The Collected Stories of Rumpole
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JOHN MORTIMER
The Collected Stories of Rumpole
Edited by CHLOE CAMPBELL
with an introduction by SAM LEITH
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
THE COLLECTED STORIES OF RUMPOLE
Rumpole and the Younger Generation
Rumpole and the Heavy Brigade
Rumpole and the Man of God
Rumpole and the Showfolk
Rumpole and the Expert Witness
Rumpole and the Spirit of Christmas
Rumpole and the Boat People
Rumpole and the Genuine Article
Rumpole and the Last Resort
Rumpole and the Blind Tasting
Rumpole and the Judge’s Elbow
Rumpole’s Last Case
Rumpole and the Tap End
Rumpole and the Bubble Reputation
Rumpole and Portia
Rumpole à la Carte
Rumpole on Trial
Rumpole and the Model Prisoner
Rumpole and the Old Familiar Faces
Rumpole and the Primrose Path
Acknowledgements
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
THE COLLECTED STORIES OF RUMPOLE
John Mortimer (1923–2009) was a barrister, playwright and novelist. His fictional trilogy about the inexorable rise of an ambitious Tory MP in the Thatcher years (Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained and The Sound of Trumpets) has recently been republished in Penguin Modern Classics, together with his autobiography, Clinging to the Wreckage, and his play, A Voyage Round My Father. His most famous creation was the barrister Horace Rumpole, who featured in four novels and around eighty short stories. Sir John, who was knighted in 1998 for his services to the arts, died in January 2009.
Sam Leith is the former literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, and the author of the novel The Coincidence Engine and three non-fiction books, of which the most recent was You Talkin’ To Me? – Rhetoric From Aristotle to Obama. He writes regularly for the Evening Standard, Guardian, Prospect and the Spectator.
Introduction
‘Being Horace Rumpole in his sixties, still slogging round the Old Bailey with sore feet, a modest daily hangover and an aching back was certainly no great shakes, but who else could I be?’ (p. 167).
Such is the situation of John Mortimer’s greatest creation. Who else could Rumpole be, but a hungover Old Bailey Hack in his sixties? His own account tells us he was born some time around 1910, but he actually drew his first breath, already in his sixties and, as it were, pre-crumpled, in December 1975, when ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’ went out on the BBC’s long-running TV series Play For Today.
Rumpole, then, had his first incarnation on the small screen. In fittingly Rumpolian fashion, he got the second choice of name and third choice of actor. Originally, he was to have been called ‘Rumbold’ (a decision hastily modified after the discovery that there already existed, in Guildford, a barrister called Horace Rumbold). And though he was brought brilliantly to life by Leo McKern, his creator had originally eyed Michael Hordern (too busy) and Alastair Sim (too dead) for the part.
The many prose stories that Mortimer went on to write, of which you hold in your hands a selection of the best, are more than just TV spin-offs, however. They have an independent, and enduring, life. McKern’s stentorian Rumpole on the small screen may have defined the character in the public mind, but what we find in the stories is a subtly different creature: camper, more feline, more Mortimeresque.
Rumpole, on the page, is quite a cocktail: there’s a very generous slosh of P. G. Wodehouse, a dash of Falstaff at his more benign, a tincture of Tony Hancock and a faint but discernible backnote of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. His readiness with a quotation from the Oxford Book of English Verse (the Quiller-Couch original, be it noted: not Dame Helen Gardner’s 1972 reboot) and fondness for The Times crossword even seem to anticipate Inspector Morse.
Rumpole takes his place among these figures without apology. He is an enduring comic character with the potential to live in any number of stories: a creation, as John Mortimer put it, ‘to keep me in my old age’.1 He is the one character Mortimer created who outlived him.
One of the great joys of these stories – like Wodehouse’s, setting a time and place in aspic – is the deep consolatory joy of familiarity. You settle into Rumpole’s world with the same easeful sigh you imagine Rumpole emitting as he settles into his place at Pommeroy’s. Each story is different, but each story is also, deep down, the same. Each twists in an eminently satisfactory way.
