Judgments in Vacation

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

A DAY OF MY LIFE IN THE COUNTY COURT.

“We take no note of time

But from its loss.”

Young’s Night Thoughts.

It is a difficult task to describe to others the everyday affairs of one’s own life. The difficulty seems to me to arise in discovering what it is that is new and strange to a person who finds himself for the first time in a place where the writer has spent the best part of the last twenty years. The events in a County Court are to me so familiar that it is hard to appreciate the interest shown in our daily routine by some casual onlooker whom curiosity, or a subpœna, has brought within our walls. Still, in so far as the County Court is a poor man’s Court, it is a good thing that the outside world should take an interest in its proceedings, for much goes on there that has an immediate bearing on the social welfare of the working classes, and a morning in the Manchester County Court would throw a strong light on the ways and means of the poor and the fiscal problems by which they are surrounded.

An urban County Court is a wholly different thing from the same institution in a country town. Here in Manchester we have to deal with a large number of bankruptcy cases, proceedings under special Acts of Parliament, cases remitted from the High Court, and litigation similar in character to, but smaller in importance than the ordinary civil list of an Assize Court. Cases such as these are contested in much the same way as they are in the High Court, counsel and solicitors appear—the latter having a right of audience in the County Court—and all things are done in legal decency and order. The litigants very seldom desire a jury, having perhaps the idea that a common judge is as a good tribunal as a common jury, whereas a special judge wants a common jury to find out the everyday facts of his case for him. I could never see why juries are divided into two classes, special and common, and judges are not. It is a fruitful idea for the legal reformer to follow out.

The practice in Manchester is to have special days for the bigger class of cases, and to try to give clear days for the smaller matters where most of the parties appear in person. The former are printed in red on the Court Calendar, and the latter in black, and locally the days are known as red-letter days and black-letter days. On a black-letter day counsel and solicitors indeed often appear—for it is a practical impossibility to sort out the cases into two exact classes—but the professions know that on a black-letter day they have no precedence, and very cheerfully acquiesce in the arrangement, since it is obvious that to the community at large it is at least as important that a working woman should be home in time to give her children their dinner as that a solicitor should return to his office or a barrister lunch at his club.

Let me try, then, to bring home to your mind what happens on a black-letter day.

We are early risers in Manchester, and the Court sits at ten. I used to get down to my Court about twenty minutes earlier, as on a black-letter day there are sure to be several letters from debtors who are unable to be at Court, and these are always addressed to me personally. Having disposed of the correspondence there is generally an “application in chambers” consisting of one or more widows whose compensation under the Workman’s Compensation Act remains in Court to be dealt with for their benefit. I am rather proud of the interest and industry the chief clerks of my Court have shown in the affairs of these poor women and children, and the general “liberty to apply” is largely made use of that I may discuss with the widows or the guardians of orphans plans for the maintenance and education of the children, and the best way to make the most of their money.

You would expect to find the Court buildings geographically in the centre of Manchester, but they are placed almost on the boundary. Turning out of Deansgate down Quay Street, which, as its name implies, leads towards the river Irwell, you come across a street with an historic name, Byrom Street. The name recalls to us the worthy Manchester doctor and the days when even Manchester was on the fringe of a world of romance, and John Byrom made his clever epigram:

God bless the King, I mean the faith’s defender,

God bless—no harm in blessing—the Pretender.

But who Pretender is, and who the King,

God bless us all—that’s quite another thing.

It is a far cry from Jacobites to judgment debtors, but it is a pleasant thought to know that one lives in an historic neighbourhood, even if the building you work in is not exactly fitted for the modern purpose for which it is used.

At the corner of Byrom Street and Quay Street is the Manchester County Court. It is an old brick building with some new brick additions. Some architect, we may suppose, designed it, therefore let it pass for a house. It was built, as far as I can make out, in the early part of last century, when the brick box with holes in it was the standard form of the better class domestic dwelling house. Still it is an historic building. In 1836 it was No. 21 Quay Street, the residence of Richard Cobden, calico printer, whose next door neighbour was a Miss Eleanora Byrom. Cobden sold it to Mr. Faulkner for the purposes of the Owens College, so it was the first home of the present Victoria University. It is now a County Court. Facilis descensus. It still contains several very fine mahogany doors that give it the air of a house that has seen better days.

