John Machin

John Machin interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 24th May 2013 and continued 6th August 2014
0:05:07 Born in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, in 1941; my family has been in Nottinghamshire since the eighteenth century and were yeoman farmers around Eakring; they seem to have been fairly radical and got into trouble, particularly with the local vicar; one of the records of the Archdeaconry of Nottingham shows an ancestor caught in the act of fornication with a girl he later married; the Vicar of Eakring nevertheless insisted that they appear before the congregation to seek forgiveness; over a period of a couple of centuries the family made a series of fortunate marriages through which they acquired freehold land and money; my great-great grandfather, Henry Machin, inherited part of the Gateford estate outside Worksop where I was brought up; he enlarged it considerably, and together with my great-grandfather, built himself a substantial house which is now an old people's home; two of my brothers still live on the estate; I only knew my paternal grandmother but she died when I was in my first or second term at the Dragon School; she was an extraordinary woman because she was widowed in 1919, just after my father was born; she lived in this enormous house with no electricity, no running water, and three children; she had to struggle on not just in the between-war years with diminishing resources, but also throughout the war; she became paranoid about Hitler and expected the invasion at any minute; the result of that was that she retreated to the cellar of the house with a camp bed, got in huge quantities of Ovaltine and Horlicks, and made sure she had a copy of the Farmers Weekly delivered every week; she survived there with an oil lamp for the best part of the war but emerged on Tuesdays in a Girl Guide uniform and on Thursdays in a W.V.S uniform, and set off into Worksop to do her duty as a citizen; by the time I was in Mrs Vassall's house at the Dragon in about the spring of 1950, I certainly remember going to see her; she said she hoped to come to see me at the school, but she feared she would not; she died in the summer of 1950; the news was broken to me by Mrs Vassall herself, who summoned me down to her drawing room; she told me granny had died, and was obviously expecting me to burst into tears; I just thanked her and said I had been expecting it
7:35:16 My mother's father was ultimately Vicar of Benson in Oxfordshire; her side of the family in contrast to my father's tended to be scholarly and theological; the family name was Pryce; my great-grandmother who married the Dean of Bangor, John Pryce, was the daughter of a distinguished Welsh theologian, Rowland Williams; his son, also called Rowland Williams, was a distinguished Fellow of King's but ultimately tried for heresy and had to appeal to the Privy Council and was acquitted; he was a correspondent with a theologian called Bunsen in Germany, and there were Darwin connections as well; I think he is my most distinguished ancestor; it was said that if he had not been swimming against the tide he would have been a bishop or the head of an Oxbridge college; my great-grandfather, John Pryce, had two brothers, one was Dean of St Asaph in North Wales and the other was a rector on Anglesey but died before he could progress further; they themselves were the sons of a shopkeeper in Dolgellau, worked their way through Dolgellau Grammar School and all got to universities on scholarships; my great-grandfather was the eldest; the next, Shedrach, went to Queens' Cambridge, and Hugh went to Pembroke; John went to Jesus College, Oxford; obviously the scholarships of the younger ones can't have been as large as my great-grandfather's because as soon as he left Oxford he went back and taught at Dolgellau Grammar School for the specific purpose of financing the others through university; I am rather impressed by that
11:48:22 My parents were very different; when they met, my mother was a teacher at the Dragon School; she was living in Benson where my grand-father had been the vicar although both her parents had died by then; she rented Mulberry Cottage, which is still there; this was 1938-9; my father had just joined the Air Force as a young flying officer; he was mad about motor cars and had a Bentley tourer which he had almost rebuilt himself; he was going back to the air base at Benson when the car ran out of fuel; he had stopped outside my mother's house and in the time that it took for a friend to come from the base to collect him, he had invited my mother to a dance at the base three nights later; he also said he would call at the Dragon school the next day, and although my mother said that was not possible he flew a Lancaster bomber low over the playing fields instead; everybody took to the air raid shelters and there must have been some kind of repercussion; the upshot was that they were married within five weeks, during the phony war period in 1939; they were utterly different in personality but got on perfectly well together; my mother was in fact some nine years older than my father, the truth of which she never divulged till the day she died; I think she admitted being two years older than him; then while she was in Canada visiting her sisters, my father told me that she had been at university while he was still at prep school; he had discovered her birth certificate; he never told her that he knew but they played an extraordinary game of cat and mouse, where both knew the other knew, but neither would confess it; my mother had wanted to go to Oxford so she could live at home, but instead went to Bangor where her aunt and uncle lived and stayed with them; she read classics; she then taught at Victoria Girls College on Jersey, and ultimately taught Latin and English to the lower forms at the Dragon - E Block as we remember it; she was called Ma Pryce; Michael Gover taught my son Hugo there; occasionally Hugo would tell him he had made a mistake and Gover replied that it was because he had been taught by his grandmother; probably to her surprise she was very good at being a mother, both to us and my father, who was mildly chaotic; considering that she came to maternity quite late in life and then had four sons, she managed on very limited resources to create a very happy family life; I only realized how happy it was when I have spoken to other people about it; one so easily takes one's own domestic happiness for granted, particularly at that age; I was particularly impressed when Bishop Snape came up to me at the Dragon recently, whom we used to have to stay in the holidays, and said that they were wonderful times; it was very much due to both of them, but my mother managed the household very well; she was almost a total stranger to vanity although Ella Wadelin, Joc's secretary, said that my mother was always the best-dressed member of staff; my father very much missed having a father; he died three