The geography of the world in which these stories are set is bounded by the mansion flat in Froxbury Court, from which Rumpole leaves each morning on the 8.45 tube; his Chambers at Equity Court, where every morning he searches his corner of the mantelpiece for a brief, and steps politely over one of ‘Uncle Tom’s’ putts across the rug; the Old Bailey, where the struggle against the irascible Judge Bullingham continues; and Pommeroy’s Wine Bar, where our hero repairs to refuel, reflect and cash cheques. He seldom ventures outside this ambit, though necessity, from time to time, forces him into a branch of the ‘Caring Bank’ – resented custodians of the Rumpole overdraft. Crime, as Rumpole is fond of reminding us, does not pay.
Familiar, too, is the cast of characters, known – as if Rumpole’s world really were the minor public school it resembles – by their affectionately deflating nicknames: the loathsome ‘Hearthrug’ and the pious ‘Bollard’, the amiably superannuated ‘Uncle Tom’, the foxy ‘Portia’, the formidable ‘Mad Bull’, the silkily capable private investigator F. I. G. – ‘Fig’ – Newton, and the innumerable scions of that irredeemably villainous family, the Timsons – locked like Montagues and Capulets in their immemorial rivalry with the Molloys.
Also, of course – known by an epithet that has left Mortimer’s stories and passed into the wider culture (see p. 66) – there is She Who Must Be Obeyed: Rumpole’s wife Hilda, the daughter of his old pupil master, C. H. Wystan. John Mortimer’s biographer, Valerie Grove, describes Hilda Rumpole as ‘dreadful’2, but there’s no great evidence of nastiness. If anything, Hilda is long suffering and occasionally ill used, forced as she is to pester Rumpole (she always calls her husband by his second name) for the wherewithal to buy Vim – her enthusiasm for which baffles her husband to the extent that he at one point asks: ‘Do we eat Vim?’
Rumpole makes a great performance of being in terror of her, but he always does exactly what he wants. Theirs is recognizably the companionable, undersexed, affectionate and somewhat separate partnership of a married couple in it for the long haul. Exasperation rather than hostility marks the temper of their relationship – and Hilda’s triumph over the wretched Perivale Blythe in ‘Rumpole and the Last Resort’ (pp. 266–7) is token of a closer and shrewder co-operation than appearances suggest.
Like all the immortals, Rumpole comes with his identifying paraphernalia. St Sebastian has his arrows and his palm frond; Sherlock Holmes his pipe and his violin. Rumpole has his egg-stains, his waistcoat marked too with the ash from a ‘small cigar’, his shabby wig, acquired ‘from an ex-Attorney General of Tonga in 1932’, and his glass of Pommeroy’s Very Ordinary Claret – aka ‘Château Fleet Street’ or ‘Château Thames Embankment’.
These, then, in their form and in their style, are deeply conservative stories. The encroachment of modernity is registered – Space Invaders machines appear in pubs; flashy computerized systems do their owners precious little good; smarmy modernizers infiltrate the Chambers and have to be seen off – and it is resisted. Rumpole himself is always looking backwards. The conceit is that our hero is writing his memoirs, and their guiding star is
a past glory: successfully defending in the case of the Penge Bungalow Murders as a junior barrister ‘alone and without a leader’.
To the despair of Hilda, Rumpole positively resists forward movement. He finds ways of avoiding being promoted – having no ambition to take silk, mustering only a half-hearted enthusiasm at the prospect of becoming Head of Chambers, and treating the idea of being a ‘Deputy Circus Judge’ with bemused contempt.
So the stories are conservative. But there is more to them than that. At the core of Rumpole’s conservatism is his regard for the law: a time-hallowed institution through which the presumption of innocence, as he often reminds us, runs like a golden thread. But Rumpole – defender of the underdog, upsetter of judicial applecarts – is resolutely anti-authoritarian.
He is proud to identify himself as ‘an Old Bailey Hack’, and evinces positive affection for the criminals who provide his living. He shows no interest in the more ‘respectable’ areas of law. Crime, he explains in ‘Rumpole and the Man of God’, ‘not only pays moderately well, but […] is also by far the greatest fun. Give me a murder on a spring morning with a decent run and a tolerably sympathetic jury, and Rumpole’s happiness is complete’ (p. 70).
