part of next day at the details, and my client got a substantial verdict.
Judge Hughes, when he was appointed, was expected to do wonderful things, and so, in truth, he did, but the authorship of “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” was not a particularly good apprenticeship for the rough and tumble of the County Court, and his short cuts to ideal justice were seldom successful. One of his earliest exploits, when asked to decide who had won a race and was entitled to the prize, was to order it to be run again, with himself as referee! Apart from the judgment being without legal sanction, the point at issue was not who could win, but who had won the race. On another occasion, during the trial of the disputed ownership of a dog, the animal came into court, and the learned judge had him up on the bench. He then ordered the defendant to go to the other side of the court and call the dog. This the defendant did, and the dog came to him. Immediately judgment was given for the defendant, but the plaintiff complained that he had not been allowed a similar experiment, which very likely would have resulted in a similar way.
Chancery law was supposed to be a speciality with Judge Hughes, but I doubt if he had any real grip of any kind of legal principles. For instance, Byrne and I had a case before him in which a lady claimed specific performance of an agreement. It was a home-made agreement about the transfer of furniture, and it contained, among other things, a promise to
marry. Judge Hughes in his kind-hearted, impulsive way espoused the lady’s cause most warmly. “Why did my client refuse to marry the lady? It was abominable conduct.” For the defendant I tried to urge legal difficulties about decreeing specific performance to marry, but Judge Hughes only shook his head indignantly and kept muttering to himself, “I shall see that agreement carried out—every line of it! Every line of it!”
During the adjournment I chaffed Byrne about his agreement—of course, he had not drawn it—and asked him how the judge was going to carry out his order to compel my client to marry. Both our clients were very obstinate, but in the end Byrne and I made a full and fair settlement of all matters in dispute, though I shall always believe that my client was the more easy to deal with, because he believed that Judge Hughes intended to have him locked up, and only released when he consented to go quietly to the altar. When we returned into court and announced the settlement the learned judge was very vexed with Byrne, and waved us away, saying, “I wasn’t frightened at Mr. Parry’s law, and you needn’t have been. I’d have had that agreement carried out—every line of it! Every line of it!”
As a Druid under an oak tree or on some island far from the Court of Appeal, Judge Hughes would have administered his own equity to perfection, and the suitors would have had an honest, righteous and sporting tribunal. But the administering of laws
made by others was altogether beyond his imagination. He was stone deaf to common law, and his equity dated back to a period before the discovery of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Coventry, the judge of the Blackpool Circuit, was a different type of man altogether. Silent, reserved, and patient, he listened at too great length to both advocacy and evidence, but his decision when it came was sound in judgment and of few words. Charles Costeker, of Darwen, who loved a sporting litigation, once instructed me to defend a most unusual case before Coventry in the Blackburn County Court. The defendants were the vicar and churchwardens of a Darwen church. It appeared the plaintiff had taken a dislike to hearing the curate preach, and used to walk out in order to avoid doing so. This insult to the curate the churchwardens resolved to avenge, and one Sunday morning, when the plaintiff tried to leave the church as usual, they locked the door and sat near it and prevented him going out. He, therefore, sued them for damages for false imprisonment. The vicar knew nothing about it, but as far as the churchwardens were concerned, there was really no answer, though I discovered a canon of the Church that makes it one’s duty to stay and diligently hear the sermon. Coventry, however, was not having anything to do with such an obscure affair as canon law, and the common law was clearly against us. I am afraid the judge, who was of Quaker origin, and some of the advocates were woefully at sea over the details of the Church service,
and an old Lancashire verger amused us greatly with one of his replies to Coventry. He was asked when he first noticed the plaintiff come into the church.
“It was during Venaite!” he replied.