years after having married late in life, aged about sixty-two; it was an absolute disaster for my father because he was then completely surrounded by women - his mother and two sisters, and a bevy of maiden aunts; my grandmother was over-indulgent and far too inclined to see my father as being delicate with the result that he had a desultory education; he went to Bilton Grange prep school, but he had scarlet fever and my grandmother decided it was unhealthy for him to be there; we can understand that to pull a child out of prep school when he is settling is the cruellest thing you can decide to do; I have always found his educational history quite difficult to follow; he was down to go to Rugby or Eton, but as far as I understand it he never actually went to either; he was then sent to a ghastly school in North Wales which subsequently closed down; it was one of these dreadful schools in a country house for boys whose parents didn't know what to do with them; it was run by men and women, usually retired army officers, who did not have any learning at all but were only interested in pushing them through the system; when he left I know that it was intended that he should come to Emmanuel, Cambridge; that my grandmother was consistent about as my grandfather had been a keen Emma man and had put him down for it as you could in those days; he came up to Emmanuel, and in those days you had to take something called "little go" which was the equivalent of five 'O' levels, but he had a disastrous weakness in Latin, so failed; if he had come it would probably have been the making of him; he had a very good engineering, mathematical mind; one of the serious criticisms I have of my grandmother was that he wanted to do one or two perfectly sensible career things, like a Rolls Royce apprenticeship because he was brilliant with engines; she wouldn't let him as she wanted him to farm the family farm; he was forced into doing that which he didn't particularly like, though he was good enough at it; when I first became aware of him I realize in retrospect that he was undisciplined and found it very difficult running or organizing anything; my mother could not do that as well though she tried it on occasions; it was very sad; he was a very kind man, everybody liked him and he meant well, but he was unable to set a standard of industry and accomplishment; he never discouraged me from doing what I wanted
29:54:10 The first distinct memory I have is being herded off into an air raid shelter; German bombers used to fly over us on the way to bomb Sheffield; the air raid warnings use to sound and there was a curious brick and concrete air raid shelter outside our back door at Raymouth Farm, which no longer exists, which was outside Worksop, where we were living; I am pretty certain I remember buzz bombs, Hitler's last weaponry; it was about that time that I found my mother's dog dead under a haystack; shortly after there was an extraordinary episode; it was harvest time on the farm, and in those days old farm labourers used to come back to help; brilliant old Tommy Rothwell came and I remember going down to the farmyard where they were threshing the corn and the stooks were being put into the barn; I saw a great crowd round the straw cart and distinctly remember seeing Tommy lying on the cart, his face ashen and eyes closed, obviously dead; I suppose I was five at the time; there was a curious sequel to that; firstly he had two incredibly bright daughters who had got from the local primary school to Retford Grammar School; everybody predicted a great future for them but the family finances were such that they had to stay; one married locally and when I was called to the Bar I had to go to Sheffield to do a number of undefended divorces; I picked up the brief the night before and noted on the marriage certificate that it was née Rothwell; the marriage had lasted about twelve years which was really pretty good because the extent of their incompatibility couldn't have been clearer; I always think it was a pity that she wasn't born ten or twenty years later because things might have been very different

34:49:03 I was sent to the Dragon from Worksop as my mother had insisted that we went there; prior to that all was managed to accomplish that objective; we were sent to what was called the Dame school, run by Miss Branson who lived with her bachelor vicar brother, her spinster sister who took the Girl Guides, and their widowed mother; she ran this kindergarten which was by understatement, pretty average; in discussion with friends who were there with me, one of the difficulties we all encountered was that she absolutely hated little boys, though she very much liked the girls; I am sure that we had to do some kind of test before we went to the Dragon, and I was very lucky to have gone there at all because by the age of seven and a half I could hardly read or write; the first time I ever wrote with a fountain pen was at the Dragon; however, my mother had taught me Latin and because of that I was a bit ahead of everybody else and was put into Lower 3 where all the bright sparks went; I might have been a brilliant classicist but the fact was I could hardly read or write; I was taught by Ma Pugh-Thomas; it is not surprising that I was shortly after marched across the playground to Lower 7, Rosemary Mumford's class, and a very nice person and encouraging; my brother Henry made an interesting remark about the Dragon the other day, saying that we were very lucky in the Dragon staff, apropos my father, because we needed a different type or role model; that is the truth; the person that he identified as being the most important role model at the Dragon was Teddy Hicks; we were both in his house; he was an extraordinarily versatile man, something of a polymath; he very nearly made an attempt at Everest before the war but forbidden by Hum from doing so; he painted the scenery for the plays, he did the sailing, swimming in the river, and was actually a very good teacher too; I think he took Upper 5, one of those fairly high upper forms; he had also been a prisoner-of-war right through the war; he was my house master at 14 Bardwell Road; when I arrived at the Dragon I was lucky enough to go into Mrs Vassall's house, a starter house, and must have been there a year before going to Teddy Hick's, but that was utterly without the hazing ritual as everybody was the same age and had arrived at the same time so there was no hierarchy; I remember being homesick but we all were; I remember waking up on my first morning and thinking that at least I was near Benson which my mother had talked about, though what use that could have been I don't know; both Mrs Vassall and Matron, Mrs Donald, who by coincidence was a distant cousin, were both very kind to me; everybody was very nice to the new boys; I remember a slight terror when school proper started; I can almost remember the first day hour by hour; I think the first assembly of the first term was in the