Nicholas Phillips

Nicholas Phillips interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 7th February 2014

0:05:07: Born Mursley, Buckinghamshire, in 1938; my mother's parents were immigrants and originally settled in Exeter - Sephardic Jews, my grandmother from Alexandria and grandfather from Istanbul; I didn't see very much of either of them as they had separated by the end of the war; I would see them when they came to visit but that wasn't very often; the fact that I am technically Jewish through my mother had quite an influence on my early life because my father packed my mother, me and my younger sister off to Canada in 1940 when it looked as though the Germans might invade Britain; from the age of two to six I was living in Canada; that seemed a very long time and when people ask where I was brought up I tend to think of Canada although I was back in England for the last year of the war; my grandfather had a great bald head and he was an antiques dealer, specializing in carpets; I have a warm feeling for my grandmother; she was a cuddly person and it was always a pleasure when she came to visit but I didn't really know them; they did not bring up my mother as a practising Jew; she was one of five sisters who were all very bright so there is a strong female talent there; I have still got one, the youngest, alive; I took her out to lunch the other day, she is ninety and lives in Dorchester, bright as a button; my mother was bright and met my father when she was doing a Dip.Ed. at Oxford and he was at Christ Church; before the war she used to mountaineer, ski, so an outdoor person, as am I; in 1944 when my sister Caroline was born my mother was ill with double pneumonia; by that time we were back in England and she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which she always denied that she had, and she lived to the age of about eighty-four and was independent right up to the end, but she did not walk vigorously after the end of the forties; my father was quite an enthusiastic walker and I think that this was a bit of a handicap for him as he would have liked to do more during retirement than he did; he retired young, in his fifties; my mother had read modern languages at university; she taught during the war; we spent the first two years on a farm; my father had an aunt who had married a Canadian and they farmed near Edmonton; we stayed with them for two years and my mother did all the housework; then we had to go to school and there wasn't a school; she went off to Banff and got a job in a school there and so we spent the second two years there, which were particularly memorable; when she came back to England she had two more children in quick succession and so she never had a job; she did all sorts of things; she took up tailoring at one stage and I remember her making suits for my father, but the multiple sclerosis slowed her up; she was a reticent person, a bit like me; I had a very close relationship with her but an unspoken one

6:23:10: My sister Caroline is absolutely fascinated by our family background and I have never really bothered too much about it; on my father's side we are going back to English gentility; he was the end of the line and only son; my grandfather was christened in 1876; he married a young girl in middle-age; the marriage was not a great success but produced my father; in later years he was actually certified and ended up in Holloway Sanatorium; had he been the Duke of Grafton as he imagined he was, this would have been considered no more than eccentricity; my grandmother came from the Lakes; she had quite a large estate, Oxen Park near Greenodd; she left her estate to Edinburgh University where her father had been, except for a small cottage which she left to her four grandchildren; she said she would leave her estate to my father if he agreed to go and live there, and rather honourably he said he wouldn't; she was a difficult woman; when my parents got engaged while still at Oxford, the parents on both sides were horrified; before they got engaged my father's mother wrote a letter to my mother saying she hoped that my mother appreciated there could be no question of her marrying my father; my mother wrote back saying she entirely sympathised as her parents' reaction had been exactly the same; her Jewish background was the clearly the cause - I remember my grandfather saying what a pity it had been that my father had married a woman of colour; they got married in Christ Church Cathedral and my grandparents agreed that they would not go to the wedding, but my father's father who had a soft heart turned up at the wedding; I liked him and he was very proud of me; he had been called to the Bar in Gray's Inn, never practised as a barrister, but as a civil servant in the Department of Lunacy, ironically; he lived into his eighties while my grandmother died relatively young; my father didn't get on with his mother at all; at the end of the war when we came back we landed at Liverpool; my father had not come with us but was in the army and never went abroad, but worked in the War Office in London; he took the lease of a flat for us in Blackheath to move into, and he came up to meet us; while he was away it took a direct hit so we had to go and stay with my grandmother for a bit, which I think was quite tricky; after that there would be duty visits; we lived in Maidenhead then and my father would drive up and I would usually go with him as I loved the Lakes, but we wouldn't stay for more than forty-eight hours with her; she never forgave my mother for marrying my father which was sad, but I have got a very deep love of the Lakes

11:15:03: My father was backward, he had a mastoid which threatened his life and they actually cut it out, and he was sent off to Switzerland for a year or two to recuperate; he was sent at the age of fifteen to Bryanston; he always said he was the first boy to arrive when the school opened its doors; I think this was in part because he was not bright enough to get into some of the more traditional schools; he told me that his father took him to look at one which had no doors on the lavatories and his father said he would not send his son to any school like that; Bryanston when in started in 1928 must have been an astonishing place; the staff were all very young so that the age difference between them and my father was not very great; he obviously had a wonderful time there; he was a good tennis and hockey player, he acted and was a star performer - 'Dr Faustus' was one of the plays; inevitably he sent me to the school; he got to Oxford but was sent down after a year at Christ Church for failing Prelims; he then went back and I think he got a third; he didn't do any work but enjoyed himself; my parents' marriage was a tremendous love match which then suffered strain when they were apart for four years; before the war he went to work for an American company that had just opened a factory in England making Mars bars, and he worked for them for the rest of his working life ending up as commercial director, in fact he turned down the offer of being managing director; this was a very go-ahead company; it had an office in Slough; everybody had to check in; you had a good time-keeping allowance of 10% which was another way of saying that you would have 10% docked from your wages if you didn't clock in on time; the managing director downward had to do the same; they all ate in the same work's canteen, with open-plan offices a very enlightened company, well rewarded; he was given some shares in the company so that when he retired they would be bought back at their current value so he was relatively well-off; he was always mean so far as money was concerned and didn't spend money on ephemeral pleasures like a good meal out; if he was buying a little Chinese pot or something that was quite different; but I do remember him saying something to my mother - who had to keep housekeeping accounts meticulously - about her spending fifty pounds on housekeeping that week, and giving her quite a tough time; I had quite a good relationship with him; we were not aware of the undercurrents in our parents' relationship, but I was never really very close to him; he retired at fifty-seven and then went to live in Cyprus; I had introduced them to Cyprus as I had got to know it when I was doing National Service in the Navy, and they built a house there so I didn't see very much of them in the last ten years of his life - he died at sixty-eight; we would go for a visit but I never had a conversation like this with him that was in any way introspective; I don't think either of them pushed me towards Law though my father always had a slight chip on his shoulder about going into commerce; it was not something his family had ever done before; he did enjoy his work; because my mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis he was allowed to take her with him when he went abroad as a special concession; he was the buyer for Mars and they used to go out to Africa to look at the crop, and they invented something that is now common form called pod counting; they would go early on and count the number of pods on the bushes and compare them with the year before, then they could make a fairly good estimate on whether is was going to be a good or bad crop; I think he made more money for Mars buying and selling commodities for them than they actually made from selling Mars bars; they enjoyed those trips enormously - going to Ghana, Nigeria - and we did eat quite a lot of Mars bars when we were young

17:44:22:
I have quite clear memories of being on the farm in Canada - obviously dramatic events - we had one enormous hail storm; I remember a little nursery school I went to and my first attempt to write which went in a semi-circle and I couldn't really understand what was happening; I remember making bowls out of melting old 78 gramophone records, so that must have been between the ages of two and four; I can remember hearing coyotes howling at night and going to visit the hired hand who was Italian, and he introduced us to spaghetti - I can visualize this - and going into a nearby town, in the farm truck; these are fairly coherent though sparse memories; I remember very clearly my mother dumping my sister and myself in a boarding establishment for small children when she went off to Banff to find somewhere to live and get a job; it was probably only for a week but it was the first time that we had been left; then we moved to Banff and lived for two years with a widower who was a plumber, whose son was fighting in the forces, called Mr Watt; he was a lovely man, like a grandfather really, and I think my mother got fond of him too; those two years were very happy; Banff is in the Rockies, and one of the most beautiful places in Canada; in the winter there was snow everywhere and you could go on sleds, drawn by horses, into the forest and have a bonfire and picnic; bears wandered through the streets, so these are quite vivid memories; Christylle and I went back to Banff a few years ago and I was able by memory to identify the school we were at; I remember the trip back in the boat and I think even some memories of the trip across to New York, but I certainly remember the convoy with ships all the way round, and lifeboat drill, and arriving at Liverpool where we were kept on board the ship for twelve hours for some reason; a lot of British soldiers came onto the dock and the passengers were throwing them bars of chocolate, rather like feeding animals at the zoo; I had just been given the most wonderful shiny penny which I thought was very exciting; I stuffed it into a bread roll to throw it to one of the soldiers; after the short period with my grandmother we stayed with some friends of my parents in Oxford for about a term and I went to school at Headingley; then my father, who was still at the War Office found a flat in Wetherby Gardens in Kensington, and my sister and I were then sent to the French Lycee for about a year or so; I remember wearing black stockings with a suspender belt under shorts; I don't remember any difficulty with the language as we were taught in French; I have got no recollection of finding this difficult though I have recollection of talking French; then my parents bought a large Edwardian house in Maidenhead which was our home until almost the time I went into the Navy; they then bought at very attractive house in Waltham St Lawrence in the rather flat Berkshire countryside, but we had a tennis court and a beautiful garden; by then I had virtually left home

