Another Race Hath Been: John Mortimer (1923-2009)

I've been meaning to say a few words about John Mortimer, the British author and barrister (that's lawyer to us Americans) who died last month at the age of 85. Mr. Mortimer was best known as the creator of the Rumpole of the Bailey series of mysteries that appeared on PBS.

Horace Rumpole was an aging lawyer who, when he wasn't defending minor South London villains in the Old Bailey Central Criminal Court, was swilling Chateau Thames Embankment at Pommeroy's Wine Bar and matching wits with his wife, "She Who Must Be Obeyed". The Sunday Times declared him "worthy to join the great gallery of English oddballs from Pickwick to Sherlock Holmes." Above all, Rumpole was a champion of freedom, one of the many champions of freedom, both real and fictional, who flourished in the second half of the twentieth century. When it came to liberty, Rumpole understood.

He understood the Freedom Paradox – that freedom, to be any kind of freedom at all, can not be limited to behavior you approve of (the old "I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it"). A society that sets out to ban behavior that a ruler, or a legislature, or a majority of the voters dislike will not remain free. Rumpole talked about this when he defended a man accused of selling dirty magazines entitled School Girl Capers. "Members of the jury," Rumpole said in his summation. "Freedom is not divisible. You cannot pick and choose with freedom, and if we allow liberty for the opinions we hold dear and cherish, we must allow the same privilege to the opinions we detest or even to works of such unadulterated rubbish as Schoolgirl Capers Volume I, number 1 to 6."

He understood the Presumption of Innocence – the "Golden Thread" that runs through our law - that a society where the government can lock you up without having to prove you did something illegal will not remain free. Lawyers are the guardians of our freedom because they make sure that the government has to prove it before sentence is pronounced. In one episode, Rumpole risked suspension from the bar in order to defend Charlie Wheeler, an alleged safecracker on trial on trumped up evidence. One of Rumpole's friends, another barrister, tried to talk some sense in to him. He pointed out that, trumped up evidence or not, Wheeler was probably guilty. "Guilty or innocent is not the point," Rumpole insisted. "That is not our business and you know it. That is for twelve puzzled old darlings pulled in off the street to decide. But we can make sure that they are not lied to or deceived or conned by some smiling copper doing conjuring tricks."

As Rumpole complained when he lost the School Girl Capers case, "Freedom's gone out of fashion." Those of us who still cling to it in the twenty-first century are running short of allies. Rumpole and Mortimer will be missed.

Rumpole's bedtime reading was the Oxford Book of English Verse (Quiller-Couch edition). He was particularly fond of the "Sheep of the Lake District", William Wordsworth. I presume John Mortimer was as well. By way of epitaph for both of them, I offer these lines from Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality":

The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.