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

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

It was only a few weeks’ experience, but it stands out as one of the times when I learned something of the technic of advocacy. I was only a “walker on” to the stage of the Court, it is true, but I was on all the time, and could take note of the courses of the stars. Henry Matthews, Q.C., and Jelf, Q.C., were

doing constant battle in the Civil Court, and Darling was defending poachers and other offenders on the Crown side. There was plenty of good example for the apprentice to study. And in between whiles we rowed our judges down the Wye to Chepstow and nearly spilled them in the river, and journeyed to Edgbaston to kiss Cardinal Newman’s ring, and visited under the pleasantest circumstances the old houses and castles and cathedrals of the Midlands; as if all the world were playing holidays when you went the Oxford Circuit in summer.

At the end of 1884 I was married, and in January, 1885, I was called to the Bar. I determined to go my father’s old circuit, the South-Eastern, and went down to Cambridge and Norwich and Maidstone to look round, but came to the conclusion that there was woefully little to do and plenty of able men to do it. I took a room in Middle Temple Lane in the old wooden building on the left as you turn out of Fleet Street. My name was painted on the door, but I doubt if anyone read it but myself. I wrote some stories for the Cornhill, started a law book that was never finished, and began editing Dorothy Osborne’s letters. As the Bar did not require my services, and I thought the country did, I made many excursions for the Eighty Club.

I spoke several times for an old friend of mine, Tom Threlfall, head of the Salford Brewery, who had come out as a Liberal against the Hon. Edward Stanhope in the Horncastle Division of Lincolnshire. The agricultural labourer was coming into his own,

and the clergy often refused us the use of the schools, so we spoke from a wagon in a field. We had a knot of independent farmers who supported the cause, and we all drove together in a big brake to the place of meeting. I shall never forget a serious faux pas of Threlfall’s. We were passing between two fields heavily manured with the favourite Lincolnshire dressing, and all the farmers sniffed it up with smiling approval. It was too much for Threlfall, and he buried his face in an elegant cambric handkerchief. One of the farmers frowned slightly, and, by way of encouraging explanation, said: “Eh, man! Pig moock! Fine!”

The farmers were sorely puzzled at his want of appreciation, and I could not help feeling that Threlfall was not really cut out for a Lincolnshire member. Unfortunately, the voters thought so, too; but he made an excellent fight.

At the end of the year, at an old boys’ dinner at King’s College after the election Sir Richard Webster, as he then was, proposed my health as president of the debating society, and chaffed me for belonging to the wrong camp; but I was able to point out that I had done good work for both parties, for I had spoken for fifteen Radical candidates and not one of them had been returned.

The fact was that at that date the followers of Chamberlain and his “unauthorised programme,” as it was called, were under the grave disadvantage of working against the ill-concealed hostility of the moderate Liberals.

I expect when the history of the time is known it will be found that when Gladstone nominated Rosebery as his successor instead of Chamberlain he naturally destined his party to their long sojourn in the wilderness. Certainly in 1885 Chamberlain was as great a name to conjure with as it is to-day. I was present at Bristol at the Liberal Colston dinner just before the autumn election, and shall never forget the enormous enthusiasm with which his name was received.

With the exception of Gladstone, I have never heard a speaker who could play upon any given audience as a musician upon a great organ, pulling out first this stop and then another, and winding up with some diapason of eloquence, some grand swelling burst of harmony, that made speaker and audience, player and organ, one vast instrument of triumph.