You will see groups of women making their way down to the Court, many with a baby in one arm and a door key slung on the finger. The wife is the solicitor and the advocate of the working class household, and very cleverly she does her work as a rule. The group of substantial-looking men chatting in the street are debt-collecting agents and travelling drapers discussing the state of trade. These are the Plaintiffs and their representatives, the women are the Defendants. Here and there you will see a well-dressed lady, probably summoned to the Court by a servant or a dressmaker. There will always be a few miscellaneous cases, but the trivial round and common task of the day is collecting the debts of small tradesmen from the working class.

I have no doubt that a County Court Judge gets an exaggerated view of the evils of the indiscriminate credit given to the poor. They seem to paddle all their lives ankle-deep in debt, and never get a chance of walking the clean parapet of solvency. But that is because one sees only the seamy side of the debt-collecting world, and knows nothing of the folk who pay without process. At the same time, that indiscriminate credit-giving as practised in Manchester is an evil, no one, I think, can doubt, and it seems strange that social reformers pay so little attention to the matter.

The whole thing turns, of course, upon imprisonment for debt. Without imprisonment for debt there would be little credit given, except to persons of good character, and good character would be an asset. As it is, however, our first business in the morning will be to hear a hundred judgment summonses in which creditors are seeking to imprison their debtors. There are some ten thousand judgment summonses in Manchester and Salford in a year, but they have to be personally served, and not nearly that number come for trial. We start with a hundred this morning, of which say sixty are served. It is well to sit punctually, and we will start on the stroke of ten.

A debt collector enters the Plaintiff’s box, and, refreshing his memory from a note book, tells you what the Defendant’s position is, where he works, and what he earns. The minute book before you tells you the amount of his debt, that he has been ordered to pay 2s. a month, and has not paid anything for six months. His wife now enters into all the troubles of her household, and makes the worst of them. One tries to sift the true from the false, the result being that one is generally convinced that the Defendant has had means to pay the 2s. a month, or whatever the amount may be, since the date when the order was made. The law demands that the debtor should be imprisoned for not having paid, but no one wants him to go to prison, so an order is made of seven or fourteen days, and it is suspended, and is not to issue if he pays the arrears and fees, say in three monthly instalments. The wife is satisfied that the evil day is put off and goes away home, and the creditor generally gets his money. He may have to issue a warrant, but the Defendant generally manages to pay by hook or by crook, rather than go to Knutsford Gaol, where the debtors are imprisoned, and as a matter of fact only a few actually go to gaol. Of course, the money is often borrowed or paid by friends, which is another evil of the system. The matter is more difficult when, as often happens, the Defendants do not appear. It is extraordinary how few people can read and understand a comparatively simple legal notice or summons. Mistakes are constantly made. A collier once brought me an official schedule of his creditors, in which in the column for “description,” where he should have entered “grocer,” “butcher,” etc., he had filled in the best literary description he could achieve of his different creditors, and one figured as “little lame man with sandy whiskers.” There are of course many illiterates, and they have to call in the assistance of a “scholard.” An amusing old gentleman came before me once, who was very much perturbed to know if, to use his own phrase, he was “entaitled to pay this ’ere debt.” The incident occurred at a time when the citizens of Manchester were being polled to vote on a “culvert scheme” of drainage, which excited much popular interest.

“I don’t deny owing the debt,” he said, “and I’ll pay reet enow, what your Honour thinks reet, if I’m entaitled to pay.”

I suggested that if he owed the money he was clearly “entitled” to pay.

“Well,” he continued, “I thowt as I should ’ave a summons first.”

“But you must have had a summons,” I said, “or how did you get here?”

“’E towd me case wor on,” he said, pointing to the Plaintiff, “so I coom.”

I looked up matters and discovered that service of the summons was duly reported, and informed the Defendant, who seemed much relieved.

“You see,” he said, “I’m no scholard, and we got a paaper left at our ’ouse, and I took it up to Bill Thomas in our street, a mon as con read, an’ ’e looks at it, an’ says as ’ow may be it’s a coolvert paaper. ‘I’m not certain,’ ’e says, ‘but I think it’s a coolvert paaper.’ So I asks him what to do wi’ it, and he says, ‘Put a cross on it, and put it in a pillar box,’ and that wor done. But if you say it wor a summons, Bill must a bin wrong.”

