Sir James Cassels

Who was Sir James Cassels? He was born in 1877, the only son of an assistant clerk at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. James learned shorthand at school but was destined for greater things than life as a clerk.

However, the shorthand must have helped him get a job – as a reporter for a local paper on the south coast and then with the Chelsea News and the Fulham Chronicle. (With the demise of so many local papers you may regard this site as the Barons Court Bugle.) He could hardly have done better but in 1898 he moved to the Morning Post and had risen to be sub-editor when he left in 1911. The expression “multitasking” was invented by IBM in 1965 so James wouldn’t have used it to describe his early career. While working at the MP he read law and was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1908. He quickly built up a successful practice on the south-east circuit forcing him to relinquish his quite promising career in journalism. I expect he knew many of his clients from his early days on the Sussex Coast Mercury.

He served in the army from 1916 to 1919, fighting at Arras, was twice mentioned in dispatches, chaired several court martials and retired as a captain. It’s worth mentioning that at the end of WW I it was usual for wartime soldiers to be given a rank on retirement below the rank held while they were serving. My grandfather retired as a captain but at one point had commanded a brigade. Anyway, Cassels went back to the criminal bar and took silk in 1923.

Rumpole’s most celebrated case was, according to him, the Penge Bungalow Murders. Cassels equivalent came in 1929 when he defended Sidney Fox on a charge of matricide; a serious charge but by no means as heinous as vulpicide, my grandfather told me. Fox had been in trouble all his life although he must have had some ability to act. He was commissioned into the RAF in the war, claiming to be an Old Etonian – maybe not so difficult. Anyway, Fox by name fox by nature, he took out insurance on his mother’s life; suspiciously the policy was only valid for six months, expiring on 23rd October 1929. He was a ditherer but on that very day he and his mother booked into a hotel in Margate. After dinner he sedated her with half a bottle of port, strangled her in her bedroom and set fire to the room. He might have got away with it but the insurance company smelt a rat and had her body exhumed. Suffocation and shock had been recorded on her death certificate but the post-mortem revealed signs of strangulation and no soot in her lungs. Fox was hanged at Maidstone Prison. If I may digress, I abhor the death penalty. I don’t object to a guilty person being sentenced to death for pre-meditated murder but all too often innocent people are convicted and hanged.

Cassels was a multi-tasker par excellence. In 1922 he was elected as a Member of Parliament for the east London constituency, Leyton West. He was re-elected in the 1923 and 1924 General Elections. In 1929 he was unseated by the Labour candidate who, remarkably, held the seat, with one small hiccup, until 1965. He became a recorder in 1927 and was made a judge and knighted in 1939 retiring from the bench in 1960 to attend to the affairs of the Wimbledon and Putney Commons conservators. Why he thought it appropriate to buy them a coat of arms is a mystery.