New Hall because Jock read out all the names in all the forms; there was a boy called John Price and I wondered if he thought my name was Price, and I got into a terrible panic about that; in the end the name Machin emerged, much to my relief; the games all seemed a bit awesome to start with; I think I was taken for rugger by Yatto Yeats who was perfectly nice but seemed absolutely terrifying as a personality; like so many of them they were absolutely charming as one grew older but one simple wasn't used to being shouted at by grown-ups, men or women, in any kind of context at all; I found that really rather distressing; I was lucky when I arrived because it was a very gentle introduction; the first thing was that my parents and I were invited to tea by Hum and Mrs Hum Lynam in the School House drawing room; as my mother had been on the staff it was a matter of courtesy; I thought Hum looked a nice old chap and I thought that the gentleness at the school would be the same as that emitted by him at the time; all I can remember of him was standing on the fender in School House drawing room and rocking backwards and forwards; I noticed when we went into prayers in the old hall two days later that Jock did exactly the same thing, which I thought very odd; I was not a Jock favourite, and there were such things; he was rather a remote figure to me; I came across him in School House and when I was a school prefect; I liked him and admired him; he ran that school extraordinarily well in most respects; one never realizes exactly how much he had to do behind the scenes but he was a prodigiously hard worker; my only criticism of him was that unless you were a good games player he wasn't really that interested, and wasn't really terribly interested in the scholars; when Henry was stooging at the Dragon, a boy got the top scholarship to Winchester; he was a day-boy as most of the top scholars were because they were Don's sons; Jock had to ask Henry to point the boy out to him, which was a reflection of his priorities; I ran a jazz band called 'The Mocking Birds' which I had started it with Gerd Sommerhoff as I could play the piano accordion; I think it was regarded as being a good thing, making a bit of a diversion at the school dances and keeping us out of mischief; there was a school debate on whether classical or pop music was better; I proposed the motion for pop and Jock asked me later why I had done such a silly thing, which struck me as odd as it was argued for in a debate; it was also odd as he used to play drums at school dances with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth; I was beaten by Jock several times; there was that extraordinary ritual that would horrify one now; the ritual was that you would knock on the door, always late because you were so nervous; summoned in, one would be blown up for being late, and told how many strokes you would get and asked what you wanted to be beaten by - "Charley chair leg","Horace hockey stick" or a black gym shoe called "Black Death"; I think if you were wise you chose "Black Death"; I don't think I ever got more than three, though there were people like John Snape who regularly got six; the idea of it now with boys of that age, is absolutely primitive, incomprehensible; what I don't understand about this, there were wives, daughters, they can't have not known what was going on; I know we are living in the aftermath of all these ghastly children's homes cases but it is not a dissimilar situation; what was everybody doing to allow all this to go on?
52:21:18 What I liked about the Dragon was the encouragement I got to do more or less what I wanted to do and to do better than otherwise I might have done in the subjects that I liked; I liked the relative freedom; I still find it absolutely astonishing at how restrictive and constrictive life was at other preparatory schools; I liked the friendliness of most of the staff and I like the eccentricity; there were one or two members of staff who were particularly kind - David Parnwell, for example, whom we kept in touch with almost until the day he died; clearly most of the staff went the extra mile for us, which is evidenced in them spending so much time doing holiday activities; when I was at the Dragon one of the most interesting things I did was not at school at all but when I went to help at the Oxford and Bermondsey Camp at Halls Green in Kent; I went at least once with Rowley, my younger brother, and enjoyed it very much because these Bermondsey boys had never been out of London or actually experienced total darkness; one of the things we did was to take them out into the Kentish countryside and they were astonished by it; another thing that surprised me was that they seemed quite strange to any relatively adult men evincing any kind of friendship towards them; I had always thought that the East End was the friendliest place on earth, but not at all; I was told the other day by Hugh Drake who also did this camp, that he took one or two of them to stay at his house as his parents lived in Kent; they had never seen such a large house in all their lives, let alone been in one; a week later these two lads with three or four others turned up at the door; they had hitch-hiked from London just to show their friends this remarkable place
28:01:18 Public school after the Dragon was a bit of a let-down; I think inevitably the Dragon brings one on so much further than most other prep schools that when you go to your Public school there is a sense in which one finds most of one's contemporaries really quite immature; one of the interesting things is that Westminster, where I went, had exactly the same effect in relation to universities; because of its position in central London and because it is a liberal, intelligent, lively school, people who went from Westminster in my time to Oxford and Cambridge said that they found the first year undergraduates incredibly immature; I don't think it is a criticism, just a fact, but unsurprising, both in the case of the Dragon and of Westminster; I found the first year at Westminster really pretty tedious and I stood still if not actually went backwards; it seemed very rigid in comparison with the Dragon, but probably liberal in comparison with other schools; as with most institutions, it improved as one went along; I didn't really start to enjoy it until my third year; I never made quite the same number of friends as I did at the Dragon; one of the criticisms made by many of the Westminster staff of the Dragons was that we never got over it and thought it much better than Westminster; this was true up to the sixth form but then they got over it; I was bullied slightly at the Dragon by someone who became a boy hero too young; I think he was perfectly well-meaning and nice but because the Dragon had a very strong sporting ethos the staff over-admired him; he was always the person they would talk to about how many runs he had made and tries he'd scored, and he seemed to be in all the teams at 11 or 12; inevitably it went slightly to his head, and in that kind of institution he had lots of acolytes who did nothing to stop him; I can't remember why he bullied me but I remember Joc Lynam intervening; he asked if he was bullying me and I said I thought he was slightly; he told me to tell him to stop it and that he had spoken to me, as he didn't want to chip in if he could avoid it; I did so and that was the end of it