22:39:06: We lived a wonderful life when I was at prep school; I went to a rather dreadful prep school which was the junior school for Haileybury; this was a boys' prep school in Windsor run by somebody who had been a colonel in the army; the only cultural activities were going to the Royal Tournament and the Army and Navy match at Twickenham, that was it; there was no music, no drama, nothing; most of the boys there were boarders; I was what was known as a day-bug which gave me quite a long-lasting inferiority complex that when I went to Bryanston as a boarder I had a feeling that I wasn't quite the same as these other boys; utterly barbaric sending seven-year old boys away to boarding school, but that was what tended to happen; at this school I was academically at the top but not good enough to get a scholarship to Bryanston; I sat the scholarship exam and got entrance; in those days I had a bicycle and with some of the other boys we would cycle round the countryside, climb trees and bird nest - a kind of freedom that children don't enjoy now; in the summer I would spend every day in the Maidenhead swimming pool; we would cycle down and spend the day there, so from that age I was very keen on swimming; when I went to Bryanston I was one of the group who would get up before breakfast and walk down to swim in the river before breakfast, which I still do 25:20:02 I enjoyed Bryanston very much; I don't think the school had changed much since my father's day; when he was there the headmaster used to cane boys occasionally, but that headmaster left under a slight cloud; by the time I was there there was a charismatic headmaster called Thorold Coade, he was one of the great headmasters and was at Bryanston for about twenty years; quite a few of the staff had taught my father and one or two of them were very good friends, indeed in this period towards the end of the war, we went to stay with a chap called Wilfred Cowley, who taught English at Bryanston, and his wife in Bryanston village - we stayed for about a term; his wife was running a mixed school for small children of which I don't have very happy memories; when I was at Bryanston I had this friend of my father's, Wilfred Cowley, as my tutor, and there were a number of members of staff that he knew well; I enjoyed the river - I had a canoe there from an early stage and could go up the river; I used to cycle down to Worth Matravers, a beautiful village on the Purbeck coast in Dorset; my father had got to know it when he was at Bryanston, and we went there for family holidays just after the war; we were allowed at weekends to cycle off and camp; I didn't actually camp as there was a nice lady who wrote children's books who let me sleep on her sofa; quite a few of us would go walking in the Dorset countryside; I think the abiding love of walking and outdoor pursuits started at Bryanston; I read classics; I'm not sure the teaching was very good; the head of the classics department was someone called David Briggs who you possibly have known; after he left he became head of the choir school here and only died a year or two ago; the most inspirational teacher was somebody called Andy Wordsworth who was a direct descendant of the poet; he was not like a schoolmaster at all; he taught Latin; I got A level Latin and stayed on for another year to take S level; I failed S level Latin so I wasn't very distinguished at Bryanston either; I acted - I learnt the whole of 'Medea' which was 570 lines of classical Greek in my spare time; I had a very good memory then; I also acted Penelope Toop ['See How They Run'] in the junior dramatic society, that's over 700 lines, but that at least was English; I did a bit of debating; I have always been very bad at ball games so I didn't play cricket; I used to row though not with any distinction; I played rugger reasonably well in that I played in the 1st 15, got my colours, but I wasn't a star; I enjoyed rugger and went on playing after I left school; I didn't get bitten by music at Bryanston; I enjoyed when the school gave a concert but after lunch every day there was something called rest period when you had to go and lie on your bed for twenty minutes or half an hour and read a book; there was a group who instead of doing this would go and listen to classical music on records, and I wasn't sufficiently interested in music to do that; I tried to learn the piano but I didn't persevere; I love music, but just enjoy it; I like Bach, Handel, Renaissance music, Beethoven, and Bartok is about as modern as I really enjoy; Harrison Birtwistle is a family friend and some of the things he writes I do enjoy; I work to background music which enables you to shut out everything else and concentrate on what you are doing; I was confirmed and quite religious at Bryanston; when I was there I made a lifelong friend of the Bishop of Portsmouth who was then a school governor; we had humanities at Bryanston and there was an atheist bachelor member of staff who was indoctrinating his group with Freddy Ayer 'Language, Truth and Logic', and Thorold Coade who was a great Christian got frightened; he summoned Launcelot Fleming the Bishop of Portsmouth to come and sort out the prefects at Bryanston; that was where I first met him and at that stage I was indeed Christian; my parents were horrified as they thought I was going to go into the church; there was absolutely no question of that; Launcelot had a little bothy in Scotland where his parents came from, and when I was at Cambridge I spent several summers up there walking with Lancelot and another bachelor don friend of his called Owen Wansbrough-Jones who had been the Chief Scientific Officer at the Ministry of Supply during the war; from then on I was really into serious walking but drifting from religion; it has decreased in importance since; if you should ask me my religion I would say Church of England, but I don't actually believe in an anthropomorphic God; I am not atheist as it seems to me there is a possibility of all sorts of powers or whatever that we can't begin to really understand; so far as organized religions are concerned, maybe like electric currents - praying, meditating, worshipping - they may be plugging themselves in to something that's there, clothing it in their own imagination, whatever they think God is, but I am pretty secular, I am not introspective and don't spend a lot of time soul-searching; I love the ritual of the Church of England and church music; I went to the Chapel for evensong, not every day, but it was an important part of my life at King's

35:05:22: I don't think there were any teachers who particularly inspired me; they were a good bunch, it was a benevolent society, they had fairly adult approaches, so a good preparation for King's; it was a school which had the Dalton system of education which meant you were given assignment work at the beginning of the week and it was up to you which particular bit you did in an assignment period; so if you had been playing rugger and feeling very weary you wouldn't tackle the maths but do bits of reading of Chaucer or something; you would have a tutor who would keep an eye on what you were doing and then you would have supervisions when your work would be discussed; this was the case right through the school and is still the case at Bryanston; I was Chairman of the Governors for twenty-nine years so that school is quite close to me; I had five very good years at Bryanston and then I had to do National Service; I think that preparatory boarding schools to thirteen are barbaric, and probably with hindsight, if you have a really good family environment to grow up in it, but I suspect that quite a substantial proportion of the populace doesn't have that, and if you have a really good school that can compensate; we sent all our children to Bryanston but not for the whole five years, but rather left it to them; two daughters went to Hampstead School, one went to Bryanston and then returned to Hampstead, the other went for the last two years

