sprig of civic
glory which we stick at the top of the affair and worship for twelve
months as My Lord Mayor.

And a merry encounter I had with the powers that be――it is deemed an
honourable thing to set the shoulders of the Corporation on the ground
in a fair bout――and I recall it with greater pleasure because it was
the last time I appeared as an advocate. It was my last brief, as it
were, and Cerberus-like I was the solicitor, the counsel and the
client――three single gentlemen rolled into one――and what was more, I
won my case. And it was not, as you may be thinking, a mere
police-court affair, I had not been riding my bicycle on the footpath,
my dog had not strayed round the corner in undress and met a
policeman――why do dogs without collars meet policemen? a mad dog never
does――nor had I been watering the garden in the summer when the
Corporation annually arrange to be short of water. No; as a matter of
fact, I was not the defendant. I was the prosecutor, and I was
prosecuting the Corporation for conspiracy to annoy certain peaceful
residents of Withington, including myself. And as in this comic-opera
constitution of ours when a Corporation annoys you, you arraign them
before themselves, it is something to have achieved to have prosecuted
a Town Council successfully before themselves, and to have found a
Town Council brave and honest enough to convict themselves and promise
not to do it again.

It arose in this way. When I found that I really was a Manchester
citizen and was going to live there for ever and ever, as I hoped, I
made up my mind to buy a home of my own, and I settled on a corner
house at the back of Withington village, bounded on one side by a
narrow street called Brunswick Road, and on the other by another
narrow street called Burlington Road. They were paved by setts, as all
the Manchester streets are, but even the setts had a peaceful
old-world aspect, and so little traffic was there over them that the
grass sprang up between them, just as the history books tell us it
used to do all over England before the repeal of the Corn Laws. Beyond
the house were fields with potatoes in them and ponds to slide on in
the winter, and there was a little stream at the end of Heaton Road,
whose presiding naïad collected old domestic china in parts and left
them carelessly lying on her bed. Then there was that ideal school for
children at Ladybarn House, with a playground to which you could
stroll and watch really great cricket matches, and marvel at the
self-detachment of a young lady of eight who could field long-stop and
make a surreptitious daisy chain at the same time. Once a year,
indeed, there was a large but orderly crowd at the annual athletic
sports. One policeman kept it in excellent order. The sport was of a
high class, and you could watch a future “blue,” literally a
three-year-old, romping home in the kindergarten race, for which he
had been laboriously trained by his elder sisters on a neighbouring
lawn.

Of course, it was not to be expected that this sylvan retreat could
remain for ever. The builder was bound to steal the fields from the
potatoes. The North-Western Railway had obtained powers to make its
way across to Parr’s Wood, and bought out the cuckoos that they might
not jeer at the engine-drivers and madden them to striking pitch with
their call of the summer. But you cannot expect a cuckoo to keep
faith, and only last year I heard them again from my bedroom
window――and if you will be hospitable to birds, as Manchester folk can
be, and make a feast of fat and cocoanut in the garden, I know no
place where birds are more ready to return your call without ceremony.
We had many generations of thrushes born in our little garden, and
starlings, blackbirds, robins and tomtits would build with us on
occasion, and would drop in promiscuous-like all through the day.

Some who know the place of which I write, may think that there is a
note of exaggeration in my description. I am ready to agree that at no
time was the hinterland of Withington a mere fairyland of milk and
honey and green pastures and still waters, but it had certain
attributes of homeliness and peace and quiet that make me remember it
with the gratitude due from one whose lines had fallen in pleasant
places.

It was this retreat of hard-working citizens that the Corporation
sought to destroy without warning or consultation, and if it had not
been that I found practically every resident of my own way of thinking
and spoiling for a fight, I think they would have successfully ruined
the district.

It was a summer morning, and a Sunday at that, when we woke up to the
fact that the motor ’buses were careering along our narrow roads back
and front of the house. They came hurtling over the setts at the rate
of about six an hour, and as you heard them chirruping in the distance
and screaming near to you and experienced the trail of stench they
left along their way, and saw the pavements and side-walks splattered
with mud, it was clear that if they had come to stay, those of us who
could afford would have to go.

But why had the motor ’bus invaded us in this way? The answer was
easily given. A company, the chairman of which was a powerful town
councillor, had obtained licences to run ’buses along these side roads
from Levenshulme to Stretford. They were to run by these back ways
because the Council had trams on the main route, and did not want the
company or competition of the ’buses. No doubt the end of August had
been chosen to start the ’buses, because in a residential district
like ours everyone was away for the holidays. I was just going off to
Grasmere, and telling my solicitor to threaten the company with an
action for nuisance, I fired a letter into the papers and went my way.
To my delight I found that the whole neighbourhood was up in arms, and
although I grudged the holiday time given up to it, I went into the
fight with considerable gusto. There was the usual newspaper
correspondence. We dilated on the amenities of Withington and pointed
out that the only traffic really catered for was the Sunday
_bonâ-fide_ traveller, and asked why one lucky councillor should have
these licences given him when the rest of such traffic was run by the
Corporation for the ratepayers. The reply was made that we were a lot
of selfish people――“carriage people” we were generally called――who
lived luxurious days in glorious country, which we wished to keep to
ourselves, and that this company of motor ’buses had been mainly
formed in the interest of the working man, who desired to ruralise
among us.

In the midst of all this clash of words we organised a petition, and
the other side did the same. It was clear that we had the residents,
who were nearly all of them workers in the city of various grades,
entirely with us. We had a very strong case on these two points alone.
First, that the type of ’bus used by the company was undesirable, and
secondly, that the roads over which it ran were unsuitable. The other
side had a strong case, in that temporary licences were already
granted, and the Corporation were not likely to go back on a matter
they had just decided. Further, the eminent councillor at the head of
the company had many supporters in the Town Council, including the
Lord Mayor, and Withington was a district recently added to
Manchester, and not much in touch as yet with Council affairs. Before
we carried our petition to the Council, in clubs and places where they
wager, the betting was three or four to one against us, but I am
conceited enough to chronicle that after the hearing it dropped to
evens.

I confess that it was so long since I had played the advocate that it
was with some trepidation that I briefed myself to appear in my own
interests at the hearing before the Hackney Coach Sub-Committee. A
large number of residents went with me, and I stated my own case and
theirs. I should like to report my speech at length. It was a
beautiful speech. But the only phrase I remember was one in which I
demolished the argument that we were a lot of selfish, stuck-up
carriage people by confessing “that for my part the only carriage I
had ever possessed was a double perambulator, and I thought most of my
neighbours held the same record.”

As a Manchester citizen I should have liked to have to chronicle a
more speedy judgment, but historical accuracy compels me to say that
Wilmslow, Levenshulme, Altrincham, and Urmston all took steps to
protect the amenities of their roads before Manchester. It was not
before October 8 that the committee refused to continue the licences.
Still, we could boast that in six short weeks the residents of our
little oasis had risen in rebellion against our rulers and governors
and convinced them of the error of their ways.

A friend of mine on the Town Council used to tease me a good deal
about the beauties of the Withington District. He lived in lovely far
off country himself, and had only visited Withington as a member of
the Highways Committee.

“It seems an ordinary enough sort of place,” he said.

“Let me remind you of what Wordsworth says,” I replied.

  Minds that have nothing to confer
    Find little to perceive.

You can always obtain the just rude word to end a discussion from
Wordsworth’s poems or David’s Psalms――David is perhaps a little heavy
handed for these days.

I suppose it is because my forefathers lived on the marches that I
cannot help enjoying a downright good fight. I know it is wicked to
enjoy the angry scenes of a contest, but even the saintly John Henry
Newman confesses on occasions to have had “his monkey up”――not a very
fierce and vicious monkey, but sufficient of a monkey as a precedent
for a poor pagan to refer to――and when you get a wilderness of monkeys
up, as we did in the Battle of the Sites, then is there a scene for
Homer’s pen.

  As when a torrent from the hills, swoln with Saturnian showers,
  Falls on the fields, bears blasted oaks and withered rosin flowers
                            … into the ocean’s force.

So did every man, woman and child in the city get whirled into the
contest and rush into the flood, and get carried out of their depths
and find themselves very much at sea. But it _was_ a fight.

The Battle of the Sites was only a glorious incident in the thirty
years’ war that in Manchester had been steadily raging round the
affair of the Royal Infirmary. And I am far from suggesting that the
good individuals who were members of the Board of the Infirmary were
any worse citizens than the rest of us. But such is human nature that
the action of a board or committee is not the action of the
individuals. A sort of lowest common moral denominator is found by
consent of all, and that becomes the ruling quantity in the resultant
action. When a good man makes a mistake he apologises and makes
amends. Had any individual member of the Infirmary Board done some of
the things that were done by him collectively, I have never doubted
that when the wrong was pointed out he would have hastened to
straighten things out. But a board or committee never apologises,
neither does it pay the costs when judgment goes against it. Those
come out of the estate.

And I wish I could believe the theory of Cardinal Newman, who solemnly
tells us in his “Apologia”: “Also, besides the hosts of evil spirits,
I considered there was a middle race, δαιμονια, neither in heaven nor
in hell; partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty,
benevolent or malicious, as the case might be. These beings gave a
sort of inspiration or intelligence to races, nations, and classes of
men. Hence the action of bodies politic and associations, which is
often so different from that of the individuals who compose them.” It
is a charming conceit, but if taken literally might lead to committees
throwing all responsibilities for their delinquencies upon the little
demons at their elbows. But I like to imagine and picture the scene of
a board meeting with δαιμονια in attendance, painted in the manner of
the younger Teniers, whose goblins, teasing the unhappy Dives, have
cheered me since early boyhood. Certainly if there were any smaller
devils taking part in Infirmary affairs, which seems a practical
solution of many difficult problems, they were not wise devils――indeed,
they were silly devils――and we did well to cast them out.

When the new Infirmary was building in the Oxford Road, I happened to
meet Mr. Charles Hopkinson, who deserves so well of the citizens for
his careful and devoted work on the Building Committee. He was
admiring the rapidly rising building, and I told him that I did not
see anything of those two pedestals in the front gardens.

“What two pedestals?” asked Hopkinson; “I never heard of any pedestals
in the design.”

“Certainly,” I replied, “there were to be two pedestals for the two
statues.”

“I haven’t a notion what you mean,” answered Hopkinson, impatiently.
“Whose statues?”

“Joseph Bell’s and my own,” I called back over my shoulder.

And although Hopkinson was quite right, and these statues have not
been placed there even yet, still it is only fitting that the great
building on the Oxford Road should have had some memorial of Bell and
myself, for without us there would have been no Royal Infirmary on the
Oxford Road. A mediæval builder would have expressed in a series of
sculptured capitals the whole history of the Battle of the Sites, and
left satirical portraits of the old Board in gargoyles hanging over
the guttering, whilst a statue of Joseph Bell would have adorned a
spacious quadrangle, round the walls of which myself and the others of
his committee were portrayed in brilliant mosaics. But your modern
architect, who would be annoyed at being called a builder, never puts
into his work any of the history of his building, but is quite content
to erect adequate walls and roof and useful equipment and decorate the
outside, much as a confectioner be-sugars a cake, to please the eye
for the moment rather than with any intention of expressing ideas in
his art. No doubt the Gothic days are over, and the Gothic spirit is
dead, but Manchester has got what she wanted, an Infirmary building
second to none in the kingdom.

I always intended to have a return match with the old Infirmary Board,
because, although I won the first of the rubber, the loss of the game
did not to my mind fall on the shoulders of those who ought to have
borne it.

Early in 1893 a lady sought my advice through her solicitor. Her story
was a very extraordinary one. She had been a nurse at the Royal
Infirmary since 1889. Her career was successful. She had been selected
to attend on the late Oliver Heywood, and up to November of 1892 there
had never been a word of complaint about her work or her conduct. A
small-pox epidemic now broke out in Lymm, in Cheshire. Another nurse
had been sent there and was ill――it was supposed, of small-pox. My
client was sent there hurriedly to take her place. She found the
so-called small-pox hospital to be two cottages converted into a
temporary hospital, and her colleague was ill in bed, and was taken
away. There was also a wife of a tramp dying of small-pox, and eight
or ten patients. There was no water in the house. It is needless to
repeat other unpleasant details of want of equipment. She stuck to her
task for several days; she sat up with a delirious patient all night,
and when the patient died she had to help the men bring in the coffin
and screw down the lid, it being with much difficulty, and only after
bribes of whisky that they would come inside the cottages at all.
After writing letters to the authorities in Manchester and asking the
local doctor for help that did not come, she at length broke down in
health and fled. Arrived at Monsall, she was nursed there for a week,
and at the end of that time received her dismissal without notice, and
was refused permission, though at the end of her probation, to pass
her examinations.

Every effort was made to get the old Board to do justice to the lady
and let her pass her examination, but as no redress was to be obtained
without litigation a writ was issued. Under her agreement the
Infirmary Board had no right to send her to Lymm at all. The lady
desired no damages against the charity, and, therefore, an action was
brought for an order to compel the Board to allow her to take her
examinations. Shee led me in the case, and Gully and Sutton were for
the defendants――and I have no doubt told them exactly what they
thought of them. Certainly it was with an air of great relief that
Gully, at Mr. Justice Day’s suggestion, threw up the defence and
agreed that the lady should sit for her examination.

The nurse agreed to compromise on the understanding that the matter
was left in the hands of the Medical Board, whose examination she
successfully passed. The lady got justice, but the Infirmary Board did
not, and I made up my mind that if I ever got the chance of a return
match with them, they should not be let off so lightly again.

The Battle of the Sites had started years before I came to Manchester.
The old Board had made up its mind to rebuild the Infirmary on the old
site in the centre of the city; the majority of the citizens wished it
to go to the present site at Stanley Grove, which was a gift of the
Whitworth Trustees. Of the jealousies, squabbles, and troubles of all
these years the less said the better.

The old Board, with Fabian genius, continually prevented any agreement
with the University authorities, and brought any other plan than that
of rebuilding on the old site to a dilatory end. The older generations
of great citizens who had fought the Board in the past――Thomas Ashton,
Reuben Spencer, Henry Simon, and Dr. Leech――were no longer with us,
and in 1902 the old Board thought this was a most excellent time to
carry through their pet scheme. They actually prepared plans for the
rebuilding, and called a meeting, believing that the opposition had
died down.

The one man who defeated their plans was Joseph Bell. His interests in
the commercial world have been too engrossing to allow him much time
for political work, but from the way he handled the Infirmary
question, I make sure he would be a big asset to any political party.
At the first onslaught it did not appear that the old Board’s
opponents were very strong, but the meeting stood adjourned. I had
never met Bell, but I received a note from him, asking for an
interview, a letter of mine having been read at the first meeting. It
was when I was reading his note that I remembered that, from a
dramatic point of view, I had left the case between the nurse and the
Infirmary Board unfinished.

Joseph Bell came to see me after Court with a bundle of papers, and,
sitting down at my table, told me the whole story of the Infirmary
Board and their doings on the site question from the earliest days.
Two things were clear; one, that my visitor had a thorough and
intimate knowledge of his subject, and, two, that he meant business.
When he had ended his statement he looked at me keenly and said: “Are
you going to help?”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“We are going to clear out the old Board and build a new infirmary on
the Stanley Grove site.”

“You may put it there,” I said, holding out my hand.

“Then the battle can proceed,” said Joseph Bell, laughing.

And a very excellent fight it was. I should be sorry to have to read
again all the letters that were written and speeches that were made. I
remember I had to move the resolution against the old Board at the
Memorial Hall and Lord Derby was in the chair. I certainly did not
forget the nurse case when I told the members of the old Board that,
“however great my temptations, I would not say anything worse of them
than I knew they often said of themselves, namely, that they had left
undone all they ought to have done, and had done all they ought not to
have done, and there was no health in them.” A sentiment I was glad to
hear heartily cheered.

We won the resolution, we won the poll the friends of the old Board
demanded, and then we had an election forced upon us. Joseph Bell’s
policy had been to form a Board by consent, and on his “ticket” he ran
several members of the old Board who more or less favoured his views.
He was absolutely master of the situation, and could, had he wished,
have nominated his own Board. There were twenty-two members to be
elected, and Bell’s committee put up twenty-one. The friends of the
old Board did not understand Bell’s good sense in taking over so many
members of the old Board, and did their best to thwart any settlement
by consent. An election took place, and certainly created more
interest and feeling than any municipal election that I can remember.
It was with some excitement that, coming out of Court on the afternoon
of the counting, I bought a paper from a _Chronicle_ boy, who was
shouting out “Result of the Infirmary Poll.” One of Bell’s candidates
had resigned at the last moment, and the other twenty were returned at
the head of the poll.

As I read the successful names I felt a sense of relief. Something had
been attempted and something done. That nurse case that had begun
before Mr. Justice Day ten years ago was really finished.

But though the Battle of the Sites was over, the Battle of what to do
with the old Site is not yet well begun, for having pulled down the
old building, there is a very pretty quarrel going on as to what to
put in its place. And I envy Joseph Bell sniffing the battle from the
upper windows of Portland Street, where the stricken field――and it is
a stricken field――lies at his doorstep. At the right time he, as a
good Manchester citizen, will off with his coat and rush into the fray
whilst I shall be idling here, with no right to heave even half a
brick in the good cause. But whoever is on the other side, the stable
money is on Joseph Bell.




CHAPTER XII

THAT REMINDS ME

     FLUELLEN: It is not well done, mark you now, to take the
     tales out of my mouth, ere it is made and finished.

                       SHAKESPEARE: “King Henry V.”


That reminds me that the little Welshman――and what race understands
the rules of courtesy more truly――warns us against the ill manners of
interrupting the story of our companion by our own incomparably
wittier jest, until there has been a fair pause for the courtly
reception of his somewhat antiquated tale, and then, I take it, good
breeding compels us to pretend that out of the ashes of his dusty
reminiscences our own admirable phœnix has sprung, and we begin our
story with “That reminds me,” not as a boast, but out of mere
complaisance. But when one has only oneself to interrupt the course is
smoother. Nor is it at all necessary that there should be any real
sequence in the story-telling to justify the phrase. It is a
well-known convention of the game that you may dash off into a story
having no reference to the past conversation as long as you preface it
with some lip-service to the pleasures of memory. For the
story-telling habit comes down to us, no doubt from the East and the
“Arabian Nights.” Poor Scheherazadé had a special reason for being
reminded of a new story at the right moment, she indeed being the
first lady novelist who literally made her living out of fiction.
Really I cannot but think we should get some brighter and more
entertaining stories from the fair writers of to-day if their novels
were written under a similar stimulus. This habit of irrelevant
story-telling is no new thing――Cervantes caught it from the East,
perhaps, and our own Fielding glories in it as being part of the
method of the Master; for is not the “History of the Man of the Hill”
a corollary to the “Novell of the Curious Impertinent”? Dickens no
doubt inherited the manner directly from Fielding, and in his earlier
style will interrupt unblushingly the humours of an evening at Dingley
Dell to narrate the unnecessary clergyman’s unnecessary narrative of
“The Convict’s Return,” and then, as old Wardle says, “You are fairly
in it!”

And having satisfied my petty legal mind with the precedents in the
case, and convinced myself that irrelevant story-telling is, as the
golfer would say, a fair hazard, I will confess that I should not have
interrupted my narrative with this particular embarrassing and
irrelevant chapter had I not seen an excellent portrait of Partington
the other day. How many remember that sound artist? I last heard of
him from Sir Henry Irving, who had seen him in San Francisco――and this
picture of Partington’s reminded me of George Freemantle, that prince
of musical critics, whose picture by the same artist still hangs in
the Brasenose Club, where he was so greatly beloved, and that reminded
me of Murphy, Q.C., and that reminded me of the Right Honourable
Arthur James Balfour, and not unnaturally that reminded me of “The
Story of the Mysterious Barber,” which, as Sir Francis Burnand’s Mr.
Barlow says――as you have not heard, I will now proceed to relate. And
“The Story of the Mysterious Barber” is in reality the story of the
election petition against Mr. Balfour in 1892.

Now, although this petition was a farce and a fiasco at that, yet I am
far from thinking that, to those who started it, it was as obviously
an ill-advised a proceeding as it quickly appeared to be in court. Of
course, Mr. Balfour himself desired the election to be conducted on
the purest lines, but, then, Mr. Balfour by himself probably could not
have succeeded in winning the election. The man who won the election
was Stephen Chesters Thompson, the uncrowned king of Ardwick, and at
the back of Chesters Thompson was a brewery. In manner and appearance
Chesters Thompson was as genial a ruffian as ever scuttled a ship, but
he had a big heart and an open hand, and was genuinely fond of
throwing largess to his poorer neighbours. I have heard that he would
enter a grocer’s shop on a Saturday night or Monday morning, when the
women were paying up their books, and, snatching the books from their
hands with a “Now, missus, I’ll be settling this for you,” he would
pay up all the books and depart with a jest and a laugh, as though the
affair were a commonplace pleasantry. He and Mr. Balfour were, indeed,
an ill-assorted pair, but politics makes one acquainted with strange
friends, and no one ever saw the least impatience exhibited by Mr.
Balfour towards his adjutant. I never heard Chesters Thompson make a
long oration, but I remember him once at the end of a meeting jumping
up and delivering a panegyric on Mr. Balfour. At the close of its
tawdry, fulsome, and sincere adulation, which Mr. Balfour bore like a
hero, Chesters Thompson wound up by patting him endearingly on the
shoulder with his heavy paw. “I luve Arthur James Balfour,” he said,
swaying heavily about with suppressed emotion, and throwing the whole
weight of his devotion into the second syllable of the word Balfour,
which he always accented thus. “I luve Arthur James Balfour,” he
continued, “and I tell you boys this, that should the day ever coom
that it is necessary, I shall be there to place the body of Stephen
Chesters Thompson between Arthur James Balfour and the dagger of the
arsarsin.” The cheers that rent the stuffy atmosphere of the hired
schoolroom at this magnificent sentiment proved that in Ardwick, at
least, poetry, romance, melodrama――call it what you will――was a living
force, and that Chesters Thompson was its high priest.

With such a general and many lieutenants who modelled themselves on
their leader, it is not to be wondered at that stories came round
bearing the interpretation of ill-doing. The election was a very
keenly contested one. Professor Munro, who fought for the Liberals,
put up an excellent fight, and was only beaten by 398 votes. In August
it was announced that a petition had been lodged by the defeated
candidate. Nothing personal was alleged against Mr. Balfour, but there
were allegations of illegal practices, bribery, treating, and general
corruption.

What was done between August and November to collect the necessary
evidence I have no idea, but when the briefs were delivered it was
very clear that it would be a difficult task to prove any of the
allegations that had been made. It was on November 4 that the case
came on before Justices Cave and Vaughan Williams. Murphy, Q.C., Lewis
Coward, and myself were for the petitioner, and Finlay, Q.C.,
Danckwerts, the Hon. A. Lyttelton, and Lord Robert Cecil for Mr.
Balfour. Murphy, who was far from well, addressed the Bench sitting
down. We really had no case to open, and those who had been employed
by Professor Munro to collect facts had, I fear, been carried away by
their enthusiasm and belief in the general iniquity of their
opponents, and had mistaken rumour and hearsay for evidence. It was a
lamentable position for counsel to be in, but Murphy――if one can
predicate such movements about so genial a man-mountain as
Murphy――skilfully danced among a labyrinth of eggs with as much
certainty and decision as if he were upon a clear stage.

He spent quite a long time over the various matters about which he
might or might not satisfy the Court, and then he paused and said
there was one specific case of bribery which, if the witness was
believed by the Court, would invalidate the election. The name of the
witness was John Francis Green. Murphy himself had never believed in
the fellow, but he agreed that if when we saw John Francis Green he
turned out to be a witness of truth, then the petition was well
founded.

The mystery of John Francis Green is like the problem of the “dark
lady” in the Sonnets. Some will believe one thing about it and some
another. The Court refused to believe him at all, and it may be that
he was merely a romancer and a liar. On the other hand, his story may
have been partly built up from facts relating not necessarily to this
election, but to some municipal or other contest. Certainly it was an
extraordinary story for a man to invent at the risk of being found
guilty of perjury, and with the necessity of giving up his business in
Ardwick. True, he was to receive £200, but only if he gave truthful
evidence, a not unreasonable arrangement, as Ardwick would not have
held him if the result of his evidence had been to invalidate the
election.

The first day’s evidence was devoted to one case after another that
more or less broke down and could not be proved. Then we received news
that John Francis Green had disappeared. He had been ill for some
days, and we adjourned without knowing whether he would turn up or
not. The next day he did turn up, a miserable figure muffled up to the
chin and looking wretchedly ill. Some said his illness was mere funk
at having to tell his false story in the witness-box, but there was
even then opportunity to go back and speak the truth. However, he told
his story on oath exactly as he had given it to Professor Munro’s
supporters.

He was a barber in Ardwick, and had many times shaved Mr. Chesters
Thompson. He said that one of Mr. Balfour’s supporters often came to
his shop and talked to him, and on one occasion gave him £15 and a
letter of instructions, and later on a man he did not know, but who
said he was an election agent, had given him £7. This money Green was
to hand over to people who presented him tickets, and these tickets he
described in great detail. There were several names on them, and some
had sealing-wax and a ribbon attached to them. After the election some
of the tickets and incriminating letters which remained with him were,
according to Green’s statement, kept by him in a box, and towards the
end of October his house was broken into and the box stolen. That in
itself was enough to make one disbelieve his story, but when it was
found that he could not identify any one of Mr. Balfour’s supporters
as the election agent, it was clear that in the absence of
corroboration his evidence must be dismissed as useless.

Mr. Murphy now took the only course open to him, and said he could not
usefully continue the petition. Mr. Maltby, Mr. Balfour’s agent, Mr.
Chesters Thompson, and others went into the witness-box and formally
denied all knowledge of Green and his extraordinary story. The Court
adjourned until the afternoon to deliver judgment, and I took Murphy
up to the Brasenose Club.

It was about noon, the club was empty, and Murphy reclined on a sofa,
and disappeared behind the _Times_. Very soon the paper boys began to
yell out “Kerlapse of the Pertition!” “Kerlapse of the Pertition!” I
knew I should have to stand much chaff and friendly abuse over the
petition, as in all clubs where there are no politics eighty per cent.
of the members were Tory, and it is only the remainder who must not
indulge in political discussion. And sure enough, in rushed
Freemantle, the musical critic, waving a paper and calling out to me,
“Here’s nice work! Here’s a disgraceful affair to be connected with!
Apart from politics altogether, did you ever read of such a wicked and
abominable conspiracy to destroy a political opponent? Of course, I
know you have had nothing to do with it, but I should just like to be
face to face with the ruffian who put this wretched case forward!”

“You shall,” I said, and pulling down the _Times_ I disclosed my
learned leader and introduced him to Freemantle. “Mr. Murphy――Mr.
Freemantle.” As I strolled away I felt Murphy was shaking with gentle
laughter to a running accompaniment of Freemantle’s explanations and
apologies.

We went back to the Court, and our case was dismissed with ignominy
and costs. Freemantle, indeed, had not said a word too much about it.
I was very sorry for Professor Munro, for he was a sincere and keen
worker for the Liberal party, and those who advised with him in the
early stages of the petition had grievously misled him; no one
supposes the election was conducted without errors, but things on the
other side were not as black as the Liberals imagined.

Certainly no word was ever spoken or thought by the most ardent
Radical against Mr. Balfour, the nominal defendant. His popularity in
Manchester remained and still remains undiminished. No one in the
political world was better loved than Mr. Balfour by all sorts and
conditions of Manchester men. Even to the very last those who had
always voted against him voted with regret, for they felt they were
parting with the first gentleman in English politics. As an Ardwick
man said in defence of himself and some of his friends, “Nay, mon,
it’s not Arthur James Balfour we’re tired of――it’s his politics.”

And that reminds me――not directly, I agree, but I will not waste
another page in tracing out the connection――that reminds me of the
story of “The Good Man and the Manilla Bills.” A certain principal
brought an action against a firm of very respected merchants. The
merchants had acted in large concerns as his agents. They had shipped
goods for him for many years to foreign parts and had had complicated
financial dealings with him. He now asserted that for years the
merchants had been defrauding him, and asked for all the accounts to
be opened between them and taken afresh. This was, of course, a very
serious charge indeed, and when the case came before the Chancery
Court the sole representative of the firm of merchants was the Good
Man, who I am happy to relate is still with us.

It is not for a common law man like myself to criticise the ways of a
Palatine Chancery Court. Astbury was my leader, and I was only one of
the team of three who defended the Good Man. Why I was there I never
rightly understood, but I think I was there to sympathise with the
Good Man in his trouble while Astbury and his eminent solicitor, the
cashier and an eminent and chartered accountant played hide and seek
among the ledgers. Technically, perhaps, I was taken into the case to
cross-examine, but I don’t remember doing it. These Chancery fellows
love doing it, and as the men on the other side were Chancery men, and
as no one knew anything about the law of evidence――least of all the
Court――what did it matter? The case lasted forty odd days. That was to
the credit of Chancery procedure. The leaders arranged each day how
far they should go, and the Court was only too glad to rise when told
that “this” was a convenient moment, as they were now coming to the
Manilla bills. And that reminds me that it is time I came to the
Manilla bills. They were a nightmare to Astbury, the eminent
solicitor, the cashier and the eminent and chartered accountant. I do
not know that they affected my sleep, but I gathered they were the
weak point in our case and were probably going to ruin the Good Man,
and that made me very sorry. For the worry about the Manilla bills was
that in some mysterious monetary manner, in passing through banks and
ledgers and other financial filters, it had so panned out that a
quarter――or was it an eighth?――per cent. that belonged undoubtedly to
the plaintiff, remained in the coffers of the Good Man. It was the
most complicated affair, but there it was. The fact must be found
against us, and then as the Good Man was an agent dealing with the
monies of his principal, would not the Court take the view that this
was fraud, and order the whole account to be re-opened? The more we
talked over this the more exasperating it became. The cashier, who had
found the system in the office when he came there, was rather proud of
it, and blankly refused to believe there was anything wrong about it.
The Good Man smilingly gave us sixteen different explanations of the
matter, which Astbury rejected with a scorn that caused the eminent
solicitor to grow visibly older. Astbury insisted in his clear logical
way on a clear logical defence of our treatment of the Manilla bills.
The difficulty was there wasn’t one. Even if we could have invented a
theoretical one the Good Man would have given it away honestly and
simply the first time he was asked. So there we were with the Manilla
bills ahead of us and within a day or two of the time when we had to
put our Good Man in the box to explain his dealings with them.

“Well!” said Astbury in despair, “I shall have to lead him through the
best explanation we have got.”

“In the Palatine Court that is always possible,” I answered; “but
isn’t it fatal?”

Astbury groaned.

“Why not let him give all the sixteen explanations?” I suggested
carelessly. “He would love to do it.”

Astbury and the eminent solicitor looked annoyed at my flippancy.

However, as it turned out, Providence had a task for me in that case
after all, for the Good Man came to me and told me that he was so
frightened of Astbury that he would really like me to examine him.

“I never seem to say what they want me to,” he said, naïvely.

And in the end, it being clear that no form of examination of the
witness could make the Manilla bill business any better or worse, the
Good Man had his own way, and he and I collaborated in the matter. We
had a rehearsal. It went like this. I asked the Good Man, “What about
the Manilla bills; tell me all about them?”

The Good Man started off――I remember I smoked two cigars of say five
and seven-eighths during his answer. It was then, I think, that he
added the seventeenth explanation, less convincing than the others. I
timed him. He was a rapid speaker, and then I worked it out in
folios――I felt sure the drama of it was right, and I determined we
would play it out in our own simple way. I fancy the saner spirits
among us washed their hands of the enterprise altogether, but even in
a Chancery Court a good comedy well played is irresistible. And the
Good Man was really an excellent witness. My part was not a speaking
one. I merely slipped him from the leash, so to speak, and away he
went.

I remember the indignant tones in which he swept aside the suggestion
of fraud and started out to victory. The shorthand writers toiled
after him, panting and breathless. It was like a fine course at
Altcar, run with vigour and mettle. At the end of the first
explanation he paused, though only for a second, and I could see our
opponents pitying us――but he was off again, heading to the opposite
bank, and the reporters after him with dismay in their faces――and our
opponents were laughing at his contradictions. But not for long. One
after another came the various possible explanations, always prefaced
by a kindly smiling desire to say all he knew and keep nothing back
that could be told. At one moment the Vice-Chancellor asked him to
repeat one of the theories of the finance of the matter. He did so.
The Vice-Chancellor said he really could not understand it, so the
Good Man repeated it again, and three pages were added to the
shorthand note. I reckoned before we had finished that the Good
Man had spoken about forty pages of shorthand notes, and in
cross-examination the other side added another twenty, and an
eighteenth new explanation of the Manilla bills, which may perhaps
have been only a variant of the eleventh. But the case was won. The
Vice-Chancellor had heard the Good Man speak the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth, and knew that he was honest. It was
a triumph of drama over law, and it was the Good Man’s own victory.

At the hearing in the Court of Appeal, the shorthand note was read and
commented upon for several days, and the Manilla bills reduced the
Court to a state of bewildered amazement. They knew the rights and
wrongs of the subject, for those were elementary, but they could not
understand the Good Man’s evidence. Like the average manager who reads
a play in manuscript, they could not appreciate the drama of it. And
then A. L. Smith――so like him――said “Let’s have a look at him.” And he
gave a second show of the Manilla bills in the Court of Appeal. I was
a judge then, but when I heard they had sent for the Good Man to give
evidence I knew all was well. For as soon as he came into the presence
of the Master of the Rolls the case was over. If there was one man on
the bench who knew an honest man when he saw him it was A. L.

And that reminds me――quite naturally, for A. L. was a sportsman――and
it was a story of the moors he told me that reminded me of this story
which I once told him――that reminds me of the story of “The Solicitor
and the Ambiguous Grouse.” It is really Louis Aitken’s story. Would
that he were with us to claim it; but it enables me as a humble
story-teller to take off my hat to him and his story as I hand it on
to others.

We had gone up to a remote County Court among the Yorkshire moors to
thrash out a small building dispute. The solicitor who instructed me
was an old friend of Aitken, and they had often shot together here and
elsewhere. During the conduct of the case it became necessary for me
to prove a certain document the writer of which was not present.

“I have no doubt my friend will admit this,” I said.

“Not a bit of it,” said Aitken, looking very firm. “I shall want it
proved strictly.”

I leaned over to talk to my solicitor about the impasse, when Aitken
continued in a bullying tone, “There is no difficulty in proving the
document. Your solicitor can prove it, you know,” and then with great
emphasis, “if he dares to go into the box――if he dares to go into the
box!”

“Really, Mr. Aitken,” said the judge deprecatingly.

“I have my reasons, your Honour――I have my reasons,” replied Aitken,
shaking his head solemnly.

By this time the solicitor was in the box and had taken the oath and
shortly proved the document, and Aitken arose with a great show of
serious emotion to cross-examine the witness.

“Do you remember the 24th of August, 1889?” he asked.

“I do,” replied the witness with a faint smile.

“This is no joking matter, sir. Attend to me. I think you and I were
shooting on your moor on that day.”

“We were.”

“What on earth has this got to do with the case, Mr. Aitken?” asked
the learned judge, putting down his pen.

“Your Honour will see in a moment that it is most material,” replied
Aitken unabashed. “Now, sir, remember you are on your oath, and answer
me this question without prevarication. Whose bird was it?”

“Well, really――――” began the solicitor.

“Whose bird was it, sir?” shouted Aitken.

“Well, I believe it was yours, Mr. Aitken.”

“Ha!” cried Aitken, triumphantly, and, bowing to the learned judge,
who was shaking with laughter, he added, with impressive humility, “I
trust that, looking to the satisfactory nature of the witness’s
admission, your Honour will not think I was wasting the time of the
Court in insisting on the strict proof of the document.”

And I suppose it is Louis Aitken who reminds me of the Northern
Circuit, and I never think of the circuit without remembering one of
the best friends of all of us, still happily of our number, McCall,
K.C.――and he reminds me of the eminent butcher. There may be some who
have not heard the story of “The Irishman and the Dishonest Backer.”
It is worth relating, I think, as an example of the strange attitude
of mind existing in the unrighteous about the administration of the
law.

There was a well-known butcher in our neighbourhood, a great
character, and a regular frequenter of race meetings. He had had a
wager with a bookmaker named Kelly, and the horse winning had drawn
£200 from the bookmaker. Kelly had reminded him at the time that the
bet was not a ready-money bet, but the butcher said he wanted the
money, and, the two being friends, had got it. An objection was
afterwards lodged and the winner was disqualified. Then Kelly wanted
his money back. The butcher declared the bet was “first past the
post,” which it certainly was not, and Kelly brought his action. The
case was brought to me to settle the defence. Of course, to plead the
Gaming Act was to win the case, and that was done. At the assizes
McCall was briefed to lead me, and the butcher came to a consultation
and tried to persuade McCall to put him in the witness-box and let him
tell his story about the bet. McCall, with his best and most rasping
north of Ireland accent, told his client in so many words what he
thought of him and his story, and sent him away to reflect on some
serious home truths. I met the butcher disconsolate in the corridor
waiting for his case to come on. He stopped me, and, pulling an
imaginary forelock in his simple bucolic way, said in a melancholy
voice, “Mr. Porry, I thowt as ’ow you ’ad this ’ere case o’ mine in
’and.”

“So I have,” I said.

“Well, wot do we want wi’ this ’ere Macoll or Macaul or whatever yer
call ’im. Wot’s ’e for?”

I explained that in important cases the idea was to have a leader,
just as in the butchering business you had a foreman. The butcher
sniffed uneasily through my explanation.

“Well, Mr. Porry,” he said at the end of it, “would yer mind telling
me one thing?”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Is this ’ere Macoll or Macaul an Irishman?”

“Yes, I should say he is,” I replied.

“Aye, I thowt as much,” he said, shaking his head despairingly. “And
you mark my words, Mr. Porry, it will be a ―――― cross between them
two. Thet Kelly, the plaintiff, ’e’s an Irishman, too.”

I chuckled and did not deny the possibility. It was amusing to watch
my client listen to McCall, and note his intense relief when he found
that the Gaming Act really worked as he had been told it would, even
in the hands of an Irishman.

And talking of Irishmen reminds me of the story of “The Arabian and
the Merchant,” which from its remoteness from the every-day affairs of
the circuit is almost as one of Scheherazadé’s own delightful tales. I
can fancy Schariar would have ordered just such a machine himself as
was the _casus belli_ in this case. For the dispute was over a piece
of machinery which a firm of Manchester merchants had sold to a
potentate called the Malektjar of Bushire. The machine was ordered to
be made to grind corn, bottle soda-water, and make ices, and when it
left this country the evidence was that it could do all these things.
In Persia it was carried in pieces up country with an engineer, who
put it together and set it in motion. The local holy men of Bushire,
honestly believing that the machine was some kind of Nonconformist
demon, and a danger to the national religion, roused up the populace
to pelt it with sand and murder its acolyte, the engineer. The latter
escaped with his life, but the machine came to a standstill.

The Arabian who had introduced the business to the merchants now
quarrelled with them over the incidence of the loss. The case was full
of detail, and drifted slowly along to a settlement. During its
progress some eminent Persians visited the Mayor of Manchester, and we
got an order to examine them on commission about the machine which, it
was alleged, they had seen. This took place before the Registrar of
the High Court. Two gorgeous Easterns with a suite of attendants and
an interpreter duly arrived, and it took fully an hour to get them
sworn. The potentates desired to kiss the tail of a sacred cow. The
Registrar held that it was not his business to keep one in the King
Street office, and counsel indulged in a learned argument as to whose
duty it was. Ultimately the witnesses saluted a Reference Library
translation of the Koran, and with doubt and hesitation and not
without prejudice gave evidence through the interpreter. The evidence
of the first was, “I have never seen the machine. I have heard it is a
false god. They light fires before it, and it waves its arms.”

Further testimony was successfully objected to as hearsay. The second
was more knowledgeable. “I have seen the machine. It is no god at all.
True it is they light fires before it, but it does not wave its arms,
it lies still.” On cross-examination the witness said he had seen the
machine many times, and “it grew red with years.” A long examination
failed to elicit from the interpreter whether this was rust, and after
much courtesy and salaams the witnesses left, hugely pleased with
themselves and their adventure. Soon afterwards briefs were delivered
and the assizes came along, and peace was made between the Arabian and
the merchant with honour, and, if I remember rightly, each party paid
their own costs and lived happily ever afterwards. And, talking of
briefs, that reminds me of the story of “The Welsh Rector and the
Presbyterian Poacher”――but I forgot. I told you that one in
“Judgment’s in Vacation.”




CHAPTER XIII

THE PEARK

  ’Tis with our judgments as our watches; none
   Go just alike, but each believes his own.

                       POPE: “Essay on Criticism.”


Shee said a witty thing to Lord Coleridge, who was puzzled with the
Lancashire dialect. A witness, in describing a verbal encounter, said,
“Then the defendant turned round and said if ’e didn’t ’owld ’is noise
’e d knock ’im off ’is peark.”

“Peark? Mr. Shee, what is meant by peark?” asked the Lord Chief
Justice.

“Oh, peark, my lord, is any position where a man elevates himself
above his fellows――for instance, a bench, my lord.”

As a matter of fact, the witness placed an adjective before the word
“peark.” But do not let us bring the blush of shame to the cheek of
modesty. There is no cheek like the cheek of modesty.

I am reminded of that story by remembering that it is more than
eighteen years since I was elevated on to my “peark” in Quay Street,
Manchester. It was rather a curious position for me to attain, and a
fortnight before I was appointed I had not the least idea of applying
for the post, and never dreamed that I should get it if I did. I had
been very fortunate in my practice, and had, if anything, too much to
do; and I confess that working at high pressure by night as well as by
day not only had no charms for me, but injured my health. The amount
of travelling one did was a great strain on the nerves. I recollect in
four consecutive days doing cases at Fleetwood, at Hull, at London,
and then at Manchester. One wanted to be as strong as the proverbial
horse to get through the work without a breakdown. About ten days
before Whitsuntide, I was in a case in town in the Court of Appeal,
and I happened to meet a well-known Lancashire member, who began
discussing with me the resignation of Judge Heywood and the chances of
the various candidates for his place. None of them seemed entirely to
his liking, and he suddenly suggested that I should ask for it. So
little did I know of the matter that I thought it was a condition
precedent to the office that a barrister should be of ten years’
standing, and to make sure about this we went across to my friend’s
chambers in the Temple and looked the matter up. It turned out to be
seven years and thus made me eligible.

