Sometimes I wonder how I ever managed to qualify.

In those days the Law Society’s College of Law (or was it school in the 1950s?) was in Lancaster Gate.

Even in the early morning, the pavement from Lancaster Gate tube station up the Bayswater Road was lined with girls, said by Duncan Webb, the crusading journalist from the People, to be controlled by the wickedest men in London - after the Messina brothers, that is.

We were not the object of their attentions, although they always said ‘good morning’ and we tipped our hats.

They were waiting for the inhabitants of the Norwegian Seamen’s Hostel to wake up.

On a Wednesday morning, a small band played outside the hostel.

Our lunch was taken in The Swan, which had a dartboard, and from which the girls were rigorously excluded.

As for the lecturers, in the style of the time and without exception, they favoured dictation.

Nothing like the Socratic method. This was probably just as well, because whenever one did ask me a question, I never seemed to know the answer.

The lecturer in company law made only two jokes throughout the entire course.

One was that all companies had a main object, ‘except that of Miss Diana Dors, which has two main objects’.

The second was ‘it was a cheque of the Dunlop variety’. We all laughed dutifully in the hope it might encourage him to further jollity, but none came.

There was one man who it seemed tormented me in the days of the legal and equitable side in conveyances.

He referred to this as the gospel and epistle side, of which I had never heard. ‘Well, Morton, gospel or epistle? Come on boy.’ I hadn’t heard of the legal and equitable side too often either and, invariably, I had it wrong.

One day, after deplorable results in a test, he called me into his room and asked if I really wanted to be a solicitor.

I think this was about the only thing I remember from the whole course.

‘The only ones who fail exams are the ones who don’t want to be a solicitor,’ he said.

‘In the future there won’t be managing clerks as there are today. They will be men who failed the final. And the only good ones will be those who should not have done so.’

Well he got that wrong.

James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor