The agony of articles

Qualifying as a solicitor in the 1950s wasn’t fun. There was something medieval about the system of articled clerkship. Those with degrees were still in a minority and five years of indented servitude awaited those without, reducing to three years for those with a law degree.

I was paralysed at the prospect of leaving university and left it to my father to arrange appointments for me with solicitors he knew in London. I soon got tired of trudging up shabby staircases to be interviewed by equally shabby prospective principals.

‘What does your daddy do?’

This implied that the questioner was more interested in what business he could get from my father than what legal knowledge he could impart to me. The dusty bag of golf clubs prominently displayed in a corner of the room was meant to impress me that this was a man of the outdoors. I was not fooled.

The best of a bad bunch was ‘the Major’. He’d had a good war and his pretensions to superior class did not grate too much. After negotiating three flights of uncarpeted stairs, passing several odiferous toilets, I reached my destination. The Major did not believe in spending money on office furniture. Most of it could have come straight from the set of a film of Dickens’ Bleak House. I was allotted a sloping desk which was a trap for the unwary, as a moment’s inattention resulted in all the papers I was working with sliding untidily onto my lap.

As winter approached, we relied on a sputtering gas fire with most of the porcelain elements either missing or broken. Health and safety was an unknown concept so spending too much time in the room risked asphyxiation from leaking gas. I found myself in charge of the one new piece of office equipment: the photocopier (the like of which would now be found in the Science Museum). It was my job to mix the required chemicals, being careful not to spill them on my hands and suffer an unpleasant acid burn.

I was greeted on my first day by my fellow articled clerk, a five-year man, who, to follow the Dickens theme, resembled Uriah Heap. He was not filled with the joys of spring himself and set out to make my life a misery. He did not succeed. A little savagery on my part was required to put him in his place. The Major did not believe in paying staff much either. As a result, there was a definite absence of quality. His assistant solicitor was a kindly but much distracted man who had spent years in a Japanese prison camp. He drank at lunchtime to forget. As a result, his afternoons were counterproductive, not that his mornings were much better. The Major’s secretary was an older woman – although then they were nearly all older women. She took me to one side and assured me that she had lived. I never found out how or why. She was delightfully indiscreet about the Major’s social pretensions, but shorthand book at the ready, would scuttle into his room at his command.

Miss F served as secretary to the assistant solicitor. She assured me what a demotion this was as she had been the deceased senior partner’s secretary. She too had mastered the intricacies of shorthand. She lived with her mother in Kew and aspired to gentility. The copy typist was Miss W, a vicar’s daughter. Miss W was also over-conscious of her status and lived in a world of past glories.

My own terms had been negotiated in the company of my father. I was to pay a premium of 100 guineas for the privilege of being articled for three years. During the first year, I was to be paid the princely sum of three pounds per week, rising in the second and third years by weekly increments of 10 shillings. It did not take a financial genius to calculate that my first nine months of service was to be provided free. I discovered later that many of my fellow articled clerks were not paid at all.

My task on my first day was to draft my own articles of clerkship using an ancient and foul-smelling precedent book. The Major did not believe in wasting money on up-to-date law books either. His commitments in the document were somewhat vague but generally directed at converting me into a competent solicitor by fair means or foul. My obligations were far more specific, ranging from not stealing his postage stamps to being just and faithful. The unpleasant sting in the tail was that I also had to pay 80 pounds by way of stamp duty. What else was in store?