Travelling home, the idea of regular hours of work and equally regular
hours of leisure seemed to possess my mind, and I could think of
nothing else. One would have to make sacrifices, no doubt, but the
credit side of the imaginary balance-sheet seemed far heavier than the
debit. So it was that, after some domestic debate, I wrote to the
Right Honourable James Bryce, who was then Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster, and told him that if he wished to appoint me as judge of
the County Court, I was at his disposal. The only person I mentioned
it to was my old friend Byrne, because I knew he was making
application himself. The Whitsuntide holidays came along, and we went
to Seascale, in Cumberland, and I heard nothing about the appointment
for more than a week. One Monday morning we were having breakfast at
our hotel when my friend Charles Hughes, who was staying in the
village, came in flourishing a morning paper, and saying, with mock
reverence, “Good morning, your Honour.” When we opened our letters
there was a kind note from Mr. Bryce, appointing me to the judgeship.
It had reached Manchester on Saturday, but Seascale in those days had
no Sunday post. That was, I believe, very nearly Mr. Bryce’s last
official act as Chancellor of the Duchy. As Louis Aitken――that genial
companion who disguised his wit and learning in an obtrusive
Lancashire accent and a downright utterance of homely truths――declared
the first time he met me in Manchester: “Another appointment of that
kind would have ruined any Government.” So they took Mr. Bryce away
from the Duchy and made him President of the Board of Trade.

I cannot say that I altogether enjoyed the change during the first
twelve months of my judgeship. In the first place, I had a serious and
not unexpected breakdown in health, and, secondly, I had the great
misfortune to lose Mr. Registrar Lister, whose long experience of the
Court and its working was invaluable. I found, too, that judicial work
is a very lonely business. From the moment of entering the side door
in Byrom Street to the time one got out again one became an unpleasant
official person. People “addressed” you instead of talking to you, and
with unblushing sycophancy pretended that they believed you to possess
a cyclopædic knowledge of the law. How many times have I been told
that legal cases were “within your Honour’s recollection,” or “your
Honour will no doubt be thinking of the case of ‘Jones _v._ Smith’,”
when counsel were well aware that it was long odds against the Court
having in mind any case whatever.

There are, of course, many advantages about a “peark” like a County
Court, but the main difference between it and my former work at the
Bar was that one was an unfriendly, solitary job, whilst the whole
spirit of the other was genial and sociable. However, I made one rule
that was a great joy to me. It became a penal offence to send any
paper, book, or document of, or connected with, the Court to my house.
At last I was able to keep my work outside my home, and when I did get
out of my cage and turn my head up Peter Street, I at least knew I was
a free man until to-morrow morning. But if judicial work tends to make
one morose, the good-fellowship that abounds in Manchester more than
corrected the tendency. I have heard judges say that it is a mistake
to live in the district in which they work, but I confess I do not
agree. During my seventeen years in Manchester I went about in clubs
and to social gatherings of every kind, and I never remember being
spoken to about a case or heard a case discussed in my presence. The
sense and courtesy of all classes in Manchester made life very
pleasant when working hours were over.

One thoughtless request I do remember, which had an amusing sequel. A
friend of mine coming down in the train――we will call him
Robinson――shouted across the carriage that he was summoned for
to-morrow as a juryman, and as it was his mail day he wanted to be let
off. I at once reprimanded him, and told him he would certainly be
fined five pounds if he stayed away. The next day I called for the
jury list and found “Robinson” at the bottom of the column. Taking a
pencil I transferred him to the top, and when the list was called
“John Robinson” came first, and I made him a most formal bow as the
policeman led him into the box. As luck would have it, the case he was
on lasted until 7 o’clock at night, so his mail day had to go on
without him. The next morning in the train I explained to him the
disadvantages of asking favours of high-souled and upright judges, and
he agreed that it was not a wise thing to do. But he consoled himself,
he said, in two ways: “I had a very entertaining day, and, being away
from the office, I saved several hundred pounds by not buying on what
turned out to be a falling market.”

After the first few years we never had any jury cases, and for myself
I think juries in the County Court are generally a mistake. There is
too little time, and too many cases to try in the time, to deal with a
jury case at proper length. I do not think I can fairly claim to be a
great judge, but I do flatter myself that I am an uncommon common
jury. And from a County Court point of view that is an asset. It
requires some dramatic instinct to take by intuition the same view of
facts that eight tradesmen would take if they had heard the same
evidence. To approach a subject full of a prejudice you have not got,
but which, as a jury, you ought to have, and gradually by listening to
your own judicial remonstrances to lay down the cherished prejudice
you never really had, and still to let a little of it appear in the
final sum you award――that, I take it, is an attitude of mind not to be
achieved without serious study. I think it may have been because I had
more sympathy with the facts of life than with the legal aspect of
affairs that Louis Aitken used to say in my praise, “that a common
judge was quite as good a tribunal as a common jury.”

The work of the Manchester County Court was divided into days for the
poor people’s cases and days for the heavier work, which were printed
in black and red on the calendars. This convenient system is at last
finding its way into other places. I took a great deal of interest in
the black-letter days, as they were called, for the smaller work,
though trifling in amount, was often not trifling in the proportion of
the amount to the weekly wage of the litigants. If I have learned any
lesson in the many days I have spent listening to the short and simple
annals of the back street, it is that the law of imprisonment for debt
bears very harshly on the working class. In season and out of season I
have preached the injustice and inequality of the law in this matter,
and we have had commissions and inquiries sufficient to reorganise the
whole legal system of the State, but out of this groaning mountain not
so much as a statutory mouse has yet proceeded. I should like to be
still on my “peark” when the list of the day is called over without a
single judgment summons in it.

And I am not one of those who, because he is a magisterial or judicial
person, thinks his mouth is closed as a citizen from reporting the
evil things by which he is surrounded. It is true one can report them
as one does to one’s pastors and masters in Royal Commissions and
elsewhere, but these high ones of the earth are too engrossed in
greater affairs to attend to such a small matter as the sending to
gaol of some eight or more thousand of the thriftless and shiftless of
their fellow-countrymen. And one has the great army of the lower
middle-class shopkeepers, who think it is to their advantage to give
credit where there is no credit, and they are right up against reform;
and behind them stand the wholesale traders who sell to the little
shopkeepers, but have the sense themselves to see that they get their
money regularly on the second Tuesday of the next month. And I suppose
those of us who are interested in this matter will go on uttering
ineffectively our protests in evidence before commissions and in
reviews and magazines and occasional addresses to students of social
science until at last a public opinion is formed strong enough to be
heard in the lobbies at Westminster.

I have often wondered how many tons of waste-paper filter through the
waste-paper basket and solidify into one grain of public opinion. But
it is better so than that some tragedy should happen, some death in
gaol or some horrid act of violence which would startle the
comfortable classes into a recognition of the injustice of the system.
However good and necessary a reform may be, it is probably not much
use having it before the large majority of citizens are really ready
for it. The working classes could abolish imprisonment for debt at
once, but some of their number think it enables credit to be obtained
in times of labour disputes, and are listless about it; the middle
classes think that any form of compulsion to make the working classes
pay for the goods they sell to them is a just and righteous thing;
whilst as for the upper classes, the few I have come in contact with
seem to think that imprisonment for debt, don’t you know, was
abolished, and that when a fellow was really “stony”――I think I have
the phrase right――he went bankrupt, don’t you know, and started
afresh. And that, indeed, is a true statement of the different way in
which the English law treats the affairs of debtors, according to
whether they be rich or poor――for the poor man has no effective
bankruptcy law.

And another thing that seems to me to bear very hardly on the workers,
and makes it increasingly difficult for them to keep out of debt, is
the heavy proportion of their income that goes in rent. If a man with
£1,000 a year spent two hundred or two hundred and fifty in rent he
would be regarded as extravagant. But that is what a working man has
to do out of his slender income before he can find food and clothing
for his wife and family. And the curious affair is that wherever you
go, whether it be Manchester, Salford, Lambeth or Dartford, the
problem seems to remain the same. Where, as in London, wages are
rather better, rent is very much higher, as though in some weird
economic way the fact that a man earns more money in London than he
does in Manchester at the same trade entitles his landlord to a higher
rent for even worse accommodation. And how this is going to be
remedied is for those professors of social economics who have studied
the question to say, but one who has discussed with many thousands of
poor folk their ways and means, and the burdens of their life, may at
least point out what seems to be the fact, that in increasing the wage
of a man, you do not make him necessarily a citizen with a better
chance in life unless you can manage to stop the automatic increase of
his rent. For the landlord, like the daughter of the horse-leech, on
hearing of a rise in wages, cries, “Give! Give!” and there is nothing
for it but to obey.

And another thing which is constantly before my mind in the work of
the County Court is that, like all institutions that were intended in
the first instance for the service of the poor, the County Courts have
gradually interested themselves in the affairs of better-class people,
and to some extent their earlier clients are being edged out. Of
course, that is the history of many English institutions, and one must
suppose that to some extent it is a natural evolution, and accept it
as such. Pious Bishop Ridley was a suitor to Sir William Cecil “in our
Master Christ’s cause” to grant him the Palace of Bridewell, “that he
might therein house the naked and hungry that starved in the London
streets.” This noble charity by natural evolution degenerated into one
of the most degraded and brutal of prisons, as Hogarth has reminded us
forever in one of his prints in “The Harlot’s Progress.” In the same
way, if you read the early histories of many colleges and schools and
charities, you will find that the pious founders had in their minds
the advancement and interests of the poorer classes, but to-day the
benefits of these institutions are almost entirely in the hands of the
middle and upper classes. I daresay they make better use of them, and
that it is all to the good that it should be so, but one cannot shut
one’s eyes to the fact that something of this sort has been the
general history of our attempts to equip the poor with social
institutions for their benefit.

And although I am not against the making of the County Court a
valuable district court for the settlement of disputes of importance,
I cannot help thinking that something might be done to make the courts
of greater value to the poor. As at present, apart from the
debt-collecting about which I have said my say, the Court is mainly
used by the poor to settle very small and domestic quarrels. But so
swollen have the rules and orders and forms of the Court grown, so
intricate are its ways, that for an uneducated man to find his correct
path among its mazes without a legal guide would be impossible. No
doubt the Registrar and his clerks give every assistance in their
power. Certainly the poor man who wants to maintain trover for a
wheelbarrow cannot be expected to spend twenty-five shillings on a
“County Court Practice” and read its thousand pages in search of the
answer to the riddle of procedure that the law has set him. Yet unless
he employs a solicitor or casts his cares on the overburdened chief
clerk to the Registrar, I suppose that is what the State expects him
to do.

The County Court as a tribunal for doing justice between poor
disputants is an ill-equipped machine, and, without doubt, if these
poorer cases were tried by the judge on strict legal lines, and if he
merely listened to the plaintiff and heard such portions of his and
his friends’ wandering narratives as came within the rules of
evidence, the almost universal result would be to non-suit the
plaintiff on the ground that he proved no case. But in practice this
does not happen. The wind is tempered to the shorn lamb. The judge
puts his legal telescope to his blind eye. He listens to everything
and everybody and both sides speaking at once. He takes a hand at the
game himself with such worldly knowledge of the man in the street as
he happens to possess, and in the end gropes his way through a mass of
prejudice and hearsay and hatred, malice and all uncharitableness, and
conveniently forgets that no one has complied with this section of a
statute or that rule or that order, and business of a kind is done.

But it would be far more satisfactory if the affairs of smaller people
were not litigated, or at all events not litigated until an effort had
been made to bring the parties together and get them to agree to a
compromise. For think of the cost of much of this small litigation and
what it may mean to a working man, and how much ill-feeling as well as
hard-earned money would be saved if the parties could be brought
together in some Courts of Conciliation or Reconcilement, and were not
permitted to go to law until, as a condition precedent, they had been
before the County Court judge and satisfied him that there was no
chance of a settlement, and he marked their papers “fit” for
litigation.

And though many will think this a revolutionary movement, yet in truth
it is nothing of the sort. For the idea is as old as the hills――and
Paul thought it a disgrace, even to the Corinthians――who were no great
class, as I gather――for brother to go to law with brother. What he
would have written to Lancashire about the spectacle of three or four
brothers and sisters wrangling in the County Court as to who should
pay for their father’s funeral tea――the sensible old man having died
penniless――I scarce like to think. Luckily Paul wrote no Epistles to
the Lancastrians. For when passions are roused, family feuds are
fought with a bitterness that few can understand whose duty has not
forced them to witness the wretchedness of it. And the day of
awakening comes with the taxation of costs and a sense that all that
has been done has been to give way to an orgy of unholiness in a
public place and make a great hole in savings laboriously acquired.

But apart from the uncharitable nature of many law-suits let me set
down the actual facts of one of the every-day cases which bring debt
and ruin upon a home. A man had a dog which bit the child of a
neighbour. The child was not greatly injured, but there was a small
doctor’s bill to pay and a certain amount of anxiety on behalf of the
parents. These people chose solicitors. After a lengthy correspondence
a claim was brought for £25 by the parents of the child. Counsel were
engaged. Doctors gave evidence on either side. Ultimately the case
went against the plaintiff, on the ground that he could not prove
_scienter_, that is to say, that he did not satisfy the Court that the
defendant knew that his dog had previously bitten someone else.

Now one need not blame the lawyers. If each party believed in his own
case and wanted to fight, the lawyers only did their duty according to
the system under which they work. The result was disastrous. Each
party was ordered to pay his own costs, which worked out at something
over £15 apiece. In any case, as I remember it, the plaintiff could
only have recovered a few pounds, for the damage was but small.

Now Paul’s idea, and a valuable one, was summed up in the question “Is
it so that there cannot be found among you one wise man who shall be
able to decide between his brethren?” Only I think he overlooked the
natural distrust that the average man has of a lay arbitrator. I do
not think it would be reasonable to expect two members of a Welsh
chapel, for instance, to leave their dispute to a deacon. The deacon
knows too much of their inner life to start with, and would be bound
to be suspected of partiality in his judgment. Paul’s idea of a Lay
Court of Conciliation or Reconcilement was not practical politics in a
work-a-day world. But when Brougham took up the idea and tried to get
the House of Lords to help him put it into a business shape, one
wonders that he got no assistance for so excellent a scheme. His plan
was to make use of existing judges as conciliators, and the result of
the combined teachings of the Saint and the Lord Chancellor seems to
be that what you want is a sensible conciliator who shall also be a
State official.

For in the dog-bite affair recorded above――supposing that there had
been a Conciliation Court to which the plaintiff could have summoned
the defendant, and both parties had appeared before the judge to talk
it over――a little discussion might, one would think, have brought the
parties to understand that the payment of the doctor’s bill or some
such course was a fair thing to do, and that pressing vague claims of
damage could result in no useful purpose. And if the parties had
agreed, they could have signed an agreement in the presence of the
Conciliator, which, if not carried out, could afterwards be made an
order of Court. But if the judge could not bring them to agree they
could still go to law, and no great harm would have been done by their
meeting.

And in claims under the Workmen’s Compensation Act there is good
reason why some such course should be made compulsory. For when the
Act was introduced, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain expected it to be an
automatic scheme, and took credit for the government that “we have
held it to be a first principle as well as one of our first objects to
avoid litigation.” There were to be no lawyers employed and no appeals
were to be allowed. What has happened in fact everyone knows. The Bill
was so altered in Parliament and by succeeding legislation as to flood
the County Courts with litigation of an expensive and difficult
nature, and to clog the Court of Appeal with endless discussions on
what are from the insurance point of view――and that is the business
point of view――trifling matters. And every day one is face to face
with the pitiable spectacle of a working man, not necessarily a
malingerer――but a neurasthenic subject――physically fit to work, or at
least to get into condition to work, and yet not capable of exercising
the necessary will power to do so, and gradually becoming more and
more unfit. And the cause of the bulk of this is litigation. When a
man is getting better and his mind should be turned towards work he
has at his elbow a lawyer and a doctor, who, being human, have their
scientific opinions biassed perhaps by the thought that only by
carrying the case into Court can they hope to get any fees. The man is
told it would be unwise to work both legally and physically. What is
he to do? Is he to throw over his scientific advisers――why should he?
Would you or I settle a case or abandon a claim against the advice of
our lawyers? Nor do I blame the lawyer. He is there to advise, and
often without his advice the man could not recover his rights, and
certainly could not maintain his rights in the Court of Appeal and on
to the House of Lords.

The lawyers are a necessary part of the scheme as it exists, and so
are the doctors. They hinder the man from getting well and going back
to work, but that is all part of the machine. The machine is not a bad
one, and no one wants to see it scrapped. We want to return to the
Chamberlain ideal and wheel our machine out of the Law Courts into the
yard, and work it under the power of common sense. Only in that way
can we escape some dishonourable responsibility for that
half-malingerer, that weak, insincere invalid, the miserable remains
of what was once a good workman, which is such a common object of the
County Court.

I have no hesitation in saying that by a system of conciliation 75 per
cent. of the present litigation under the Workmen’s Compensation Act
might be stopped, to the great benefit of the community. I would allow
no Workmen’s Compensation Act case to go forward to litigation until
employer and workman had come in person――or by lay deputy on the
employer’s behalf――to discuss a way out. Many a workman would go back
and try work again if he could go into a room and talk his affair over
with a judge, and was assured that his interests would be cared for
whilst he made the experiment.

The scheme of workmen’s compensation was intended by Mr. Chamberlain
to be a businesslike and statesmanlike scheme of accident insurance to
be administered by a County Court judge, acting as an arbitrator, with
the assistance of a medical referee. There were, as I have said, to be
no lawyers and no appeals, which to his business mind were merely
things leading to “expense, annoyance, and irritation.” The statesman
desired and intended a scheme for the benefit of employer and workman
based on peace and conciliation, but the lawyers have been too many
for him, and to-day the Workmen’s Compensation Act litigation is
little better than a wild-cat legal gamble. To diagnose whether an
accident arises out of or in the course of a workman’s employment you
want a legal mind combining the subtlety of a Jesuit with the
discrimination of a laboratory professor. And even then you may fail
if your mind is anything but an exact replica of two out of the three
of those who will ultimately sit to hear the appeal. Nor is there
indeed always safety in that, for there is the House of Lords to
come――and if you think the word “gamble” is too strong a word for the
existing state of things, ring them up at Lloyds and ask for the
current rate of odds against any Workmen’s Compensation Act appeal on
its voyage from the Strand to Westminster.

But it will be said, is not all this rather an attack on the writer’s
own profession? I do not think so. I have tried to make it clear that
I blame the system, and not the individuals who have to work it. And
though I believe that any sort of Court of Reconcilement or
Conciliation must in time do away with much litigation, I do not
necessarily think that a bad thing for the profession. How often
to-day do lawyers try and keep their clients from litigation and
promote compromise to their own cost, to satisfy their high ideals of
right action. I am far from thinking it desirable that we should keep
alive a system of litigation that we believe harmful to the community
because it brings in fees to ourselves. The spectacle in “Jarndyce v.
Jarndyce,” where “eighteen of Mr. Tangle’s learned friends, each armed
with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen
hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their
eighteen places of obscurity,” may have pleased the unthinking lawyer
of the day, but Dickens, with prophetic foresight, knew more about it
than the Bar. It had to be swept away. And has it ruined the Chancery
Bar?――ask them in Lincoln’s Inn. The fact is that if we are to
maintain in the face of better-educated and more thoughtful citizens
the privileges and traditions of the Bar, we must satisfy ourselves
and the world that the work we are doing is worthy, useful work
beneficial to the community. When it fails to come up to that
standard, it ought to be joyfully surrendered.

Nor do I think that my suggestions would, even if they were carried
out by a stroke of the pen, injure any practitioner to any serious
extent. New problems are arising daily and new work is waiting to be
done. But whether the results of conciliation would be to the injury
of the profession or not, before anything is done the lawyers will
have their say on it in the Houses of Parliament, where their number
is legion, and where, as far as I can make out, the poor litigant, the
client whose interests I am saying a word for to-day, is wholly
unknown and unrepresented.




CHAPTER XIV

OVERTIME

     To play is for a man to do what he pleases or to do
     nothing――to go about soothing his particular fancies

                       CHARLES LAMB: “Letter to Bernard Barton.”


That idea of soothing your particular fancy gives to me the very
clearest image of play and playtime. And most men’s fancies take a
deal of soothing, since man will fancy himself and his capabilities to
be x, when his nearest and dearest could tell him, if they were not
his nearest and dearest, that they are not even y, but something far
nearer to _a b c_.

And as long as a man does not fancy himself at his real work, but only
in playtime, what does it matter? For in a sane man it seems a natural
attribute that he should dislike work he is peculiarly fitted for, and
should hanker after jobs that he is naturally ill-equipped to perform.
I always looked forward to what I called “overtime,” when I could get
away from briefs and law books, and put in a few solid hours spoiling
beautiful hand-made paper with inharmonious water-colours, or writing
plays and stories that nobody wanted to publish. Why I should have
called it “overtime” I do not know, for real overtime is paid at least
at the rate of “time and a quarter,” but my overtime generally cost me
money. Perhaps the idea I have in calling it “overtime” is that these
tasks could only be done after the day’s work was over, which is the
only attribute my “overtime” had in common with the overtime of the
working man.

