Rumpole and Penge Bungalow Murders by John  Mortimer

    John Mortimer's Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders sees our eponymous hero tackle his first ever case. It is just after the war and two RAF heroes are found shot dead. Simon Jerold, the son of one of the victims, is the only suspect and young Rumpole is given the hopeless task of defending him. But Rumpole is determined to save his client from the gallows and make a name for himself. His bid to do so opens the first chapter in the story of the law's finest comic creation.

Rumpole and Penge Bungalow Murders by John  Mortimer

Extract

'Claude Erskine-Brown told my pupil she had extraordi­narily nice legs.'

'What're her legs like, then? Rather gnarled tree trunks, are they?'

'Don't be ridiculous, Rumpole! Lala Ingolsby is a very good-looking girl.'

'With a name like Lala Ingolsby I should have thought she wouldn't mind having her legs complimented.'

'She wouldn't mind! That's what you all say, don't you, Rumpole? Just like a man! Anyway, I have reported Erskine- Brown's conduct to the Chair of the Society of Women Barristers.'

The speaker was Mizz Liz Probert, my one-time pupil and in many ways a helpful and hard-working barrister, when she was not determined to throw the book at Claude Erskine-Brown. He was being tried in absentia, having left early to catch about twenty-four hours of the Ring Cycle at Covent Garden.

'Through the Chair!' Luci Gribble, our chambers Director of Marketing and Administration, spoke urgently to Soapy Sam Ballard, our Head of Chambers.

He looked both pained and startled, as though this 'Through the Chair' form of address involved some kind of physical attack and penetration.

'Through the Chair!' Luci (who spelled her name with an inexplicable 'i') repeated. 'It will be no good at all for our chambers' image if we get a reputation in the Society of Women Barristers for acts of sexual harassment.'

It's rare indeed that I am present at chambers meet­ings, held under the chairmanship of Soapy Sam Ballard and dealing often with such vital matters as the expendi­ture on instant coffee in the clerk's room or the impor­tance of leaving a signed bit of paper on the library shelves when borrowing a book. But these were the dog days in the cold, wet and bleak start of the year, the crim­inals of England seemed to have all gone off for a winter break to Marbella or the Seychelles, and I had wandered into Ballard's room as an alternative to yet another strug­gle with the crossword puzzle.

'I suppose I must have words with Erskine-Brown on the subject.' Soapy Sam sounded despondent, as though he were being asked to take immediate action about the condition of the downstairs lavatory in Equity Court.

'You could tell Miss Ingolsby that if nothing worse happens to her, in her life in the law, she'll have been remarkably lucky. Come to think of it, at about her age I was doing the Penge Bungalow Murders, alone and with­out a leader.'

As I said this, the chambers meeting and all its concerns seemed to fade away. For a moment I was back long ago. I remembered myself sitting in an interview room under the Old Bailey, looking into the terrified eyes of a young man who had realized that the great engine of the crim­inal law was intent on driving him towards a grim execu­tion shed and ceremoniously breaking his neck.

Then Luci Gribble startled me with an extraordinary question. 'What on earth,' she asked, without a note of shame in her voice, 'were the Penge Bungalow Murders?'

I was, I have to confess, shaken by such ignorance of one of the most remarkable trials of the post-war years; but in all fairness I had to concede that Luci Gribble was a lay person with no legal training. The story would take too long if I went into it myself and so I appointed Liz Probert to act for me.

'You tell her, Liz.'

'I'm not sure. . .' For the first time in the meeting, the politically correct Mizz Probert was caught off her guard. 'I'm not sure I ever knew the facts,' she astounded me by admitting. 'Before my time, of course.'

'Ballard?' I appealed to our so-called Head of Chambers. 'I'm not sure I ever knew what went on in the Penge bungalows either,' he said, as though one of my greatest legal triumphs were something that just slips the mind, like where you put the bus ticket. 'I've heard you speak of it, Rumpole, of course, on many occasions. You clearly remember it.'

'Old men forget,' I gave the meeting a well-deserved thought from Henry V, 'and all shall be forgot. Yet I'll remember with advantages what feats I did that day.'

Of course, I altered the quotation a little to suit my purpose. But it was then that I realized it was high time I added the full story of the Penge Bungalow affair to my memoirs. So much of history is being lost. Young people nowadays are vague as to the identity of Hitler and Churchill, and although the murders at Penge were once headline material, the details of that remarkable case may have become lost in the mists of time.

We're looking back, down the long corridor of history, to the early 1950s. The war had been over for several years, but it still seemed part of our lives. Films featured life and death in the skies during the Battle of Britain, and heroes or heroines of the Resistance. It was a period when those who had enjoyed an unheroic war continued to feel pangs of guilt, and we all congratulated ourselves on having survived the Blitz, bread rationing, the Labour chancellor telling us all to 'tighten our belts' and clothes on coupons.

It was, in many ways, an age of obedience when the government, the royal family and judges were treated with what was sometimes ill-deserved respect. It was also the time when the only sentence available for murder was death.

My own war had been unheroic. I had spent some years in the RAF ground staff (where I was well known as 'Grounded Rumpole') and, when hostilities ended, I had taken a law degree at Keble College, Oxford. As learn­ing law in those days entailed an intimate knowledge of the Roman rules for freeing a slave and the rights of 'turf age' over common land (scraps of information which I have never found of the slightest use in the Uxbridge Magistrates' Court) and as I never at Keble experienced the excitement of rising on my then young hind legs to address a jury, I turned in a fairly honourable third-class degree. It has always been my view that knowing too much law is not only no help but also a considerable handicap to the courtroom advocate. Juries, on the whole, have little interest in freeing slaves or the Roman law governing the ownership of chariots.

My tutor at Keble had been Septimus Porter. I had loved his shy and nervous, but sometimes unexpectedly liberated, daughter dearly. In fact we were engaged to be married, but this engagement had to be broken off because of Ivy Porter's early death during the cold winter and fuel shortages after the war. Septimus Porter found me a place in the chambers of C. H. Wystan, QC, the father of that HiIda Wystan who was to become known to me, during a long life of argument and dispute both in and away from the courtroom, as She Who Must Be Obeyed.

Wystan's importance, therefore, both in the events surrounding. the Penge Bungalow affair and in my future career and life, cannot be exaggerated.

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