One account of his origin – and a telling one as to Rumpole’s moral make-up – is that he was modelled on the real-life QC James Burge, a bon vivant and self-declared anarchist, whom Mortimer once heard refer to ‘my old darling Prince Peter Kropotkin’. ‘Burge referred to everyone as an “old darling”,’ Mortimer recalled, ‘except his wife, […]and there I had Rumpole.’3
Rumpole is a classic Establishment rebel. As he puts it in ‘Rumpole and the Blind Tasting’ (responding to his pupil Mizz Probert’s earnest sociological account of criminality): ‘I was brought up in appalling conditions, in an ice-cold vicarage with no mod cons or central heating. My old father, being a priest of the Church of England, had only the sketchiest notion of morality, and my mother was too occupied with jam-making and the Women’s Institute to notice my existence. Is it any real wonder that I have taken to crime?’ (p. 290).
Disambitious and determinedly suburban, Rumpole operates from a very particular place in the English class system, and the stories are coloured with sharp and funny little nuggets of social stereotyping. Hunter’s Hill, for instance, home of the defendant in ‘Rumpole and the Expert Witness’, is a ‘delightful little dormitory town in Surrey, where nothing is heard but the whirr of the kitchen mixers running up Provençal specialities from the Sunday supplements and the purr of the hi-fis playing baroque music to go with the Buck’s Fizz’ (p. 135). The criminal patriarch Fred Timson, meanwhile, is ‘a grey-haired man, his face bronzed by the suns of Marbella, wearing a discreet sports jacket, cavalry-twill trousers and an MCC tie […] flanked by two substantial ladies who had clearly both been for a recent tint and set at the hairdressers […] brightly dressed as though for a wedding or some celebration other than their husbands’ day in Court’ (p. 348). Part of the joke is how little difference there is between the two worlds.
Rumpole is a paladin disguised as a rogue: a trickster hero. He is part barrister, part stage actor; delighting in the courtroom coup de théâtre. His raffishness is a form of generosity, a marker of his wide and perpetually amused tolerance of human folly. Adulterers, pornographers and honest villains don’t disturb him half so much as do prigs, punishment junkies and whited sepulchres, like the odious Hearthrug.
Rumpole makes it a point of principle always to defend. When it’s suggested that he might take up prosecuting, he retorts in the negative, ‘with the determined air of a man who has to draw the line somewhere’: ‘I’m not going to use my skills, such as they are, to force some poor devil into a condemned Victorian slum where he can be banged up with a couple of psychopaths and his own chamber pot’ (p. 197).
This, in essence, is the golden thread of seriousness that runs through these stories intended to delight: a recognition of mortal folly, and an effort to spare the fools – as far as possible – the harshest consequences of it. This applies outside the Old Bailey as well as in it. When he spies Phillida Erskine-Brown gearing up for a fling with an unsuitable lover, Rumpole gently sabotages the affair; not from moral censoriousness, but to be kind to her.
It’s a mark of Mortimer’s deftness that, even in the essentially comic and consolatory universe of Rumpole – one in which no real harm ever comes to anybody, and Uncle Tom will forever have a place in the office to play golf – the odd note of melancholy occasionally, like the faint chill in a summer evening, intrudes.
Just look at the lovely temper of the payoff to ‘Rumpole and the Heavy Brigade’:
I suppose it was a waltz. As I steered Hilda out on to the great open spaces it seemed quite easy to go round and round, vaguely in time to the music. I heard a strange sound, as if from a long way off.
‘I’ll have the last waltz with you,/Two sleepy people together …’ Or words to that effect. I was in fact singing. Singing and dancing to celebrate a great victory in a case I was never meant to win. (p. 69).
That, ladies and gentlemen, is life itself. Let us raise a glass of Château Thames Embankment to it.