37:23:21: I was supposed to go to Christ Church and you got into university by taking the scholarship exam; I tried the Christ Church exam at Bryanston and did lamentably; I had done National Service before going up to Cambridge; actually I didn't really like Christ Church very much, it was a bit frightening; then I was trying for a scholarship at King's on the basis that if they gave me a scholarship I would come here, otherwise I was down to go to Christ Church; whether they would have given me a place or not was another matter, and I am not sure they would have done; I didn't do too badly with King's but I made a hash of the English paper; I was up in competition with some brilliant classicists; I remember waiting for my interview and I could hear through the door the boy in front of me who was being asked what he did in his spare time, and he said he was writing a Greek play; I thought that I couldn't compete with that; I had my interview and they said I could ask any question; I said that if I didn't get a scholarship could they give me a place as I liked King's so much better than Christ Church; Wilkinson interviewed me with John Raven; they were probably impressed that I had acted 'Medea' in classical Greek; I think I was slightly unusual as I was very extrovert in those days, probably a bit bumptious; I am rather shy and introverted now but I think that is largely a result of spending my whole lifetime in the Law; some people talk about their cases but I never did as it didn't seem right that you should, so you are doing something that cuts you off from society; now I am becoming a little more outgoing, and indeed, there is a degree of liberation when you retire from the Bench, you can actually speak your mind

40:21:21: Before King's there was the very important part of my life, two years in the Navy; like most public schoolboys in the Navy I would be immediately streamed off to get a commission; you had to do basic training; the Navy took very few National Servicemen and this was a great thing because it was a professional service, almost everyone in the Navy were professional sailors not conscripts; there would be only four or five conscripts per ship so you would be with professional sailors; I applied to do the course to get a commission and was turned down; I was quite bright but undoubtedly immature, and so I did a year on the lower deck which was very educational and also invaluable; occasionally as a Judge you are told that you don't know how the other half lives; if you can reply try a year on the lower deck it is quite a good answer; I was at sea most of the time with a couple of months based in Gibraltar through the first winter of my National Service which was actually rather nice; then I got a commission and was sent out to Malta to join a minesweeper, chugging off to Cyprus and patrolling against the EOKA arms-running; that was wonderful; you have this little wooden ship, five officers, I was the most junior officer, and a lot of responsibility; you would be on watch, awake at night with nobody by the helmsman, for four hours while you navigated round the island; so when I came to King's it all seemed a bit infantile; you had to be in by ten o'clock, a lot of rules, and Noel Annan was then Provost and I didn't meet him once in all the three years I was here; I had a good group of friends and most of them had done National Service as well; I played rugger in the King's first XV which doesn't say very much, but before I came up to Cambridge Launcelot Fleming gave me some advice to do some work every day, to set aside maybe as much as four hours a day for work; so I worked relatively hard though I never worked in vacations; I signed up for the Oxford and Cambridge Travel Club and used to take parties skiing at Christmas and Easter, and maybe to Austria in the summer; my father couldn't believe that wouldn't fail my degree by not working then; I did Part I economics because of course King's didn't think anything of lawyers and wouldn't allow you to do both parts of the Tripos in law; Nicky Kaldor used to supervise me but Robin Marris was the number one supervisor; Lord Kahn was here as was Pigou; I quite enjoyed economics but was very bored by economic history which seemed to be nothing but statistics; I got a 2:2; I remember Ken Polack bumping into me and asking me what went wrong, horrified that anyone who was going to read law should get such a miserable degree; when I started reading law, for the first time in my life I had something that I really enjoyed academically; I got a first in law and a prize for public international law; Armitage I remember teaching criminal law; he was I think the best of the lecturers; Hobsbawm was the one who bored me rigid with economic history; I enjoyed criminal law, tort, contract, I wasn't so keen on land law, real property; I prepared quite well for the exam; I had little cards that I would take with me to learn from; I learnt a whole string of French which I put into one of the papers - all bullshitting; although I got a first, I didn't rate myself as a brilliant academic, it was a nuts and bolts hard work first; I did not know much about the history of law, knew a little bit about Maitland; I was pretty laid back in some ways; I joined the Middle Temple as a result that when I was first at Bryanston I had got interested in law when a barrister came down to talk about it; I talked to him afterwards and he invited me to go and spend the day with him when he was sitting as a recorder, and he was a member of the Middle Temple which was why I joined it; then you had to eat thirty-six dinners; this is not the case now, but if you go back to the Middle Ages you qualified by going to an Inn of Court, spending up to five years there, living with the barristers, taking part in mock trials and so on, before you were called to the Bar; this was a remnant of that; it was a complete waste of time; there was nothing by way of academic activity at all; you would just go an eat a dinner with a lot of other students who were eating dinners; you never met a barrister; I used to hide in the cloakroom because if the hall was full you could the sign out and get credited with a dinner; quite a few of us used to do that; to go up all the way to London from Cambridge to one of these dinners was absurd; now they have reduced it so you only eat twelve; there is much more activity going on; the Inns really need to justify their existence and they are doing it well by helping to train the barristers, but not in my day; quite by chance one evening I found myself dining with barristers which was very unusual, and I got talking to them; when they heard that I had been in the Navy one of them said that he practised in Admiralty Chambers and invited me to do a pupillage with him; I had never heard of Admiralty Chambers; now looking back I hadn't taken any steps to find a pupil master, to think about which chambers I was going to go into, I was just happily working for my Bar finals; my whole life from that moment has really been entire chance as I never set out to go in any particular direction; I did a little bit of research, saw that this particular barrister had a very good practice - he was in the Law Reports all the time; Admiralty law was all about the physical side of shipping, that seemed quite fun, and indeed it was fun for the ten years I practised in Admiralty; it did not involve a great deal of law but knowledge of seamanship; it was a very small Bar and most of the practitioners had been in the Navy, and it was considered rather bad form to take a point of law; when I first started at the Admiralty Bar the Judge was rather similarly disposed; I think he had been Merchant Naval Captain at one stage and he wasn't a great lawyer; then when he retired he was replaced by an outstandingly brilliant lawyer, a King's man called Henry Brandon; the Admiralty Bar got into terrible trouble because Brandon would ask them what was the authority for that; at that point I really quite flourished at the Admiralty Bar; the bread and butter things were called Lloyds Salvage Arbitrations; most shipping was insured at Lloyds of London and if a ship had to be salvaged it would be on terms of contract called Lloyds Open Form; there are firms of professional tug owners all round the globe who are waiting for ships to get into trouble, and go rushing up and make the Captain sign Lloyds Open Form; then after the salvage services there would be an arbitration to decide how much the award would be for this service - well-paid work, quite fun because the stories you were dealing with would be dramatic, and I would do maybe two or three of these a week and they were well-paid; fairly early on I bought my cottage in Worth Matravers, I would take my briefs down at the weekend and lie on a grassy ledge by the sea and prepare my salvage arbitrations for the next week; it didn't absorb all one's free time so it was a good life then - a bachelor life, I had got engaged but broken off my engagement, but by then I had bought the matrimonial home in Dulwich; I then advertised for tenants and had about four other young men sharing the house; there was occasional travel; I was sent out to Calcutta to cross-examine a River Hooghly pilot; that was right at the end of the long vacation which was two months, and I used to take the long vacations; my solicitors very kindly gave me a cheque to cover the first class air travel to Calcutta and back - this was 1968 - and I got a ticket on a freight plane that was taking two aero-engines out to Singapore; I had two months and it was the first time I went to Nepal right at the end of it, but I was in Thailand and Cambodia

