JOHN MORTIMER: The barrister, playwright and author Sir John Mortimer, who has died aged 85, was a man for all the seasons that touched his garden in the Chiltern Hills in southeast England, where he lived as profusely as he wrote, in a spirit of unjudgmental generosity. His greatest achievement was to create, in Rumpole of the Bailey, a lawyer whom the world would love.
Though born in Hampstead, north London, Mortimer grew up in the house at Turville, near Henley, Oxfordshire, that he never really left. His father was an irascible, blind barrister, the Mortimer of the textbook Mortimer on Wills, Probate and Divorce. His mother, devoted and stoic, read aloud the sad, true stories of cruelty and passion between the wars contained in his father's briefs for the divorce court.
Mortimer, an only child, was sent to the Dragon school at Oxford, in a class with the historian EP Thompson and a “sour-faced boy who wouldn’t share his tuck”, who grew up to become a severe circuit judge and model for Rumpole’s adversary, Judge Bullingdon. Home from Harrow, the teenager wracked his imagination to stage theatricals that his father might “see” – his contribution to the stiff upper-lipped family pretence that Clifford Mortimer was not blind.
He determined to be a writer, and on leaving school joined the Crown Film Unit, devising accounts of industrial and military Britain in wartime. But Clifford had other ideas, a clash captured in A Voyage Round My Father, the account by John of their relationship that first surfaced on BBC radio in 1963.
When Britain's other 1960s playwrights examined their fathers – Peter Nicholls despairingly in Forget-Me-Not Lane, David Mercer bitterly in After Heggarty– A Voyage Round My Fatherstood out, not only for its stagecraft and for Alec Guinness's central performance, but for the unquestioning love distilled in its lines for this man who had refused to show any to his son.
After Brasenose College, Oxford, and at war's end, love and law came hand in hand. He was called to the bar in 1948 and in the following year married Penelope Fletcher, taking on her four existing children and adding two of their own. They wrote a travel book together, With Love and Lizards(1957) and novels separately, as he struggled to develop a practice. Soon he discovered a real talent for divorcing people (in those barbaric, fault-finding days before divorce reform), and for the arcane chancery world in which time and talent is expended in deciding the charitable status of a legacy to Trappist nuns.
Mortimer's first stage success, A Dock Brief– set in the cells, where an incompetent barrister counsels himself and his convicted client – was rooted in his own nervousness about failure and his terror at having responsibility for another's fate. For this reason, he avoided the criminal law until reform dried up his contested divorce work, and he had no alternative but to go "down the Bailey".
By the end of the 1960s he had a considerable reputation as a novelist (his first, Charade, drawing on his Crown Film Unit experience, and unrelated to the movie, appeared in 1947) and playwright, and had played an important role in the abolition of the death penalty and the passage of the Theatres Act, which saw off that bane of the British stage, the lord chamberlain's power of censorship – not that his own work had ever been in danger from this quarter.
An irony of his leadership of the anti-censorship movement was his profound belief that anything at all should be capable of being said about sex, coupled with his own reluctance to deal in his work with anything other than its consequence. Sex was an amusing but bemusing fact of life: “The whole business has been overestimated by the poets.”
This was not an attitude shared by Penelope. Theirs was, in fact, a remarkable marriage, although its final stages were somewhat bitterly reflected by Penelope in her novel The Home(1971). Mortimer, typically, celebrated more of the fun and laughter in his play Collaborators (1973), in which the couple metamorphosed into characters played by Glenda Jackson and John Wood.
By this time, Mortimer was a successful silk – he had become QC in 1966 – having reinvented himself as an advocate in murder trials. He acquired a singular ability to charm expert prosecution witnesses out of their preconceptions. He was the greatest cross-examiner of such experts (“the art of cross-examination is not to examine crossly”) and many alleged murderers owed their liberty to his ability to draw out a doubt in the apparently closed mind.
But nothing in the training of the English bar and bench had equipped it for the underground press, and when, in 1971, a largely unreadable magazine called Ozpublished a cartoon strip featuring Rupert Bear with an erection, its editors were treated as if they had committed treason. QCs fled from the proffered defence brief.
A few days before the trial – for conspiracy to corrupt public morals, an offence carrying a maximum of life imprisonment – Mortimer was shown the offending publication while he was lunching a young woman, also named Penelope.He agreed to take the case.
Thus began his second life, as defender of the apparently indefensible, as creator of Rumpole and much else besides, and, from 1972, following his divorce, as husband of Penelope Gollop, and father of Emily and Rosie. His first wife died in 1999.
Mortimer retired from the bar in 1981. Rumpole was the barrister he wanted to be, but wasn’t. He was too nervous – petrified before a big case, and diffident about his own abilities. However, his final speeches, meticulously handwritten, were minor works of literature. Almost alone at the bar, he could laugh a case out of court (had he stayed, he would have made a fortune in libel defences).
From dawn each day Mortimer would be at work on his supreme creation, Horace Rumpole, perhaps the first truly Dickensian character to emerge from the medium of television.
- John Clifford Mortimer: born April 21st, 1923; died January 16th, 2009