Sam Leith, 2012
Notes
1. John Mortimer, The Best of Rumpole (London: Viking, 1993), author’s introduction.
2. Valerie Grove, A Voyage Round John Mortimer: The Authorized Biography (London: Viking, 2007), p. 283
3. Grove, A Voyage Round John Mortimer, pp. 284–5
Rumpole and the Younger Generation
I, Horace Rumpole, barrister-at-law, 68 next birthday, Old Bailey Hack, husband to Mrs Hilda Rumpole (known to me only as She Who Must Be Obeyed) and father to Nicholas Rumpole (lecturer in social studies at the University of Baltimore, I have always been extremely proud of Nick); I, who have a mind full of old murders, legal anecdotes and memorable fragments of the Oxford Book of English Verse (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s edition) together with a dependable knowledge of bloodstains, blood groups, fingerprints and forgery by typewriter; I, who am now the oldest member of my Chambers, take up my pen at this advanced age during a lull in business (there’s not much crime about, all the best villains seem to be off on holiday in the Costa Brava), in order to write my reconstructions of some of my recent triumphs (including a number of recent disasters) in the Courts of Law, hoping thereby to turn a bob or two which won’t be immediately grabbed by the taxman, or my clerk Henry, or by She Who Must Be Obeyed, and perhaps give some sort of entertainment to those who, like myself, have found in British justice a life-long subject of harmless fun.
When I first considered putting pen to paper in this matter of my life, I thought I must begin with the great cases of my comparative youth, the ‘Penge Bungalow Murders’, where I gained an acquittal alone and without a leader, or the ‘Great Brighton Benefit Club Forgery’, which I contrived to win by reason of my exhaustive study of typewriters. In these cases I was, for a brief moment, in the Public Eye, or at least my name seemed almost a permanent feature of the News of the World, but when I come to look back on that period of my life at the Bar it all seems to have happened to another Rumpole, an eager young barrister whom I can scarcely recognize and whom I am not at all sure I would like, at least not enough to spend a whole book with him.
I am not a public figure now, so much has to be admitted; but some of the cases I shall describe, the wretched business of the Honourable Member, for instance, or the charge of murder brought against the youngest, and barmiest, of the appalling Delgardo brothers, did put me back on the front page of the News of the World (and even got me a few inches in The Times). But I suppose I have become pretty well known, if not something of a legend, round the Old Bailey, in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar in Fleet Street, in the robing room at London Sessions and in the cells at Brixton Prison. They know me there for never pleading guilty, for chain-smoking small cigars and for quoting Wordsworth when they least expect it. Such notoriety will not long survive my not-to-be-delayed trip to Golders Green Crematorium
. Barristers’ speeches vanish quicker than Chinese dinners, and even the greatest victory in Court rarely survives longer than the next Sunday’s papers.
To understand the full effect on my family life, however, of that case which I have called ‘Rumpole and the Younger Generation’, it is necessary to know a little of my past and the long years that led up to my successful defence of Jim Timson, the sixteen-year-old sprig, the young hopeful, and apple of the eye of the Timsons, a huge and industrious family of South London villains. As this case was, by and large, a family matter, it is important that you should understand my family.
My father, the Reverend Wilfred Rumpole, was a Church of England clergyman who, in early middle age, came reluctantly to the conclusion that he no longer believed any one of the 39 Articles. As he was not fitted by character or training for any other profession, however, he had to soldier on in his living in Croydon and by a good deal of scraping and saving he was able to send me as a boarder to a minor public school on the Norfolk coast. I later went to Keble College, Oxford, where I achieved a dubious third in law – you will discover during the course of these memoirs that, although I only feel truly alive and happy in Law Courts, I have a singular distaste for the law. My father’s example, and the number of theological students I met at Keble, gave me an early mistrust of clergymen whom I have always found to be most unsatisfactory witnesses. If you call a clergyman in mitigation, the old darling can be guaranteed to add at least a year to the sentence.
When I first went to the Bar, I entered the Chambers of C. H. Wystan. Wystan had a moderate practice, acquired rather by industry than talent, and a strong disinclination to look at the photographs in murder cases, being particularly squeamish on the fascinating subject of blood. He also had a daughter, Hilda Wystan as was, now Mrs Hilda Rumpole and She Who Must Be Obeyed. I was ambitious in those days. I did my best to cultivate Wystan’s clerk Albert, and I started to get a good deal of criminal work. I did what was expected of me and spent happy hours round the Bailey and Sessions and my fame grew in criminal circles; at the end of the day I would take Albert for a drink in Pommeroy’s Wine Bar. We got on extremely well and he would always recommend ‘his Mr Rumpole’ if a solicitor rang up with a particularly tricky indecent assault or a nasty case of receiving stolen property.