The dapper Sir Charles Darling, the judge in the Herbert Rowse Armstrong murder trial, was in some ways forward-thinking. In others he jostled for the title of ‘worst judge in history’.
A barrister with no great practice, in 1897 he was a political appointment by the Conservatives to the High Court. It was probably Darling’s view on the case which saved Stinie Morrison from the gallows. Darling told the jury in the 1911 Clapham Common murder trial that merely because someone – particularly a foreigner – produced a demonstrably false alibi, it did not mean they were guilty. He also declined to say he agreed with the jury’s verdict. Not that Morrison was in any way grateful.
Unfortunately, Darling was a judge who liked his remarks and those of counsel to appear in the evening papers. In an early version of ‘Who are the Beatles?’, knowing perfectly well what both were, he told counsel he knew of the Coliseum but what was the Trocadero? ‘My Lord,’ said the unnamed counsel, ‘the Coliseum is where the Christians were thrown to the lions as food. The Trocadero is where the Lyons throw the food at the Christians.’
Section 2 of the Ecclesiastical Courts Act 1860 provided that it was an offence to ‘behave indecently’ in a church, which in this context meant interrupting a church service.
The act was rarely used, but in a case in the 1920s – when the prosecution had said that any interruption whatsoever came within the legal definition – Darling would have none of it. ‘Isn’t that going too far?’ he asked. ‘Take one impossible case. Suppose someone were to say “encore” at the end of a sermon?’
He could lose interest in a case quickly, as he did in the 1923 trial of the Cortesi brothers for attacking the rival Italian Sabini gang. At first he was happy to explain the rape of the Sabine women to the jury but when he discovered none of the witnesses or defendants spoke Italian he threw up his hands, eventually overruling the jury who wanted the Cortesis deported.
James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor
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