One can gather something from this poor fellow’s difficulties of the trouble that a summons of any kind must cause in a domestic household, and one can only hope for the day when England will follow the example of other civilised countries and at least do away with the judgment summons and imprisonment for debt.

The hundred judgment summonses will have taken us until about eleven o’clock, and meanwhile in an adjoining Court the Registrar has been dealing with a list of about four hundred cases. The bulk of these are undefended, and the Registrar enters up judgment and makes orders against the Defendant to pay the debt by instalments at so much a month. A small percentage—say from five to ten per cent. of the cases—are sent across to the Judge’s Court for trial, and small knots of folk come into Court to take the seats vacated by the judgment debtors and wait for the trials to come on.

The trial of a County Court action on a black-letter day, where Plaintiff and Defendant appear in person, where neither understands law, evidence, or procedure, and where the main object of each party is to overwhelm his opponent by a reckless fire of irrelevant statements, is not easy to conduct with suavity and dignity. The chief object of a County Court Judge, as it seems to me—I speak from many years’ experience—should be to suffer fools gladly without betraying any suspicion that he considers himself wise. Ninety-nine per cent. of the cases are like recurring decimals. They have happened, and will happen again and again. The same defence is raised under the same circumstances. To the shallow-witted Defendant it is an inspiration of mendacity, to the Judge it is a commonplace and expected deceit. All prisoners in a Police Court who are found with stolen goods upon them tell you that they have bought them from a man whose name they do not know. There is no copyright in such a defence, and it sounds satisfactory to each succeeding publisher of it. No doubt it is disappointing to find that the judge and jury have heard it before and are not disposed to believe it. In the same way in the County Court there are certain lines of defence that I feel sure students of folk-lore could tell us were put forward beneath the oak trees when the Druids sat in County Courts in prehistoric times. The serious difficulty lies in continuing to believe that a Defendant may arise who actually has a defence, and in discovering and rescuing a specimen of a properly defended action from a crowded museum of antique mendacities. Counter-claims, for instance, which of course are only filed in the bigger cases, are very largely imaginative. The betting against a valid counter-claim must be at least ten to one. It is, of course, in finding the one that there is scope for ingenuity. It is the necessity for constant alertness that makes the work interesting.

The women are the best advocates. Here, for instance, is a case in point.

A woman Plaintiff with a shawl over her head comes into the box, and an elderly collier, the Defendant, is opposite to her. The action is brought for nine shillings. I ask her to state her case.

“I lent yon mon’s missus my mon’s Sunday trousers to pay ’is rent, an’ I want ’em back.”

That seems to me, as a matter of pleading, as crisp and sound as can be. If the trousers had been worth five hundred pounds, a barrister would have printed several pages of statement of claim over them, but could not have stated his case better. My sympathies are with the lady. I know well the kindness of the poor to each other, and, won by the businesslike statement of the case, I turn round to the Defendant and ask him why the trousers are not returned and what his defence may be.

He smiles and shakes his head. He is a rough, stupid fellow, and something amuses him. I ask him to stop chuckling and tell me his defence.

“There’s nowt in it all,” is his answer.

I point out that this is vague and unsatisfactory, and that the words do not embody any defence to an action of detinue known to the law.

He is not disturbed. The lady gazes at him triumphantly. He is a slow man, and casually mentions “The ’ole street knows about them trousers.”

I point out to him that I have never lived in the street, and know nothing about it. He seems to disbelieve this and says with a chuckle, “Everyone knows about them trousers.”

I press him to tell me the story, but he can scarcely believe that I do not know all about it. At length he satisfies my curiosity.

“Why yon woman an’ my missus drank them trousers.”

The woman vociferates, desires to be struck dead and continues to live, but bit by bit the story is got at. Two ladies pawn the husband’s trousers, and quench an afternoon’s thirst with the proceeds. The owner of the Sunday trousers is told by his wife a story of destitution and want of rent, and the generous loan of garments. Every one in the street but the husband enjoys the joke. The indignant husband, believing in his wife, sues for the trousers and sends his wife to Court. The street comes down to see the fun, and when I decide for the Defendant there is an uprising of men, women, and babies, and the parties and their friends disappear while we call the next case. These are the little matters where it is easy to make a blunder, and where patience and attention and a knowledge of the ways and customs of the “’ole street” are worth much legal learning.

One must learn to sympathise with domestic frailties. I was rebuking a man, the other day, for backing up his wife in what was not only an absurd story, but one in which I could see he had no belief.

“You should really be more careful,” I said, “and I tell you candidly I don’t believe a word of your wife’s story.”

“You may do as yer like,” he said, mournfully, “but I’ve got to.”

The sigh of envy at the comparative freedom of my position as compared with his own was full of pathos.

A case of a workman who was being sued for lodging money gave me a new insight into the point of view of the clever but dissipated workman. His late landlady was suing for arrears run up when, as she said, he was “out of work.”

The phrase made him very angry.

“Look ’ere,” he said, “can that wumman kiss the book agen? She’s swearin’ false. I’ve never been out o’ wark i’ my life. Never.”

“Tummas,” says the old lady, in a soothingly irritating voice. “Think, Tummas.”

“Never been out o’ wark i’ my life,” he shouts.

“Oh, Tummas,” says the old lady, more in sorrow than in anger. “You remember Queen’s funeral. You were on the spree a whole fortneet.”

“Oh, ay!” says Thomas unabashed; “but you said out o’ wark. If you’re sayin’ on the spree I’m with yer, but I’ve never been out o’ wark i’ my life.”

It was a sad distinction for a clever working man to make, but a true one and to him an important one, and I rather fancy the nice old lady knew well what she was doing in her choice of phrase and hoped to score off Thomas by irritating him into an unseemly exhibition by the use of it.

A class of case that becomes very familiar arises out of the sale of a small business. A fried-fish shop is regarded by an enterprising widow who does not possess one as a mine of untold gold. She purchases one at a price above its value, fails from want of knowledge to conduct it successfully, and then brings an action for fraudulent misrepresentation against the seller. Of course, there are cases of fraud and misrepresentation; but, as a rule, there is nothing more than the natural optimistic statements of a seller followed by incompetence of the purchaser and the disgust of old customers. In a case of this sort, in which up to a point it was difficult to know where the truth lay, owing to the vague nature of the evidence, a graphic butcher gave a convincing account of the reason of the failure of the new management. He had come down to the Court in the interests of justice, leaving the abattoir—or as he called it “habbitoyre”—on his busiest morning.

“Yer see,” he said, “I knew the old shop well. I was in the ’abit of takin’ in a crowd of my pals on Saturday neet. So when the old Missus gave it up, I promised to give it a try wi’ the new Missus. Well, I went in twice, an’ there wor no sort o’ choice at all. There worn’t no penny fish, what there wor, wor ’a-penny fish, and bad at that, an’ the chips wor putty.”

It was obvious that the Plaintiff had started on a career for which Nature did not intend her, and that the cause of the failure of the business was not the fraud of the Defendant, but the culinary incompetence of the Plaintiff.

It is amazing how, apart altogether from perjury, two witnesses will give entirely different accounts of the same matter. No doubt there is a great deal of reckless evidence given and some perjury committed, but a great deal of the contradictory swearing arises from “natural causes,” as it were. A man is very ready to take sides, and discusses the facts of a case with his friend until he remembers more than he ever saw. In “running down” cases, where the witnesses are often independent folk and give their own evidence their own way, widely different testimony is given about the same event. One curious circumstance I have noticed in “running down” cases is that a large percentage of witnesses give evidence against the vehicle coming towards them. That is to say, if a man is walking along, and a brougham is in front of him and going the same way as he is, and a cab coming in the opposite direction collides with the brougham, I should expect that man to give evidence against the cab. I suppose the reason of that is that to a man so situated the brougham appears stationary and the cab aggressively dangerous, but whatever the reason may be the fact is very noticeable.

On the whole the uneducated man in the street is a better witness of outdoor facts than the clerk or warehouseman. The outdoor workers have, I fancy, a more retentive memory for things seen, and are more observant than the indoor workers. They do not want to refresh their memory with notes.

A story is told of a blacksmith who came to the farriery classes held by the Manchester Education authorities. The clerk in charge gave him a notebook and a pencil.

“Wot’s this ’ere for?” asks the blacksmith.

“To take notes,” replied the clerk.

“Notes? Wot sort o’ notes?”

“Why, anything that the lecturer says which you think important and want to remember, you make a note of it,” said the clerk.

