What the Judge Saw: Being Twenty-Five Years in Manchester by One Who Has Done It

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

Bertram Cox was undoubtedly the ablest pupil in my time. He neglected an ordinary career at the Bar and specialised on heavy public legal work, and was rightly rewarded by being appointed legal Under-Secretary to the Colonial Office—​a position which I believe Mr. Chamberlain invented in order that the office might have the benefit of his services. He is now the solicitor to the Inland Revenue. Another pupil was Bartle Frere, who is a legal luminary at Gibraltar. Danckwerts seemed to instil into his pupils the capacity to arrive. Frere was one of the merriest fellows in the world, always doing some careless and amusing thing, on the strength of which Cox and I built up apocryphal stories about him which we insisted upon as traditions of the pupil

room. Thus it was asserted to be Frere who, after carefully studying the papers in an action for seduction, had drafted a defence of contributory negligence. I believe, however, there was some foundation for the story that in his early days he wrote an opinion to the effect that, as every step taken up to date on behalf of the plaintiff was useless, the best thing he could do was to drop his present action and commence an action for negligence against his solicitor.

“Excellent advice, no doubt,” said Danckwerts dryly, “but you seem to forget that we are advising the solicitor.”

The last time I met Frere was in Norwich, about 1896. I had gone to sit as judge for Addison, and took my seat in the old Castle Court with great dignity, bowing to the Bar, when I looked up and my eye caught Frere’s.

“Good heavens, it’s Parry!” he cried out in an audible voice, and laughed heartily at the idea of finding me on the bench. The Court did not hear the interruption, but Parry did, and enjoyed it hugely. We dined at the Maid’s Head that evening, and had a pleasant crack together, recalling many stories of the old pupil room in New Court. No doubt memory brightens o’er the past, but certainly no youngsters ever learned their business under pleasanter auspices than we did.

Outside the pupil room there were lectures to attend, scholarships to be read for, dinners in the old hall, and debating clubs meeting on several evenings

in the week. Mindful of my father’s advice, I had always kept in touch with an old boys’ debating club at King’s College School, and now I joined the Hardwicke and a very pleasant and more social club, the Mansfield. The Hardwicke was a conservative institution, and I remember startling the ancients of our benches by raising a debate on the effect of the Pre-Raphaelite movement on the art of the country. Everyone spoke on it, and the frank expressions of dogmatic ignorance and the enthusiastic denunciations of the works of the school were thoroughly healthy and entertaining. Still, we mustered a stalwart minority, and a little later gained a practical victory over the Philistines. I was elected on the committee of the Hardwicke, on which Clavell Salter—​now a K.C. and M.P. for the Basingstoke division—​was an important official. The society was in funds, and we resolved to spend them in creature comforts; not in olive draperies and sunflowers, perhaps, but in reasonable luxuries. Our meeting room was at that time floored with boards, the door opening from the road banged violently whenever anyone entered, and the uncovered gas-jets in the centre glared and hissed at you distressingly during your oration. Without a word of our purpose to the general body of members we adorned the room with a carpet, a screen to hide the door, and some glass globes for the gas. Incensed with indignation and breathing fire and war, the hosts of the Old Bailey came down upon us in wrath. Geoghan the eloquent, Cagney the

persuasive, and the subtle Burnie closured our debate, carried the suspension of the standing orders, and on a motion to surcharge the upstart members of the committee rent the air with denunciations of our malversation of the funds and our want of patriotism in destroying the ancient amenities of their beloved Hardwicke. It was with difficulty that our side continued the debate, which was of an earnest and fiery nature, until the hour of the adjournment. By next week we whipped up our supporters, who were base enough to prefer comfort to tradition, and we remained in office. The prophecies of decadence and disaster came to naught. The Hardwicke survives in prosperity. Long may it flourish.

This habit of debate and discussion naturally led us to desire to try our strength in a wider field of battle. Some took one side and some another, but for myself, from hereditary example perhaps, I have always been fond of belonging to a minority; and now that I have been a total abstainer from politics for many years, I may freely admit that in the eighties I was an ardent Radical, and, naturally, a disciple of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, who in that day was preaching the reforms that Mr. Lloyd George is now putting on the Statute Book. I was a member of the Eighty Club, then a Whig institution, and as Radical speakers were greatly in demand I got many opportunities of political speaking all over the country. As a very young Radical in a minority among many superior persons, it was, of course, part

of my duty to criticise my elders and betters whenever I got the opportunity. As an artist friend said of me, I had an unfortunate habit of “getting out of drawing,” even outside the studio, and I remember very well an instance of this at a dinner given in the autumn of 1895 to Trevelyan. It was the custom of the club for a senior to propose and a junior to second a vote of thanks to our guest. On this occasion Haldane was the senior and I was the junior. I had made up an eloquent little speech, but in accordance with my usual habit—​then and now—​I made another. Haldane had—​as I thought rather unnecessarily—​made a great many allusions to the “nephew of Lord Macaulay,” as though Trevelyan bore no other claim to fame. When my turn came I got a round of applause for welcoming our guest as himself, a personality far more interesting to the working politician of to-day than the mere nephew of a Whig peer. Trevelyan himself seemed to enjoy the joke, and wound up the proceedings by an appeal to the younger members for missionary work, in which he referred very pleasantly to some of my father’s Radical fights of old days, and congratulated me on belonging to the true faith.