A London stipe once said to me that, after his appointment, the first five years were learning, the second five were interesting and the remaining 10 were waiting for his pension. Certainly, some of them played with lawyers they knew to keep themselves amused. One said to me when I was mitigating: ‘Say that in Italian, Mr Morton’. The defendant called me over and said: ‘He’s taking the mickey.’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but he’s not going to send you to prison.’

Others developed a good line in put-downs. One of the milder stipes used to sit at Horseferry Road and never looked up from his paperwork, although he seemed to know the moment someone had strayed into his court. ‘How nice to see you, Mr Morton,’ he would say. ‘Shall we take your case next?’

He once said to a barrister about to mitigate: ‘I’ll remand your client on bail for reports.’

‘I want to address you now,’ said the man.

‘Of course you may,’ said the stipe. ‘We have plenty of time in this court to do everything twice.’ Not as harsh as the magistrate at Marylebone who told a young barrister: ‘Until you began to cross-examine, I thought there was a doubt in the case. Now I’m certain there is not.’

Edwin McDermott, who sometimes also sat at Marylebone, was a man who would stand no nonsense. I remember watching him try a pornography case when the defence called a professor of Anglo-Saxon literature. ‘What medical qualifications have you, professor?’ he asked, knowing full well the answer, and as he wrote down the reply, said slowly and deliberately, ‘No, med-ical qual-if-ic-ations.’ Later, when the poor professor was explaining how the exhibits were good for you, McDermott pushed a candle in the shape of a life-sized phallus towards the witness box and asked ingeniously: ‘And what therapeutic qualities do you say this has, pro-fess-or?’ There was little point in my staying to watch the inevitable outcome.

On the subject of pornography, I remember defending in a seaside town in a case about a collection of films to be forfeit. During the retirement the clerk to the justices told me that, such had been the interest among the magistrates, that lots had to be drawn to decide who would sit on the bench that day. Forfeit the films were. I’ve often wondered where they went…

James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor