It was suggested following the summer riots that teachers should be given more power to discipline pupils. This reminded me of the late magistrate David Fingleton, who liked to say that since the death of Sir Robin Day he was now the rudest member of the Garrick.

A man who polarised opinion, in the days when connections rather than suitability were often required for appointment to the bench, Fingleton became an often irascible stipendiary in 1980. He was ahead of his time. Those were days when magistrates tended to accept police evidence without question, but he was not in that mould. Unfortunately, he also had a tendency to dismiss cases if the officers were in matron’s room when their case was called - a trait which did not endear him to them. At least no defendant could ever argue they had not had a fair crack of the whip from him, something which could not be said for all his colleagues.

In fairness, Fingleton had sustained a hip injury at school, which left him in considerable pain throughout his life and did not always contribute to an even temper. Small, rotund and lame, he took on waiters, and taxi-, bus- and lorry-drivers. In 1999, Barbara Windsor, his neighbour (pictured), had to rescue him from a dispute with a 20-year-old lorry driver, who floored him near his Marylebone home. Decently, or perhaps sensibly, he declined to prosecute.

It was also unfortunate that he did not see eye to eye with the then chief magistrate Sir David Hopkin, and was sent into what Fingleton saw as a gulag - Wells Street court. After Hopkin’s retirement, Fingleton was released and he sat at Bow Road court until, in 1995, with officers said to be queuing up to give evidence in favour of an unlicensed, illegal immigrant taxi driver with whom Fingleton had collided outside the court, he retired on the grounds of ill-health.

And why did the riots remind me of him? Back in 1982 when dealing with a privately brought assault case he presciently commented that teachers should expect to be assaulted by pupil or parent at least six times in a 20-year career. He survived the fury caused by that remark but shortly after compounded his bad behaviour by saying that any woman found at 1am in a certain north London road should prima facie be regarded as a prostitute. Unfortunately for him there was a nurses’ home in the street - and it was off to the gulag.

James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor