David Waddington Memoirs (6 page)

M
y national service now at an end, it was time to join the barristers’ chambers in Manchester where I was to be a pupil of James Warden Stansfield. Stansfield was the shyest man I have ever met. A table and chair were provided for me in his room and he threw a few sets of papers at me and asked me to read them. No further words were spoken till 1 p.m. when he asked me to accompany him to his club for lunch. He never said a word when we were walking there or during the course of lunch. After lunch we watched some people playing snooker as we drank coffee, again in silence. The afternoon was also spent in silence: and the following day I was told by the chambers’ clerk, Randall, that Mr Stansfield had decided that I might be happier in a room with another pupil. From that time onwards I saw little of Stansfield and I cannot remember doing any work for him or receiving any advice from him. Luckily, however, the head of chambers was a very different type of man. John Addleshaw was enormously popular, not surprisingly as he was prepared to go to endless trouble to help the young people in chambers, advising them on their court cases, helping them to draft pleadings and write opinions. I suppose he could not have been very busy himself or he would not have had the time to help as he did. Work was not plentiful at the Bar in Manchester at the beginning of the fifties before legal aid became a growth industry; and the 300 guineas I
earned in my first year, although not a record, was thought pretty good going.

The reason for my doing quite well was that I was the only barrister who lived in north-east Lancashire. Most Northern Circuiteers with chambers in Manchester lived in Cheshire. A few were scattered around Preston and Blackpool but there was no one near Burnley or Blackburn. My father’s old firm lived up to its reputation for caution. One day the senior partner rang and said he had an important brief for chambers. My spirits soared but only for a moment; because he quickly added that it was a weighty matter which he was proposing to give to Stansfield. But plenty of other local solicitors gave me massive support and I scooped the pool at Burnley and Blackburn Quarter Sessions.

The Prosecuting Solicitor at Blackburn Quarter Sessions was a relative by marriage with a daughter called Ann. One day he rang up and said that I could have an extra brief provided I took his daughter to the Hunt Ball. I duly did so.

John Addleshaw had recently acquired a new pupil called Colin Muscroft. He came from Huddersfield but for some mysterious reason had sought a pupillage on our side of the Pennines. We thought he was quite a guy because his father was the manager of the Huddersfield Transport Undertaking and had his name on the side of every Huddersfield bus. Muscroft was given a
voluminous
set of papers by a solicitor friend and was asked to advise in a dispute arising out of a contract for the sale of a large quantity of cloth. Muscroft nursed and cosseted these papers like a mother might a newborn child. Each morning he undid the red tape, glanced at one of the 100 or so exhibits, sighed deeply and retied the tape. At eleven o’clock when coffee was served for those not lucky enough to be in court he walked round chambers with his baby seeking advice on the multifarious problems thrown up by the case; and advice, most of it contradictory, was always forthcoming
– advice in enormous quantities given from the depths of our
ignorance
. In the afternoon, after many lunchtime libations, Muscroft would set to work on the papers but soon felt obliged to have a nap after which it was time to catch the train back to Huddersfield. In this leisurely fashion many weeks passed, but then Randall the clerk began to relay disturbing news. The solicitors were asking when the opinion would be ready.

On the scene at this stage came the great Neville Laski – a very senior member of the bar, a Silk and the recorder of Burnley. Muscroft was due to spend that night in Manchester attending Bar Mess, and over the second decanter of port he told Laski that he was rather over-burdened at that particular time by a complex set of papers involving a cotton contract. Laski said that he had spent much of his life at the Bar doing commercial cases and he would call round at chambers at nine the following morning to give his help. At nine prompt he arrived, picked up the papers, undid the red ribbon, affected to peruse the instructions to counsel and cried: ‘Fetch a stenographer.’ A shorthand typist appeared and Laski proceeded to dictate a long opinion. The only trouble was that when it was typed up and passed around chambers the
unanimous
view was that it was utter rubbish from start to finish. Poor Muscroft’s efforts had been in vain, the port had been drunk for nothing and the hangover contracted to no benefit. He dolefully replaced the ribbon round the papers, put them at the back of his desk and went off for a drink.

Appearing before Laski at Burnley Quarter Sessions was a sobering experience. Mr Foulds, the prosecuting solicitor, sat at the table below Laski alongside the clerk and as each old lag appeared in the dock Laski asked Foulds to read from a scrap book the report in the
Burnley Express
of the man’s last appearance,
including
, of course, the comments made by the recorder in passing sentence:

Nursing my first brief at Burnley Sessions I heard this exchange: ‘John Smith you heard what I said when you last stood in that dock. You are a menace to society and you’ll go to preventive
detention
for eight years.’ ‘But, Mr Laski, I’ve got cancer and I’ll never live that long.’ Laski: ‘Well, do your best. Do your best.’

Everybody in our chambers lived in terror of being dispatched to the Court of Appeal, the Divisional Court or the Court of Criminal Appeal at a moment’s notice having been handed what was known as a return from another set of chambers. This fate had actually befallen Kenneth Taylor in our chambers. He had been told at five in the evening that the following morning he was to appear in the Divisional Court against Henry Burton who was acknowledged to be the best advocate on the Northern Circuit. Ken nearly died of fright but survived the ordeal. Sadly, Henry Burton was killed a short time afterwards in the Harrow rail disaster.

In 1954 I tried my hand at acting, playing the parts of Captain Hardy in
Journey’s End
and Algernon in
The Importance of Being Earnest
. The stage, the Bar and the political platform had all become part of my life and all scared me stiff.

It was in that same year that I joined a group of people bound for Luxembourg and Strasbourg to study the workings of the European Coal and Steel Community and the Council of Europe. One of the party was Mark Carlisle, who became a life-long friend. Another was Commander Courtenay who a few years later became an MP and then resigned after disclosing that the KGB had tried
to blackmail him with photographs taken on a visit to Moscow. I am sure the visit to Strasbourg was most instructive but what sticks in my mind is the night when Mark Carlisle and I escaped from the ladies’ seminary (the ladies were not in residence) where we were staying. We visited various night clubs, ran out of money at the last one, and had to wash up till four in the morning because we could not pay the bill. The brave Commander Courtenay discovered that we had jumped ship, guessed correctly that we were out on the town, visited sundry night clubs in his efforts to find us and eventually rescued us from the place where we were so usefully employed.

Shortly after this adventure I decided it would be no bad thing if I fought a hopeless seat in the coming general election. It would certainly put me in a stronger position to get a decent seat when later I felt I could afford to get into Parliament. I first had to get on the candidates’ list and that meant a visit to Central Office in London for interview by the then vice-chairman of the Party, John Hare – later Lord Blakenham. I was ushered into his presence and he smiled brightly, told me to sit down and asked me whether I had been in the army. I said, ‘Yes, the XII Lancers.’ ‘Oh!’ he said, ‘that’s good enough for me. Thank you for coming. Of course you can be a candidate.’ I felt rather cheated, having stuffed my head with information about the economy and three islands off the coast of China called Qemoy, Amoy and Matsu. It was as if I had taken my harp to a party and and no one had asked me to play.

Anyhow, in no time at all I became the prospective
parliamentary
candidate for the Farnworth Division of Lancashire, the sitting member being a most excellent former Mayor of Rochdale, Ernest Thornton. I became candidate in no time at all because no one else wanted the job. Not for the first time I wondered why on earth I had this compulsion to make my life a misery. I was still cripplingly shy and appallingly nervous when it came to public speaking. But
I was determined to fight an effective campaign and when the date of the general election was announced I took up residence in a pub in Walkden (pronounced Wogden) and began a full programme of daytime canvassing, factory visits and nightly public meetings. I owned a Ford Popular and on the first day I took it to a firm to have a loudspeaker fitted. When I returned I discovered that two holes had been drilled in the car roof and an enormous horn bolted on to it. I drove home at the weekend forgetting about this appendage. The horn hit the top of the garage, the back of the loudspeaker was driven through the Ford Popular’s roof and my saloon was instantly transformed into a sort of coupé.

