David Waddington Memoirs

by David Waddington

  At about this time I went to London to appear for someone in the Court of Appeal. I went to see him in the cells below the Lord Chief Justice’s Court and on my way back took a wrong turning. I opened a door, stepped forward and found myself in the dock looking down on the Court of Criminal Appeal in session. I beat a hasty retreat. Later in the day I was half way through my submission that the sentence passed on the old lag I was representing was unduly severe when the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker of Waddington, interrupted me and asked whether I would be satisfied if the sentence was reduced to two years. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Oh!’ said the Lord Chief, with by now a note of tetchiness in his voice. ‘What had you in mind?’

  ‘Twelve months,’ I said boldly. ‘Very well,’ said the great man, ‘twelve months it is.’

  There is some bleak moorland above Haslingden in east Lancashire, and a moorland farmer was having an unhappy time. Someone was stealing his hens. So one night he decided to stay out late and give the intruder a nasty shock. Sometime after midnight a local villain, well known to the farmer and the local police, came prowling up the side of a dry stone wall close to the hen pen. The farmer stood up and shouted ‘Come one step further and I’ll blow your foot off!’ The man stepped forward and the farmer fired his twelve bore and blew the man’s foot off.

  In due course the farmer appeared at Haslingden Magistrates’ Court charged with wounding with intent. My job was to try to avoid his being committed to the Assizes on that serious charge where he might expect to receive a long prison sentence. And I was well pleased with myself when the magistrates accepted my submission that it was not a case of wounding with intent, agreed to deal with the case summarily on my client pleading to common assault and fined the farmer twenty-five pounds.

  But that was not the end of the story. Soon the farmer was served with a writ and a claim for damages for assault, and my solicitor made clear that he held me entirely to blame for having advised the farmer to admit to assault. Some months passed and then the case came on for trial at the Assizes in Manchester. The plaintiff gave his evidence and I rose to cross-examine and to try and establish my plea of consent.

  ‘The farmer said “Come a step further and I’ll blow your foot off”?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You knew that if you took a step further, he’d blow your foot off?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you asked for your foot to be blown off?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You wanted your foot blown off?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The decision – judgment for the defendant with costs.

  At five one evening I was told by my clerk that I had to run for the London train and appear in the High Court the next morning for plaintiffs claiming damages from the suppliers of a machine which was not performing as intended. On the train I feverishly examined the plans and had some difficulty in deciding which was the top of the plan and which the bottom. I did not sleep well that night. I did not sleep at all.

  I arrived at the Royal Courts of Justice in good time, got robed and went and stood outside the court. Half an hour later a very flustered and unhappy member of the Bar (with a wig much whiter than mine) hove into view. ‘How much will you take?’ he said. I then made the biggest mistake of my professional life. Instead of asking for twice the sum suggested by my solicitors I asked for the very amount. ‘Done,’ said my opponent. ‘Costs of course,’ said I. ‘Of course,’ he said. And at half past ten I walked into court and asked Ashworth, J. for judgment by consent for £15,000 and costs. At 10.40 I was in the Strand hailing a taxi but wondering where my wife was likely to be. She had caught the train with me hoping for a few days’ shopping and had set out that morning with a gleam in her eye. Harrods, I thought and ‘Harrods!’ I cried to the taxi driver, ‘as fast as you can make it!’ I rushed through the doors and there she was, caught red-handed at the very first counter. ‘Come on, dear. If we rush we can get the twelve noon train to Manchester’; and we did rush and we did catch it. I was very popular with my clerk, less so with my wife.

  But to talk of wives is to jump a long way ahead and to introduce my wife to this narrative I must go back to 1954 or 1955 when I met Hilary Green, daughter of the Alan Green for whom I had campaigned as an undergraduate. I took her out on a few occasions and then one night she asked me to stop the car on the way home because she had something important to tell me. She looked rather embarrassed so to help her I said: ‘Don’t worry. Let the best man win. Tony’s a very nice chap and I am sure if you marry him he’ll make you very happy.’ She said: ‘It’s not Tony. It’s Norman.’

  When all this became known to the family there were many prophecies of doom, but Hilary would not be told and she duly married Norman, I being best man for no other reason than he didn’t seem to have many friends. Then I had a stroke of luck. One of the bridesmaids was Hilary’s younger sister Gilly. After the reception we went to a show and after the show to a night club – and with one or two ups and downs that was that.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Marriage and

  Nelson & Colne

  Gilly was just about to go to Brighton College of Art, and half way through her first term there I went to see her. I had a peacock blue Morris Minor, easily recognisable at a considerable distance; and as I drove towards the front of the college still dressed in the black striped trousers I had been wearing in court that morning I saw Gilly run across the road and beckon me into a nearby side street. I assumed that she was trying to find me a convenient parking space and not the horrible truth that she was scared stiff that her bohemian college friends would see me in all my squareness. In spite of this somewhat inauspicious happening we soon became engaged. I have to confess that this was after Gilly had raised the subject of politics. ‘I could not possibly marry a politician,’ she said. ‘One in the family, my father, is quite enough. I hope you are not thinking of standing again.’ And I told her what I think I then honestly believed – that I had got politics out of my system.

  A month or two later we paid a visit to St Helens which I imagine strengthened Gilly’s views about politics. Mark Carlisle, who was to be my best man, was fighting a by-election there and we went to support him. In the morning we did a bit of desultory canvassing and in the afternoon Mark and his recently acquired fiancée, Sandra, and Gilly and I set off in a loudspeaker van to look for a crowd. There was nobody about when we got to the St Helens Rugby Club but we parked and awaited events. We heard a distant whistle and a few people began to appear. Mark addressed a few remarks in their general direction which one or two acknowledged with a genial shake of the fist or obscene gesture. Rather more people began to debouch on to the vast concrete area in the middle of which stood our minuscule van; and then the gates were opened and we were engulfed in a veritable tide of humanity. The girls leapt into the van, just in time for it to be picked up off the ground and shaken like a child’s rattle. This was all done in great good humour while somewhere beside, or perhaps in part beneath, the vehicle Mark’s voice could be heard battling against the uproar – ‘Vote Conservative. Vote Carlisle for a better future.’

  Gilly and I were married in Preston Parish Church on 20 December 1958. The venue was chosen for political reasons (Preston South being my father-in-law’s seat). The date was chosen for legal reasons. A honeymoon over the Christmas holiday would lose me the least work. We went to Sicily and Rome and when we arrived at the Timeo Hotel in Taormina there was much tongue-clicking from the lady behind the desk who clearly thought I was a dirty old man who had run away with a child bride.

  Back in Lancashire in January we found that the little house we had created out of the stables at the top of my parents-in-law’s garden was not yet finished and when in February we did move in, it was freezing cold and we regretted having decided that central heating was a luxury we could not afford. What made matters even worse was that most of the curtains had not arrived – including the one designed to separate the living room from the dining room –
and the bedroom was so cold that we woke up each morning with the top blanket soaking wet with condensation. But it did not seem to matter all that much; and I counted myself the luckiest man on earth.

  Those were the days before rampant inflation hit Britain and we converted the stables and furnished them quite adequately with a gift of £5,000 from my father and a wedding present of £1,000 from Gilly’s grandfather. I was earning quite a lot at the Bar and without any children and no school fees to pay we felt very well off. But I kept getting invitations to go before selection committees in the north-west and when, in 1959, Richard Fort was killed in a car accident and there was to be a by-election in Clitheroe, I was sorely tempted to go back into the fray. I realised, however, that it was expecting far too much of Gilly, and the temptation was resisted.

  Looking back on our engagement it does seem to have taken place in the most unlikely circumstances for we were often rendered speechless when in each other’s company. One night I took Gilly to a cocktail party at the judges’ lodgings in Salford and we reached Besses o’ th’ Barn on the outskirts of Manchester before I summoned up the courage to say anything. In fact, one or two drinks turned it into rather a good evening. At the party the judge who was our host became alarmed at the speed at which the drink was disappearing and, at 7 p.m. when we were just beginning to enjoy ourselves, he hammered on the table and rudely declaimed, ‘Gentlemen, all good things must come to an end.’ We slunk out of the front door like whipped curs but got back our courage when at the top of the drive we spotted a member of the Manchester Constabulary standing to attention in a mobile sentry box. One shove and the box began to trundle down the drive, not at a great speed but fast enough to make it difficult for the officer to leave with dignity. So he remained upright and travelled to the bottom of the slope, cheered on by the bibulous spectators.

  I am lucky to have some of Gilly’s school reports from Moira House, Eastbourne – better known as MoHo. They reveal an interesting state of affairs and how well qualified she was for marriage. Autumn Term 1951: ‘Seldom punctual for bed. Very untidy. Thirty-five order marks against her name.’ Spring 1952: ‘Too often late for bed. Untidy.’ Summer 1952: ‘Most unpunctual downstairs. Better in bedroom.’ Autumn 1952: ‘Gillian breaks rules without compunction and goes her own way regardless.’ Spring 1954: ‘Persistently late for bed through playing. Is vague over time. Late for breakfast nine times.’ Autumn 1956: ‘Very pleasant upstairs but she does not take enough responsibility.’

  If truth be told, Gilly was taking on an awful lot marrying when so young and marrying someone ten years older than herself. I think, looking back, that my insistence that we should marry before she had even completed her course at Brighton was quite unreasonable, but I can only say in my own defence that I was madly in love, that I knew a good thing when I saw it and I was simply not prepared to take the chance of waiting and her finding somebody else. I felt I could make her a good husband and I knew she would be a super wife, loyal and forgiving. For Gilly, marriage was an act of madness. In her journal she writes:

  I had already made up my mind on leaving school and viewing life’s cornucopia of opportunities that politics in any form was quite out of the question. It came very nearly bottom of the list just before cleaning out the sewers or managing a mink farm.

  I suppose we had our ups and downs like every married couple. Once, I threatened to go home to her mother. I knew I could not go home to mine. But we had some marvellous times and still do.