1:02:10:13 At Westminster I enjoyed music and rowing, I was not a ball game player but I played a tiny bit of fives; I played the clarinet; I think one of the most valuable assets I acquired from Westminster was that I learnt to appreciate good music very young; I also began to develop an appreciation for art; the benefit of a school in London is that you have access to the concert halls and galleries, and indeed to libraries; there was some arrangement whereby we used to go to the Warburg Institute; not so much a benefit conferred by the school but the situation of the school; for that I was very grateful; I did make some good friends, and there was the rowing that I was not particularly good at but enjoyed very much; it got one out of central London and down to Putney and I enjoyed being on the river, the camaraderie, and the regattas, and rowing behind Dan Mackenzie of this college [King’s, Cambridge]; it was a different kind of rowing in those days; the boat house at Westminster, like those of Oxbridge colleges and other rowing schools, was almost Edwardian; they had old-fashioned things like boatmen who greased one's oars; that all changed when they had fibreglass boats, but I just saw the end of that era; not the least of the pleasure was that one had quite a long journey from Westminster by tube to Putney and had many good conversations on the journey with friends there and back; the debating I did was really at the Dragon and that was when I first learnt to get on my feet and found that I liked it; there were some good debaters, not least Michael Beloff; I think I was secretary which was a total sinecure of a position; there was not a good debating society at Westminster though there were some very learned and stimulating societies; there was the Political and Literary Society, now called the John Locke, and that stimulated a lot of very stimulating and useful discussion; whilst it didn't teach one to think on one's feet, it certainly taught one to think; drama is far better now than it was then because one of the problems that still confronted it was that it had been bombed out, and there were very limited theatre facilities; the only serious play that ever took place when I was there was the Latin play; since I was hardly a classicist I never participated, and since the Latin was so complicated, when there was a joke the Latin master held up a staff with a pink ribbon on it and we were all supposed to laugh
1:07:39:07 I was prepared for prepared for confirmation by the school chaplain called Michael Stancliffe; he actually made an effort to prepare us for confirmation which was impressive, and he did engage in a certain amount of theological discourse which I found quite interesting; I am, I suppose, a sort of Christian now, but then one couldn't help being impressed, particularly at Westminster and the Abbey being one's chapel; Michael Stancliffe was an outstanding chaplain and subsequently became Dean of Salisbury and Rector of St Margaret's Westminster in between; however I am bound to say that one did it for convention because it was the thing to do; it is inescapable in retrospect, a rite of passage; whether if I were to start with a clean sheet now at my age I would be confirmed again, I rather doubt; I do go to church now, but I hadn't been to church for about twenty years in spite of living at Southwell for most of our married life; the reasons for my church-going don't do me much credit; in the first place I went to church after school because when I was reading for the Bar in London I lived at an extraordinary clergy house, a high-church bachelor establishment where I got bed, breakfast and dinner for £5 a week - I was at the Middle Temple; the reason one paid so little was that one had to be a server; being high-church I only the slightest idea what to do having once watched a Roman Catholic service on the television; that was certainly religion of necessity; it still is because our local church is practically in our garden and I have to have the key and am the lay rector; that has no religious significance but only means that you are responsible for the repair of the chancel so have to keep up your insurance premiums with the ecclesiastical insurers; I am not actively hostile to religion at all and have always maintained an open mind about it; at the same time I can't pretend for a minute that I do much more than the bare minimum; the congregation is a valuable local social resource; I would not countenance becoming a lay reader
1:13:23:12 By the Lower Sixth I was really beginning to get interested in history; as with my father, there was a tacit pressure on me to farm so there was an attempt to make a scientist of me; it was about two terms before I took 'O' level that I was having a long discussion with Jeremy Noakes, my best friend at both the Dragon and Westminster; he was going to be a modern linguist and he decided that he wouldn't be, and I decided that I wouldn't be a scientist, and both decided to become historians; so it was that we went into the history sixth; Jeremy became a very good historian and is now one of the leading authorities on the Third Reich; I did history and English to 'A' level and I think if I had my time again I would like to have tried a bit harder at English; I remain an extremely interested historian; when I was at the Bar I didn't do what the present Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, did right through his time at the Bar and perhaps still does - take 'History Today' every week; my history master was Charles Keeley, and history at Westminster was very good; what I particularly liked about Charles was that he ran the department as if it was an Oxbridge tutorial; we almost used Oxbridge terminology; what was so good about him was that I seriously lacked confidence for scholarly activity, and he encouraged me; he had this way of spotting when you needed encouragement; I remember my first day in the history sixth; we used to do a thing called topics basically to get one in shape for the Oxbridge general paper; I recently re-read the essay I did and it was the most ghastly thing you have ever seen - but he had asked me to read it in class and said it showed a lot of promise, which I have never forgotten; Charles Keeley was a bachelor, he was at Maidstone Grammar School, his father was level-crossing keeper; he got an open scholarship in history to New College, got a first, and applied to Christ Church for a studentship; Keeley told us that the most important lesson he would ever teach us was that