Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders (2 page)

C. H. Wystan was in no way a bad man. In fact he treated me, during my early years as a white wig, with a sort of remote and distant kindness. The trouble was that he regarded the whole business of being a barrister, and following in what he called ‘the fine traditions and great fellowship of the bar' (such rules as ‘We don't shake hands' or ‘We don't lunch with our instructing solicitor'), as more important than the Bill of Rights or the presumption of innocence. Like Soapy Sam Ballard, our present Head of Chambers, the niceties and formalities of life in the law were to him more precious than justice. Law courts were places where honourable men (there were, as yet, no female barristers in Equity Court), dressed in wigs, gowns and appropriately dark trousers, lived up to their finest traditions. He found the cases in which we dabbled, the adulterous, fraudulent or violent acts alleged against our clients, the indecencies or even the murders they might have committed, of less interest than the correct behaviour of the barristers and judges sent to try them. He dined frequently in his Inn and was always available to take a bishop or a senior politician in to dinner on his arm. Judges found his behaviour in court impeccable, but his score of victories was low. All the same, he was considered so trustworthy that the Lord Chancellor felt able to give him a silk gown, so that he now proudly bore the letters QC (Queer Customer, I'm inclined to call them) after his name. Solicitors thought of him as ‘a safe pair of hands'.

The hands I was put into when I first arrived at number 4 Equity Court were not so much safe as inactive. ‘We've fixed up a pupillage for you with T. C. Rowley,' Wystan said. ‘You'll find him an agreeable pupil master. He's very well liked in chambers, where he's affectionately known as “Uncle Tom”. It would be wrong to describe him as a
busy
practitioner, but he'll have plenty of time to iron out problems and give you the benefit of his long experience.'

After introducing me to the clerk's room and to one or two important-looking barristers, who were apparently too busy to iron out the problems of a white wig, he showed me into T. C. Rowley's room, where I sat expectantly at a small table in the corner to await events.

Events, as such, were extremely slow in arriving, as indeed was T. C. Rowley himself. ‘We're expecting Uncle Tom in before the end of the month,' was the constant answer in the clerk's room when I asked if he was likely to drop in to chambers. So I sat alone and got to know our room by heart, the few legal textbooks and law reports, the reproduction of
The Stag at Bay
over the fireplace, the tin box which no doubt contained Uncle Tom's apparently little-used wig, the bottom drawer of the desk, which concealed a few back numbers of
Naturist
magazine, and, most puzzling of all, a golf club in the umbrella stand.

Each morning I stared out of the window and watched busy barristers, chattering importantly, setting out for court with their junior clerks carrying briefs or pushing trolleyloads of books. Each evening I stayed until the lamplighter, with a flaming rod, lit the gas lamps in Equity Court. When it became apparent that I was not going to have many problems to iron out if I remained closeted in Uncle Tom's quarters, I began to haunt the clerk's room, which I rightly guessed to be the centre of chambers activity, much in the way that dogs sniff around kitchen floors in the faint hope of picking up a few scraps.

Albert Handyside, then our head clerk, was a large, slow-moving man whose pockets were overflowing with cause lists, notes of fees, messages from solicitors and packets of small cigars. His apparently gloomy outlook on life concealed a deep inner hilarity. If, by some joke of fate, C. H. Wystan found himself briefed in two different cases at the same time, Albert would shake with silent mirth but then, after a tactful visit to the Old Bailey list office, solve the problem by persuading a judge to sit later or a prosecutor to agree to prolong his final speech. Most of his business was conducted with solicitors' clerks in Pommeroy's Wine Bar, where they swapped stories and pints of Guinness. There he persuaded them, or so I hoped, to sample, perhaps in a little matter of assault and affray at East Ham Quarter Sessions, the talents of a white wig new to chambers by the name of Horace Rumpole.

I have to say I did my very best to cultivate the friendship of Albert Handyside, who I knew would be of far more use to me than the elusive Uncle Tom, or even C. H. Wystan himself. I spent time, and money I could ill afford, in Pommeroy's seeing that Albert's glass of Guinness was continually refilled. My attentions were rewarded. He sent me off to fix a date for trial at London Sessions. I did this, after an evening of anxious rehearsal, apparently to everyone's satisfaction.

