Marshall Hall obtained an unlikely acquittal for Robert Wood, accused of killing a prostitute in the so-called ‘rising sun murder’ in 1909. He heard no more from the man until, when on Assize in a Midland town, he saw Wood in the street.
‘Don’t I know you?’ asked Hall. ‘No sir, I’ve never seen you before but I want to thank you for saving my life,’ was the reply.
Not all meetings between lawyers and defendants have been as cordial.
‘Who’s the old boy in the sheepskin?’ asked one defendant to his counsel of Sir Henry Hawkins. ‘I see him often at the races.’
Eric Crowther, who sat at West London, ran into a not dissimilar situation. The police were opposing bail for a man who they said had no fixed abode. Not correct, the man told Crowther. ‘You know I always sleep on Shepherd’s Bush Green, sir. I was there this morning when you came home at 1am.’
After Melford Stevenson sent down two of my clients after they had been sniffing glue and robbing sub-post offices, counsel James Cartwright and I went to see them about an appeal. They were more interested in the judge. ‘Who woz the old geezer who put us down?’ asked one. Cartwright told him it was ‘Mr Justice Melford Stevenson’.
‘We don’t want to appeal,’ said the other.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘So’s we can tell our mates we was potted by Melford.’
I forget the name of the judge who said ‘I know you quite well’, to a witness he thought he recognised. ‘Yes, sir, I’m the barman at the Dog and Duck’ was not necessarily what he wanted to hear.
I do know the name of the long dead solicitor who took counsel on a ‘View’. After they had trudged down the alleyways which ran off the High Street in Wood Green and clambered up a fire escape or two, the solicitor suggested a drink. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere I’m known,’ he said. They drove to a shabby pub in Tottenham.
The solicitor led the way in, to the barman’s greeting: ‘Oh, it’s yourself Mr O’Flaherty, sir. Your usual then?’
James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor
No comments yet