In the campaign Labour focused on the H-bomb, calling for disarmament under international control. Its other themes were rising prices (as a result of cuts in the food subsidies introduced in the War, sugar had gone up from 6d to 8d a pound and bacon from 2s/7d to 3s/6d), unemployment and the need to secure the future of the Lancashire cotton industry by control of imports from India. I talked of Britain’s success on the world stage (we had played a key role in the Geneva Conference on Vietnam) and the way we had managed to dismantle war-time controls and get rid of rationing. People were finding it difficult to remember that as recently as 1951 the weekly rations were: butter – 3ozs; cheese – 1¼ ozs; sugar – 10 ozs; tea – 2 ozs; bacon – 3 ozs; sweets – 6½ ozs; and eggs –
sometimes
one, sometimes two. As for meat, until shortly before the 1951 election, the shopper was allowed to spend only eight pence a week, two pence of that having to go on corned beef.

My campaign began inauspiciously with a newspaper headline: ‘
HITCH AT TORY NOMINATION
’. My inefficient agent had taken me to the town hall to pay my deposit and on his advice I had proffered a cheque for £150, but this the town clerk had quite properly refused to accept. There then came a day when along with other Lancashire candidates I was summoned to the Midland Hotel in Manchester
to hear a pep talk from Prime Minister Anthony Eden, but none of us was impressed by him. He was asked about education and said it wasn’t his subject, we questioned him about housing and were told to have a word with one of his aides … and so it went on, with Eden revealing a complete lack of interest in, or knowledge of, anything but foreign affairs.

At the end of the morning of polling day I returned to the central committee room to get a progress report and on the locked door was a notice in the agent’s handwriting ‘gone for lunch’, and the rest of the day I spent fearing that this and other examples of our inefficient organisation was going to lead to a humiliating result. In the event, however, the Labour majority came down with a bump and I came away from the count heartily glad the ordeal was over and reasonably content with the result.

In 1957 it was rumoured that I was to be the candidate at a by-election in Rochdale. Luckily I resisted the temptation to put my name forward – the result was a disaster. John Parkinson took
terrible
punishment from mill owners furious at the damage being done by foreign competition and he never stood for Parliament again.

At about the same time, however, I did miss a good chance. I was interviewed for Lancaster but lost to Humphry Berkeley, one of the oddest men ever to enter British politics. When an
undergraduate
he attended the Preparatory Schoolmasters Annual Conference masquerading as the headmaster of an obscure prep school, and in the various discussion sessions offered eccentric advice on how to run an educational establishment.

I used to do a lot of work at Lancaster Assizes. The court sat in the castle and on the steps going down from the dock to the cells below were branding irons and other instruments of torture. One hot summer afternoon, when I was defending one of six
defendants
in a long trial and had little to do, my eyes strayed to the jury box and I saw to my amazement that thirteen people were sitting
in it. I sprang to my feet and began, ‘My Lord.’ ‘Sit down, Mr Waddington,’ said Mr Justice Paull. I sank back into my place, but after a moment or two my conscience pricked and I rose again. ‘My Lord –’ I began again. ‘Mr Waddington, you are interrupting an important cross-examination. Will you please remain silent or I will report you to your Inn of Court.’ Again I sat down; but it did not take me long to conclude that drastic measures were required. I leapt to my feet and before the judge had time to interrupt, I yelled ‘My Lord, there are thirteen people sitting on this jury!’ The judge looked at me with a face of fury but then began to count; and sure enough I was right. A little old lady had come to the Castle to watch the proceedings, had tucked herself in behind a file of people making their way across the court, had sat down where everyone else seemed to be sitting and then, when she realised her error, had lain low in the hope that she could escape at the end of the afternoon undetected. Needless to say the judge did not thank me for my public spiritedness.