Law Society’s Gazette, 23 September 1981

Navy Nicknames

I do not know how it may be nowadays, but when I was in the Navy there were a certain number of standard nicknames. A particular surname carried a nickname as a matter of course; no question of choice or what was appropriate to the individual.

I wish I could remember more of them, but Bensons were always ‘Ticker’, after the long-forgotten clock-makers, just as Millers were always ‘Dusty’.

One, though, continued to puzzle me long after I swallowed the hook and took to the law. Hawkinses were called ‘Justice’ – but why should Mr Justice Hawkins have loomed so large in the vulgar imagination that he thus put his mark upon the whole of his tribe?

I think, more than 30 years later, I have found the answer; found it at the top of a dusty bookcase in a provincial second-hand bookseller’s shop in the shape of two volumes, published in 1904, called The Reminiscences of Sir Henry Hawkins, Baron Brampton.

There is no doubt that books of legal reminiscence are among the worst written of all works of autobiography; this one must take the prize as the very worst.

Sir Herbert Stephen, writing in the Dictionary of National Biography, says, ‘It has no pretence of arrangement and is a miscellaneous collection of anecdotes wholly lacking in literary skill and in verisimilitude, many of them being demonstrably inaccurate and none of them in any degree trustworthy.’

Notwithstanding these strictures, mine and Sir Herbert’s, the book does give the flavour of the man and tells why he was such a popular figure in the late Victorian era…

There are some intriguing passages in the book. One is the unexpected candour of Hawkins’ remark about his early quarter sessions practice. ‘My greatest delight, perhaps, was obtaining an acquittal of someone whose guilt nobody could doubt’.

Another is a mystifying reference to the ‘Palace Court’ which, he says, was closed to all who could not pay £2000 for the privilege of practising in it ‘although a junior might devil there for the benefit of a legalised practitioner’.

Furnival Furnival’s Inn