From my earliest days――when to the dread and horror of my family I
bought a fiddle and tried to learn to play it――I have experienced a
sane and healthy desire to spend my working hours on jobs I know I can
never do, rather than in exercising capacities which have always been
with me. I call it a sane and healthy tendency, because I find it to
exist in nearly everyone who feels physically and mentally well.

I once knew a plus 2 golfer who spent all his overtime away from the
links in trying to grow tomatoes out of doors. Each season the
climate――which he spoke of as a horticultural bogey――was at least 7 up
on him before the first frost came and stopped the round. But he had
many merry hours in his garden, and laughed gaily when he topped a
budding plant with a careless approach with a hoe or was badly
bunkered by a patent manure. What really bored him was the monotony of
golf with eighteen perfect drives every round he played. It was only
on those rare occasions when he pulled or sliced into the rough that I
have known him to smile and openly admit “that there was some fun in
the old game, after all.”

I early discovered the delights of “overtime” in my father’s library,
where I was supposed to do my home-work whilst I was at King’s College
School. There I read all the great English writers with a larger
enjoyment, because, like the Jew who ate the pork chop, I could feel
that I was “sinning at the same time.” I think that library and its
contents are entirely responsible for my taste in overtime.
Shakespeare, Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, Thackeray, Mrs. Opie, and
Aphra Behn. I remember the very format of each volume. I do not think
there was a single dramatist or novelist of any mark in the English
tongue that was unrepresented.

Perhaps my favourite book was Cumberland’s “British Theatre,” with its
forty-eight volumes. The stage-directions of the bloodiest of the
melodramas were my favourite reading. Their only rival was the brief
in some sporting case which lay on the table at which I worked. I
would often slip the papers out of their red tape and peruse them far
more diligently than I did in after days, when I was paid for doing
so. How carefully I read the solicitor’s story of the case. In later
years I found that no self-respecting advocate ever studied these
lengthy pages, well understanding that under an absurd legal system
they are put there merely for the taxing master to appraise and allow
in the form of costs.

I remember Nash being amusingly scored off by a well-known solicitor,
who rather plumed himself on his frugal literary gifts, and took much
pains in the composition of the story of a case. He complained to Nash
that he never read these narratives, and Nash had assured him, out of
polite respect to his hobby, that he always made a point of studying
them and greatly admired them. Soon afterwards Nash was instructed by
the solicitor to defend a client in a criminal case at the assizes,
and a fat brief, marked “30 guas” and beginning with a very lengthy
narrative, was delivered to counsel. How far Nash read any of it I do
not know, but he duly acquitted the prisoner. To Nash’s annoyance and
surprise――for the solicitor was a most solvent and respectable
person――the fees were not paid. Nash’s clerk made several efforts to
solve the mystery, and was told that they had been paid to Mr. Nash at
the assizes, but Nash knew that this was not so, and was very
indignant with the solicitor about it. A month or two afterwards Nash
met the solicitor in Cross Street, and going up to him expressed his
views of the solicitor’s conduct very roundly.

“But I paid you at the assizes, Mr. Nash.”

“Nothing of the sort, sir, and you know it.”

“Did you read my story of the case, Mr. Nash?” asked the solicitor.

“Of course, I did. I always read every word of my briefs,” said the
unblushing Nash.

“H’m, that’s very curious. I can’t understand it,” said the solicitor,
with his head on one side, and his left eye half-closed. “I can’t
understand it at all, because on page three of that statement of the
case I pinned a cheque for your fees, and――hadn’t you better go back
to chambers, Mr. Nash, and read that brief again?”

But when I was a lad the introduction to the brief was my first study.
If it looked dull and boresome I dropped the papers speedily. How
often in after life I wished I could deal with briefs in similar
fashion. And as no child will ever read these pages I may confess that
from the short years of my schooling the only things that remain with
me are elegant extracts of forbidden reading; forbidden not by my
father, I should say in fairness to both of us, for he knew all about
it and winked, but by my pastors and masters.

I think it is Walt Whitman who expresses the thought that he would
like to get away from mankind and “turn and live among the animals,
they are so placid and self-contained.” And I have the same kind of
feeling about school-masters. The prosperous incompetence of the
school-master is to me one of the great mysteries of life. When I
lived among school-masters a cowardly idolatry, the offspring of
tyranny and coercion, prevented me using opportunities to make careful
observation of their mental and moral constitution. I had a vague
knowledge that they were hopelessly wrong, but I had not the energy
and ability to analyse the wherefore of it. Physically they were of
varying size and beauty, but mentally they were absolutely and
uniformly all alike. It never occurred to my young mind that this was
a natural result of pouring youthful educational hot stuff into an
old-fashioned mould and turning it out when it had grown cold.

There were, of course, many charming persons among them. What an
excellent fellow was E――――. I have long forgiven him, but his offence
was rank and smells to heaven. He it was who persuaded me for a whole
term to spend my overtime on school books. I have some prizes on my
shelves now, the result of my foolish complaisance. I have never
looked inside them, but the bindings are handsome, and they serve as a
_memento mori_ of wasted hours that can never be replaced. The
speculation was commercially sound, no doubt, but whilst I was doing
it my conscience smote me. The next term I dropped it, and my good
friend, with that rare prophetic insight that enables the
school-master to foresee the unbetiding, filed my deficiency account
in words that still have a haunting sound of failure: “has some
ability, but no staying power.”

It does not need an alphabet of scholastic degrees to enable a man to
back a double event and find both of them to be losers. And yet old
E――――’s epigram, that looked at the time so like real stable
information, was but a huckster’s tip after all. Most of my relatives
and all my real friends, those who know best, have cheerily shaken
their heads at the word ability――did so, I remember, at the time――and
have admitted that he was wrong there, but even E―――― himself would
not now, I think, gainsay the fact that I have stayed the course. And
yet my innate reverence for the school-master is such that I have an
uneasy feeling that I ought to have so shaped my life that the words
of the school-master might be fulfilled, and that in not having done
so I am in danger of judgment.

The early days of the Bar are all overtime. And the first big overtime
job that I undertook, and perhaps the pleasantest I ever carried
through, was the preparation of a version of “Dorothy Osborne’s
Letters,” the first edition of which I finished in my early days at
Manchester, and published in 1888. I remember my joy when Mr. Comyns
Carr, who then edited the _English Illustrated Magazine_, accepted my
first essay on Dorothy Osborne. How I still reverence his critical
acumen. The joys of winning a legal scholarship, or having that first
brief at quarter sessions delivered to you by a real solicitor’s
clerk, have none of that _tremens_ delirium about them that you attain
when your literary essay is accepted in a courteous autograph from a
master in letters. The manuscript of “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters,” like
all great works, was refused by many of the leading publishers, and
when it was published the book was an immediate success. It has been
pirated in many countries, and will, I think, remain in the English
library, not on account of any work of mine, but because of the
peculiar charm of Mistress Dorothy’s style in letter-writing. It was a
satisfactory bit of “overtime.”

My next book was a life of Macklin, the actor, written for a series
edited by William Archer. Mr. Lowe wrote a life of Betterton. Mr.
Archer himself wrote Macready, and then came my “Life of Macklin.” For
some reason or other that ended the series. It was not half a bad
book, and a friend of mine in Dublin says my chapter on the Irish
stage has amused and entertained him for many pleasant hours in
tracing out and confuting by authority the errors and inaccuracies it
contains――but, then, he admits that no other Saxon had ever dared to
try and write such a chapter.

And I suppose it is only right to enter on these time-sheets my
journalistic work as overtime. I know nothing so exhilarating as
journalism. If I was really to take to writing as a business, I should
hire an upper chamber in some building which was gently rocked from
below by a steady throbbing engine, and arrange for the smell of its
oil, coupled with the aroma of printer’s ink, to pervade the
atmosphere, then having hired a whistling and insistent boy, with a
raucous voice, to put his head in and shout “copy” at me every quarter
of an hour, I should sit down to work, hopefully assured of a glorious
“spate of style.” For many years I wrote dramatic criticism and
reviewed books, and wrote “shorts” and occasionally full-dress leaders
for the _Manchester Guardian_. I do not think I had any very
particular reputation in Cross Street, except for punctuality and
dispatch. It is not every journalist who has even these humble
attributes, but they were evidently well remembered of me.

I mind meeting C. P. Scott one autumn morning some three years after I
had been judge, as I was walking down to my work――along the fragrant
groves of Rusholme. He seemed somewhat disconsolate and told me his
trouble. He had an advance copy of “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
Letters,” and through illness there was no one in the office free to
review it. Two columns about were wanted before going to press. “I
wish, Parry,” he said, with half a sigh, “that you were available.”

Of course I was available. The book, with its two volumes of over
eight hundred pages, came down to the Court. I started it in the
luncheon hour. I got at it again after the Court rose at about 4
o’clock, and before 11 at night I entered the office and was received
with enthusiasm by a grateful sub-editor thirsting for copy. I
compared my work the next day with that of some of the London
champions, the plus 4 men at the game. I had scooped out nearly all
the tit-bits, and I had done more. I had discovered that Mrs.
Browning’s baby was a good half-column, and the other fellows had
missed that delightful child altogether. Moreover, I had not only
written my review, but I had copied out all my extracts, for I never
could bear the thought of mutilating a book, and so the volumes remain
with me as a pleasant memory of a happy day’s overtime. For when I had
had some supper I had missed the last tram, and dreaming that I was
still in the days of my youth and could not afford a hansom, I had a
joyful walk home in the moonlight.

And long before that, whilst I was at the Bar, Hulton, the elder, came
into my chambers and asked me to write some articles for the _Sunday
Chronicle_. For some reason or other a new hand was suddenly wanted.
The articles had to be a column and a turn-over. Any subject might be
written upon as long as the writing was tense, vivid and entertaining
and the matter was of popular interest. The manuscript had to be ready
by Friday. I doubted my capacity for the task, but Hulton told me that
he had been assured by that kind-hearted doyen of the craft, Spencer
of the _Guardian_, that I was all right. I bowed to his verdict, for
to me Spencer’s was the last word about journalistic matters.

I shall never forget that week. Nothing happened. Day succeeded day in
stagnant succession, no one of importance said or did anything. There
was not a crime or a law-suit, or even a political speech in which one
could pretend an interest. On the Thursday morning I rose early and
rushed at the newspapers. The same dismal outlook of barren
nothingness. I passed the canal and looked at its waters lovingly. Was
I to disgrace myself by going back on the verdict of Spencer? It
seemed impossible that I could do that and live.

About midday, whilst sitting in chambers with a blank sheet of paper
before me, symbolic of the mind within, my clerk brought in some
papers, and in a diffident off-hand manner said casually, “I suppose
you’ve heard the news!”

“News,” I cried testily, “there is none.”

He turned on his heel.

“What is it, then?” I called after him.

“Only Mr. Parnell’s dead!”

I had a real reverence for Parnell, but to undertakers and journalists
death is indeed the reaper, and the poor gleaners cannot be blamed
that they are thankful when the season brings them their only harvest.
In truth I never wrote with greater sense of responsibility nor with a
more eager desire that every word and sound should toll the message of
his life into the hearts of my readers. Heaven knows how far I
succeeded. It was enough for me that Spencer nodded approval. And to
the quiet homage for the statesman that most of us have to-day there
comes into my heart a thrill of grateful emotion whenever I hear the
name of Parnell.

I wrote those _Sunday Chronicle_ articles for some time, but it was a
worrying task, and my work at the Bar began to creep into the
overtime, and ultimately, like Aaron’s rod, swallowed up all other
pursuits. But I look back to the task with pleasure, because it
enabled me to write an article to the glory of Charles Hopwood and his
policy, and I still possess a faded letter, full of hope for the
future and thanks for the help that had been given to the cause he had
so much at heart. Of course, I had known Hopwood as a leader on
circuit for some years, but after the _Chronicle_ article he began to
talk to me about his various views and plans of reform in a way that
was deeply interesting.

And to go back to my earliest recollection of Hopwood I must go back
to when I first joined the circuit, and recount an early journey to
Lancaster Assizes with Falkner Blair. He had been retained to defend a
wretched man who, in a fit of despair, had taken the lives of his
three children. It was a very sad case, and the only line of defence
was insanity. When the train stopped at Wigan a gentleman got into our
carriage for a smoke. He got into conversation with Blair, and hearing
of the murder case expressed his desire to attend the trial. He turned
out to be the Reverend E. Burnaby, a brother of the celebrated Captain
Burnaby, hero of the “Ride to Khiva,” and we invited him to join us at
Bar mess. He was on his way to the Lake District, but his interest in
trials made him gladly accept our invitation, and we appointed him a
sort of honorary chaplain to the mess during the three or four days he
was with us.

That chance meeting saved the life of Blair’s client. Blair made an
eloquent speech in defence of the murderer, but the medical evidence
was conflicting, and Mr. Justice Cave did not sum up for a verdict of
insanity. He left the matter to the mercies of the jury, who could not
see far beyond the horrible fact and circumstances, and without long
consideration brought in a verdict of guilty. Burnaby was strongly
convinced that the man was insane, and expressed his intention of
moving for a reprieve. The means of the man’s friends had been
exhausted in preparing the defence, and had it not been for Burnaby’s
energy nothing would have been done. Burnaby started a local petition,
and later on, followed the circuit to Manchester, where he interviewed
Cave, and there he met Hopwood. Hopwood made a most careful inquiry
into the facts of the case, and having satisfied himself that it was a
case for the interference of the Home Office, assisted Burnaby with
his counsel. Under his direction the matter was carried to a
successful issue. A further examination of the prisoner was made, and
he was pronounced to be insane, and sent to Broadmoor.

This was my first experience of Hopwood, and as I grew to know him
better I came to the conclusion that not only was he a very
kind-hearted and merciful man, but he was also one of the wisest and
most sensible of judges in a criminal court that I ever appeared
before. People were very apt in those days to look upon him as a
visionary and enthusiast, but the fact is the administrators of the
criminal law in all its harshness were the real visionaries, for they
kept their eyes straining after a set of affairs fast passing away
instead of keeping a brave, healthy outlook on the actual facts before
them.

Nowadays, with our Criminal Court of Appeal and our humaner rendering
of the criminal code, it is difficult to understand what horrible
things were done twenty-five years ago. But by no means let us believe
that the judges who did these things were themselves cruel and harsh.
It is so difficult when you have grown up with a system to see that
there is anything fundamentally wrong in it. It seems so dangerous to
reform or to alter existing laws that have apparently worked so well
for years. I do not think the judges who sentenced young men and women
to be hanged for theft, nor the later judges who transported hundreds
of small offenders to the Antipodes, were cruel men. Certainly I know
that some of those judges who were harshest in their sentences in the
earlier eighties were kind-hearted gentlemen in action and sentiment.
They believed in the system. They thought it was a good and just
system. It was Charles Hopwood, with his deeper insight, who showed
them they were wrong.

When Hopwood became Recorder of Liverpool he was able for the first
time to put his principles into execution. The kind of thing that had
been going on all over Lancashire was instanced in one of his charges
to the grand jury after he had been a year or two in office. “A
woman,” he said, “pleaded guilty before me of stealing some articles
of little value. I looked at the record of her history. She had just
come out after three several sentences of penal servitude a poor,
broken-down, miserable being. Her first severe sentence anterior to
the above was one year’s imprisonment for stealing a pound or two of
butter. Her first seven years’ sentence was for stealing some trifling
quantity of butter again. Her second seven years was for stealing some
butcher’s meat. From this she had been out a month and was again
committed and sentenced to another seven years for stealing a duck
from a poulterer’s shop. Twenty-two years for five or ten shillings’
worth of food. It calls to mind Hood’s passionate cry, ‘That bread
should be so dear, and flesh and blood so cheap.’ Every one of these
offences points to the pressure of extreme want. I gave her a slight
punishment and have never seen her since.”

And that is what happened in practice. It was found that very many of
these petty criminals pleaded guilty at Liverpool Sessions, received a
light sentence, and came out with a hope and intention, often
fulfilled, of leading honest lives. Others, of course, fell again and
again into bad ways, but those, he argued, were really persons who
wanted some form of asylum rather than a gaol, where their feeble will
power could be protected from the temptations of the world. These long
terms of penal servitude for petty thefts were survivals of the old
criminal code. In the middle ages a thief was hard to catch, and
probably when he was caught the best use to put him to was to hang
him. Nowadays the thief is comparatively easy to catch, and therefore
the hanging of him when caught ceases to be a sensible action. One of
Hopwood’s arguments was that at his sessions prisoners pleaded guilty
and gave no trouble to the prosecutor, whereas in the days of harsh
sentences prisoners pleaded not guilty and juries hesitated to
convict. Another of Hopwood’s reasons for weighing carefully the
length of a sentence was――as he often reminded us――that every year,
every month, nay, every day that is added to a prisoner’s sentence is
too often a year or a month or a day added to the misery of guiltless
women and children, whose lives and happiness depend on the return of
the wretched men whose liberty is forfeit.

I have often heard Hopwood discuss these matters, and always with
profit to myself. The mere fact that such long sentences could be
defended was, to him, evidence that the passing and witnessing of such
sentences led to a moral deterioration――a hardening of the moral
nature of both judges and spectators. I think this is true. We have
recognised the truth of it in relation to public executions, and there
is no doubt that to be a part of the working machine of the criminal
law blunts the edge of compassion. Further, one effect of long
sentences on prisoners was to make them commit worse crimes and to
resist capture by violence. That is an aspect of criminal policy that
is apt to be overlooked by those who clamour for harsher and stronger
measures against evil-doers.

One of Hopwood’s best attributes was that calm, reasoning detachment
of mind which enabled him to understand the point of view of the
poorer classes on our administration of justice. What the bottom dog
sees when he puts his nose over the dock and blinks at the learned
Recorder and his brother magistrates of the city, is a very different
picture of Justice from that which we behold so complacently from our
side of the railing. To him it seems a mere mockery to behold Justice,
well fed and prosperous, blind to the many frauds and much misconduct
of its own class, pompously and Pharisaically denouncing the less
guilty, the mere stealing of something to eat or something to clothe,
by sentences which should be reserved for real and atrocious crime.
Certainly, it makes one uneasy to remember how many successful and
fraudulent schemes have swept away the savings of the working classes
into respectable broadcloth pockets――even magisterial pockets――and the
law has found no remedy and no punishment. But the scandal is not a
new one, and is well sanctioned by precedent. Our forefathers rhymed
it, in their easy-going way:

  You prosecute the man or woman
  Who steals the goose from off the common,
  But leave the larger felon loose
  Who steals the common from the goose.

Hopwood was a much-abused reformer, but he kept a stout heart, and
went his way remitting hundreds upon hundreds of years of imprisonment
in mercy to his fellow-creatures. There is no evidence that his
methods injured any class of the community. He preached the cause of
criminal appeal to deaf ears, but since he has gone we are all
converts to his view, and wonder how we could have hindered the reform
so long. What was it that began to awaken Lancashire folk to the
belief that Hopwood had not only a warm heart, but a clear head, and
was talking business sense? Sometimes I think it was the statement in
one of his later charges that in not inflicting long sentences he had
already saved the taxpayer £28,000. If there is one thing Lancashire
does understand it is figures.

Looking back on my recollections of the men on circuit, I think he was
undoubtedly the greatest man I knew. I say great, inasmuch as he
fulfils Longfellow’s words, for his life indeed reminds us of the
greater possibilities of our own humbler lives. Even now that he has
departed his footsteps re-echo along the hopeless corridors of the
gaol as of one who brought glad tidings to the oppressed. When the
social history of the nineteenth century comes to be written the man
who, by his fearless example and persevering energy, proved to society
that the existing treatment of the smaller criminal was unnecessarily
cruel will have a higher place than many more ambitious reformers.

And in spite of his tenacity and the outspokenness of his unpopular
opinions we all loved him on circuit, though not all of us were his
disciples, and I shall never forget the cheers of laughter and delight
that went up when an Irish colleague thus concluded an after-dinner
peroration in his honour: “Hopwood has indade taught us what a
beautiful thing it is to temper mercy with justice.”

After all, like many a “bull,” it really expresses very clearly what
Hopwood was doing.

And though I have never more than half believed the extravagant claims
of the almost mesmeric power of the Press over the common horde of us,
yet as a mere “man in the street”――to use a phrase that Greville
brought from Newmarket――I have seen enough of the inner chambers of
journalism to know that if a journalist may not do much to educate the
public he can do something towards the education of himself. The
discussions you enter into with men of all parties, the books you have
to read, and the plays you cannot stay away from, ought to cultivate
in you a better sense of charity. If it does not, then the fault is in
the seedling and not in the soil.

I have never been under any delusion about the _scribendi cacoethes_.
It is not a pleasant disease, but it has comparatively good points
about it. When the fit is upon you, you do not worry your family and
your neighbour with the details of it, as you do when you have an
attack of the spleen, or the rheumatism, or the slice, or the pull, or
whatever recent manifestations of neuritis you may be suffering from.
You only wish, like any other well-mannered sick mammal, to be left
quietly and undoubtedly alone till the fever leaves you. I know I have
wasted a lot of my spare time in writing; it soothes my particular
fancies, it is the form of indolent amusement that I enjoy.