52:51:13: I was getting a bit bored with Admiralty and so I changed Chambers; in those days it was very unusual, like getting divorced, and my colleagues in Admiralty took umbrage to some extent; I went into a small set of Chambers for two reasons; first of all I applied to the commercial chambers next door to us and they turned me down; I shared my house in Dulwich with David Vaughan who had gone into this small set of Chambers; Bob Alexander who I got to know first at King's, he again had no contact in the law and started off with a circuit practice on the Western Circuit, wanted to move to London so I suggested that he join these Chambers; so a few years later when I wanted to move this was a natural set of chambers to join; by then I had got a good clientele of the big City firms of solicitors; a number of them would do Admiralty work almost as a lost leader for their shipping clients but they were not really interested in it, but interested in the commercial work; they started sending me commercial work though I did continue to do quite a lot of shipping law, in fact after I moved I was appointed to be Standing Counsel in Admiralty work to the Ministry of Defence, which again didn't please my Admiralty colleagues; the next thing to happen was that I took silk in 1978; once I had taken silk, that then opened doors; anyone can apply to take silk but it was the Lord Chancellor's gift and his staff would take soundings; but because I had this job of being Treasury Junior and I left it quite late to apply for silk, I got it on first application; it is called silk because you swap your cloth gown for a silk gown; there were a lot of restrictive practices when I took silk, for instance, if you instructed a silk who would appear in the front row in court, you had to instruct with him a junior counsel; the silk was the advocate and the junior counsel would do the dogsbody work, helping to prepare the case; so you put yourself into a more expensive bracket which is quite a tricky thing to do as you might price yourself out of the market it you were not up to it; anyway, I was really doing quite well in commercial work; instructions to go an appear in Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, occasionally to go over to the States to talk to clients, it was a very satisfying life; I enjoyed the advocacy work, I loved communicating with the court and working out how to do it; my early extrovert nature was still there; I had one traumatic case where Bob Alexander was then Chairman of the Bar, and the Bar were then trying to get an increase in criminal aid fees; Lord Hailsham, then Lord Chancellor, had promised he would give consideration to the accountancy case that the Bar had had prepared with professional accountants; he didn't consider it carefully because he was actually sympathetic with the Bar; he thought that they ought to be getting paid more, not because of the accountancy which his department had told him was rubbish, but because he wanted to attract high-fliers to the Bar; Margaret Thatcher refused point blank in Cabinet to approve this; so he was left completely exposed, he hadn't done what he had promised to do to give a reasoned response to the accountancy case, so Bob Alexander judicially reviewed him, which was unprecedented; he instructed Sydney Kentridge, a great South African lawyer who had joined our Chambers, to appear for the Bar; Hailsham instructed me to appear for him, and he had no case at all; I was completely taken to the cleaners, it was awful, but notwithstanding that, a few years later he summoned me and said he wanted me to be a Judge which I didn't particularly want to do at that stage; indeed, more than that, there was another King's man called David Calcutt, and he and I had been discussing whether we wanted to go on the Bench and both agreed that we didn't; he was then offered the Bench and he said that he didn't want it and nor did Nicholas Phillips, or something to that effect; anyway I think Hailsham just took this as a challenge; I wasn't sufficiently bold to turn it down as in those days you wouldn't have been asked again; I actually bought myself a couple of years time; I was appearing as a witness in a criminal case where the accused had said I had said he could do what he did, basically, so that Hailsham decided he wouldn't appoint me until this was out of the way; then I went on the Bench

