At this time of year I think of Lord Denning, the eminent lawyer and judge.
“It happened on April 19 1964. It was bluebell time in Kent”, began his judgment in Hinz v Berry (1970) and bluebells trigger this memory. It was also in 1964 that The Denning Report was published. It had been commissioned the previous year by Harold Macmillan, then the Prime Minister, to inquire into the extent that the UK’s security might have been compromised by John Profumo, when he had an affair with Christine Keeler, while he was Secretary of State for War. He was the pre-penultimate minister to hold this post which was abolished on 1st April 1964 and replaced by a Secretary of State for Defence.
Denning’s report was not dry as dust. It was divided into sections with headings like: “Christine tells her Story”, “The Meeting of the Five Ministers”, “The Slashing and the Shooting”, “The Man in the Mask”. I wonder if Lord Chilcot will produce similar attention-grabbing headlines? “Forty-five Minutes until Armageddon”, “Bush and Blair get into Bed Together”, “Saddam goes Underground”, “Sunni Days are Over”.
Mandy Rice-Davies rather sweetly said of Denning that he was “quite the nicest judge I ever met”. Judges did not retire at seventy in those days and Denning remained in post until he was eighty-three. A cartoon in Private Eye showed two barristers reading the headline “Denning To Retire”. “I expect,” observed one to the other, “the House of Lords will overrule his decision”.
An apocryphal story amuses me. When the Athenaeum was temporarily closed its members were offered the hospitality of the Turf Club, round the corner in Carlton Gardens. A member of the Turf seeing Lord Denning coming in asked who he was: “The Master of the Rolls”. “Never heard of him, must be one of those small Irish packs”.
Lord Denning OM died aged one hundred in 1999.
Mandy Rice-Davies died aged seventy in 2014.
An anecdote from a few years ago came to mind. It hasn’t got much to do with your post, but the MP in question, Neil Marten, was, according to Wiki, a fierce opponent of the EEC, the other character named was also a distinguished legal figure and I haven’t contributed to your most enjoyable blog for some time. I quote:
“A keen raconteur, Marten told a story of a tour he took around the Palace of Westminster with his Banbury constituents. Touring through the maze of corridors they turned a corner and met Lord Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor, wearing the full regalia of his office. Recognising his Parliamentary colleague in the midst of the Banbury constituents, Hailsham boomed, “Neil.” Not needing to be told again, the tour party fell to their knees with some haste.”
There is an undoubtedly apocryphal story about my great uncle, Sir John Pennycuick, Vice-Chancellor, head of the chancery division in the early 1970’s. His nickname in the Temple was ‘the head gardener’ because of his somewhat scruffy appearance. On a postprandial stroll along the Embankment he was apprehended by a policeman who thinking he was a vagrant asked him who he was. The reply elicited a response along the lines of ‘and I suppose the next thing you’ll tell me is that you’re the King of Siam’.