I daresay if I had tackled the higher things of life, and given the
industry of my overtime to more serious pursuits, I could have reduced
my golf handicap below the mediocre twelve at which it stands, or lost
more money on horses than I have on books. But this I can say with
honesty, that when I write _finis_ on the last page, and my time is
over, the best of it has been the “overtime.”




CHAPTER XV

PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS

  Oh Lord! Thou kens what zeal I bear,
  When drinkers drink, and swearers swear,
  And singing there, and dancing here,
                Wi’ great and sma’;
  For I am keepit by thy fear,
                Free frae them a’.

                       BURNS: “Holy Willie’s Prayer.”


When I was a small boy I liked above all things the stories about
Pharisees and Publicans. Pharisees, I think, were connoted in my mind
with schoolmasters. Publicans, on the other hand, were a mysterious,
jovial people given to gluttony and wine-bibbing. The latter I knew
nothing about, but the gluttony I forgave. I remember a pang of
disappointment when I discovered in older years that Publicans were
connected with the Inland Revenue.

In China I believe nearly all morals are imparted by means of fables,
and it is the story-telling department of our early teaching that
leaves us with something tangible which we can use in after life as a
bobbin whereon to wind the weft of our own thoughts. And this
distinction of Pharisee and Publican remains with me so far a reality
as to stand for something which the words themselves of course do not
mean. They are convenient symbols for the class who want mankind to
walk along the path of mechanical obedience, and the class who are out
to realise the best the world can give; the class who condemn
themselves and their fellow-creatures as miserable sinners, and the
class who not only love to be merry and wise, but are ready to sink a
certain amount of wisdom in the interests of merriment. William
Fisher, of Mauchline, was a typical Pharisee, and Robert Burns, who
immortalised him, was the greatest of the Publicans.

And though I agree that there is no historical fitness in my use of
the term Publican, I think the Pharisee is a continuing social type
and probably as eternal as the hills themselves. That is to say, it
will require some new geological period to shake him off the earth,
and he will not depart until he can no longer be of service to the
world. For my more recent reading about the Pharisee has led me to
modify my childish imaginings. To-day I have a great respect for the
Pharisee. I have learned that with all his faults he was a very
respectable, classy Israelite. He knew that he was set apart from the
common herd, and he was proud to be an abstainer and ascetic, as if
these things were good in themselves. His ideal of life was to have a
lot of meddling, fussy laws of outward conduct, and not only to obey
them scrupulously himself, but to persecute others who did not. Not an
amiable character, perhaps, but at least sincere and honest. Moreover,
he knew no better. Whether there was the same excuse for the Pharisee
of Manchester in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and ninety is a
doubtful point.

Not that I would like to see――or am likely to see――a city bereft of
Pharisees. A few to sanctify and give general tone and outward
respectability are as necessary to Manchester as lace curtains to a
suburban villa. My grumble is that in Manchester there are too many
Pharisees to the square yard. They capture and run organisations that
were made for better things. They make it impossible for the average
wicked citizen to take part in their good works, they bring disrepute
upon the city by their vagaries on the house-tops, and they rouse up a
great deal of hatred, malice, and uncharitableness in fighting with
great ability and vehemence against the right of the harmless,
necessary citizen to amuse himself in his harmless, necessary way.

Many will remember an historic quarrel between two old friends who
were engaged in very doubtful municipal transactions, and how they
made it up in a Wesleyan chapel, and one put £50 in the plate as a
token of regret for having uttered naughty words about the other. By
the more respectable class of Manchester that action was regarded as
being a natural and right expression of apology. If it was earnest and
sincere it had a folk-lore resemblance, I suppose, to the sacrifice,
or burnt offering. By the elect it was quoted as a very beautiful act
of retribution. To one like myself, outside the circle, it was not
perhaps actual evidence of conspiracy to commit fraud, but it was at
least a beacon light warning of a dangerous shore. I remember
prosecuting an embezzler at Lancaster who always prayed with his
victims before he took their money. Whalley, the famous Blackburn
solicitor, who swindled his hundreds, was a famous prayer-monger, and
in all those doubtful societies and associations which are so popular
in Lancashire, and through which the savings of the working class are
transferred to the pockets of their elders and betters, there is
generally a halo of holiness surrounding prominent members of the
board. And as long as popular opinion is in favour of the Pharisee,
and will invest in his business concerns because he is a Pharisee, so
long Manchester, with its simple, saving working class, is bound to
have more than her fair share of the race.

It has been a very interesting occupation with me during the last
twenty-five years to watch the constant dispute between the Pharisee
and the average citizen, and though the contest is by no means over
yet, I am glad to be able to chronicle that up to now the Pharisee is
several down. And that phrase reminds me of his attitude towards
Sunday golf. The Pharisee, of course, did not want to play golf on
Sunday, but a large majority of golfing citizens did, therefore it was
an evil thing to do, and they must be protected against themselves. At
one club where a meeting was held and feeling ran rather high, a
humorist moved as an amendment “That Sunday golf be not compulsory.”
The leading Pharisee――the sect have no sense of humour――protested
eloquently that no body of men could compel him to play golf. The
humorist drily pointed out to him that a careful reading of the
proposed rule would show that they did not intend to compel him. Then,
amidst laughter and cheers, it became a rule of the club, and, as far
as I know, it is a rule to this day.

What an excellent, sane rule it is. Your Pharisee is always compelling
you not to do this and not to do the other. What a calm, dignified way
of meeting him――to place on record the common law of the land that
Sunday golf is not compulsory. Of course, Sunday golf won all along
the line, one reason being that golf is a rich man’s amusement, and
that young Master Pharisee, when he was down from Oxford, would have a
round with his friends on Sunday afternoon, and that made the
governor’s position peculiarly ridiculous. But wait until the working
classes demand their outdoor amusements on the Sabbath, and you will
see a gathering of the sect worthy of Manchester in the palmiest days
of Pharisaism.

The fight over the Sunday papers had been fought and won before I came
to Manchester, but I remember a little skirmish started by Canon Nunn
in the form of a protest made against the boys shouting papers on
Sunday. Now, town noises are most people’s aversion, and if this had
been a real attack on unnecessary noise it would have been reasonable
enough. But it did not seek to stop Church bells or boys shouting
papers on Monday or Tuesday, and was really only an effort to
inconvenience those who preferred to read the sermons of Hubert by
their own fireside rather than to listen to the parsons in an
uncomfortable church. The Sunday paper is not, perhaps, the highest
ideal of journalism, but it is to many the only newspaper of their
week. It is to the discredit of the Pharisee that he has put every
obstacle in the way of the Sunday paper to prevent it from developing
into a bigger and more useful institution than it already is.

But one’s heart bleeds for the poor Pharisee when the theatre is
mentioned. I remember some Bolton Guardians passionately endeavouring
to hinder the little workhouse children from seeing a Christmas
pantomime. One asserted that theatres “brought ruin to thousands,” and
another that “he could not ask God’s blessing on a child whom he took
to the theatre.” Fortunately, there was a majority of sinners among
the Guardians, the holy men were defeated and the little children were
suffered to see the pantomime.

One of the wildest outbursts of fanaticism that I have ever witnessed
arose over the licensing of the Palace of Varieties. To anyone who had
lived in a healthier and more normal civilisation the affair seemed
impossible. For what was the situation? Manchester had a few
old-fashioned, out-of-date music-halls and a very large number of
singing-halls attached to public-houses――not the most desirable places
of entertainment. The directors of the Palace of Varieties proposed to
erect a large modern music-hall and give the best entertainment of
that kind that could be given. It was a London company, and, from a
business point of view, it made a mistake in not interesting
Manchester men in the company in a business sense. But there was no
doubt that such a hall was badly wanted by the general body of
citizens, and that the men who were going to run the show would never
allow any performance that the average Manchester citizen would not
like to see, just as his average London brother did. You would have
thought that any citizen of foresight would have welcomed such a
change. For years the magistrates and rulers of the city had provided
this class of entertainment in most undesirable places, and the
complacent Pharisee passed by on the other side; it did not come
between the wind and his nobility. But this “centre of vice,” as a
prominent Pharisee called it, was to be in the Oxford Road. It was to
be open and honest, and that was its offence. The Pharisee knew that
the Manchester citizens were evil people, that the music-hall was
going to be an evil thing, and, therefore, certain to be popular among
evil people, and so he opposed it with a vitality of strenuous abuse
that was the admiration of all who take pleasure in such
manifestations.

The earnestness of the crusade was beyond dispute, and the bed-rock
principle of it seemed to be a firm belief in original sin. The youth
of Manchester, as I gathered from letters of the protectors of morals,
is naturally evil and very prone to vice and immorality. Once it
strays from a Sunday school into a music-hall it directly takes to
excessive drinking and other immoralities and crime. The regime of the
Sunday school in no way renders the patient immune from these results.

In the interests of this hopeful class of youth, said the Pharisee,
the music-hall must be shut. The fact that there are a large number of
normal, healthy, young citizens who take no harm in music-halls was
overlooked. For weeks before the licence was applied for the
correspondence rolled on. Letters in favour of the Palace were
generally unsigned, as employees whose employers or directors were of
the ruling sect had to be cautious.

Nearly every church and chapel organisation went against the
improvement of music-hall performances. I remember one notable
exception. The Rev. W. S. Caiger, rector of St. Mark’s, had the pluck
to stand up against the overwhelming torrent of holiness that poured
through the newspapers. “Mr. Price-Hughes,” he wrote, “talked of the
wickedness of men who make a gain out of the exhibition of ballet
girls. A ballet girl who is fairly proficient in her profession is in
a far safer moral position than the young girls I watched the other
day making flannel shirts at tenpence the dozen.” That was a cap that
would have fitted more than one leading Pharisee, but the wearing of
it might have obscured his halo.

The legal history of the licence is not worth reporting. Licensing by
magistrates is not a very exact branch of scientific law. There was
the usual canvassing and peaceful picketing by the Pharisees and their
opponents. In the first round the former won, and one of their leaders
called for a “great meeting of united prayer and thanks to God for His
divine favour to our city.” I do not think this was held. There was
then a larger session. Gully applied, Sir John Harwood was in the
chair, and the licence was gained by 33 to 27. Thus on Whit-Monday,
1891, Manchester possessed a first-rate music-hall. Since then others
have been built and opened to the general benefit of weary citizens
who are fond of innocent amusement. And nowadays the Pharisees
sometimes patronise them, and so “all’s well that ends well.”

And the whole attitude of mind of the English Pharisee towards the inn
and the tavern is the most incomprehensible affair to the average
citizen. One would have thought that an endeavour would be made to
have the inn a place of cleanliness, beauty, and good repute, where
relaxation and bright amusement and music might be a God-send to
hard-working people. But generations of magistrates have decreed that
the workers are to have their drink surrounded by every discomfort.
Magnificent hotels and restaurants with music and dancing are only for
the rich. All this is, of course, done in the great cause of
temperance, and as Mr. Balfour said, “love of temperance is the polite
name for hatred of the publican.” In the upper and middle classes the
altered manners of the day in relation to strong drink are not due to
shutting down public-houses and degrading those that are left open.
Legislation is never likely to achieve any great moral reform, nor are
the licensing magistrates, as a rule, administrators of much sweetness
or great light.

Had they been so I think they would have noticed that in records of
English habits and English character the inn stands for nearly as much
as the church in the social life of the people. Those of us who have
plenty of house room do not quite recognise how an inn may be the one
possible meeting-place for friends in hours of recreation. How
shortsighted, then, to forbid its expansion, to make it uncomfortable
and degrading. In the literature of our country the inn is very rarely
spoken of with disrespect. It were easy to quote passage after
passage, from the holiest literature to the lightest, of the high
place that the inn and what it represents occupies in the minds of the
best Englishmen. Licensing magistrates should overhaul their Bibles
for the right references, and “when found, turn the leaf down.” Doctor
Johnson puts it in a phrase when he says: “No, sir; there is nothing
which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is
produced as by a good tavern or inn.” He then repeated with great
emotion Shenstone’s lines. The last verse is well remembered:

  Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round,
    Where’er his stages may have been,
  May sigh to think he still has found
    The warmest welcome at an inn.

The spirit of freedom and social comfort that runs through all the
English writing about inns is a good thing to foster in itself. And in
whose interest is it suppressed? Not in the present-day interests of
the working man, but at the behest of the Pharisees, who have added a
commandment of their own, “Thou shalt not permit alcohol,” and who
believe that they can by associating drink with degradation and
discomfort put an end to its use. It was Charles Kingsley who solemnly
warned the teetotalers that they were “simply doing the devil’s work.”
As he said with much foresight and wisdom, “I dread the spirit of
teetotalism, because it will beget that subtlest of sins, spiritual
pride and Pharisaism. Its founders, like the first founders of every
ascetism may be, and as far as I have conversed with them are, pure,
humble, and self-denying men. So were the Fakeers, the first
Mohammedan ascetics, the first monks, the first Quakers … but after a
few generations the self-avenging Nemesis comes, the evil spirit drops
his mask and appears as Pharisaism.”

But if he could have lived to see the work of the licensing benches of
to-day, how they make it daily more impossible to run an inn or tavern
on right lines, bright, respectable, large, airy, and clean, with all
reasonable recreations for its patrons, Kingsley would have been able
to give the Evil One his due for the work of his adherents. Probably
the boldest and best solution of our difficulties would be Free Trade,
a high rateable value of premises and reasonable police supervision.
There could not, one would think, be a better field for practising
Free Trade principles――if you really believe in them――than in the
trade of our national beverage. It seems little less than a scandal
that new licences for experimental purposes are practically
unobtainable, and that the working classes are shut out of a fair
enjoyment of comfort and decency in tavern accommodation, whilst the
supply of luxuriously appointed hotels and restaurants for the upper
classes knows no bounds.

And there is another new sin that the Pharisee regards with peculiar
horror when it manifests itself among the working classes in any of
its popular forms――the sin of gambling. I remember when Bernard
Vaughan preached a sermon in Manchester to show that betting was not
in itself sinful, the whites of many Nonconformist eyes were turned
appealingly to heaven. Heaven gave no sign in the matter, and we may
take it the appeal was dismissed. For what can be sounder than the
Publican view of this and other matters, namely, that eating, drinking
and wagering are not in themselves sinful, but that the sin comes in
with the excess. Gluttony, drunkenness and gambling――if we use the
last word only in its expression of excess――those are the sins; and
even a Pharisee would not be too strict about eating, for something
like gluttony has ever been attendant upon the profession of piety.

For my part, so far from forbidding children to bet, I should teach
them how to do it prettily. A round game, say Pope Joan, played for
fish――the engraved mother-of-pearl variety for choice――at which
children learn to lose or win in a sweetly mannered and unselfish way
would always make, I think, a charming moral lesson. I remember my
father had strong views about the importance of everyone being taught
to bet――or gamble, if you prefer the word――in youth. My brother and I
had always to play whist against our parents for farthing
points――twopence a bumper――which had to be paid when we lost out of
our own pocket-money, and our fellow-gamblers exacted their winnings
to the uttermost farthing.

My father himself admitted that this was, for us, excessive gambling,
but then there were not in those days many serious financial calls
upon our means. I should not care to-day to risk so large a proportion
of my weekly income on the hazard of the card. But the point is that
if you learn to gamble for definite sums at definite games you can
easily content the wagering spirit that is within you without rushing
into excess. And think how well it would be if the schools and
Universities turned out lads capable of leading their fourth best.
Surely a man is a better citizen whose powers of observation have been
sufficiently developed to enable him to see a call for trumps, and is
not the eleven rule as near to the business of life as the rule in
Shelley’s case? At the University a good professor of whist might make
his chair self-supporting by playing with his pupils for very moderate
points. How few professors do that in classics, theology, or even the
sciences. The more the matter is gravely considered the clearer it is
that gambling requires educational stimulus rather than legislative
restraint. It wants the Publican’s treatment rather than the
Pharisee’s.

What a far better world it will be for the English workman when he is
invited to play his rubber in a neat restaurant after the manner of
the Belgian who orders his beer and his _jeu-de-bac_, and rattles the
dice with noisy merriment on the marble tables. Why should not the
municipality set up a sixpenny, or, if you will, a penny totalizer on
the racecourse, and abolish the yelling crowd of bookmakers, who by
some Pharisaical interpretation of the law are encouraged to carry on
their trade upon a racecourse because it is not a place within the
meaning of the Act?

What moves the Pharisee to roll in the dust and groan about gambling
is difficult to understand. For in every business transaction in life
there is an element of gambling. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer
promotes a great scheme of health insurance he invites his customers,
in the phrase of the ring, “to buy money,” and calls out the odds as
nine to four on the field. He knows the gambling instinct in mankind,
and very properly appeals to it. And, indeed, the gamble is
everywhere. Even in the County Court when you pay your hearing fee
there is the uncertainty of the law, and the betting is generally
against the defendant’s solvency, and you may never get even your
original stake out of the pool. What are the odds when the workman
buys his grocery or drapery on credit that he will get his money’s
worth?

I fear there is an element of jealousy in these sermons against
gambling. The preachers do not want the working man to gamble with the
bookmaker, but to put his money in some insurance or investing society
with prominent Pharisees on the board, calling out tempting odds in
specious advertisements which the Publican would be too honest to
offer. And if there is to be a statute against gambling, let us so
draft it and work it as not to kill trivial amusement, but to warn off
the course pious directors of fraudulent companies who in prayerful
tones commend their wild-cat gambles to the working man.

No, the truth is that gambling is to most of us an element of our
life, and, like all the other elements, should be used thankfully and
wisely, and not in excess. By all means follow Michael’s advice and

                               … well observe
  The rule of――Not too much: by temperance taught,
  In what thou eat’st and drink’st;

and, indeed, in all actions of life. But remember that the rule of
“Not too much” can never be exercised by a mere refusal to look the
facts of life in the face and run the risks of temptation.

I have preached that doctrine to many in Manchester, but I am bound to
say, without making many converts. I remember an amusing jest played
upon me at the Llandudno Golf Club. I had been laying down the true
rule about gambling, and no doubt preaching about it in a somewhat
Pharisaical tone, when a member of the committee asked me if I would
play a certain ex-mayor of a Midland borough who was making matches of
a very gambling and extravagant character with several of the younger
visitors.

“He will take it from you, Judge. You tell him firmly you are going to
have a ball on and nothing more; you can give him your views on
gambling, and don’t let him start off on the first tee with a
sovereign a hole, or anything of that sort.”

“Certainly not,” I said, “I’ll keep him within bounds.”

“You just talk to him like you’ve been talking to us,” said my friend.
“It will do him good. I’ll tell him you will play him at 10.30
to-morrow.”

The Pharisee within me was rampant, and I prepared to dress down the
ex-mayor and make him play his best for only half-a-crown.

At 10.30 he was on the tee, and I walked out to meet him. He looked a
short, thick-set, commonplace citizen with nothing of the gambler
about him. But appearances are often deceitful. After a few words of
greeting, I thought I would get to work, and said with some emphasis,
“I will play you for half-a-crown, sir, and not a penny more.”

He looked up astounded, and gasped out, “I beg your pardon, sir.”

“Half-a-crown,” I repeated, and to ease his disappointment I added, “I
don’t mind a shilling on the bye.”

“Sir!” he said, drawing himself up to what height he could and
speaking with scornful dignity, “This is a very unseemly joke. I have
never made a bet in my life, and I have a poor opinion, sir, of anyone
who wishes to make so fine a game as golf the subject of betting. I am
president of our Anti-Gambling League.”

With that he drove off a fine drive, and I topped the ball feebly into
the rough. From the club-house came the congratulatory laughter of
many Publicans at the discomfiture of the Pharisee.

It would be wrong indeed if I were to picture Manchester as a city
where the most eminent citizens were kill-joys, and where the men wore
broad phylacteries in their buttonholes when they went on ‘Change. On
the contrary, I speak of the Pharisees as merely a small but powerful
element in the community. For in no city were there more men of the
world who loved to do good with a merry heart and enjoy the give and
take of hospitality with their comrades and brother sinners.
Manchester men know how to work hard and play hard. They are early
risers, early closers, and early diners. If you were a stranger
wandering through the streets after 8 o’clock in the evening, you
would think you were in a deserted city; but put your head into the
Free Trade Hall, and it will be packed for a concert; ask for a seat
in one of the popular music-halls or a cinematograph show, and you may
not get one; you will even find people at the theatre――quite a throng
if it is a musical comedy――such a varied taste has Manchester in
entertainment.

But if you want a really delightful evening go and dine with one of
the societies or clubs whose annual dinner is being held at one of
Manchester’s best inns. It may be the Statistical Society or the
Playgoers Club or the Edinburgh Academicals, but it will not really
matter. For whether it be statistics or drama or scholarship, I can
promise you both fun and good fellowship. And I say this with honest
certainty, that there never was a more hospitable place than
Manchester, and there never were public dinners with less dulness and
boredom about them. I don’t know that the after-dinner speaking was
any better than it is in other places, but there was a jollity and
abandon about it difficult to convey in writing, though pleasant
enough to remember.