when you are introduced to a Christ Church Don never say "pleased to meet you I'm sure"; he never completed a D.Phil. there, but was offered a job at Westminster and stayed there his whole working life; he produced some fairly remarkable people, Nigel Lawson, for instance; one of the very important influences was being taught in that architectural environment; we were taught in a room in the library which was in Ashburnham House which had been designed by Inigo Jones; the room looked out over Little Dean's Yard; we didn't sit at desks but round a table with Charles Keeley; it was really simply a perpetual debate; that was the subject I liked best and remains so; I got English, history and Latin at 'A' level; the whole university thing was a total disaster because I could never pass 'O' level maths; I had got a place to read history at Emmanuel here - fortunately the Middle Temple didn't require maths so that wasn't a problem - but I hit this extraordinary problem that I was doing my Bar exams and still taking 'O' level maths; I think Emmanuel kept my place open for two years by which time I was very close to taking Bar finals; the history tutor wanted me to go there as did the Master, Edward Wellbourne, so my place was kept open; I got within one or two marks of a pass but in the end I decided not to go there as I would be getting too old; it is rather absurd to be an ancient undergraduate who by then may be a qualified barrister as well; at that time one was allowed to go straight to the Inns of Court though it is not the case now; it was a system which was immensely beneficial to some people because in those days there were people who could not afford to go to university and you got people going to the Bar who were immensely valuable to it - people like Rufus Isaacs and Patrick Hastings, neither of whom went to university; Rufus Isaacs had been in the Stock Exchange and then read for the Bar, because you could almost do it by post provided you ate your dinners as well; it was difficult and unstimulating, but those sorts of people did it like that; of course, being called to the Bar never guarantees any success at it; it is simply not a question of passing exams; you have got to be competent, and you won't go to the Supreme Court unless you are absolutely brilliant academically; at the same time, you won't make much progress at the Bar if all you have done is be a successful examinee; I think that applies to almost anything; I have interviewed people for Chambers who are absolutely brilliant, but you will never be successful unless you can engage with people properly; if you can't do that you can't be an advocate
1:28:03:91 There is more to eating dinners now but the system of education at the Bar is slightly more subtle; you have got to know enough law to know where to look for it so the Bar exams themselves are very wide-ranging; I think there were about six or seven papers of fourteen parts; they began with Roman Law and the last paper one took was divorce one half and international law the other half, and between that all the rest - crime, contract, tort and so on; that qualifies you to seek a pupillage; in my day there were Part I papers consisting of about eight parts and then there were the finals as I described; I think you could probably do these within two years if you worked flat out; you had lectures and supervisions, so very like university, but the critical part at the Bar, once you had been called, is the pupillage; it is like an apprenticeship and is very intense; you are attached to a barrister of about seven years standing who had got well established and is expected to do well; I had two pupil masters, both became judges, one was Chairman of the Bar; you sit with them in their room, have unlimited access to their papers, you write opinions as if you were writing opinions for a solicitor, they read it and if it is a really good opinion they will have it typed and signed; that is the way it works and is a superb system, provided it isn't abused; the trouble is that as with every system there are abusers and there are some very bad barristers and bad chambers who will take pupillage fees but don't have enough work of the right kind to be able to teach; it may be more strictly regulated now; you do a pupillage for not less than one year; you go to court and watch them in action; my pupil masters would expect me to take full notes of their cross-examinations which they could use; being a pupil is the best bit of it because you are in that wonderful half-way stage of not having the responsibility of the result of the case or the way it is managed, but at the same time being intimately involved with it; it is a wonderful way of teaching; I was very lucky as I had marvellous pupil masters whom I think transformed me; I don't think I would have made much at the Bar if it hadn't been for them; at the end of the pupillage you have got to go somewhere; you are not guaranteed a tenancy in chambers and have to apply for that as a separate application; towards the end of your pupillage you write a formal letter to the head of chambers and they will hold a chambers meeting; all the chambers where you were a pupil will have had their ear to the ground about what other people think of you who have seen you in action - you go into court in your second six months - and they see whether you will fit in; most importantly, your pupil master will have written a long letter and had several discussions with the head of chambers; then the whole thing will be completely ventilated in a chambers' meeting which will consider your application; if they won't take you on you will have to look somewhere else; it gets tricky as you can then start going down the ladder to very bad sets of chambers and you are almost better finding something else to do; I was taken on in my second set of chambers

Interview continued 6th August 2014
0:05:07 A Judge's Marshal is the equivalent of an A.D.C. to a High Court judge and you go with him on circuit for a period of a month or two, usually at the time that you are awaiting the results of your Bar final; I went with Mr Justice Milmo on the Northern Circuit in midwinter to Carlisle and Lancaster; we nearly had to go to Appleby which is on the Northern Circuit but Appleby only has about one Assize case every two years so they usually don't sit there; on this occasion Mr Justice Milmo - who interviewed Philby, unsuccessfully, on one occasion - rather insisted on going to Appleby; in the end he was dissuaded because there weren't any judge’s lodgings in Appleby and it would have meant the vicar being turned out of the vicarage and the village hall being turned into an Assize court; everybody thought it was not a good idea at that time of year, so the case was sent down to Lancaster; it was an interesting experience; it enabled a young barrister, such as I was, who had not been in court much before, to sit with a judge and learn how his mind worked, and more importantly one saw some