John Mortimer - The First Rumpole Omnibus

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE FIRST RUMPOLE OMNIBUS

Sir John Mortimer is a playwright, novelist and former practising barrister. During the war he worked with the Crown Film Unit and published a number of novels, before turning to theatre. He has written many film scripts, and plays for both radio and television, including A Voyage Round My Father, the Rumpole plays, which won him the British Academy Writer of the Year Award, and the adaptation of Evelyn Waughs Brideshead Revisited. He has also written Character Parts, which contains interviews with some of the most famous men and women of our time, and an acclaimed autobiography in three volumes, entitled Clinging to the Wreckage, Murderers and Other Friends and The Summer of a Dormouse. His novels include Summers Lease, Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained (which have been made into successful television series), Charade, Dunster, Felix in the Underworld and The Sound of Trumpets. Many of his books are published by Penguin.

Sir John lives with his wife and their youngest daughter in what was once his fathers house in the Chilterns. He received a knighthood for his services to the arts in the 1998 Queens Birthday Honours list.

JOHN MORTIMER IN PENGUIN

Fiction

Dunster Felix in the Underworld

Like Men Betrayed The Narrowing Stream

Charade Summers Lease

Paradise Postponed Titmuss Regained

The Sound of Trumpets

The Rumpole Series

The Trials of Rumpole Rumpole for the Defence

The Best of Rumpole The First Rumpole Omnibus

The Second Rumpole Omnibus

The Third Rumpole Omnibus

Rumpole and the Angel of Death

Autobiography

Clinging to the Wreckage Murderers and Other Friends

The Summer of a Dormouse

Interviews

Character Parts

John Mortimer

THE FIRST

Rumpole

OMNIBUS

Rumpole of the Bailey

The Trials of Rumpole

Rumpoles Return

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Rumpole of the Bailey first published 1978

Copyright Advanpress Ltd, 1978

The Trials of Rumpole first published 1979

Copyright Advanpress Ltd, 1979

Rumpoles Return first published 1980

Copyright Advanpress Ltd, 1980

This collection first published 1983

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-192800-5

Contents

Rumpole of the Bailey

For Irene Shubik

Rumpole and the Younger Generation

I, Horace Rumpole, barrister at law, 68 next birthday, Old Bailey Hack, husband to Mrs Hilda Rumpole (known to me only as She Who Must Be Obeyed) and father to Nicholas Rumpole (lecturer in social studies at the University of Baltimore, I have always been extremely proud of Nick); I, who have a mind full of old murders, legal anecdotes and memorable fragments of the Oxford Book of English Verse (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couchs edition) together with a dependable knowledge of bloodstains, blood groups, fingerprints, and forgery by typewriter; I, who am now the oldest member of my Chambers, take up my pen at this advanced age during a lull in business (theres not much crime about, all the best villains seem to be off on holiday in the Costa Brava), in order to write my reconstructions of some of my recent triumphs (including a number of recent disasters) in the Courts of Law, hoping thereby to turn a bob or two which wont be immediately grabbed by the taxman, or my clerk Henry, or by She Who Must Be Obeyed, and perhaps give some sort of entertainment to those who, like myself, have found in British justice a life-long subject of harmless fun.

When I first considered putting pen to paper in this matter of my life, I thought I must begin with the great cases of my comparative youth, the Penge Bungalow Murder, where I gained an acquittal alone and without a leader, or the Great Brighton Benefit Club Forgery, which I contrived to win by reason of my exhaustive study of typewriters. In these cases I was, for a brief moment, in the Public Eye, or at least my name seemed almost a permanent feature of the News of the World, but when I come to look back on that period of my life at the Bar it all seems to have happened to another Rumpole, an eager young barrister whom I can scarcely recognize and whom I am not at all sure I would like, at least not enough to spend a whole book with him.

I am not a public figure now, so much has to be admitted; but some of the cases I shall describe, the wretched business of the Honourable Member, for instance, or the charge of murder brought against the youngest, and barmiest, of the appalling Delgardo brothers, did put me back on the front page of the News of the World (and even got me a few inches in The Times). But I suppose I have become pretty well known, if not something of a legend, round the Old Bailey, in Pommeroys Wine Bar in Fleet Street, in the robing room at London Sessions and in the cells at Brixton Prison. They know me there for never pleading guilty, for chain-smoking small cigars, and for quoting Wordsworth when they least expect it. Such notoriety will not long survive my not-to-be-delayed trip to Golders Green Crematorium. Barristers speeches vanish quicker than Chinese dinners, and even the greatest victory in Court rarely survives longer than the next Sundays papers.

To understand the full effect on my family life, however, of that case which I have called Rumpole and the Younger Generation, it is necessary to know a little of my past and the long years that led up to my successful defence of Jim Timson, the 16-year-old sprig, the young hopeful, and apple of the eye of the Timsons, a huge and industrious family of South London villains. As this case was, by and large, a family matter, it is important that you should understand my family.

My father, the Reverend Wilfred Rumpole, was a Church of England clergyman who, in early middle age, came reluctantly to the conclusion that he no longer believed any one of the 39 Articles. As he was not fitted by character or training for any other profession, however, he had to soldier on in his living in Croydon and by a good deal of scraping and saving he was able to send me as a boarder to a minor public school on the Norfolk coast. I later went to Keble College, Oxford, where I achieved a dubious third in law - you will discover during the course of these memoirs that, although I only feel truly alive and happy in Law Courts, I have a singular distaste for the law. My fathers example, and the number of theological students I met at Keble, gave me an early mistrust of clergymen whom I have always found to be most unsatisfactory witnesses. If you call a clergyman in mitigation, the old darling can be guaranteed to add at least a year to the sentence.