Sir John William Maclure was always a great figure at a banquet, both
literally and physically as well as socially, and ready enough he was
either to take a jest at his own expense in good part or to pink his
adversary with an epigram. I remember one excellent score he made off
myself. Maclure was the acknowledged impresario of the Tory party, and
was rather proud of the fact. He used to deny with mock-modest
emphasis that every appointment of recent years was made through his
influence. “But very nearly so!” he added. It was at a grand jury
dinner, where I sat next Sir Joseph Leese, the Recorder of Manchester,
and in proposing Sir William Maclure’s health I taunted him with the
discomfort he must feel on seeing Leese and myself present, and
knowing that we were the only two jobs in Lancashire with which he had
had nothing to do.

“Ah!” said the genial baronet as he finished his reply, “it is
correct, and it is a sad truth, no doubt greatly regretted in
Lancashire, that I had nothing to do with the appointment of the
present Recorder or the present County Court Judge. I have the
greatest respect for those two gentlemen, but I must correct his
Honour in one particular. He referred, no doubt in jest, to the two
appointments as two jobs. May I put him right? Sir Joseph Leese’s
appointment was not a job.”

In his more expansive humour, Sir John William was quite Falstaffian
in his addresses. I remember at a dinner given by a Society of
Accountants to which he had come from London, he expatiated on the
difficulties he had had in coming down at all. “I must tell you,
gentlemen, that Mr. Balfour said to me, ‘Sir John, it is impossible to
carry on the House if you leave us.’ ‘But, sir,’ I said, ‘I have to
dine with the Manchester accountants.’ ‘Ah,’ said Mr. Balfour, ‘then I
won’t keep you; but tell that excellent body from me how much I admire
them.’ (Great cheering.) But that is not all, gentlemen. In
Westminster Hall I met Lord Salisbury, and I had the greatest
difficulty to get away from him. He wanted me to come down to Hatfield
with him. I said, ‘What, my lord, and break my word to the Manchester
accountants?’ ‘No,’ said Lord Salisbury, ‘of course you mustn’t, but I
tell you what you must do; you must tell them from me that without
accountancy the nation would be ruined.’ (More cheering.) But,
gentlemen, it did not end there, for at the railway station I found
there was a special train just going to Sandringham. I was sent for,
and the Prince of Wales was gracious enough to request me to come down
and spend Sunday with him. ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘such a kind request is a
command, but I have promised to be with the Manchester accountants
to-night.’ ‘Not another word, Maclure,’ said the Prince. ‘Keep your
appointment, and tell the Manchester accountants that in my view they
are the backbone of the nation.’” (Long and continued cheering.)

Later in the evening a speaker of no particular account, who spoke in
a diffident, somewhat halting way, said he did not move in the select
circles that Sir John William Maclure did, “but,” he continued, “I
happen to know on the highest authority the regard in which he is held
by the greatest in the land. I was strolling in the gardens in Windsor
the other day, and a Scots servant in a kilt came up and asked me if I
came from Manchester. I said I did. ‘And do you know Sir John William
Maclure?’ ‘Very well,’ I replied. ‘Come with me then,’ he said, and he
led me into a beautiful drawing-room in the Palace, in which I found I
was in the presence of Royalty itself. After a courteous greeting I
was asked what I knew about Sir John William Maclure. I drew a noble
picture of all the virtues and attainments which endear him to
Manchester men. When I had finished, the gracious lady said, with a
sigh of relief: ‘You have taken a great load off my mind, for I was
not at all sure that he was a good companion for Albert Edward.’”

Fair play for Maclure, he enjoyed the chaff as much as anyone. And
that was one of the happy traits of after-dinner in Manchester――everyone
was there, like a schoolboy, to make fun or take fun in good part.
And, perhaps, the most admirable feature of the whole thing was that
even if there were reporters present, they were always clever enough
to pick out the sense of the speeches, and leave the wilder flights of
humour to the pleasures of memory.

Alas, John William’s jovial face smiles at us no longer, and too many
of the good fellows who were guests at the board are shadows of
memory. But fond as I was of the older days, and loyal as I am to the
memory of the older men, I am not going to praise yesterday at the
expense of to-day. I think the same right spirit of enjoyment still
holds good, and I hope it will always be true to say that no one will
find himself in touch with Manchester who cannot thoroughly enter into
that “joyous folly that unbends the mind,” which is Manchester’s habit
after dinner.




CHAPTER XVI

THE MANCHESTER STAGE

   In other things the knowing artist may
   Judge better than the people; but a play
  (Made for delight, and for no other use)
   If you approve it not, has no excuse.

                       WALLER: “Prologue to the Maid’s Tragedy.”


A good history of the Manchester stage remains to be written.
Theatrically, the city has a very noble past, and there are many signs
that its future may be equally illustrious. Probably the red-letter
day in the annals of the Manchester stage is October 15, 1864, when
Charles Calvert, with a performance of “The Tempest,” started those
ten years of Shakespearean revivals which are now noteworthy in the
wider history of the drama of England. I once heard a lover of art,
who was also a banker, say that Manchester had but three things to her
credit, the Rylands Library, Ford Madox Brown’s frescoes in the Town
Hall, and Charles Calvert’s Shakespearean revivals. I told him that he
did not know the water-colours in the Whitworth Gallery or the
old-world romance of the Chetham Hospital, and he was bound to admit,
after inspection of these securities, that he would have to increase
our artistic overdraft.

The drama owes many debts to Charles Calvert. He was the first to
recognise the merit of Henry Irving, and engaged him for the stock
company at the Theatre Royal in 1860.

“Why on earth did you engage that raw fellow?” asked an influential
friend of Calvert at a rehearsal. Calvert looked at Irving, and
theatrically touched his own forehead, intimating that he considered
that Irving had brains, and that that was the reason of the
engagement. Those five years which Irving spent in the company under
Charles Calvert must have had a deep influence in moulding his
ambitions and educating his ideals.

But in 1886, when I came to Manchester, the old stock companies were
gone and forgotten. The days of the touring companies were in their
prime, and the _cognoscenti_――they would not like to be called merely
the “knowing ones”――deplored in eloquent prose the splendours of the
theatrical past. Had they aspired to verse they would have sung with
Wordsworth:――

  “A jolly place,” said he, “in times of old;
   But something ails it now: the spot is cursed.”

Yet speaking as one whose duty it was to go to the theatre every week
and write about it, I doubt if any city had better theatrical fare
than Manchester in the later eighties.

For in those days, mind you, we were a humble people. Those learned
young gentlemen who can see no theatrical merit in the leading London
actors, and will find no virtue in a play that entertains the general
public, had not yet left those dour Nonconformist nurseries, where
doubtless they were raised. It was, if not a better world, certainly a
merrier world, and the poor, old-fashioned, uneducated pagans in it
actually went to the playhouse after a hard day’s work in search of
entertainment. What is more, they got it. And being good judges of
acting, and keen about the actor’s art, there came to meet them a
never-ending procession of the best actors from London, bringing down
their own companies in pieces that had met with success in town.

Turning over some playbills of 1887 it is impossible not to realise
that the theatre-goer of that date had the opportunity of seeing a
higher and more varied standard of acting than it is possible to
witness in the Manchester of to-day. In that one year we had Mr.
Farren, that master of old English comedy, in his three greatest
studies, Sir Peter Teazle, Sir Anthony Absolute, and Lord Ogleby. One
wishes Charles Lamb could have lived to see Farren, and describe his
Sir Peter. Lamb only saw King, the comic, fretful, old bachelor, but
left on record his judgment that Sir Peter was to be played as a real
man, a neighbour, or old friend, which judgment Farren put into
execution. Then Miss Mary Anderson was on tour with the most ardent,
handsome, and intelligent _jeune premier_ of our time, Forbes-Robertson.
They were playing “Pygmalion and Galatea,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and “As
You Like It.” Barry Sullivan was still with us, and those who never
saw him in “Richard III.” and “The Gamester” will not be able nowadays
to realise what was meant by the “high and palmy” school of acting,
and what were its merits and shortcomings. Up against this interesting
memory of bygone acting was young Benson, with his fresh, intelligent,
new methods and clever comrades, capturing the hearts and winning the
intellectual sympathy of an ever-widening circle of play-goers.

In the same year, too, Wilson Barrett brought “Claudian” and the
“Silver King,” with the company and scenery that he had with him in
London and America; Toole and Edward Terry paid us regular visits, and
Mr. and Mrs. Kendal gave us a notable revival of “Lady Clancarty.”
Sarah Bernhardt paid Manchester a flying visit with performances of
“Adrienne” and “Theodora”; and last, but not least, Henry Irving and
Ellen Terry rejoiced the hearts of Manchester playgoers with what we
always regarded as the festival week of our theatrical calendar.

When I hear people groaning over the theatre in the provinces of
twenty-five years ago, I would ask them to read that list of events
and honestly say whether the programme of to-day can beat it. It may
be said that there are no such stars in the firmament to-day, and,
therefore, they cannot shine upon Manchester. But that is not wholly
true. There are great actors to-day and great productions, but
nowadays they are not brought to Manchester.

The main reason why that is so is probably a commercial one. For some
time a dead set was made against “eminent” actors and their London
productions by mistaken friends of another type of drama. Certain
writers on the drama in Manchester made themselves “laughing stogs to
other men’s humours,” as a Welshman may say, by exalting the players
on the eastern side of Peter Street into a glorious company of
apostles, and deliberately tormenting the actors on the western side
of the thoroughfare as though they were a noble army of martyrs. No
doubt it injured business, and kept some of the bigger actors away
from Manchester.

But, in my view, the great days of touring companies in the provinces
are over. A London success now has a bigger chance in Australia and a
less certain but, of course, more remunerative chance in America. And
although a run round some of the big towns in England may be included
in the future plans of the more popular actors, yet I think it is
quite unlikely that Manchester will ever see so many first-rate
performances on the road as there were in 1887. Nor is this altogether
a matter of regret. I have always been an optimist about the English
theatre, and have never believed that it would fall into the hands of
either financiers or cranks. And in watching the evolution of the
theatre in Manchester it has been manifest for a long time that some
form of repertory theatre was on the way.

The beginnings were made, I think, in 1893, when Mr. Louis Calvert
produced “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon” for Mr. Charles Hughes, who, as
chairman of Convocation of the University, gave a theatrical party to
his guests. He was the leading spirit of our Independent Theatre,
which produced “Candida,” “The Master Builder,” “Love’s Labour Lost,”
and “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” without scenery, and many other
interesting plays, in 1894. Louis Calvert was also associated with
Flanagan in the earlier Shakespearean revivals at the Queen’s, whence
he was spirited away by Sir Herbert Tree to act in and assist him with
several memorable Shakespearean productions in London. Robert
Courtneidge, too, must not be forgotten as a Manchester manager, who,
at the Prince’s Theatre, gave two beautiful and reverently intelligent
productions of “As You Like It” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In
these editions everything was done for the text and the play, and the
actor’s art was not hampered, but the adornment, exquisite as it was,
clothed the drama without overwhelming it with finery.

These were the forerunners of Miss Horniman’s Repertory Theatre, which
has won for Manchester such renown in the world of the drama, coming
as it did at exactly the right moment, and coming――as surely it has
come――to stay.

I am not one of those who has ever indulged in extravagant hymns of
praise over any of the particular plays and artists of the Manchester
Repertory Theatre. I think its greatest enemies have been its
“die-hard” friends, who insisted, in season and out of season, that
every actor and actress upon its stage was a genius with a consummate
knowledge of technique, and that every play produced by a local
playwright could only possibly have been improved upon by some Belgian
or Dutchman. As I have always said, the acting is so good and many of
the plays are so interesting that they deserve to be judged by the
highest standard, and, to my mind, the highest standard of acting and
production is to be found in the London theatres. There is no doubt
that the old stock companies had a great advantage in coming in
contact with the star actor from time to time and playing with him. In
the modern repertory theatre this is not so. There must necessarily be
a certain touch of the amateur in a repertory company. For myself, I
recognise it, and I like it, but I see no use in telling an amateur
that he or she has great technical skill and nothing to learn. One
does not expect to find a series of golf champions on a local green,
and we should not expect or pretend to a series of star actors in a
repertory company.

When the repertory system becomes more universal, and broadens out on
the wide healthy lines of providing entertainment for all classes of
people and giving smaller proportion of time, say one day in seven, to
the cranks and pulpiteers of the drama, we shall find the repertory
theatres getting a greater hold on local patriotism, and one by one
growing stronger in good work and higher ambitions, until at last they
unite into what will be in truth, as well as in name, a national
theatre.

There is one thing in which I heartily agree with the expressed
opinions of many well-known actors. The Manchester audience is a great
audience. Once captured and really entertained, the Manchester
audience is a fearless and loyal friend. I have often been delighted
to read in local critical columns the solemn excommunication of a
play――especially an amusing play――and to note the pompous warning to
the audience that if they are amused by this kind of thing they
condemn their mental condition, and their moral purpose is ended; and
then to go into the theatre and hear a Manchester audience in thorough
enjoyment of what their guardian high priest has forbidden. Only the
other day I read that “Our Boys” visited the Gaiety Theatre, and the
play “_mirabile dictu_ went amazingly.” The Manchester digestion is
good, its appetite is healthy, and many years of theatrical diet akin
to the highest and most moving cheese has not destroyed the taste for
a slice of honest plum cake. This kind of pedagogic critical
literature is like the leader-writer’s essay. It fills the columns of
the newspaper very decoratively. But when the polling boxes are turned
out on the table and the votes are counted, you can appraise its
value. It is the box office that speaks.

I am pleased to remember that on the few occasions I have ventured on
dramatic productions I have had the Manchester audience with me.
Perhaps they carry toleration too far, but I state the facts as they
occurred. It was always certain to my mind from the days when I ran a
toy theatre and cut the characters out of cardboard――would that some
of the live actors could be cut out of their cardboard!――that I should
some day produce a real piece of my own in a real theatre, but I had
waited so long about it that really the ambition had nigh gone to
rest. It was Louis Calvert who aroused it when he was staying with me
at Nevin, in North Wales, in 1900. “Why not write a play?” he asked,
and, of course, I responded too readily to the suggestion, and no
sooner was his back turned than I was astride my hobby-horse and
galloping round the history of the world in search of a subject.

I reined up in the paddock of her gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth,
where I had always felt at home since I failed to gain a prize for her
biography at the early age of nine. I wrote a splendid play about
Queen Elizabeth. It was quite modern in its construction. Everyone sat
down and talked as long as he or she wanted to, and went in and out
without any dramatic reason. There were very many acts, and as many
scenes to the acts as Shakespeare himself could have supplied, and
there was a lot of real history in it lifted from Froude. It was a
valuable human document, and from the standpoint of the elect of
to-day it was a play. I doubt, however, if in its original form it
would ever have been produced. The supply of that kind of thing seems
far larger than the demand, and my ugly duckling got turned into a
really well-behaved swan through Louis Calvert’s collaboration.

“Collaboration” is a form of literary wrestling that is delightful
exercise, but can only be indulged in with advantage by good-tempered
friends. My partnership with Calvert began in this way. I took the
script of my play up to London, and read it to him. I did not read all
of it, for it was a warm summer afternoon, and he fell asleep before I
was a quarter through with it――somewhere about Act ii., scene 7, if I
remember right. In the end he dismissed it with costs――the costs
taking the form of breakfasting with me the next morning at my hotel.
I remember we had curried chicken for breakfast, and I have mentally
associated curried chicken and dramatic construction ever since.

It was during his second helping of chicken that Calvert suddenly
announced that there was an “idea” in my play. The words, the history,
the construction, and everything else were useless, but the “idea” was
there. At the time I thought this estimate unduly pessimistic, now I
regard it as glowing with the warmth of friendship or curry or both.
Louis Calvert reduced the “idea” to its lowest common denominator of
four scenes. With easy hand he unbarred the gates of light and
extinguished by the brilliancy of a few suggestions the petty
historical sequences that I had borrowed from Froude, and within a few
months out of the ashes of my old play arose “England’s Elizabeth,”
which was produced at the Theatre Royal on Monday, April 29, 1901.

I remember that first night very well indeed. There was a crowded
house, and I was eager to see how far the play was going to interest
the public. At the same time I had some doubt how far I was entitled
to take a prominent part in the proceedings as half the author of a
play on its first-night production. I felt rather like a father at a
christening, proud and happy, but ready to give the real credit of the
affair to my partner.

I happened to find myself in a box with my back more or less to the
stage, and I found that I could best measure the way the piece was
going, as I used to do speeches to the jury in the old days, by fixing
on the most unpromising face in the jury and watching it closely to
see if it developed any interest in the proceedings. I chose an old
gentleman in the third row of the stalls, who turned out to have a
very kindly nature, for he began to enjoy himself in the first scene,
and refused his wife’s entreaties to come away and catch his train in
the middle of the last act.

One performance among many good ones stands out in my memory. It was
that of Mr. Edmond Gwenn as an old gardener. During the rehearsals Mr.
Gwenn, no doubt in the interests of the piece, had uttered sentiments
of his own, which in my conceited way I thought inferior to the words
I had written. Diffidently I approached him on the subject, and
suggested that beautiful as his words were mine had a sort of first
mortgage on his attention, as being prior in date if not in relevance.
With great charm of manner Mr. Gwenn assured me that on the first
night I should have every word as written, and I shall never forget
not only hearing the words, such as they were, but having contributed
to the success of one of the most perfect pieces of character acting I
ever witnessed. Some day “England’s Elizabeth” will be discovered. I
know it is a good play, for many years afterwards a scene-shifter in
London asked me after it, and assured me that he had seen “a good deal
of it” when he was at the Theatre Royal. Moreover, the lady who took
the coats and hats told me that she had seen it several times, and
always went in at the end of the last act to cry. These testimonials
are unanswerable. Anyhow, the play is worth reviving if only for its
first gardener.

It was a popular success with its first-night audience, and at the end
of the play I was hurried into the wings, and Mr. Calvert and I went
forward and made our bow. It was not a joint bow, we each made one of
our own. Calvert’s was far the best, mine was but an indifferent
affair, and then when the curtain went down there were cries of
“speech,” and Calvert insisted that I must go on alone and say
something. I must have been very nervous, for I made a wretched mess
of it. What I really intended to say, of course, was that all the best
things in the play were Calvert’s; but what happened was that having
thanked the audience for our kindly reception, I concluded: “I have
often been asked as to this collaboration, which parts of the play I
have written, and which parts Mr. Calvert has written. I can tell you
in a sentence. All the parts that you have enjoyed are mine, the rest
are Calvert’s.” There was a yell of delight. I made a really beautiful
bow this time and retired to the wings, where Calvert was shaking a
friendly fist at me in histrionic anger.

Since then I have been in at many first nights in which I was
interested, and several of them have been in Manchester, where, as I
have already said, I have found a kindly welcome. And although I have
no cause to complain, but rather the reverse, of any want of kindness
in any audiences to whom I have submitted my work, I must admit that I
think the dullest first nights I have ever attended are those of a
play intended to be amusing which is produced in London. For the house
is full of guests, most of whom are regular diners-out at meals of
this kind, with very little appetite for ordinary cake, or else they
are critics on duty. And at no time are these latter more to be pitied
than on the first night of a farce. If they went to be amused they
would cease to be critics, and as they go to criticise they are little
likely to be amused.

I have been at two first nights of farces in which I was interested.
What I have seen is a strenuous battle between the actors and a great
part of the audience, a sort of tug-of-war to see if the actors could
tug any laugh out of the weary play-goers in front. In the two battles
I witnessed, the actors won. In the first of them a curious incident
occurred. A well-known and ample author――let us hide the breadth of
his identity behind the letter C―――― ――not being to the manner born of
first nights, was so tickled at the early humours of the opening
scenes of “What the Butler Saw” that he laughed by himself in his
unprecedented radical way all through the first act. His laughter was
like a minute gun at sea, exploding at intervals amidst unechoing
icebergs. There from the second row of the dress circle came the
laughter of a kind heart as the merriment of a little child expressed
in the music of a bull of Basan. The sound of it frightened the actors
horribly, and my friend and collaborator, Frederick Mouillot, rushed
round to the stage to assure the terrified artists that it really was
laughter. For apparently it is not etiquette to extend any sort of
notice to the first act on a first night. But later on everyone joined
in and stooped to enjoy the fun for the moment, though C―――― continued
to lead by several octaves.

Some day in a better world I hope to write as funny a farce, with as
excellent a collaborator as Mouillot, and to have it as well acted,
and I shall play it in a big theatre with the roof off. And there
shall be no one in front but shall have the heart of a little child
and the lungs of a giant. It will always be a dull thing to produce a
farce written for young hearts before an audience with wrinkled
livers.

And I think one of the most amusing judgments ever made after one of
my Manchester first nights was delivered by an anonymous amateur
critic on a post-card, which was placed upon my desk as I started my
work in Quay Street on the morning after the production of “The
Captain of the School.” I have received many absurd anonymous
communications in my time, for there are a great many folk whose only
taste in life seems to be to expand the postal revenue in this
fashion. Some of them are crudely coarse and objectionable, but this
post-card breathed a genuine sincerity and honesty of dispraise that
was admirable. It ran:

     A VOTER.

     Sir,――I went last night to see your play. It was like your
     verdicts――Rotten!

Rough on the playwright, of course, but does it not contain a subtle
compliment to the Judge? I extend to my anonymous correspondent my
best thanks. No post-card that I have ever carried about in my pocket
has given greater pleasure to my friends.