of the top silks on the Northern Circuit performing because the judge only tried murders and very heavy cases; Rose Heilbron was on one case, and was almost the first silk I ever saw in action; the judge asked one's opinion more out of politeness than anything else, but one dined with him and had to organise his dinner parties and things; he was not himself a criminal lawyer but had come from the Defamation Bar, so he would ask what was the law on murder, and so you’d look it up and write a note for him, and was slightly disconcerted to hear one's words repeated word for word in his direction to the jury; it was a very valuable exercise and I wish really that more Bar students were able to do it; they do it now in a way more widely, with Circuit and High Court judges; the trouble is that there are more people who want to do it than there are vacancies; some judges don't like taking marshals anyway, but it is valuable and the judge is often a friend for life as well; I could always ring him up if I had a serious problem about something that he thought he could help me with; it is probably now called mentoring, and I'm sure all the terminology has changed; Mr Justice Milmo's clerk called Edward Hainsby; he asked me what I was going to do about pupillage; I said I hadn't thought about it except that I wanted to go on the Midland Circuit because it was local, and I'd like to have six months in London then six months in Nottingham; he said that he knew Terry Barnard who was Mr Arthur James's clerk, who was head of a good set of Midland chambers in the Temple; he said he would have a word with him and that I would hear from Mr James - he subsequently became Lord Justice James; he wrote to me to come to Nottingham Assizes where he was doing a civil case a fortnight hence; I went and saw him in the robing room; he suggested I went with Desmond Fennell - he was later the High Court judge who did the King's Cross enquiry; he was also in the robing room and agreed to take me as a pupil in London; Mr James then asked Dennis Cowley who was head of the Nottingham chambers, who was also in the robing room, if he would take me for the second six months and he also agreed; nowadays you have to go for pupillage interviews, you are interviewed by panels, you take tests, your academic results are looked at, the idea of that kind of thing could possibly happen now would cause absolute scandal and outrage; it was not patronage as such, though technically they got 50 guineas; the head of chambers got nothing; pupillages are free once you have got one but what happens is that you eventually get work for them; the system is that a pupil has unfettered access to the pupil master's papers with implied absolute confidentiality; I saw all sorts of papers of Desmond Fennell's which I could never talk about, very interesting and some never prosecuted which some might say should have been; what you do, particularly with the civil papers, is to do them as if they were your own; so you draft an indictment, write an opinion, draft a statement of claim, and you deal with the papers as you are invited to by the solicitors in draft; then your pupil master, just like a school master or tutor, goes through it and lets you have it back with comments and criticisms; the great aim of the pupil is for his work to be used without being corrected by the pupil master; once that starts to happen you know you are beginning to make progress; it is an invaluable process because it gives you confidence if you do it well and your pupil master inevitably becomes your role model; you begin to develop the style of your pupil master; the pupillage lasts from twelve to eighteen months; you can quite easily do eighteen months if in your first six months you don't get on in the area of practice where you are a pupil; suppose you go into criminal chambers and find you don't like it but really want to be a Chancery practitioner, you would try to get a pupillage in Lincoln's Inn where the Chancery are; then you have to do another year really because you can't dramatically change your discipline; as it happened to me, I was going to a general Common Law practice, six months London, six months Nottingham; it was in your second six months you were allowed to begin to take work and go into court as a barrister, which was pretty nerve-racking; I remained a barrister for the best part of twenty years; after that you start sitting as a judge, and again that system has entirely changed in the terms of the way it is managed and how one is selected; you can practice as a barrister once you have done your pupillage; there was a move to say that you couldn't even be called to the Bar until you have done your pupillage, but that hasn't happened
12:47:09 My goal initially was to make a living because that can't be taken for granted; you are essentially a consultant professional and depend on solicitors for your work; Mr Justice Milnow CHECK used to talk admiringly in 1965 about knowing somebody who had made £1000 in his first year as a member of the Bar; that would be unthinkably absurd now; the first year or so is tricky because you may do frightfully well and get lots of cases and earn a lot of money; but solicitors are notoriously slow payers and are almost always at least six months in arrears, so you can't expect to earn anything really for your first year; so one's initial goal is to make a living; you can't even think about getting married or buying a house; there wasn't an official bar to marrying early but there was certainly a convention that, on the whole, you didn't get married until you got a tenancy, that is a place in a set of chambers; you might find yourself at the end of a pupillage rejected by those chambers and would have to look elsewhere; without a tenancy you are in trouble and may have to go into government legal departments or into a commercial company as a paid lawyer, but you can't practice as a barrister unless you have got into a set of chambers; fortunately in my second Nottingham set I was offered a place at the end of my pupillage, so I was straight into practising the day my pupillage ended; I married within six months; it was a relief as some people's lives were brought to a grinding halt if things didn't work out at that stage of their careers; fortunately, they did and we all lived happily ever after
16:40:01 The main work of a criminal barrister is prosecuting for the Crown and defending for the defendants; such a barrister more than any other spends the whole of his life in court, day in day out; in other branches a barrister will go into court possibly once a week, but not as a rule because he will be spending a lot of time advising, achieving settlements in civil cases, having conferences with people, and so on; it can be quite a gruelling existence as a criminal barrister for quite a long time; you have to read a lot of cases, a lot of work overnight because cases will suddenly come into court and you would receive the brief late; Sue and the children didn't see very much of me for quite a long time in the evenings; you come out of court at 4.30pm and if you have conferences, with the police if you are prosecuting, or a defendant, these all take place between 5-7pm, so you don't really start work until you get home at 7.30pm, preparing for the next day's work which might be in Newcastle, for instance; it is a five day week; the way people used to manage was always to have Saturday off, but you really had to start again by Sunday afternoon, and that was the routine; everybody got used to it
