A Voyage Round John Mortimer by Valerie Grove

Author:Valerie Grove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2007-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

17. The Old Darling

‘Horace Rumbold’ was the original name. But there turned out to be a Sir Horace Algernon Rumbold, an old Christ Church man now living in Guildford, so ‘Rumpole’ was substituted. Was John remembering Evelyn Waugh’s character Rampole in Vile Bodies? Wherever the name came from, it also had a comical echo of Kenneth Williams’s Rambling Syd Rumpo. It conjured up a rum character, a substantial, roly-poly, rumpled figure in threadbare wig and frayed gown, ash on waistcoat, claret stains on tie. ‘A crumpled fellow,’ John said, ‘always recovering from hangovers.’ Rumpole was, still is, ‘an Old Bailey hack’, the oldest member of his chambers, who has never taken silk, and boasts only two trial triumphs to his name: the Penge Bungalow Murders and the Great Brighton Benefit Club Forgery. He is married to the dreadful Hilda, known as She Who Must Be Obeyed, daughter of his late pupil master. They live in a dismal mansion flat in SW7, from which he escapes every morning with relief.

Rumpole arrived fleshed-out: born in Dulwich in 1910, son of a clergyman, product of Lancing and Keble College, Oxford. Unheroic war, RAF ground staff. Knows quantities of Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse by heart. Implacably on the side of the underdog, representing undeserving miscreants under the legal aid scheme. Has an aversion to prosecuting and no interest in boring civil cases. In his first synopsis, John vouchsafed another interesting detail of his history: Rumpole ‘got a poor third class degree at Oxford’, he told Shubik, ‘where he had a tendency to prefer young men’.

John’s first choice to play him was Alastair Sim, who was unfortunately dead. Michael Hordern was unavailable (too thin anyway). The director John Gorrie proposed Leo McKern. McKern was only fifty-five, but being portly and jowly, with the face of a battered old prize-fighter – bulbous nose, leathery skin, jungly eyebrows – looked older; he had lost an eye in youth in his native Australia. John had met McKern in 1967, when he might have played the title role in The Judge, and found that McKern had an Australian’s atavistic disdain for authority, so Rumpole’s dislike of pomp came naturally. From the start, McKern’s performance was a tour de force, snorting with indignation, puffing on a small cheroot, rolling out mellifluous phrases, as if he had waited all his life for Rumpole. His opening lines, in voice-over, were Wordsworth’s ‘There was a Boy: ye knew him well, ye cliffs/And islands of Winander!’ A great reciter of poems himself, and adept at the Times crossword, McKern felt at home in the character (‘He’s not at all like me but he’s got many qualities I admire,’ he said), so his acting seemed effortless, instinctive. In the first play, Rumpole defended a young black man charged with attempted murder. Rumpole revealed the defendant’s written confession to be a police fabrication, since the boy was illiterate. This slender plot fuelled the eventual change in the rules on police evidence. But it was the personality and pronouncements of Rumpole himself that won over audience and critics alike.

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