That first night of “The Captain of the School,” on November 14, 1910,
had a keen interest for me, inasmuch as it was the first appearance of
my daughter, Miss Dorothy Parry, so that, as it were, from a domestic
point of view we were having two first nights at the same time. She
made an excellent success, which she repeated in London and elsewhere;
but certainly she ought to agree with my appreciation of the
Manchester audience. May it be my good fortune to risk another argosy
among its friendly waves before the end of the last act.




CHAPTER XVII

QUOTATIONS FROM QUAY STREET

     The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice
     than those conceive who can see nothing more in a quotation
     than an extract.

                       ISAAC DISRAELI: “Curiosities of Literature.”


At the corner of Byrom Street and Quay Street was the Manchester
County Court, as I knew it, from 1887 to 1894, as a barrister and
afterwards from that date to 1911 as judge. I must have spent a great
portion of my waking hours within its dreary walls. Often do I walk
down Peter Street in my dreams, and find the same officer on point
duty holding up the traffic like the waves of the Red Sea in order
that I may cross Deansgate with dignity and he may deliver an
elaborate salute; but following the pleasant desultory fashion of
dreamland I never actually reach the old Court, but wander away
elsewhere. I do not think when I am departed I shall ever return to
haunt the court-house, not merely because it is noisy, ill-ventilated,
and uncomfortable――most court-houses are――but because if I once got
back there I should want to be at work again, and to take a hand in
what was going on, for despite all the dreariness of its somewhat
squalid routine, I found a percentage of entertainment in the day’s
work. I think the real reason spirits do not return to their old
haunts is that they know that they would not be allowed to cut in and
take part in the game.

I was on the point of saying I had no unpleasant memories of Quay
Street, but that would scarcely be correct, for it was in that court
that I had the misfortune to be shot. One does not care to remember
the tragedies of life, but if one is to set down the happenings of
one’s Manchester days one can hardly leave out such an extraordinary
occurrence. The facts as I understood them were these. On the morning
of July 26, 1898, I had to cancel the certificate of a man named
William Taylor. The case had lasted very late the night before. After
the decision and just as the next case was started I became aware of
what I first thought was a dynamite explosion close to my left ear.
The second explosion, which caused me intense pain, I recognised to be
a pistol shot, and the bullet from that I carry about with me still.
The third, which gave me even greater pain, never hit me at all, for
Henry Thomason, with magnificent bravery, had caught my assailant by
the throat, thrown him on to the floor, and the third shot, in fact,
went into the plaster on the opposite wall and then out again into the
middle of the court. I must have tried to drag my head out of the way
and so hurt myself. I never absolutely lost consciousness, and
remember Montgomery, the surgeon who happened to be in court,
examining my throat and saying “there was no perforation.” I hadn’t an
idea what he meant, but it sounded reassuring.

There is no object in recalling the long months of pain that I had to
go through before I was fit to work. It is pleasanter to remember the
enormous kindness shown to me by all sorts and conditions of people
during those grievous days. In the nursing home they very soon made an
effort to photograph the bullet with the X-rays, which were then only
beginning to be used. It was a terrible ordeal in those days, and I
should think I was over twenty minutes trying to lie still on a couch
with a square negative for a pillow whilst the light spluttered about
in a most unpleasant way. When it was developed they showed me a blur
with one indistinct blob on it.

“What is that?” I asked.

“The bullet,” said the doctors.

“And have you photographed all the metal in my head?”

“Certainly.”

“Then where is the portrait of my gold tooth?”

I never got an answer to that, and the doctors took away the
photograph, which I always maintained was only of interest to
dentists.

A year ago I thought I would make a further investigation and went
down to Birmingham, where my friend, Dr. Franklin Emrys Jones, with
his partner, Dr. Hall Edwards, made several radiograms of it. Dr. Hall
Edwards was in South Africa during the war, and was specially
interested in bullets. It is marvellous, after all he has suffered in
the pursuit of radiography, to see him, maimed and in pain, directing
the work with the greatest enthusiasm. The modern engines are more
terrifying to the victim, and the affair is somewhat uncanny, for when
the light is turned on the operators retire behind a lead-glass screen
and watch you from afar. But it was all over in a few minutes, and
very soon they returned with a negative in a dish, not a flattering
likeness, perhaps, but an excellent picture of a side view of my skull
and the bullet at the base of it.

I had plenty of doctors to look after me, and they were kindness
itself, Wright and Southam and Judson Bury were with me at Quay
Street, and Dr. Larmuth came up and put my ear-drum back in its place.
It had got blown aside by the concussion of the revolver. I think that
depressed me more than anything, for I knew if I was deaf I should
never get back to work again. It was the left ear, and one of my early
visitors said to cheer me up, “That doesn’t matter, judge, that’s the
defendant’s ear, and you never listen to him, you know.” “That may
be,” I said, “but there is all the difference between not listening
and not hearing when you do listen.”

After some weeks I got down to Nevin, in North Wales, but it was
extraordinary what a long time it was before I got over the shock. Of
course, for many months I was often in pain, but with every desire and
incitement to get back to ordinary life I found I had not, at first,
the will to do it. I remember Dr. Leech, who was making a tour of that
part of Wales to write an essay on its climatology, came up to see me,
and was insistent in his kindly way upon my having a swim. I had had
to grow a beard, and I looked like an Anarchist, and I hated going
about, because people stared at me. However, the next day I crawled
down to the shore with Dr. Leech, and with the aid of two sticks
walked into the sea. I regarded the doctor as a manslaughterer at the
time, but when I came out rejoicing and walking ever so much better I
knew I had won the first victory. The second was over my bicycle,
which I knew I couldn’t possibly ride, and very nearly didn’t in
consequence. After that I got bold and went swimming out a bit until a
six-inch wave knocked me on the side of the head, and reminded me that
I was very far from being whole.

I recall these things because I have often found them useful to refer
to in those difficult cases of neurasthenia and malingering in
workmen’s compensation cases. Here was I, with every incentive to
recovery and every desire to recover, and every opportunity that human
being could have, bungling the affair from want of the necessary will
power. I learned that after a severe shock it is a really tough job
for an honest man to get himself back into condition, and that long
after wounds and limbs are healed or mended there remains a real
mental indisposition to look the world in the face again that is hard
to overcome. Even to-day, though all the effects of the accident have
practically passed away, I cannot sit still if anyone suddenly opens a
soda-water bottle at the back of me, and I am distinctly gun-shy.

I got back to work in November. It was too early, and I broke down
again, but I did get back to work and was able to do it. I could not
have stood a formal greeting, but a great many friends came down, and
there was quite a crowded court as I took my seat. I had arranged with
Charley McKeand that as soon as I took my seat he should jump up and
ask for some imaginary case to be adjourned to prevent anyone starting
an oration. This was done. A few days afterwards Joseph Collier, the
surgeon, told me an amusing anecdote about it. “I was coming down
Byrom Street,” he said, “and the officer at the door, whom I know,
called out to me, ‘Hi, Mr. Collier, you’d better coom into coort this
morning. There’s gran’ doin’s on. Judge Parry’s taking his seat again,
and Charley McKeand’s down, an’ ’e’ll be makin’ a fine pow-wow. You
see.’ So I went in,” continued Collier, “and as you know, nothing
happened. When I came out I jeered at the policeman, who seemed quite
upset. ‘I never saw the like of it,’ he said. ‘After all that’s
’appened, and ’im so well liked and aw, and they make no more fuss
than if he’d just been off the bench to have a drink like usual.’”

I think the officer referred to the luncheon interval. There were
certainly no other adjournments, even on the thirstiest days, though
Collier often used to chaff me about it. However, I soon had a good
story against Collier. There had been an accident to a workman, which
was said to have resulted in concussion of the spine. The workman was
a very stolid character, and Collier had examined him for the
insurance company. The following cross-examination took place:――

“Do you remember Mr. Collier examining you?”

“Aye, I do.”

“Did he stick a pin into your thigh?”

“Aye, ’e did an aw.”

“Did you start up and scream?”

“Well, so would you.”

“But hadn’t you told him your thigh was numb and had no feeling?”

“What’s the good of telling ’im onything?” said the witness, pointing
contemptuously at Collier. “That’s where doctor made ’is mistake. I
told ’im I were numb i’ front, and what does ’e do but go and stick a
pin into my backside. ’E’s no doctor.”

When the case went to the medical referee Collier’s views were upheld,
though I always used to warn him against the danger of sticking pins
into the wrong part of the human joint.

I could fill many columns with pleasant memories of our works and days
at Quay Street. The Registrar and his clerks and the high bailiff and
myself were a very happy family, and despite our somewhat gloomy
surroundings we managed to put a good deal of cheeriness and
heartiness into our work. It is not for me to say how far we
succeeded, but this I may say for the Court, and I chronicle it with
pride, that I believe it was the only Court in England that had a
cricket team with a card of fixtures, and regularly played a high
bailiff and a judge.

And, on the whole, I think the staff, from lowest to highest, worked
hard to make an efficient machine of it and certainly the affairs of
the poorer people were thoughtfully administered, and the Registrar
and chief clerks did a lot of work in looking after the estates of the
widows and orphans in cases under the Workmen’s Compensation Act.
Personally I used to see each of the widows once a year at least, and
by keeping in touch with the family doings we were often able to give
a child an appropriate start in life which he or she would never have
had if the money had merely been invested and automatically paid over.
Not every experiment was a success, of course, but the experience
satisfied me that the death payments at least were a very great boon
to the working class, enabling a widow to save her home and the home
life for her children in a way she could not have done before the
passing of the Act.

No one dislikes grandmotherly interference more than Manchester folk,
unless it be Salford folk, but in dealing with large and unaccustomed
sums of money it is a good thing that the widows and orphans should
have the co-operation of the Court. Naturally many of these poor
widows have short views, and cannot see far enough ahead to the days
when what to them is indeed a bottomless purse shall be found to be
empty. It is very difficult to prevent them rushing into businesses
for which they are ill-fitted. They are surrounded by agents and
friends, who have some unsuccessful business――generally a fried-fish
shop――to sell at a high price, and both buyer and seller are indignant
with the hard-hearted and unbelieving judge when he wants to see books
and invoices, and to have proof of the weekly takings before he will
allow the widow to invest her money. To the widowed soul, fried fish
is synonymous with fortune; to me it always smells of fraud.

I cannot say that all our battles with ignorance and shiftlessness
were victories. We got badly hit on occasion. I remember in my early
days a young widow, who had re-married, coming with her husband, a
handsome young fellow, with letters from relations from America, and a
scheme of going out there, where work was plentiful. It seemed an
excellent plan, and after some discussion all the figures having been
put before us by the young man in a businesslike manner, a big sum was
handed out for the equipment and travelling expenses of the family,
and the remainder was to be sent over when they arrived. Months passed
and we heard no more of them, and at length one day the clerk told me
the woman had turned up in the office, with a black eye and a new
baby. They had not been nearer to America than Blackpool, and the man
had never done a stroke of work until the money was spent. That was
one of our failures. Since then we have worked through an emigration
society or taken the tickets ourselves. It has been notable that on
several occasions when I have told the applicants that we would take
their tickets and make all the arrangements they strongly persuaded me
not to go to the trouble, and seemed quite pained that they should be
the cause of so much extra worry. Indeed, finding me adamant on the
subject, they have thrown up the idea of emigrating altogether and
stayed in the old country.

Tombstones are the source of a great deal of difficulty. Seeing the
example set in high places, one sympathises with the poor in their
desire to show respect to their dead, even if one is convinced that
the measures they take are unwise. I generally like to postpone the
drawing out of money for a tombstone as long as possible; but I have
never made any hard-and-fast rule that nothing shall be used for such
a purpose. I remember one widow grieved very much that I could not
allow her a considerable sum for a “stone.” I told her we would
discuss it again in about twelve months. When she returned after this
period I happened to remember her trouble, and said: “I do hope, Mrs.
X., you have thought over all I said to you last time about the
tombstone.”

She looked down on the ground, and I feared we were going to have
tears.

“I think there are so many better ways of showing respect,” I
ventured.

“Yes, sir,” she began falteringly, “so do I, sir.”

“I’m very glad,” I said heartily.

“So am I,” she said, blushing. “You see, I’m going to be married
again.”

And though one laughs over the little comedies in the lives of these
poor folk, I became daily more and more impressed with the sterling
worth of the people whose servant I was, and I spoke with all
sincerity when I said, on leaving Manchester, that I took off my hat
to the Lancashire man who brings up his wife and children worthily on
twenty-five shillings a week. I have been face to face with the man,
and feel that his outlook on life is a great asset for our country,
and that it has been a privilege to be called upon to minister to his
needs, even in the obscure atmosphere of an urban County Court.

As a witness, he is a most refreshing and epigrammatic personality. He
is far from being a saint or a hero, but he is in the main honest,
homely, and humorous, and you can learn a great deal of the
difficulties of his works and days by appreciative study of his
sayings. Most of them could have left the court with a clear
conscience, saying in the old style:――

  An’ I niver knaw’d what a mean’d, but I thowt a ’ad summut to saay,
  An’ I thowt a said whot a owt to a said, an’ I coom’d awaay.

Here, for instance, is a melancholy epigram on Manchester as a city,
where sane human pleasure should be catered for by the rulers and
governors. It occurred in the cross-examination of a workman by that
excellent advocate, Mr. Hockin. He was seeking to show that the
witness was not present at the works when an accident to which he was
testifying had happened.

“But I think that you said you had a holiday that day.”

“I had an aw!”

“Do you mean to tell the Court,” asked Hockin, in his most
archdeacon-like manner, “that you came back to the works when you
might have been enjoying a holiday?”

“Certainly,” replied the witness.

“Why did you do that?” asked Hockin, with a touch of triumph in his
voice as if there was no possible explanation.

The reply was only too obviously truthful.

“What should I do? I have nowhere to go. I’m teetotal now.”

It requires quite a long and subtle study of the Lancashire witness to
really understand when he is condescending to incivility, though many
of his phrases might too hastily be interpreted against his sense of
good manners. An excellent old brewery collector was trying to recover
a lost barrel, and was quite unable to show me documentary evidence of
its residence in the defendant’s house. I was cross-examining him
about it, and could get no satisfaction.

“When was the beer sold?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Was it several years ago?”

“Nay, but I don’t know.”

“But I must know the date,” I replied sternly.

He folded his hands in despair at my unreasonable obstinacy and sighed
deeply, and speaking with slow emphasis said: “Then all I can say is
that you’ll have to go down to the brewery.”

I shall not easily forget the entire change of scene caused in a small
County Court drama by a very Lancashire witness. The plaintiff was a
south-country Chemist’s assistant, most dapper and polite――a very
Osric of the pharmaceutical world. His employer had dismissed him for
drunkenness. On the view it was hard to believe that the plaintiff had
vigour enough for any such delinquency, but his testimony, given in a
mincing voice, was a little suspicious.

“I assure you, sir, that I have the misfortune to suffer from asthma,
and my doctor has ordered me to take whisky on these foggy mornings,
that are so severe in this climate. I am a very temperate man. I need
hardly say, sir, a very temperate man. A lady came in for a syphon,
and I gave her one. She thought it was soda, and it was lemonade. It
was entirely the lady’s error, and that seems to have annoyed the
lady. It does annoy ladies, and she seems to have got the
impression――of course, an entirely mistaken impression――that I was
not, in fact――sober. Your Honour will know what I mean; but, of
course, a mistake, a sad mistake, and the lady unfortunately sent word
to my master, and he came down and was very violent, and threw me out
of the shop.”

The defendant said the man was drunk, and proceeded to call witnesses.
The lady was ineffective, but a working man called on subpœna and a
very unwilling witness put the matter beyond doubt. We had no
advocates, so I told him to tell his story in his own words.

“I dunno reely much aboot it,” he said, “I wor passing shop an’ ’ad a
bit o’ cough mysen, so I went in for twopennoths o’ balsam. An’ when I
got in t’ shop I saw yon mon”――pointing to plaintiff――“leaning up agin
them variagated decorated drawers like they ’ave in them shops, an’ I
says to mysen, I says, ‘’Enery, you ain’t tired o’ your life yet, are
you, ’Enery?’ An’ with that I cooms out wi’out ony balsam――an’ that’s
all I know.”

The plaintiff, who had little dramatic instinct, insisted on
cross-examining as to whether the witness was prepared to swear he was
drunk, but the witness replied with true Lancashire charity and
caution, “I ’oped as ’ow you was drunk, but, in coorse, you might ’a’
been taking poison.”

A very few months after I was made judge I got a homely rebuke from a
suitor that led to an interesting reform in my conduct of affairs. A
man was telling me in moving for a new trial that he had got in the
County Court on the day of the trial too late for the hearing. I asked
him why he had not waited until the end of the day and made an
application to me.

“So I did,” he said, “but as soon as last case was over you jumped up
and bolted through yon door like a rabbit.”

After that I made more dignified exits, and I also arranged a practice
of waiting and talking to everyone who was left over and had anything
to ask, so I am grateful to my critic. I used to have many strange
applications for advice, some quite beyond my power of satisfying. For
instance, a working man came to me once with the most perplexing
problem. “I want to know,” he asked, “whether I must call my little
girl Ferleatta?” I spell it phonetically, as he could not help me in
the spelling, but I fancy the real name may have been Violetta.

“What has happened?” I asked.

“Two young women as visited the missis during ’er confinement coom one
neet as we were at tea. They takes the baby down to parish church and
they brings it back ‘Ferleatta,’ an’ I wants to know what are my
rights.”

I counselled consultations of a kindly nature with the young ladies,
foreseeing litigation of a complicated and painful ecclesiastical
nature.

Another poor fellow told me his adventures when I was sitting as
Recorder in the Minshull Street Courts, and he was summoned as a
witness. “First I went down to the County Court an’ they tells me to
coom up here, an’ I gets into the Police Court and an officer tells me
to cross the bridge, an’ I lost my way an’ got into the Coroner’s
Court, and they sent me out o’ that and unfortunately I got among the
solicitors, and they told me to go into the hall and wait till my name
wor called――which it never wor called.”

I forgave him all the trouble he had caused for sake of the word
“unfortunately.”

I am very sorry for a man who gets to the wrong court; the summons is
generally clear enough for the ordinary citizen, but to the less
literate of the community it seems often a difficult problem.

If one had the faculty of painting genre pictures of “Our Street” in
Hulme or Ancoats the County Court is the place to find the incidents.
A good lady, a little, short, fussy woman, was describing to me how
she got a plumber’s job done in her house. I could see the picture.

“Landlord tells me ’e couldn’t get Thomas to do it, ‘and,’ says ’e,
‘if you can I give you luck.’ I went to Thomas’s missus, an’ I says,
‘Where is ’e?’ She says to me, ‘If you don’t find ’im in the beer’ouse
you won’t find ’im at all.’ With that I went to the beer’ouse an’ I
got ’im out, and I takes ’im up to the ’ouse. ’E wasn’t for coming,
but I sauced ’im all the way down Pimblott Street, an’ ’e kept telling
me whot ’e’d do if I was ’is wife.”

Here is another recollection of a graphic story told by a woman
witness. If unreliable at times, the evidence of women is generally
full of good advocacy. This good wife gave me a very dramatic account
of her husband’s dealing with a Jew jeweller. The tallyman tempts
women with drapery and men with jewellery. The wife turned up to
defend the case, very wisely leaving her husband at home. The tallyman
produced an order form with a cross on it alleged to be made by the
absent husband. I asked the woman if her husband was a scholar. “No,”
she said, “David wasn’t brought up to scholarship; he was brought up
to hard work.” Then she told her story. “Yon man,” she said, pointing
to the plaintiff, “his name is Isaacs, and he’s by way of being a
Scotchman, and I’ve had a shawl off him. Many a time he’s tried to
sell David a watch, and I told him I wouldn’t have it. Well, he comes
in Saturday afternoon for a talk with a box of joollery. I remember
the day ’cause he tripped over our door-mat and nearly spilt hisself,
and he says to me, ‘I’ll have to be selling you a new door-mat,
missus,’ and I says to him, ‘Our door-mat’s plenty good enough for the
folks that comes across it.’ With that he laughed and gave me a
shilling to get a quart at M‘Ginnis’s vaults, and when I comes back
they was handling the joollery, and knowing how soft my husband is
about joollery I made him put it back in the box afore I gave him the
beer, and I can swear there was no watch there then. We all talked a
bit and supped the ale, and then he and David went out. It was very
late when David came home, and he came home drunk with a cigar in his
mouth, but he never had no watch on him ’cause I put him to bed
myself.”

The case was adjourned for David to appear, but I never saw David, and
I dare say the affair was amicably settled over another quart from
M‘Ginnis’s vaults.

Some of the most amusing evidence is given in running-down cases. No
Lancashire witness ever admitted that he did not understand a plan,
but it is generally waste of time to trouble him with one. Counsel,
however, will do it, and I was delighted once when counsel’s own
witness marked with a cross the scene of a collision between a tramcar
and a milk float in the chancel of the parish church.

They are very dogmatic, too, about the miles per hour a vehicle is
travelling, a fact that few can measure accurately. The following
dialogue between counsel and witness shows how worried and confused a
witness may get about comparative pace, but his attempted recovery
from the dilemma is at least ingenious.

“Where were you, and what were you doing?” asked counsel.

“I was walking along the Eccles Road towards Eccles at about four
miles an hour.”

“What pace was the trap going?”

“Very slow indeed,” replied witness. “Say about three miles an hour.”