It was when I came back from this courtroom triumph that I heard, as I approached my usually lonely room, the sound of a golf club striking a ball. I opened the door to see a tall, even a gangling, grey-haired man smiling with delight as a golf ball sailed into a wastepaper basket. ‘Hello, young fellow,' he greeted me. ‘I'm Uncle Tom and you're my pupil.'

I had to admit that this was indeed the truth of the matter.

‘I was waiting for you to come in,' he said. ‘In fact I wondered where the hell you'd got to. Having a lie-in, were you - after a heavy night?'

‘Not really. I was making an application at London Sessions.'

‘An application! At your stage?' Uncle Tom gave a small whistle of admiration as he put his golf balls back in the oval black and gold box which was built to contain a wig. ‘Bit of a fast mover, aren't you, Rumbelow?'

‘The name,' I told him, ‘is Rumpole.'

‘I hope you weren't waiting for me to come with you. Show you the ropes. You managed it on your own?'

‘I managed it,' I told him, ‘entirely on my own.'

‘Good for you, then. I'll tell Wystan that I've got a most promising pupil.'

In those far-off days young barristers had to pay £100 to be ‘taught' by their pupil masters. Uncle Tom had it from a legacy my old father received from my great-aunt. I didn't begrudge him this money, although he told me it came in very useful in settling his golf club subscription at a time when the secretary had given him ‘a couple of old-fashioned looks'. He wasn't entirely without work: he had two long-running divorce cases and an extremely slow-moving post office fraud in which he had occasional conferences with a solicitor called ‘Nobby' Noakes, who chatted to Uncle Tom about his golf handicap, much to the boredom of their client. In time we came to an unspoken agreement. Uncle Tom visited the room even less often and I was in sole possession of his desk as my practice didn't exactly flower but put out a few tender and tentative shoots.

When I look back on that Rumpole, the inexperienced and more or less unlearned friend who could suffer nervous attacks, a dry mouth, sweaty hands and a strong temptation to run out of the building before entering the humblest magistrates' court to do the simplest careless driving, I can scarcely recognize him. Indeed I'm not at all sure that I would like him, at least not enough to spend a whole book with him, were it not for the fact that he gave me some hints, at least, of the Rumpole to come.

For instance, one evening when I was having a drink with Albert in Pommeroy's, I said I felt in the mood for a glass of red wine. ‘You won't get any of your vintage claret here,' Albert said, and I can remember asking if it were more ‘your non-vintage Château Thames Embankment'. This produced a loud rumble of laughter from Albert Handyside and a name for a wine which seems to have survived for about half a century, and when old Vernon Pommeroy was succeeded by his son Jack the change caused no perceptible improvement in the wine. It was also at Pommeroy's that Albert offered me one of his small cigars, introducing me to a source of comfort and relaxation when the insolence of office and the law's delays had become almost too much to bear.

So, by regular attendance at chambers and in Pommeroy's Wine Bar, I had managed to win a reasonable number of taking and driving aways, actual bodily harms and minor indecencies round a number of fairly unsympathetic courts. I could see myself, in the years to come, as the moderately successful, middle-of-the-road type of advocate of whom we had quite a few in our chambers.

And then, as I say, the double murder in the Penge bungalows hit the headlines and changed my life.

3

I had, for many years, been aware of Penge. My father, the Reverend Wilfred Rumpole, had charge of a church (St Botolph's Without) in the neighbouring suburb of Croydon. My old father was not entirely happy in his work. He had serious doubts, he once told me, about most of the Thirty-Nine Articles; but his training had not equipped him for any other job, so he was compelled to soldier on at St Botolph's.

In my early years I seem to have spent more time in a bleak boarding school on the Norfolk coast or at Keble College than I did in the south London suburbs. When I got a place in C. H. Wystan's chambers I made a determined bid for independence and took a room in the house of a Mrs Matilda Ruben, who not only let out bedsits but owned a small shop for the sale of trusses and other surgical appliances, including what, in those far-off days, we used to call ‘rubber johnnies', in a street just off Southampton Row. This was in walking distance of the Temple. There were, I promise you, briefless days when I had to become a walker in order to save on bus fares.