“Oh,” was the scornful reply, “anything I want to remember I must make a note of in this ’ere book, must I? Then wot do you think my blooming yed’s for?”

It is the use and exercise of the “blooming yed” that makes the Lancashire workman the strong character he is. May it be long before the mother wit inside it is dulled by the undue use of the scholastic notebook.

Witnesses are often discursive, and the greatest ingenuity is devoted to keeping them to the point without breaking the thread of their discourse. Only long practice and a certain instinct which comes from having undergone many weary hours of listening can give you the knack of getting the pith and marrow of a witness’s story without the domestic and genealogical details with which he—and especially she—desires to garnish it.

I remember soon after I took my seat on the bench having an amusing dialogue with a collier. He had been sued for twelve shillings for three weeks’ rent. One week he admitted, and the week in lieu of notice, which leads to more friction between landlord and tenant than any other incident in their contract, was duly wrangled over and decided upon. Then came the third week, and the collier proudly handed in four years’ rent books to show nothing else was owing. The landlord’s agent pointed out that two years back a week’s rent was missing, and sure enough in the rent book was the usual cross instead of a four, showing that no rent had been paid for that week.

“How did that week come to be missed?” I asked the collier.

“I’ll never pay that week,” he said, shaking his head stubbornly. “Not laikely.”

“But,” I said, “I’m afraid you’ll have to. You see you admit it’s owing.”

“Well, I’ll just tell yer ’ow it was. You see we wor ’aving rabbit for supper, an’ my wife——”

He looked as if he was settling down for a long yarn, so I interposed: “Never mind about the rabbit, tell me about the rent.”

“I’m telling yer. Yer see we wor ’aving rabbit for supper, an’ my wife ’ad got a noo kettle, an’ we don’t ’ave rabbit every——”

“Oh, come, come,” I said impatiently, “just tell me about the rent.”

He looked at me rather contemptuously, and began again at the very beginning.

“I’m telling yer, if yer’ll only listen. We wor ’aving rabbit for supper, an’ my wife ’ad got a noo kettle, an’ we don’t ’ave rabbit every neet for supper, an’ my wife ’ad just put the kettle, the noo kettle——”

“Oh, never mind about the kettle, do please get to the rent,” I said, and was immediately sorry I had spoken.

“I’m getting to it, ain’t I?” he asked, rather angrily. “We wor ’aving rabbit for supper”—I groaned inwardly and resolved to sit it out without another word—“an’ my wife ’ad got a noo kettle, an’ we don’t ’ave rabbit every neet for supper, an’ my wife ’ad just put the kettle—the noo kettle with the rabbit—on to th’ fire, when down coom chimley an’ aw into middle o’ room. Was I going to pay rent for that week? Not laikely!”

It turned out that I was wholly in the wrong, and that the destruction of the rabbit was a kind of equitable plea in defence to the action for rent. When I am tempted now to burst in too soon upon an irrelevant story, I think of the rabbit and am patient. Of course all rabbit stories are not even equitable defences, but the diagnosis of what is purely domestic and dilatory and of what is apparently anecdotal but in reality relevant gives a distinct charm to one’s daily work.

One day of my life every month is given up to the trial of Yiddish cases. The Yiddisher is a litigious person, and his best friend would not describe him as a very accurate witness. One ought to remember, however, that he has not had generations of justice administered to him, that he is a child and beginner in a court of law, and that the idea of a judge listening to his story and deciding for him upon the evidence is, in some cases from personal experience and in all cases from hereditary instinct, an utterly unfamiliar thing. The fact, too, that he speaks Yiddish, or very broken English, and never answers a question except by asking another, always gives his evidence an indirect flavour. One strong point about a Yiddisher is his family affection, and he swears in tribes, so to speak. A Christian in a family dispute will too often swear anything against his brother, and is often wickedly reckless in his sworn aspersions. A Yiddisher, on the other hand, will swear anything for his brother, and most Yiddish evidence could be discounted by an accurate percentage according to the exact relationship by blood or marriage of the witness to the Plaintiff or Defendant.