“Ha!” cried counsel, triumphantly; “but the trap overtook and passed
you――you forget that.”

“I do not forget. It’s you that forget,” replied the witness with
indignant assurance. “The trap was trotting; I was walking.”

And it is because the bulk of the people who come before the Court are
so bewildered by the forms and ceremonies of litigation, and so rarely
do themselves justice in the examination and cross-examinations as at
present conducted, that I want to see all this replaced for small
affairs by some simpler and more domestic procedure. We should lose
some of the comedy, no doubt, if we had our Courts of Conciliation and
the judge were to try to make peace instead of giving a legal verdict
in matters where there is very little right and plenty of wrong on
both sides, but we should gain greatly in utility. And if anyone is in
doubt whether there is room for such a court, let him go down to Quay
Street for himself and verify these quotations.




CHAPTER XVIII

DEALING IN FUTURES

  Do I sleep? do I dream?
  Do I wonder and doubt?
  Are things what they seem?
  Or is visions about?
  Is our civilisation a failure?
  Or is the Caucasian played out?

                       BRET HARTE:
                      “Further Language from Truthful James.”


There are some who think that in Manchester the Caucasian is very much
played out, but I am not of their number. I look back on the past
history of the city and compare it with the present, and am still of
opinion with Richard Cobden that Manchester is the place for all men
of bargain and business. The gambling trade in bills no doubt belongs
to London, but the real trade of making, collecting, and selling
belongs to Manchester. For Manchester is the place where people do
things.

It is good to talk about doing things, but better still to do them. As
a great teacher used to say to his art students: “Don’t talk about
what you are going to do――do it.” That is the Manchester habit. And in
the past through the manifestation of this quality the word Manchester
became a synonym for energy and freedom, and the right to do and to
think without shackles.

And as I say, there are some who think that the days of freedom and
energy are gone, and that Manchester is “left as a cottage in a
vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers,” but I refuse to be of
their party. For as I have read of the past, so I look round and see
here to-day the old eternal fight going on, the contest between those
who think anything is good enough for Manchester and those who think
nothing is too good for Manchester. For these contending spirits are
the Genii fighting over the soul and the body of the Master of the
Event.

And anon you find the good spirit in the ascendant, and a citizen
raises an Owens College or a Whitworth Gallery or a Rylands Library
that the name of Manchester may be magnified, and again the Evil Genie
has gained the day and hardened the hearts of the rulers of the city,
and they can only sit and talk and talk about necessary libraries and
art galleries, having altogether lost the Manchester habit of doing
them. And to those who are in despair about the hopelessness of the
fight, let me recall that delightful American parable dear to my
childhood, the Story of the two Frogs. There were, as I remember, two
frogs who visited a dairy. One was an optimist and the other a
pessimist. And the latter fell into a milk-can and swam about, gazing
despondently at the shiny sides up which he could not crawl, and at
last feebly ceased to struggle and sank to the bottom and was drowned.
Now the optimist frog also fell into a milk-can, and he too looked up
at the shiny sides of the can, but he kept a good heart, and all
through the night swam and kicked and struggled, until in the early
dawn he found himself at the bottom of the can sitting on a pat of
butter.

That kind of spirit is not only to be found in frogdom. Richard Cobden
had it, and calls it Bonapartian, “a feeling that spurs me on with the
conviction that all the obstacles to fortune with which I am impeded
will (nay _shall_) yield if assailed with energy.” That is the true
Manchester spirit, and it is not dead to-day.

And to my thinking, if you want to realise fully the wonderments that
trade and commerce could produce if they would, turn into the real
Manchester Cathedral――not the parish church which belongs to the
past――but the Cathedral of to-day in Deansgate, the Rylands Library.
Around you, seated in their stalls, are the great prophets and
preachers of the world, clothed in glorious but perfectly legal
vestments, not thrusting their messages uncivilly toward you, but
waiting in dumb dignity until you feel worthy to approach and learn.
And for my own part to reach one of those side niches, those pleasant
pastures of study, harbours of letters in quiet creeks away from the
main stream of the library, is to arrive at the haven where I would
be. I do not grudge another his ritual and his music, and the
sing-song of his priest. I only know that I feel better without them.
For in this building I find an odour of sanctity not always to be
found in churches. Here I have listened to sermons――voices from
beyond――more eloquent in their wisdom than many preached in latter-day
pulpits. Sitting in peace and at rest in this beautiful building, the
dim ripple of the outer traffic just reaching my ear, I have often
wondered whether all Manchester might not be builded and furnished in
the same spirit of honour and worthiness. And being faintly imbued
with the Manchester spirit myself, there are times when I believe that
this will really be so. For my eyes refuse to see, even in nightmares,
a picture of Manchester in ruins, with tourists tracking over the
desert on hired camels to visit the remains of the Town Hall with its
battered frescoes, and the shell of the Rylands Library, sole relics
of a vanished city.

My dreams and imagery are far otherwise, and I hold with the poet that
eidolons are the entities of entities. And if I have ever appeared to
the good librarians in Deansgate to have had my eyes closed in
ecclesiastical slumber, it was not really so. I was seeing visions,
dreaming dreams, or more truly perhaps, I had impelled my spirit into
the future and had left my body, umbrella-wise, hypothecated in the
safe keeping of the library officials. For in this method I have many
times visited Manchester several hundred years hence, and my
difficulty has always been to find the Rylands Library, or even the
Town Hall, so many noble buildings of even finer proportions stood
among the lawns and gardens and fountains of the city. And I had
rather see visions of a New Manchester than a New Jerusalem.

I know no prettier dream, if it be one, than to sail from Eastham up
the pure waters of a wider canal and see the country folk resting
after their day’s work in the dainty cabarets along the shores, and as
the last lock gates close behind you and you swing into the great
lagoon to the south of the city, the setting sun crimsons the clean
stone and marble warehouses of a noble city. For this I can
prophesy――it is information, not a tip――that if there is to be a
Manchester at all some hundreds of years hence it will be a city
without smoke, its people will be healthy and handsome, its Pharisees
will be fewer, and all will breathe pure air and walk clean streets,
and when a citizen’s day’s work is done he will be found angling for a
trout in the church pool with a better chance of success than he would
have to-day.

But these futures depend on the good Genie of Manchester winning the
battles of to-day. For when energy, freedom, and the power to do
things depart from Manchester she will become “as an oak whose leaf
fadeth, and as a garden that hath no water.”




  INDEX

  Abbott, Rev. Edwin, 18
  Abbott, Elizabeth, 18
  Abbott, George (Archbishop of Canterbury), 18
  Addison, J., Q.C., Judge, 41, 113, 139, 152, 153, 174
  Agnew, Sir William, 58-64
  Aitken, Louis, 90, 134, 135, 212, 214, 221, 224
  Anderson, James, Q.C. (Official Referee), 58, 64
  Anderson, Mary, 280
  Anderton, Mr. (Solicitor), 144, 145
  Archer, William, 244
  Arnold, W. T., 73-80
  Ashton, Thomas, 196
  Asquith, Rt. Hon. H. H., 39
  Astbury, J. M., 151, 208-210

  Balfour, Rt. Hon. Arthur James, 201-207, 265
  Ballantine, Serjeant, 23-29
  Barrett, Wilson, 281
  Barrie, J. M., 75
  Beccaria, Bonesana, Marchese di, 107
  Bell, Joseph, 192-198
  Benson, Frank, 281
  Berry, James, 109
  Blair, Falkner, 62, 80-83, 87-89, 90, 96, 113-120, 248, 249
  Blair, Mrs., 81
  Bovill, Sir W., Q.C., 23
  Bowen, Lord Justice, 49, 131
  Bradbury, J. K., 96
  Bradlaugh, Charles, 102
  Britland, Mary Ann, 111-118
  Brontë, Charlotte, 79
  Brougham, Lord, 18, 232
  Brown, Ford Madox, 278
  Bruce, J. A. B. B., 44, 45
  Bryce, Rt. Hon. James, 221
  Burnaby, Rev. E., 249, 250
  Burnie, R. W., 43
  Bury, Dr. Judson, 296
  Butt, Hon. Mr. Justice, 50-54
  Byrne, T. F., 88, 113-117, 140, 141, 221

  Cagney, C. F., 42
  Caiger, Rev. W. S., 264
  Calvert, Charles, 278, 279
  Calvert, Louis, 282-289
  Carr, J. Comyns, 244
  Cave, Hon. Mr. Justice, 113-118, 134-136, 203, 249
  Cecil, Lord Robert, 203
  Chamberlain, Rt. Hon. Joseph, 40, 43, 55-57, 233, 235
  Clarke, Sir Edward. K.C., 114
  Clay, Robert, 69
  Cobden, Richard, 311, 313
  Coleridge, Rt. Hon. Lord Chief Justice, 47, 89-92, 139, 219
  Collier, Joseph, 298, 299
  Collins, Henn, Q.C., 34
  Costeker, Charles, 142
  Cottingham, James, 122
  Courtneidge, Robert, 283
  Coventry, Judge, 142, 143
  Coward, Lewis, 58, 203
  Cox, Bertram, 40

  Danckwerts, W. O. A. J., 39-41, 203
  Darling, C. J., 54
  Davey, Sir Horace, 132, 133
  Davies, Rev. Llewelyn, 17
  Davis, Mrs., 81, 82
  Day, Mr. Justice, 195-198
  Derby, Lord, 197
  Dixon, Mary, 112, 113
  Dixon, Thomas, 112-116
  Douro, Lord, 22
  Drummond, Lister, 51, 52
  Ducat, Colonel, 62, 63
  Dukes, 119-122
  Duncombe, Thomas Slingsby, 22

  Edwards, Dr. Hall, 295
  Esher, Lord, 130, 131

  Farren, William, 280
  Finlay, Sir Robert, Q.C., 119, 132, 203
  Flanagan, Richard, 282
  Forbes-Robertson, J., 280
  Freemantle, George, 202, 206
  Frere, Bartle, 40, 41

  Garnett, Richard, 19
  Gaskell, Miss, 78-80
  Geoghan, G., 42
  George, Rt. Hon. D. Lloyd, 43
  Gladstone, Rt. Hon. W. E., 56
  Gordon, George, 119, 120
  Gordon, Meyer, 119-122
  Gordon, Mr., 119-122
  Grantham, Hon. Mr. Justice, 127-131
  Green, John Francis, 204, 205
  Gully, W. C. (Lord Selby), 99, 100, 130, 155, 160-162, 195
  Gwenn, Edmund, 288

  Haldane, Rt. Hon. R. B., 44, 45
  Hannen, Lord, 131
  Harwood, Sir John, 265
  Hawkins, Hon. Mr. Justice, 23, 49, 63, 133
  Heron, Sir Joseph, 59
  Herschell, Sir Farrer, Q.C., 36
  Heywood, Judge, 133, 220
  Heywood, Oliver, 194
  Hicks-Beach, Rt. Hon. Sir Michael, 168
  Higgin, William Housman, Q.C., 95-101
  Hill, Dr. Birkbeck, 106
  Hockin, Mr. (Solicitor), 303, 304
  Hodgson, C. D., 169-173
  Holker, Sir John, Q.C., 24
  Holyoake, George Jacob, 19
  Hopkinson, Charles, 192, 193
  Hopwood, Charles, Q.C., 158, 248-255
  Horniman, Miss, 283
  Hughes, Charles, 221, 282
  Hughes, Judge, 140, 141
  Hulton, Mr., 246, 247
  Hutton, Crompton, Judge, 143-146

  Irving, Sir Henry, 77, 200, 279, 281

  James, Sir Henry, Q.C., 36
  Jelf, Sir Arthur Richard, Q.C., 53
  Johnson, Dr., 105-108, 266
  Jones, Dr. Franklin Emrys, 295
  Jordan, Ernest, 158

  Kelly, Mr., 215, 216
  Kendal, Mr., 281
  Kendal, Mrs., 281
  King, Alderman, 59
  Kingsley, Charles, 267

  Larmuth, Dr., 296
  Leatherbarrow, James, 136, 137
  Lee, Yate, Judge, 132
  Leech, Dr., 196, 296, 297
  Leese, Sir Joseph, 274, 275
  Legros, Alphonse, 36
  Leresche, J. H. P., 99-101
  Lister, Mr. Registrar, 222
  Loehnis, H. W., 39
  Lovett, William, 21
  Lowe, R., 244
  Lush, Robert, Q.C., 23
  Lyttelton, Hon. A., 203

  McCall, R., Q.C., 214, 215, 216
  McKeand, Charley, 67, 88, 96, 153-162, 298
  McLachlan, Lachlan, 58-64
  Maclure, Rt. Rev. Dean of Manchester, 33
  Maclure, Sir John William, 274-277
  Maltby, Mr., 205
  Martin, Baron, 28
  Marwood, Mr., 108
  Mathew, Hon. Mr. Justice, 49-54
  Matthews, Henry, Q.C., 53
  Montgomery, P. (Surgeon), 29
  Morley, Samuel, M.P., 165
  Morris, Phil, R.A., 81
  Mouillot, Frederick, 291
  Müller, William, 164
  Munro, Professor, 203, 207
  Murphy, J. P., Q.C., 201-206

  Nash, T. A., 240, 241
  Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 54, 190, 191
  Nowell, Dr., 179
  Nunn, Rev. Canon, 261

  Orton, Arthur, 49

  Panizzi, Anthony, 19
  Pankhurst, Dr., 58-63
  Parnell, Charles Stewart, 247, 248
  Parry Dorothy, 292
  Parry, Rev. Canon Edward, 12
  Parry, Edward (Tanner), 12
  Parry, John Humffreys (Welsh Antiquary), 10
  Parry, John Humffreys, Serjeant, 10-31, 35, 144, 269
  Parry, John Humffreys (Actor), 30
  Parry, Thomas (Attorney), 12
  Partington (Artist), 200
  Pete, Sir Samuel, 22
  Pinero, Sir A. W., 77
  Pope, Sam, Q.C., 86
  Price, Judge, 177

  Rosebery, Lord, 56
  Ross, Sergeant, 121
  Ruskin, John, 182
  Russell, Sir Charles, Q.C., 24, 160, 161, 163
  Russell, Judge, 137, 138

  Salter, Clavell, K.C., M.P., 42
  Sarcey, Francisque, 77
  Scott, C. P., 72, 245, 246
  Scott, Mrs. C. P., 72, 78
  Shee, H. G., 88, 96, 195, 219
  Shee, Serjeant, 23
  Shields, Frederic, 60
  Shuttleworth, Mr., 137
  Simon, Henry, 196
  Smith, A. L., Hon. Mr. Justice, 136, 137, 212
  Smith, Richard, 37-39, 58-64
  Southam, F. A., F.R.C.S., 296
  Spencer, Reuben, 196
  Spencer, Mr., 247, 248
  Stanhope, Hon. Edward, 54
  Stewart, Archie, 45-47
  Sullivan, Barry, 280
  Sutton, E., 96, 195

  Taylor, William, 294
  Terry, Edward, 281
  Terry, Ellen, 281
  Thomas, John (Solicitor), 11
  Thomason, Henry, 294
  Thompson, Stephen Chesters, 201-205
  Threlfall, Thomas, 54, 55
  Toole, J. L., 281
  Tree, Sir Herbert, 283
  Trevelyan, Rt. Hon. Sir G. O., 44
  Tuke, Dr. D. H., 26

  Vaughan, Father Bernard, 268

  Webster, Sir Richard, Q.C., 55
  Welldon, Rt. Rev. J. E. (Dean of Manchester), 7
  West, Henry Wyndham, Q.C., 89-95
  Weston, Sir Joseph, M.P., 163-169
  Whalley, Mr. (Solicitor), 260
  Will, Shiress, Q.C., 58
  Williams, Lord Justice Vaughan, 131-133, 203
  Willis, Judge, K.C., 24, 175
  Wilson, Richard, R. A., 12
  Woodard, M. N., 113
  Woodburne, Lancaster, 135, 136
  Wotton, Sir Henry, 105, 123
  Wright, G. A., F.R.C.S., 296
  Wright, R. S., Hon. Mr. Justice, 39, 47, 132
  Wright, Wildy, 29, 30
  Wynne, Mr. (Solicitor), 11

  Yates, W. M., 96




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                         SOME PRESS OPINIONS.

_Athenæum._――“They deal among other topics with the letters of Dorothy
Osborne, the disadvantage of education, the craftsmanship of the drama
and the nice problems of the kitchen; and they all possess a lightness
of touch and sense of companionableness which makes them agreeable
reading.”

G. K. CHESTERTON in _Illustrated London News_.――“I cannot refrain from
imploring my readers to get hold of Judge Parry’s ‘Judgments in
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_Morning Leader._――“Literature and law jostle each other with a
delightful air of indifference.”

_The Standard._――“It is a rollicking book.”

_Daily Graphic._――“A wide range of knowledge and experience and a
faculty of literary skill unite to make this collection of his papers
exceedingly readable.”

_Manchester Guardian._――“It is all very jolly and irresponsible.”

_Eye-witness._――“But it is not only a witty, sparkling book, it is a
human document in which the tragedy of the poor, their never-ending
debts, their hopeless yet patient insolvency is sketched with a
profound insight, a living sympathy.”

_Westminster Gazette._――“But perhaps we have said enough to show that
for an hour or two by the fire the book is all good company.”

_Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury._――“The essays and papers in his
Honour’s book are in every way worthy of the bright humour, vivacity
and literary skill we are wont to associate with the name of the
Admirable Crichton of the County Court Bench.”

_The Spectator._――“Judge Parry deals with various subjects, social,
literary and other, and has something worth hearing to say about all
of them.”

_Daily Telegraph._――“Whether his themes are grave or gay the mood in
which he treats them, lively or severe, Judge Parry is invariably
interesting, and his volume should be widely read.”

_Morning Post._――“For to pay the last and best compliment, clubability
of style is a thing as pleasant as it is rare.”

_Yorkshire Post._――“But humour is by no means the only rare quality in
these ‘Judgments.’ In the pure Lamb and Stevenson sense they are
literature.”

_Evening Standard and St. James’s._――“It goes without saying that this
collection of essays is witty, full of amusing anecdotes, and besides
that, is written with the literary sense which always dignifies the
work of his Honour.”

_Law Magazine._――“All the essays are worth reading, but the most
important are connected with the County Court.”

_Boston Evening Transcript._――“His latest book is as witty and wise as
any of its predecessors, and may be heartily commended without any
reserve to all who enjoy an essayist of the Lamb School.”

_New York Herald._――“The definite qualities of jurisprudence have not
so often found so agreeable an exponent as the author of these
graceful, good natured essays.”

――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――-

                       =The Scarlet Herring,=
                        =And Other Stories=

           Illustrated by Athelstan Rusden.       253 pp.

              Bound in specially designed Cloth Cover.

                              Price 6_s._

――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――-

                              LONDON:
                        SMITH, ELDER & CO.
                     15, WATERLOO PLACE, S.W.

――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――-

         Crown 8vo.          Illustrated.          350 pp.
                              Price 6_s._

           Presentation Edition, White Vellum, 6_s._ net.

       =Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple.=

_Pall Mall Gazette._――“We trust the new and beautiful issue of an
ever-fragrant book will give it yet more readers and lovers than it
has had before.”

――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――-

                          =Butter-Scotia,=
                   =Or a Cheap Trip to Fairyland=

180 pages. With a Map of Butter-Scotia, many full-page Plates and
Illustrations in the Text. Bound in specially designed Cloth Cover.
6_s._


――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――-
     Second Edition, 96 pages, Cloth.           3_s._ 6_d._

                           =Katawampus:=
                     =Its Treatment and Cure.=

_The World._――“One of the very best books of the season.”

_Saturday Review._――“The book is one of rare drollery, and the verses
and pictures are capital of their kind.”

_Pall Mall Gazette._――“A truly delightful little book,…”

――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――-

         With Beautifully Coloured Plates by Walter Crane.

                            Price 6_s._

                =The Story of Don Quixote Retold.=

――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――-
      Crown 8vo.            193 pp.            Price 1_s._ 6_d._

                   =Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare.=

――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――-

        Illustrated by A. Rusden.                 Crown 4to.
                        Price 3_s._ 6_d._ net.

                      =Pater’s Book of Rhymes.=

――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――-

             Christmas Stories for Children of all Ages.

                     =The First Book of Krab.=

              132 pages, with many full-page Plates and
                    Illustrations in the Text.

         Bound in specially designed Cloth Cover, 3_s._ 6_d._

――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――-

                   Royal 8vo.           Price 1_s._

                       =Katawampus Kanticles.=

Music by Sir J. F. Bridge, Mus.Doc., Organist of Westminster Abbey.
Words by His Honour Judge E. A. Parry. Illustrated Cover, representing
Kapellmeister Krabb, by Archie Maccregor.


――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――-

              May be obtained from SHERRATT & HUGHES,
        33, SOHO SQ., LONDON, W., 34, CROSS ST., MANCHESTER,
                        OR ALL BOOKSELLERS.

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Transcriber’s note:

Dialect, alternative spellings, and obsolete and misspelled words
were left unchanged. Inconsistent hyphenation was not changed.

Obvious printing errors, such as backwards, upside down, or partially
printed letters, were corrected.

Final stops missing at the end of sentences and abbreviations were
added.

Adjusted punctuation in the index for consistency.

Duplicate footer in advertisements at end of book was deleted.