Harry Ognall - A Life of Crime: The Memoirs of a High Court Judge

W hat follows will be the odyssey of my life at the English criminal Bar and as a Queens Bench judge, recounted through the prism of some of the more memorable trials in which I was involved. But every narrative must have a beginning, and my early years seem to me to be as logical a starting place as any. Wholly to ignore the first twenty-five years of my life seems to me, anyway, to leave a void. However accidental my ultimate choice of career may seem to have been, perhaps within my early years is to be found the seed bed out of which my future grew.

I was born in 1934 in Salford, Lancashire, of middle-class Jewish parents. They were never more than easy-going in their orthodoxy, and (save in my early days at school during the war) my religion never featured as a significant or oppressive aspect of my life. I was named (curiously) Harry Henry, after my paternal grandfather, who had died one month earlier. I know very little about him. He was by all accounts a kind, modest and hard-working man. He lived with his wife, Bessie, in Rutherglen, Glasgow, and was a councillor for the Gallowflat Ward in what was then the separate town of Rutherglen, serving for one year as its provost, or mayor. He made the improvement of educational facilities and standards his special interest. He ran a small business, selling smoking pipes and tobacco.

My father, Leo, was the oldest of my grandfathers three sons and a daughter. He was born in 1908 and left school at sixteen. Thereafter, he worked first in Glasgow and then in Manchester in a variety of generally mundane jobs until the outbreak of the Second World War. (For a short time he was a cub journalist for a national newspaper, and achieved temporary fame by riding pillion on the Wall of Death at a visiting circus.) He worked for some years for a very large mail-order company. That bred in him a deep-seated and lifelong aversion to working for anybody save himself. He was adamant that both my young brother, Michael, and I should become professional men. (Michael was to qualify as a doctor.)

At the outbreak of war in 1939, his extreme short sight meant he was excused military service. He spent the war years working as a supervisor at an ordnance factory near Leeds that produced military vehicles and ammunition.

Providentially, he found his true niche in life in his middle years. He had always been an avid reader of detective fiction. I can remember a monthly magazine devoted to the genre Black Mask , which was always in our house. With the end of the war, and with no obvious employment in prospect, he decided to give writing a go. It was a courageous decision. He had a wife and three children to support, and no guarantee of success, but against the odds, it worked. His first offering to Collins publishers was accepted. Thereafter, until his death in 1979 he wrote under two pseudonyms some four detective novels a year. The royalties, while never very substantial, more than kept the wolf from the door. Above all, it fulfilled his fierce wish for independence.

My fathers small stature may well account for the fact (which I only recognized after his death) that he never rid himself of deep feelings of inadequacy. Only when going through his effects did I gain true insight into his real self. Over the last ten years of his life he wrote and assembled a large collection of reflections on life entitled Thoughts while Thinking. To my distress, I realized from reading these that I had scarcely known my father at all. His musings are sometimes provocative, sometimes touching, often profoundly wise, and throughout suffused with melancholy. I read them with a growing sense of wonder, and with sadness. Among them, I found this written a few years before he died:

All my life I have been a failure. My one achievement is that I am now honest enough to admit it.

How often since I first read those words have I wished I could tell him how wrong he was.

My mother, Cecilia (Cissie to all her friends), was born in 1909 of Polish immigrant parents who at the turn of the century had fled the pogroms with their families, and later married in the UK. Like many other Jewish refugees, they settled in Leeds. (The city was then a centre for bespoke tailoring, and my grandfather Noah was a skilled tailor.) My maternal grandmother (another Bessie) never learned either to read or write in the English language. Noah could read sufficiently to master the race cards published in the newspapers. He was an avid gambler.

My mother was a physically attractive woman. She was denied any higher education, but was gifted with a considerable native intelligence, insight and a natural charm. Unlike my father, she enjoyed a wide circle of friends. From time to time she turned her hand to the writing of short stories, some of which were published in magazines such as