Pre-war chief magistrate Sir Chartres Biron, a stickler for the King’s English, fancied himself as something of a belle-lettrist.

Morton landscape

James Morton

He was disliked by his fellow magistrates, who thought he was lazy and should not take six weeks off in the winter to go to the south of France with his friend Arnold Bennett. He was disliked equally by defendants such as the Blind Beggar gangleader Arthur Harding, who opined: ‘He was a bloody villain, he’d have sent his own mother to prison, if it was to get him an advantage.’ Out of court, like so many chief magistrates, Biron was a member of the Garrick Club.

Court stories apart, the most interesting pages in Biron’s autobiography Without Prejudice are those he devotes to his fellow members, along with literary idols. They include Thackeray’s daughter, the now forgotten Anne Ritchie, and the once enormously popular and just as forgotten Rhoda Broughton, who said of herself, ‘I began as Zola and ended as Charlotte M Yonge’.

Biron thought fellow Garrick member the barrister Sir Anthony Hope, although financially well rewarded for The Prisoner of Zenda, was disappointed that so many ‘most indifferent explorers’ followed his steps. He very much liked the now also forgotten William Pett Ridge, who with his studies of Cockney life was thought to be the natural successor to Dickens.

An Old Etonian, Biron was often snobbish about fellow members, including Charles Garvice, the son of a bricklayer. ‘There was a good deal of criticism among the highbrows’ over his election but Biron read one of his novels ‘and thought it rather good’. Until, that is, he read a second and found Garvice ‘had only one to write. The heroine dyed her hair and moved from Norfolk to Cornwall, just as the villain changed his nationality and methods as the case might be but the story was always substantially the same’.

It is amazing to think that Garvice, who wrote over 150 romance novels, and was the most popular author in Britain, is now completely forgotten. But there again so are Arthur Harding and indeed Biron himself.

 

James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor

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