Second Part

0:05:07: Becoming a Judge meant a complete change of lifestyle; I was allocated to the Commercial Court which meant that I spent two-thirds of my judging time in London as opposed to fifty-fifty, but the other third you were sent out on circuit to try criminals with juries; this was no entirely novel because before I became a Judge I sat as a Recorder, a part-time Judge, for a month a year, and there you would do low-grade crime with juries; that was the only experience I had; now judges have quite a lot of training but in those days you didn't have any; you would go out on circuit and stay in magnificent lodgings with a butler and cook and pomp and circumstance, which I think has now gone; I actually found that I was enjoying crime and summing up to a jury which is a completely different art; I look back on my career with astonishment because I never expected to get anywhere; it never occurred to me that I would be a judge when I was at the Bar; I don't know where my particular talent lies; I have never considered myself an academic lawyer, I am a pragmatist and quite good at objective analysis and setting out fairly clearly one's ideas; because of my commercial background I was given a very long fraud trial called Barlow Clowes which went on for nearly a year; there were about four defendants; Clowes was the principal villain - actually I don't think he was the principal villain; he was duly convicted and I gave him the longest sentence anyone has ever had for fraud I think - twelve years - and I would have given him longer if I thought I could get away with it; it was absolutely iniquitous; he persuaded little people to put their savings into his company with the promise that it would be all in gilt-edge and absolutely safe, and used it to buy yachts and things; I then was given the Maxwell brothers which again went on for months and months; they were prosecuted for conspiring with Robert Maxwell to defraud, and they were acquitted; in the course of that trial I was appointed to the Court of Appeal and a much more gregarious life, of course; being a single judge is quite lonely; I had got married when I was at the Bar to a French widow with two small children; my Clerk, Ron Burley - Brick Court Chambers was most famous for its Clerk, an outstanding Clerk, and the Clerk is your agent and gets you all your work, and he ran chambers with a rod of iron; when I told him I had got engaged to a French girl he said, "Mr Phillips, Sir, if you have got a good relationship don't spoil it by getting married" - I did not take his advise; we had two more daughters to add to the boy and girl; I met her at a wedding in Toulouse, of friends who had shared my house in Dulwich originally; her name is Christylle Marie-Thérèse Rouffiac (her first husband's name); her mother was 100% English by blood, her father 100% French

5:14:12: As a lonely Judge, I was surprised at how much one got out of the dialogue with barristers who were appearing in front of you - very formal in one way, but talking to and fro all the time, and that filled the gap a bit; the minute you are in the Court of Appeal you are working in a team of three so it is quite different; on juries, I am not convinced; I don't think the jury is an ideal tribunal for a lengthy fraud trial that goes on for nine months; if you a lucky and get a good jury, fine, but there are so many objections to it; first, you take these people out of their lives for nine months; certainly in the first fraud trial I had I felt that while they could focus on the principle villain it was too much for them to be assessing the other defendants, and there was certainly one whom I shouldn't name who was a bigger crook than the man who was at the head of it as he was responsible for devising the whole scheme, and he was acquitted; I had always said that I thought with a serious fraud trial it would be better to have a judge or maybe judge and assessors; the other thing is that the Judge would give a reasoned judgement, and I asked a lot of colleagues if they were wrongly accused, would they rather have a good judge or jury, and almost universally they said they would rather have a good judge; in general, they are a strong pillar of democracy; the idea that you have your fellow men deciding whether you are innocent or guilty, they may not be as expert at doing it as a judge would be, but you never see a jury criticised by the press, their verdicts are just accepted; I think it is quite important that people have legal representation when they are involved in judicial proceedings because the average man is a bit lost; unfortunately at this moment we are cutting back on legal aid; it is the partnership you get between the lawyers and the judges which if it is working well is very good indeed - the defence lawyer; the presumption of innocence is very important; you have to prove, satisfy, a judge or jury, and we have a standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt; in Scotland they have 'not proven' - a bit invidious, I think, as not satisfied beyond reasonable doubt but we have our suspicions - I don't think that is satisfactory; the most important message to get across is that the judges must be objective, uncorrupt, unbiased, not asking themselves what would the Government or whatever like us to do; if you don't pay judges properly the temptations are too great; Lee Kuan Yew was very wise in Singapore; he insisted his judges should be paid at the same level as commercial men, and so it had a tradition that it was not corrupt; the Hong Kong tradition is our tradition; corruption went out in England a long time ago; if you read Coke, even then you had a pretty high integrity; when the Supreme Court came into being, the purpose of creating it was to make the existing separation of powers between the executive/legislature on the one hand and the judicature on the other, transparent; if there was a worry it was that the judges would get too uppity in the Supreme Court, and start challenging legislation; the role of Lord Chancellor went; I think the Supreme Court was rather subsidiary to getting rid of the Lord Chancellor, and how much the desire to get rid of him was attributable to a belief in the importance of the separation of powers, and how much was political, it a matter of debate; when I was waiting to see you I was thumbing through Blair's autobiography and he said almost nothing about the creation of the Supreme Court, it doesn't seem to have stuck him as being of any great significance; he referred to Charlie Faulkner who had taken over from Derry Irvine as Lord Chancellor as just a trivial event, and there was undoubtedly a lot of politics behind this; Blair hadn't consulted anyone but did it off his own bat; one of the reasons he didn't consult was that he thought that if he did bring it into the public domain he would never get it through, and I think he is probably right; I think it has worked very well; most of my colleagues were not in favour, and I think that I would have been with them; I only had a year replacing Tom Bingham when he had to retire to I had not got really enmeshed in the House of Lords; now that I have spent a bit of time there and it's a very seductive place; most of those who were unhappy quite quickly became in favour of it; we worked better as a collegiate body and our facilities were so much better; it is easier to do the job if you have the right facilities, and sweeping away the formalities of debate and voting, because when you gave the judgement you were simply in theory making a speech, so everybody tended to make a speech or write a judgement, so you got too many judgements; now with the Supreme Court you can have a single judgement if you all agree and they are much less prolix, which is good

15:11:05: There were two programmes made on the workings of the Supreme Court, one was made by a lady who came and spent a year with us in the House of Lords and then moved to the Supreme Court, but I suspect you saw the BBC programme which I thought was very good; it was controversial, some of my colleagues didn't think it was a good idea to expose ourselves to public view, better that we were anonymous cyphers administering the law, but those of us who took part didn't share that view, and I thought it was quite important to let the general public see that we were ordinary people living ordinary lives

16:29:21: I hadn't been in the Court of Appeal that long when I was asked to chair the enquiry into BSE, mad cow disease; my terms of reference were to report within a year, and that was hideous because as I went on it became perfectly obvious that I couldn't do it in a year; I had to go crawling back to them on two occasions asking for an extension; I found running this enquiry by far the most stressful thing I had ever done, I reckon I nearly had a breakdown; I was not sleeping at night, went to a hypnotist to try to get help with sleeping, I was depressed, and I think part of it was simply the pressure of time, trying to meet a deadline; we were looking at how Government had responded to this, whether there had been a cover-up, whether the way they had handled it was adequate, and this covered a period of ten years; we had to look at England, Wales, Northern Ireland, I think I had probably a hundred Ministers or ex-Ministers give evidence; we took evidence by people in groups rather like Parliamentary committees, it was an administrative challenge; I had about fifty young men and women, largely from Australia and New Zealand, having year out, working as paralegals, sifting documents; we had so many documents in the building we had to have it surveyed to make sure it wasn't going to be under stress; I was put under stress, really; I loved the science; it wasn't any part of our job to work out why cows had got this disease, but we did, by logic; the received wisdom of the Ministry of Agriculture was that it was because they had changed the way they rendered dead cattle, mincing them up at a low temperature, and that enable the prion or whatever it was to survive; I thought this cannot be right, and it wasn't right; our conclusion was that there was an initial case of this and then it was recycled over the years before it started to come out; anyway, I survived, but only just; Christylle was very worried, my family were worried, I would not accept another enquiry; it went on for nearly three years; in the end we gave a fairly clean bill of health to the Government; I remember I had a press conference at the end of it, and the first question was from Joshua Rosenberg asking why our report was such a whitewash; as I was nearing the end of that I was promoted to the House of Lords and the only case I sat on was Pinochet mark two, they had to hear the Pinochet appeal again because there had been a challenge to the first appeal on grounds of bias of one of the judges who had a connection with Amnesty, and had intervened; it was on whether General Pinochet was entitled to immunity as Spain were trying to extradite him; he had come to visit England, Spain then sought to extradite him, he said they couldn't as he had state immunity; we decided he hadn't, but then the Home Secretary said he was not fit and sent him home; it was a very interesting case, but the only one I sat on because I was then asked to become Master of the Rolls which meant going back to the Court of Appeal and presiding over the Civil Division there; it is a very old office, but currently the Master of the Rolls is head of the Civil Division of the Court of Appeal; most judges of the Court of Appeal also sit in the Criminal Division, but the Criminal Division will be made up of one judge from the Court of Appeal and two more junior judges; most of the work you are doing in the Court of Appeal is civil work, or maybe family work, sitting in courts of three; so back I went; while I had been away for three years there had been some very significant changes which I wasn't up to speed with; we had introduced the Human Rights Act and Lord Wolff had introduced a whole lot of reforms of civil proceedure, and all my colleagues had been trained in these but I had been too busy with mad cow disease, so it was quite frightening to suddenly find myself in this position; also I had done very little public law at all which is the major diet; I had a word with Lord Wolff and he said I would pick it up as I went along; from there I was then asked if I would like to be Lord Chief Justice; this was at the time of the constitutional changes, about abolishing the Lord Chancellor who was the Head of the Judiciary; in the end he wasn't abolished but all his judicial functions were taken away, so the roll of the Head of the Judiciary moved to the Lord Chief Justice as far as England and Wales was concerned; I didn't think of it in terms of power but the administrative responsibility was much wider, and also they transferred responsibility for the magistrates to the Lord Chief Justice; I wasn't actually dealing with appointments as they incidentally introduced commissions for judicial appointments, so instead of the Lord Chancellor doing it with guidance from his officials, now there is a new system whereby anyone who wants a judicial appointment, right up to the Supreme Court, had to apply, then interviewed, and then a commission with a majority of lay people on it would appoint; the whole system has changed; I didn't have any appointment under the new system, it was always technically the Lord Chancellor offering me the position, although I think when it came to President of the Supreme Court they went through the same motions as they would have been required to do if the Act had been in force; I think that they consulted all the people that the Constitutional Reform Act required to be consulted, including of course the serving members - the Law Lords as they then were; this was all done before the Supreme Court came into existence and my first year was as Senior Law Lord which carried with it automatic translation into being President of the Supreme Court; now there is an ad hoc commission that selects members of the Supreme Court; it is presided over by the President and then we have got independent Judicial Appointment Commissions for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, they provide one member each of the ad hoc commission for the Supreme Court, presided over by the President of the court, then there is one other senior judge; this is a recent change in my time; it is absolutely apolitical, from top to bottom all judicial appointments are apolitical; I did that for three years; the mandatory retirement age for me was seventy-five which was the retirement age when I was appointed to the Bench; I retired a few months early in order to have an orderly handover at the end of the judicial year