19:06:05 When prosecuting, the question of whether you believe in the guilt of a person or not is bound to affect you because your doubts would inevitably arise from the state of the evidence; they wouldn't arise at the start of a case because you probably wouldn't start prosecuting it at all if you had doubts about it; what can and does happen is that suddenly a witness will go into the witness box and completely contradict themselves, which will raise doubt and undermine your case, and you then clearly have a duty to drop it; the procedure then is, as the judge and the solicitor will be perfectly aware what has happened, that the jury will be asked to retire and agreement reached with the judge and solicitor to dismiss the case; if you are instructed by someone who unreasonably prosecutes cases, or want to prosecute cases that are not going to succeed and you refuse to take the case, you will probably lose their patronage, but that is just the price you have to pay; I have been fortunate that if that has happened others have filled the gap; you usually find that such people have a reputation and it is the younger and less experienced members of the Bar that get landed with them; the CPS people who want to prosecute vigorously on slender evidence are usually people who will never be advised whether they should or shouldn't; these poor young barristers get up and even before the jury is empanelled the judge will ask whether he has a case to which he will answer that he is instructed to prosecute; then there is a dilemma as they have their instructions to prosecute; they know, left to themselves, they wouldn't prosecute, and the judge is saying they shouldn't; I suspect the only thing they can do is to limp on and wait for the judge to throw the thing out at the end of the prosecution case as he's not going to leave it to the jury; in the end, these lunatics who insist on prosecuting get a reputation in their own department so are not trusted to do the cases; but it is a long and tedious process and it demonstrates the tensions between different interests and between the prosecution and defence of a particular case; on corruption, I came across one pressure which came from an unusual source, but it is probably the only one, and inevitably it was a commercial pressure; it concerned my clerk who in many respects was very good because he promoted the commercial interests of his barristers which is one of the things a clerk is expected to do; the only pressure I ever felt resulted in my being instructed in a case in which I was told the solicitors had clearly said I had got to fight as they had criminal clients who just wanted a scrap; I went to court on the first day of the Assizes; the judge was Mr Justice Lane, subsequently Lord Lane of St Ippollitts, Lord Chief Justice, and I went down to the cells and all these defendants had talked among themselves and decided since it was in front of Mr Justice Lane who was a well-known toughy, they would all plead guilty; the solicitor who was insisting that they should all fight didn't come to court but gave instructions over the phone to the clerk who would then send his office boy to sit behind counsel which was unsatisfactory; so I couldn't talk to him or to anybody about it, but they wanted to plead guilty, there was plenty of evidence, and I would certainly have advised them to plead guilty left to myself, but I had this instruction in the back of my mind that no way should they be allowed to; anyway, they pleaded guilty as it was what they wanted to do, and in my view their instruction prevailed over everybody else's; anyway I got back to chambers and there had been a terrific row; the solicitor who had insisted on pleading guilty had heard about it and said he would never instruct me again; from the clerk's point of view he was a very valuable solicitor and I got into trouble about it; I was quite young then and went to Head of Chambers who supported my action, I had done the right thing and should forget about it; no one has ever offered me money for favours
28:07:03 I had not thought of any kind of activity as a judge although at the back of my mind I did think I would do so eventually; I was prosecuting a case of falsely claimed agricultural subsidies in Nottingham, instructed by a man from the Ministry of Agriculture; we talked about rearing partridges before the case actually started; sometime afterwards I got a letter from the Ministry of Agriculture saying that there was a vacancy for someone to sit on the Agricultural Land Tribunal for the Eastern region; because the family have a farm and I know a bit about farming I thought it would be a way to make a gentle start in judicial work; it was in those circumstances that I started; I went off deciding on cases between agricultural landlords and tenants all over East Anglia, and it was great fun; then the time came inevitably when somebody said wasn't it time for me to sit as a Recorder; it wouldn't happen in this way now because all that happened then was a judge said it was time I sat as an assistant Recorder and was he at liberty to say something to someone; I agreed and about a year later - it is an immensely long process - I was summoned to be interviewed, half-way up the Victoria Tower in the Lord Chancellor's department in the Palace of Westminster; I thought something might happen but nothing did for another year when I got a letter announcing that I was now an Assistant Recorder; that is a bit of a watershed; if you make a mess of it you have had it, and I'm afraid to say that some people do; one grits one's teeth and it is always the first two or three cases one tries that are the most nerve-racking; eventually I became a Recorder - unlike a judge, a Recorder is a part-time role so you continue in practice, and sit as a Recorder for twenty days a year minimum; as an assistant Recorder you are very much on trial for a Recordership; you can be "stood down" as an assistant Recorder at any time without notice; a Recorder is appointed for five years, then your recordership is or isn't renewed; I had been appointed a full-time judge before the end of my first five years in 1997; that is what I remained until I retired; I was a Circuit Judge on the Midland circuit, or rather it was the Midland Circuit when I joined it as a barrister, it then amalgamated with the Oxford Circuit and became the Midland and Oxford Circuit, then much to the chagrin of the Oxford Circuit which always considered itself much grander than we, the name Oxford was dropped altogether; actually the circuit amalgamation was great fun because we got all the Oxford Circuit courts, and also we used to use Christ Church dining hall and things like that for Bar mess dinners, which was a great perk