I had, however, a clear memory of Penge, a small suburb beside the island of parkland surrounding the old Crystal Palace, now burnt down, where I used to go on walks with my father and listen to his serious doubts on the subjects of God's toleration of evil and original sin. I even remembered the street of bungalows which had sprung up in the 1930s to accommodate the growing population of the families of bank clerks, department store managers and commercial travellers who looked on Crystal Palace Park as their particular and privileged glimpse of the countryside.

The facts of the double murder in the bungalows emerged from the newspapers which I read, rather as a young man hitchhiking through Somerset might read of a voyage of discovery in darkest Africa, never dreaming that I would come any nearer to the case than the full story in what we then called the ‘News of the Screws'.

Denis, always known as ‘Jerry', Jerold was a clerk at the National Provincial Bank when he got married to Yvonne and moved into their bungalow, number 3 Paxton Street. There they had their only child, Simon. When the war started, Jerry joined the RAF and soon became a bomber pilot. His life was less exciting when peace returned him to the bank, but his bungalow was filled with relics of the war: photographs of himself scrambling into his bomber, drinking and laughing with his fellow officers, together with his carefully preserved uniform, the silk scarf always tied at his throat when on a mission, fragments of destroyed enemy aircraft and a Luger pistol taken from the body of a dead enemy officer. Also prominent in the photographs was Charlie (‘Tail-End' Charlie) Weston, who lived at number 7 Paxton Street. He joined up with Jerry and, by a series of lucky chances, was Jerry's rear gunner. After the war, Charlie Weston returned to his bungalow and his job at the Happy Home Mortgage and Insurance Company.

Both Jerry and Charlie survived the war, but Yvonne, Jerry's wife and Simon's mother, was killed by a buzz bomb when she was out shopping just north of Oxford Street in the closing stages of the war.

After his wife's death, according to the
News of the World
, Jerry moved in, from time to time, a series of girlfriends, but none of them lasted long and for considerable periods father and son were living alone in the bungalow.

On the night of the murders Jerry and Charlie had been at a reunion dinner of members of the old squadron living in and around Croydon. Some they had known well, some were almost strangers. After the dinner and seeing Judy Garland at the London Palladium, singing and more than a little drunk, they came back to Jerry's bungalow, where they woke up Simon and the party continued. During the course of it, according to the evidence given at a preliminary hearing before the Penge magistrates, a quarrel sprang up between father and son and young Simon was seen to pick up the German pistol and threaten his father and other members of the party. At that point he was quite easily disarmed by one of the RAF companions, after which he shut himself in his room.

The party continued for a while, but in the morning young Simon rang the police to say that he had found his father dead, shot through the heart. ‘Tail-End' Charlie was later found dead in his bungalow. Apparently he'd been shot when answering the door to some late-night caller. Both men were killed by German bullets. The pistol and magazine with two of its bullets fired were found in the dustbin outside the Jerolds' back door.

Jerry's son was arrested and charged with a double murder. As though he weren't in enough trouble already, he asked to see the only solicitor he'd ever heard of. This was a Penge local who had done a number of civil cases with my Head of Chambers, for whom the solicitor had a surprisingly high regard.

So Simon Jerold, being just over twenty-one, was old enough for national service and old enough to be hanged. And it was on C. H. Wystan that his life depended.

4

There is no point in writing your memoirs unless you're prepared to tell the truth, and I have to confess to a number of occasions when I have felt stirred by an often hopeless passion and believed myself deeply in love. At Keble I had loved my fiancée, Ivy Porter, who was carried off in the cold snap after the war. When I was a member of the ground staff I was helplessly smitten by an alluring WAAF named Bobby O'Keefe, with whom I enjoyed a brief but ecstatic love affair until she was wooed from me by the then heroic charm of a certain pilot officer, Sam ‘Three Fingers' Dougherty, who flew Spitfires and had apparently lost one of his fingers in action. I felt hidden longings, many years later, for a Kathy Trelawny, a beautiful if somewhat spaced-out member of the ‘alternative society' who, ignoring my advice to stay silent at her trial, talked her way into Holloway Prison, where I had to say goodbye to her.