In the 1950s, when not everything was done over the internet, some mortgages with the Woolwich building society were redeemed at their offices, which were in London’s High Holborn. There was also a considerable amount of unregistered land, and title documents had to be checked. Inexperienced articled clerks were often taken through the process by a genial and unbelievably patient man who looked like the archetype of a British flying officer in a war film.
He was the solicitor Roy Fuller. In fact he had not served in the RAF but in the Royal Navy, enlisting as an ordinary seaman, and then the Fleet Air Arm where he was commissioned. He was also a highly regarded poet.
A man of parallel careers – born in Lancashire to the director of a rubber proofing mill – Fuller was articled in 1928, the year his first poem was published. In the 1930s he joined the Woolwich and, by the late 1950s, he was not only head of the legal department, he was a director of the society. During this time he became a member of the Law Society’s committee making recommendations for conveyancing reform, and adviser to the Building Societies Association.
Then a committed Marxist, he published his first volume of verse in 1939. Throughout the war, he wrote verse that reflected the situation of the small person: the recruit, the housewife left behind, and the Blitz victim. Volumes were published at regular intervals. The verses were said to have ‘unequalled significance as a record of what it was like to be British through the many changes Fuller experienced’.
Fuller retired in 1969. Despite refusing to give his inaugural address in Latin, the previous year he had been appointed professor of poetry at Oxford, a position he was to hold for five years.
He was a member of the board of governors of the BBC for seven years from 1972 and chairman of the Literature Panel of the Arts Council in 1976. He was awarded a CBE in 1970. He continued his prolific output almost until his death in 1991. He also wrote seven novels, four crime mysteries, several memoirs, and countless magazine reviews and essays.
James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor
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