33:50:14 One starts off as a circuit judge in three jurisdictions - family, civil and crime; you quite soon start trying the heavier crime; there is a system which I think still obtains called the ticketing system whereby circuit judges can be authorised by the Lord Chief Justice to try certain types of serious case; there are fraud tickets, murder tickets, rape tickets, serious sex tickets and so on; I did rape and serious sex, and fraud, but not murder; in the end, what I did a great deal of, and we are now very much moving into recent times, was child sex abuse and that kind of case, which I think you are fairly carefully selected to do because you have to deal with quite difficult child witnesses, and in ordinary rape cases, rape complainants; its a very sensitive area; interesting, in a way; I didn't much like the child sex cases; I got into quite a lot of it when there was a thing called Operation Ore, an internet sex ring which originated somewhere in the Texan desert where some very unpleasant people were manufacturing all this material and distributing it; there was a raid by the FBI which uncovered huge lists of credit and debit cards all over the world; this was about 2007-8; the result of that was that all sorts of people who had paid for this were rounded up all over the country, as they still are, and a lot of it suddenly came into the lists of judges who were authorised to try it; so I did spend the best part of my last year on the Bench which I found in the end a bit of a stress, just watching this stuff and sentencing people for it; its very very unpleasant; I think they are going to have to do something if this volume persists to spread it evenly among the judges because nobody should do more than 20% of their judicial time on this as it is actually depressing; I never came across any satanic child abuse though I did hear of cases where social workers had latched on and were taking lots of children into care, and the implication was that the parents were something to do with it; in the end I think it was all discovered to be unfounded; watching this material has made me form views about paedophiles; I think I'm reasonably satisfied that paedophilia, if one can generalize, is perhaps something that the sufferers from it can't help; I think that is certainly possible, but I'm often slightly worried about it; I have always taken the view that the important consideration is the victims; I take the view that any of these paedophiles don't have to do it, or have at least any physical contact with children; I don't subscribe to the view that some paedophile information service supporters would argue that children actually benefit from it; that is an argument that I have heard advanced; in all the actual cases I have encountered there was never any suggestion that any of them had been viewing such material at all; certainly in one case there were two brothers who were concerned with nieces; in their case it is entirely possible that they were so dim that they wouldn't have been able to operate any of the equipment; it is interesting for I think I would have remembered if there had been a connection because it is obviously something that is of interest to anybody who wants to know what the effect is; trying paedophiles in those days was when cases were just coming to the fore, and it was rather like the Jimmy Saville case where they were historic; this was very much the case in these closed communities in the Lincolnshire fens; what had happened would be that cases had gone unreported for years until suddenly there would be difficulties experienced between husbands and wives, and as a result possibly quite old men would have to go to prison; I can think of a dozen cases off the top of my head of that sort of situation; I suspect that now there would be many more much more recent cases because it has become so much more widely acknowledged that this activity occurs
44:13:02 At the Dragon I never experienced any sexual activity between boys though I heard rumours of it; I think that the emotional dynamic of masters and boys at a place like the Dragon School hadn't a direct connection with paedophilia or physical connection; I suspect that the Dragon was very much a substitute family so what boys themselves were looking for, and to an extent receiving, was just a kind of warmth they'd hoped for from their home life; I don't think from the point of view of boys themselves there were very close friendships, but I think there are very close friendships between boys anywhere, and not attributable at all to the kind of institution that a boarding school was; apropos King's in relation to single sex institutions, there was an architect called Tom Greeves who was a King's man who was married to a cousin of mine; at his funeral the person who gave the eulogy was his great friend from King's; he was in a dreadful state as he gave it as they were obviously immensely close friends, and he implied that they spent the whole of their lives together while they were here; we must be talking about the 1920s 1930s, and that kind of situation probably would have prevailed here then; I think that older-younger relationships were becoming very much discouraged when we were young men; I seem to remember Jock Lynam giving us a warning of big boys approaching us when we went to our next school; my house master at Westminster used to give us a similar talk later on; there was a farmer's son from the fens in our house and he went to the house master for his little talk; the house master suggested that as he was a farmer's son perhaps he need not bother; the boy said that might be the case but he would very much like to hear his account
51-0-11 I am very lucky in my family, as I have often reflected when I see the anxieties that some people's children cause their parents; Charlotte is single, living in London, a photographer; Hugo, an Old Dragon, a banker, has just started working for Schroders; they have produced three grandchildren for us; has a very nice wife who was a historian and publisher; he read English at Durham, having been at Eton; he did a Master's degree at Reading, married, and has just moved to Rutland; so we are very lucky; We are very close to them all and they are kind and affectionate. I met Sue in North Wales; she is the sister of my brother Giles's best friend; they were both at the same school in North Wales; we met when about 19-20 but went our separate ways for about four years; we met again when I started pupillage and were married within eighteen months of that; she's very artistic, and a very accomplished botanical painter. We celebrate 50 years of very happy marriage in 2017.