27:44:03: The issue of European law versus English Common Law is very topical and I am giving a lecture in Oxford next week about this very thing - the position of the Strasbourg Court; what happened was that all the members of the Council of Europe signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights; we signed up when signing the convention was an executive act of the Government; now Parliament is saying that we are saddled with this court but why should we take any notice of it, it's a derogation from sovereignty from our supremacy as Parliament, and of course it is, but it is one that this country voluntarily did for the general good; if you get a lot of countries that enter an agreement on the manner in which they will treat those who are in their territories they are derogating from their ability to treat them in a different way as a matter of international obligation; now there are elements in Westminster who are saying that Strasbourg is going too far and we ought to stop taking any notice of them, never mind that we will be breaching the United Kingdom's obligations under international law; as a matter of principal of international law, if you don't like it you should pull out of the treaty not simply disregard it; I sat on a joint parliamentary committee considering what Parliament should do with Strasbourg's decision that it's contrary to the convention to refuse all prisoners the vote; happily, the majority of us said we ought to have regard to our obligations under international law and Parliament should alter the law to give some prisoners the vote; whether Parliament will or will not remains to be seen, but that's our advice; there are two separate issues; first of all is Strasbourg a good thing, which I think it is even though I haven't agreed with all their decisions, but even if it is a bad thing, are we saddled with it unless we withdraw in a way that's consistent with our international obligations under the law

31:14:01: On the issue of evidence gained through torture being inadmissible in court, I entirely agree with Tom Bingham on that; Tom Bingham was a most wonderful man; he was head and shoulders above everybody else in my view; his clarity of thought, his academic knowledge, I think that almost everyone would say that he was the great lawyer of his generation; he was a great proponent of having a Supreme Court and it was just bad luck that he hit the age limit a couple of years too soon as he should have been the first President; apart from clarity of thought and knowledge, a great Judge needs wisdom, to be able to see everything in the round, his analysis of the rule of law and of it's importance has been a very valuable contribution; there are two aspects to the rule of law, first of all society runs by rules that are laid down which everyone has to comply with, and if you don't have the law which you can comply with you have chaos; but also there are some fundamental principles that I would say are part of the rule of law; the independence of the judiciary, for instance, principles of criminal law, that you have to prove people are guilty before convicted; I think Western thought would say there are some fundamental principles by which society should be ruled that one should observe, but that everyone is equal under the law is an important part of the rule of law; our law historically is customary so traditionally was not written down; you might argue, like the French, that all law is written down and that judges aren't allowed to make law; in our system, we can fill gaps; now most of the law is written down but some of it has it's origin in Common Law, but if there are gaps we can fill them just on our own say so; a good example is that it was a rule of Common Law that you couldn't be guilty of raping your wife, and overnight the courts exercised their Common Law powers to change that; a recent example was the Scientology case, and I was talking about it at King's College, London, two days ago; I was saying that lawyers give words a meaning which is influenced by the context in which words appear; here the context was a couple who wanted to be married according to the rites of Scientology which they believed in, and it was hard to think of any reason why they shouldn't be allowed to do so; so approaching this particular Statute you want to give religious worship as broad a meaning as possible; but Lord Toulson didn't attempt a definition, he did attempt a description, and his description took out God from the formula; you have got to believe in something that is insubstantial which you cannot prove exists; you have got to have faith in something; when I was thinking about it, religion can be defined in different ways, and Denning said you had got to be worshipping a God; it was a pretty awful task for any Judge to give a definition of religion, and Lord Toulson made it quite plain that he was defining it in the context of that particular Act which goes back to 1855, and the point of principle that he made was when you are describing or defining a "religion" from an Act of 1855, you do so through modern eyes, not through the eyes of the person who passed the Act; I think in that case he was right, but not axiomatic, that Denning when he gave his judgement fifty years earlier, assumed that this was what was expected by the people who wrote the Statute; despite the influx of people from many different background into this country, I don't think there general problems with the law, but you do get problems such as whether women should be prohibited from wearing the burka in certain situations; a big issue in France is whether women can wear the burka in public, which Strasbourg is going to have to consider; Switzerland, a ban on building mosques; I think the liberty of the individual is extremely important and you shouldn't interfere with that unless there is very good reason indeed; when I was Lord Chief Justice I had this problem, could I lay down some general principle about women witnesses, jurors or defendants, who wanted to be veiled and I chickened out; I said that the individual Judge has got to decide what the particular requirements of justice are in the particular case; this has always been our approach to law; you don't have to have a law which allows you to do something, you can do anything you like unless the law says you can't; I subscribe to the negative definition; the historical principals of equity were maintained, and there are rules of equity now which will be applied in any case; the Common Law has merged with the Law of Equity so there are equitable principles that one applies and I have seen them invented or developed in my lifetime; Lord Gough developed the principles of unjust enrichment and restitution which really are equitable principles, although I think he got his inspiration from German law

43:49:19: I think that anyone who is married to, or is a child of a lawyer, has got a pretty poor deal; it tends to invade your life to an unhealthy extent, and I am conscious of how I became more introverted; if you talk to Christylle she would say that I had really given up conversation; I have tried to reverse that, but I think I am quite a silent person; I don't think I am as chatty with my grandchildren as some people would be; I think the family matters so much and I am blessed with mine, my children and my grandchildren, I think they are all marvellous; there is no individual member of my family that I am at odds with which is not always the case; when I look at the interests of my colleague I think I am quite narrow; I like outdoor activities, but I don't read nearly enough, and still feel guilty if I spend an hour reading a novel