AN OLD PROFESSION

Becoming “a professional man” is a classic bourgeois ambition, hence the torrent of doctors, bankers, lawyers, economists, statisticians, scientists et al emanating from our universities, graduates of wildly differing quality and attainment. The professional classes are indeed a keystone in our society and we rejoice when they perform competently and effectively. Yet their exalted status is not always deserved and some have a condescending attitude towards the laity. They can take themselves too seriously and their bubble needs a regular pricking.

I will be concentrating on the Law and the legal profession, for years the most influential and powerful pillar of the Establishment. In England, the ladder starts with the modest solicitor, although senior solicitors can be very significant players, rises to the court-pleading barrister, who may eventually “take silk” as a Kings Counsel (KC) and may become a judge, even a judge of the Supreme Court and a “Law Lord,” giving membership during his tenure of the august, if anachronistic, House of Lords.  Many seek to make a career in this ubiquitous profession and many have done very well out of it, thank you very much.

                     

Lord Brougham

  

                                                                       Sir Charles Dilke

A prominent lawyer in the 19^th century was Henry Brougham, founder of The Edinburgh Review, adviser and advocate of Queen Caroline, tireless campaigner, notably against slavery and for extension of the voting franchise. He was Lord Chancellor (1830-34) but his behaviour was not always dignified; he paid blackmail money to avoid being named as a client in the memoirs of the notorious harlot, Harriette Wilson (the braver Duke of Wellington had said Publish and be damned!) Brougham was also said to be roaring drunk, fully robed, at Musselburgh Races. He ended his days in Cannes, a spa he effectively founded.

Another lawyer, called to the Bar in 1866 but never practising, was Sir Charles Dilke, a Radical Liberal heavily involved in the 1885 extension of the franchise to agricultural labourers. Dilke was reckoned as being Gladstone’s most likely successor, but was ruined by a scandal surrounding his divorce – he had seduced his mother-in-law and, on another occasion, invited the maid to make a threesome. The popular prints accused him of “every vile French vice” – O Mon Dieu!

Some lawyers in the 20^th century were the acme of respectability, HH Asquith, (Prime Minister 1908-16), for example, but he was rather a snob and a toff, coining the elitist phrase – “that ineffable air of effortless superiority that so distinguishes a Balliol man”. His successor, David Lloyd George (Prime Minister 1916-22) was a humble Welsh solicitor, a Liberal Radical, opponent of the Boer War, author of the Peoples Budget of 1909, which led to the curbing of the powers of the House of Lords. His dynamism made a large contribution to Britain’s ultimate victory in World War 1. But Lloyd George was a serial womaniser, installing both wife and mistress simultaneously at No 10 and well deserving his nickname “The Goat” until he died in 1945.

                             Asquith and Lloyd George

In the inter-war years there were certainly two remarkable lawyers. Sir William Joynson-Hicks (always known as “Jix”) was a crusading Home Secretary in the 1920s. He had a particular aversion to London night-clubs - an American import – and he shut them down regularly as supposed places of vice. He also persecuted “Bolsheviks” and drove communists underground. He was an Evangelical Anglican Tory and led the eloquent opposition in Parliament to the revision of the venerable Book of Common Prayer in a debate of the highest standard. Jix won, but the revision was introduced nonetheless as the authority of Parliament over the Church in such matters was unclear. Jix was laughably illiberal.

Jix

   

F. E. 

A more likeable fellow was F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead. A brilliant barrister, he became Lord Chancellor in 1919 and in Tory ministries thereafter until 1929. A fervent Unionist, he was in the team negotiating the creation of the Irish Free State. As Chancellor, Birkenhead completely overhauled the Law of Property and improved the legal position of married women. He was a heavy imbiber and it was his regular habit on walking home from the Carlton Club to use the toilet at The Athenaeum, whose denizens included many bishops and academic writers. Birkenhead was not a member. The Club Secretary remonstrated one night with Birkenhead who replied in feigned innocence: “I had no idea you were a Gentleman’s Club as well!”

The Law took some time to shed its wartime authoritarianism in the post-war years. Labour appointed as Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard who held this office 1946-58. Goddard was a diehard hanging and flogging judge, revered by the criminal Bar, but thought prejudiced by others. Creepily, his clerk/valet confided, after Goddard’s death, that whenever Goddard donned the black cap conferring the death sentence, he would ejaculate into his pin-striped trousers and have to be re-dressed. Clearly, if true, his motivations were not simply legal! His associates were similarly two-faced, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, later Lord Kilmuir, had been a prosecutor at Nuremberg and a dynamic reformer of the Tory party, but as Home Secretary (1951-54) he embarked upon a crusade to persecute homosexuals, thought regressive even then. His Attorney-General was Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, aptly nicknamed “Bullying-Manner”.

Lord Goddard

  

Lord Kilmuir

It is with some relief that we enter the more tolerant age of Butler, MacMillan, Wilson and Roy Jenkins, all of whom initiated belated social and legal reforms. In my native Scotland, the first First Minister since 1707 was clever if caustic Glasgow solicitor Donald Dewar. His recent successor, is also a small-time solicitor, Nicola Sturgeon, married to erstwhile SNP chief executive Peter Murrell. Both are involved in a current imbroglio about missing funds, the ownership of a campaign bus and the truth of past denials. No charges have been laid, so I am happy to state that both are pure as the driven snow.

All the above demonstrates that the Law is an absorbing profession and that lawyers, like us all, often have feet of clay. He who is without sin, cast the first stone!

Donald Dewar

 

Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell                                 

PS. Lest other professions revel in self-righteous congratulation, a quick glance at two others.

-          The banking profession has egg all over its face with the Farage/Coutts/ NatWest scandal of deeply-ingrained and malign Wokery and elementary breaches of client confidentiality.

-          The medical profession is unlikely to smell of roses after the Covid Enquiry starts to report on its readiness and competence in dealing with the epidemic.

 

SMD

27.07.23

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2023

 

ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL

I was engaged recently in the melancholy duty of “de-cluttering” our Athens house, which is a polite description for removing all my accumulated nostalgia, cherished but underused furniture, dated objects of various sorts and all those things the family consider Mum and Dad’s old tat. I made a habit of buying a guide book/brochure of places I had visited in Britain and Europe and they occupied shelves and shelves. They were long unread and indeed untouched, so they had to be dumped in the communal skip, (though I kept back a handful) - to the relief of the family and the house could breathe again!

An organized De-clutter

This exercise stimulated thoughts about how we follow our interests and travel to odd places, maybe away from the beaten track. I have had friends whose love of spectator sport has made them globetrotters. They cross continents to see a rugby or cricket test-match and World Cups trigger off a frenzy of enthusiasm – often soon disappointed – as they moon about venues in Japan, South Africa or Sochi.

Other friends were fanatical anglers and tiring of the imperishably gentle joys of the rivers Dee, Don or Ythan in my native Scotland, they pursued rod-stressing rainbow trout in New Zealand or sockeye salmon in Alaska, competing perilously with ravenous brown bears!

The open banks of the Ythan

For my part, on starting to work in London, my interests were first stimulated by David Piper’s excellent Companion Guide to London (1964) and by John Betjeman’s writings on the City of London Churches. Piper extolled the virtues of The Wallace Collection and Rococo art, while Betjeman introduced me to the joys of church-visiting, an unexpected activity for a then-militant card-carrying atheist!

                                              Fragonard’s The Swing, the essence of Rococo

St Bartholomew the Great, City of London

Church visiting took me all over England, guided especially by sage Alec Clifton-Taylor and soon introduced me to many splendours in Europe. One of my favourites is The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by the van Eyck brothers in St Bavo’s, Ghent, an astonishing altarpiece, replete with medieval devotion.

 

Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (1432) 

My pursuit of Rococo drew me to what became my favourite Rococo church, Ottobeuren Abbey;

Resplendent Ottobeuren in Bavaria, South Germany

On entering Ottobeuren for the first time, I was literally rooted to the spot. Elaborate statues of saints, fine proportions, the whole place exuding praise, joy and celebration. Other beauties in this area include Die Wies and Vierzehnheiligen, unmissable pilgrimage shrines.

Greece had not figured on my radar in my callow youth. Then I married the lovely Grecian goddess Betty in 1969 and I have visited (and even lived in) Greece every year since. Although I love the many ravishing Classical sculptures and sites like the Acropolis and Delphi, I became particularly interested in Byzantium and its legacy. The celebrated Christ the All-Judging (Pantocrator) in the monastery of Daphni, near Athens, underlines the unforgiving nature of Byzantine theology. But oddly, the finest Byzantine site outside Constantinople itself is in the former outpost of Ravenna, Northern Italy, where churches and mausoleums have been lovingly preserved.

Pantocrator at Daphni

  

                                                   Mosaic, San Vitale, Ravenna

 You may think I am a modern fellow – I dress like any 80-year-old and I confess to drinking the in-cocktail this summer, Aperol Spritz, and enjoying it. But my passions are mainly medieval, leavened by some Rococo frivolities, and no amount of de-cluttering will eliminate those memories from my eternally grateful mind.

 

SMD

3.07.23

Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2023