  We had a miniature poodle called Sydney. One day Gilly went down the garden to have lunch with her mother, leaving the house unlocked. She returned home to find a masked burglar coming down the stairs. Sydney shot under the dining room table, teeth a-chattering. Gilly locked herself in the cloak room. After a conversation through the keyhole the burglar left and the constabulary were summoned. The sergeant went upstairs and when he came down again he offered to make my wife a cup of tea and began to explain that some burglars had very beastly habits and she had to prepare herself for the possibility that something very nasty might have happened to her dog. At first Gilly could not think what the man was talking about but, on going upstairs herself and seeing a pile of black curls on the white bedroom carpet, remembered that before going to lunch she had given Sydney his monthly trim. This was the evidence that had so impressed the officer and convinced him that he was in pursuit of a pervert.

  While making a good living, I was not greatly enjoying life at the Bar. I seemed unable to lose a case and then forget all about it. Instead I always felt personally responsible if things did not go absolutely right. So when in 1960 my father-in-law suggested I should go off to America and see whether there was an opening for me in the Beloit Iron Works in Wisconsin. I leapt at the idea. Beloit manufactured paper-making machinery and had recently bought an interest in Walmsleys in Bury, a firm of which Gilly’s grandfather had been chairman and managing director.

  It was curious being in America at that time. Few there seemed to think world war and a nuclear holocaust could be avoided. Indeed, this dismal topic featured in almost every conversation and overshadowed my whole visit. Beloit as a town had nothing to commend it. It was built round a lake so polluted that anyone bathing in it would have been dead in minutes. I also saw an example of the dangers of keeping fit. The chairman of the company had a harness contraption rigged up in his private lavatory and, having performed his normal duties, used to haul himself up in the harness a few score times to strengthen his muscles. Shortly after I returned to England he was found dead in the loo.

  The countryside round Beloit was flat and uninteresting but a thirty-mile drive took one to a fairly pretty lake from which, I was told, people thought nothing of commuting 100 miles to Chicago. One night we had dinner at a hotel called the Wagon Wheel. The manager said in jest: ‘If a guest is given a room with a high number, he is advised to take a packed lunch for the journey.’ And, indeed, it was about a mile from one end of the hotel to the other. The people in Beloit were immensely friendly and on my last night the lady with whom I was staying said: ‘Gee David, I just love your accent. I’d like to hide you in my closet and bring you out whenever we had people in for dinner.’ I came home sure that Beloit would not appeal to Gilly and resolved to settle down at the Bar.

  In October 1960 James, our eldest boy, was born. My father lived long enough to see him but died of a heart attack on 17 March the following year. He was sixty-seven. In August 1962 Matthew arrived on the scene and soon turned out to be a bundle of trouble and the life and soul of the party.

  We had a succession of girls to look after the children. One was a Danish girl called Kirsten, known as Puck to her family and friends. James went into Barclays Bank in Burnley and declared in a piping voice ‘we have a new nanny and she is called “Fuck”’. The name proved particularly apt, and the house was besieged by boys from the village who had never had such luck.

  In about 1963 Mark Carlisle was adopted for Runcorn to succeed Dennis Vosper, and again my thoughts turned to politics. They would probably have remained no more than thoughts had not the Nelson & Colne Association approached me and asked me to be their candidate for the 1964 election. After much doubt and indecision I accepted. I do not think Gilly was very enthusiastic, but she had probably by then come to realise that I had not got politics out of my system and there was no point in making a fuss when my efforts in an unwinnable Labour seat would surely come to nothing.

  The Labour Member was Sydney Silverman and the name Silverman was painted in enormous letters on the tallest mill chimney in Nelson town. Nelson itself was called ‘little Moscow’ by the locals and its town council, proudly pacifist, had before the War refused to allow the East Lancashire Regiment to march through the town.

  A succession of ambitious Conservatives had fought the constituency over the years, none with much success. Harmar Nicholls was the candidate in 1945, Alan Green – my father-in-law to be – in 1950, Elaine Kellett-Bowman in 1955. In 1945 Harmar Nicholls
was in the army, as were the two others invited for interview but fog in the Channel led to only Harmar turning up on the night. Glamorous in service dress he was duly selected and was then so intoxicated by his success that when he met the press outside the room he announced that he was going to challenge Sydney Silverman to an open debate. The Tories were horrified because they knew Silverman’s reputation as a skilled and canny debater but there was no turning back. The Imperial Ballroom, Carr Road, was an enormous establishment with a tin roof, later used for big band concerts, and on the day appointed for the great contest it was packed. A vicar had been asked to take the chair and said that each candidate was to have exactly twenty minutes to state his case. He then took off his watch and placed it on the table in front of him. The debate then proceeded and to no one’s surprise Harmar Nicholls had a very painful time. But at the end of the evening the vicar looked down and was horrified to discover that his watch had gone, stolen apparently by someone in the front row of the audience. This was good news for the Tories for the following day the headline in the Nelson Leader was not about Harmar’s humiliation. It read: ‘ELECTION MEETING DRAMA. VICAR’S WATCH STOLEN.’