It is needless to say a foreign-speaking race such as this gives one some anxiety and trouble in a small-debt court. One of my earliest Yiddish experiences was a case in which two Yiddishers each brought his own interpreter. A small scrap of paper cropped up in the case with some Hebrew writing on it. One interpreter swore it was a receipt, the other that it was an order for a new pair of boots. Without knowing anything of Hebrew, it occurred to me that these divergent readings were improbable. The case was adjourned. I applied to some of my friends on that excellent body, the Jewish Board of Guardians, a respectable interpreter was obtained, and the Hebrew document properly translated. There is now an official interpreter attached to the Manchester Court, and I think I can safely congratulate the Yiddish community on a distinct improvement in their education in the proper use of English law courts.

That some of them have the very vaguest notions of the principles on which we administer justice may be seen from the following story which happened some years ago. A little flashy Yiddish jeweller who spoke very bad English, had taken out a judgment summons against an old man who appeared broken down in health and pocket. I asked the little man for evidence of means which would justify me in committing the debtor to prison.

“Vell,” he says, “I vill tell you. He ish in a very larsh vay of pizness indeed. He has zree daughters vorking for him and several hands as vell, and zare is a great deal of monish coming into ze house.”

The old man told a sad story of ill-health, loss of business, and said that his daughters had to keep him. It turned out that there was a Yiddish gentleman in Court, Mr. X., who knew him, and Mr. X. corroborated the defendant’s story in every particular. He had had a good business, but was now being kept by his daughters, having broken down in health.

I turned to the little jeweller and said: “You have made a mistake here.”

“It ish no mishtake at all,” he cried excitedly. “Mr. X. ish a very bad man. He and the Defendant are both cap makers, and are vot you call in English a long firm.”

This was too much for Mr. X.—a most respectable tradesman—and he called out: “My Lorts, may I speak?” Without waiting for leave, he continued very solemnly: “My Lorts, I have sworn by Jehovah that every vord I say ish true, but I vill go furder than that. I vill put down ten pounds in cash, and it may be taken avay from me if vot I say ish not true.”

The offer was made with such fervour and sincerity that I thought it best to enter into the spirit of the thing.

Turning to the little man, I asked: “Are you ready to put down ten pounds that what you say is true?”

He looked blank and lost, and, shaking his head, murmured sadly, “No, it ish too motch.”

I pointed out to him how his attitude about the ten pounds went to confirm the evidence for the Defendant, and seeing his case slipping away from under his feet, he cried out, as if catching at the last straw, “My Lorts thish ish not mine own case, thish ish mine farder’s case, and I vill put down ten pounds of mine farder’s monish that vot I say ish true.”

The offer was not accepted, and the Defendant was not committed. But the story throws light on the rudimentary ideas that some Yiddishers have of the administration of justice.

And now we have finished the list of cases, but there are a few stragglers left in Court. Some of them have been in the wrong Court, or come on the wrong day; some have applications to make, or advice to ask. I always make a point now of finding out what these folk want before leaving the bench. I remember in my early days a man coming before me the first thing one morning, and saying he had sat in my Court until the end of yesterday’s proceedings.

“Why didn’t you come up at the end of the day,” I asked, “and make your application then?”

“I was coming,” he replied, “but at the end of last case you was off your chair an’ bolted through yon door like a rabbit.” I think his description was exaggerated, but I rise in a more leisurely way nowadays, though I am still glad when the day’s work is over.

I do not know that what I have written will convey any clear idea of the day of my life that I have been asked to portray. I know it is in many respects a very dull grey life, but it has its brighter moments in the possibilities of usefulness to others. I am not at all sure that the black-letter jurisdiction of a big urban County Court ought not to be worked by a parish priest rather than by a lawyer. I know that it wants a patience, a sympathy, and a belief in the goodness of human nature that we find in those rare characters who give up the good things in this world for the sake of working for others. I am very conscious of my own imperfections; but I was once greatly encouraged by a criticism passed upon me which I accidentally overheard, and which I am conceited enough to repeat. I was going away from the Court, and passed two men walking slowly away. I had decided against them, and they were discussing why I had done so.

“Well, ’ow on earth ’e could do it I don’t see, do you, Bill?”

“’E’s a fool.”

“Yes, ’e’s a fool, a —— fool, but ’e did ’is best.”

“Ay. I think ’e did ’is best.”

After all, coming from such source or indeed from any source, the suggestion contained in the conversation was very gratifying. I have often thought that one might rest beneath an unkinder epitaph than this:

HE WAS
A —— FOOL,
BUT
HE DID HIS BEST.