Memory Lane

Experiences of an Articled Clerk in the ’20s

In the spring of 1927 I landed in Liverpool from West Africa, after two ‘tours’ in that land as a trader’s assistant. I had enough money to get married and did so, although I got the sack the day I stepped ashore. After an improvident honeymoon of six weeks near Bridport, a solicitor friend offered me a job and my articles. I got £3 a week, which had risen to £5 by the end of my articles.

The books of account in the office I joined comprised one bound ledger, a cash-book and petty cash-book, all kept by ‘George’ who eventually tried to commit suicide. George was old and part of the office. He knew where all the files were. If one was wanted of any age, George found it. There was no index. Completed matters were put into old envelopes, mostly those in which the deeds came back from stamping, and having been endorsed were placed in an upstairs room which, I think, did not have any shelves.

I cannot remember George failing to find a file, given the time he needed. He would stand at the door of this top-floor room as still as a pointer dog, looking over at the various heaps of envelopes. Then he would assay one heap by dusting off a few of the top bundles, which seemed to give him a line to the particular file required.

The principal was a tall, handsome and kind man who had passed his final examination during a time of relaxed standards for ex-first-world-war warriors of whom he was one. He knew no law, and his practice was hindered by the changes introduced by the 1925 land legislation, he having been nurtured mainly on the old law. He never understood the new.

About my third year he let me do a Poor Persons divorce. It was the first in the office and looked on as a jarring innovation. Indeed, it turned out to be a frightful case. Our client got damages for his wife and later married her again, and I always felt the office held that against me.

We had one county court case about a blowlamp. Our client, an ironmonger, had sold the blowlamp to the plaintiff who said it had ‘burst’ in use causing him severe burns for which he claimed damages. The makers said their blowlamps could not burst, and demonstrated to me the truth thereof, and the falsity of the plaintiff’s allegations. We won the case. I still have the blowlamp, which is serviceable after 27 years, except that the nozzle is blocked at present.

Law Society’s Gazette, 19 April 1972

Humour in the Office (letter to the editor)

Might I make a small suggestion on a matter of presentation?

Would it be possible to use a slightly more ‘indirect’ heading than ‘Humour in the Office’ for letters which recount some typist’s error or client’s malapropism? I feel that to tag every such letter ‘Humour…’ right out loud raises expectations which the content of the item does not always fulfil. (Some of our brethren have a flat-footed way of rubbing in the modest point of something that wasn’t very funny to begin with.)

If there were some neutral heading, like ‘By the way’ or ‘Obiter scriptum" or’ PS’, one would not feel that one was being dug in the ribs by the club bore. Another possibility might be to print these items, without any heading or comment, at the foot of a column here and there in the paper, as Punch used to do and the New Yorker, I think, still does.

Alastair K Ross, London SW1