I see Lord Wolfson trotted out that perennial pride of the Bar ‘the cab rank rule’ in his Policy Exchange speech. In 25 years of practice, I never met a clerk who, if he or his master did not want a case, could not evade it. Whether it was simply requiring an exorbitant fee on the brief – I know of one 1980s case where £800 was demanded for a half-day paper committal with a submission – or lame excuses: ‘Mr Smith has (unexpectedly) gone part-heard in Nottingham’. It was the same for the paying and the legally aided client.
It was in the latter case always accompanied by: ‘Mr Jones, a very good young man who just had a fine win at Chelmsford, is available’. This could often be translated as: ‘The prosecution offered no evidence’.
In 1963, the year I qualified, I decided to employ Wilfrid Fordham. His client had been discharged at the committal proceedings and I thought that was sufficient for my clients. Until then, our firm had almost exclusively used John Averill, who was becoming increasingly eccentric. I had spent a month at Bury St Edmunds with him. He had refused to stand when Melford Stevenson came into court and, since he only drank lemon and honey, and only in small quantities, he passed out – to Stevenson’s annoyance.
So I telephoned Wilfrid’s clerk to offer him a small housebreaking and was met with a point-blank decline. No worries about the cab rank. The conversation went something like: ‘Mr Fordham is far too good for that sort of case. If you care to send me the brief I’ll find you a decent man, and then after a few more cases we’ll see about Mr Fordham’. I was naive but the ‘decent man’ worked out well and that autumn I was permitted to brief Fordham.
What a success that was. Fordham may not have been a brilliant cross-examiner but he had a good deal of charm with a jury and, well-liked by judges, he was a brilliant mitigator. He won a number of cases and I don’t think a client of mine went to prison until the New Year. He became the man to go to and I was the conduit. I had a practice of my own.
James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor
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