The writer and former barrister was a national treasure who increasingly came to resemble his Old Bailey character
Sir John Mortimer, pictured with his daughter Emily, would recount tales to his huge family over dinner
As a rule, nobody should write a biography of a living person. But when asked to write about John Mortimer, I found the prospect irresistible. What I most liked about him was that he was the centre of an enormous family - four stepdaughters, a son and daughter from his first marriage and two daughters from his second. Most male writers, even if they may have the occasional child, seem to have little to do with family life. I had often seen John in the thick of it, surrounded by children and grandchildren at Sunday lunch, or in Tuscany on holiday, seated at the head of the table telling his tales in the midst of chaos. So I said yes.
He was already a shadow of his former self: wheelchair-bound and reedy of voice. But John Mortimer, for whom the term “national treasure” might have been coined, seemed indestructible.
Despite being in great pain and hardly able to see, he continued to perform whenever he had an audience, determined not to let anyone down. Only last autumn, booked to appear at the Windsor and Henley literary festivals with me, he turned up as ever, to be wheeled on stage to tell his oft-told tales from his days in court.
The audience, stricken with sympathy for the frail old man in his slippers, invariably got full value, and would prompt him to repeat once more the familiar stories: “Tell us about the penis left in for two hours, Sir John!” cried a lady in our Sheffield audience last year. “Ah yes,” he replied. “That was a rape case, and we had to establish that penetration had taken place. At that point, the judge intervened and, thinking of his lunch, said, ‘Well I think we'll leave it there and all come back in a couple of hours'.”
Stories, tales - the more salacious the better - were his stock-in-trade. He was a born writer and raconteur, and only the insistence of his blind old father steered him into becoming a divorce and probate barrister - which, in the event, was the making of him, especially after he had “turned to crime” and made the Old Bailey his second home, and that of his most famous character, Horace Rumpole.
I enjoyed many hours in his company during the past few years. Sir John's life was in my hands, as he liked to say, pouring champagne and gesturing to a seat opposite him at his father's old desk at Turville Heath Cottage, the house that Clifford Mortimer built near Henley-on-Thames in 1932. But writing a biography of a celebrated fabulist and anecdotalist has its drawbacks. Deviate from the anecdotes, so brilliantly written in his memoirs, and he would become silent and morose, and forgetful. “It's all so long ago,” he would say mournfully. “How's your glass?” and pour more champagne.
His reputation for defending free speech had its limits. He did not care to be asked about anything concerning his private life. He could not recall anything about his first post-marital affair - in 1953, with the recently divorced first wife of Humphrey Lyttelton. He could recall almost nothing of Wendy Craig, whose long affair with him in 1960 produced a son - even though Penelope Mortimer, his first wife, had written a brilliant novel, The Pumpkin Eater, about that episode. (Though he welcomed his 42-year-old long-lost son - who looked exactly like him - and he was always willing to declare his admiration for Penelope, who had “managed to produce such great novels from our life together”.) All these suppressed incidents in his life surfaced regularly in his plays and fiction: the long-lost son whose paternity is disputed, and the passion in youth for another man.
It was very early on in our dealings that his friend from Oxford days, the poet Professor Michael Hamburger, told me about the cloud under which Mortimer left Oxford in 1942, after the discovery of letters that the 19-year-old wrote to a handsome public schoolboy. The young man had been expelled from his school, and Mortimer was told not to return to Oxford for a third year.
When I told John that I knew the recipient of the letters, by now a distinguished retired judge, Quentin Edwards, QC, he wrote Edwards a postcard, giving permission for him to speak to me, and regretting that they had not met since “our small scandal at Oxford”. In fact they had appeared in court on opposing sides in 1973, in the Lady Birdwood blasphemy case. One of Mortimer's many instances of “selective memory”.
So associated did he become with cases of pornography and freedom of speech that he was credited with having led Penguin Books' victory in the Lady Chatterley trial; but he had no part in that - in 1960 Mortimer was still a probate and divorce lawyer. The Last Exit to Brooklyn appeal, in 1969, was his first success in that field, followed by the great comic showcase that was the six-week trial over the Schoolkids' Oz in 1971.
He was not a scholar of the law, unlike his father, whose great work on probate ran to 1,300 pages; he was an advocate, whose chief purpose was to win over the jury, preferably by laughter in his summing up, belittling the cause in hand. He would never enter into any discussion about what his defence of pornography had unleashed in the era of the internet.
He was certainly averse, like any barrister, to appearing in a witness box himself. I had the unhappy experience, in 1988, of being sued for libel by Alistair Forbes, after reviewing Mortimer's novel Summer's Lease in The Sunday Times, and casually saying that the novel's wonderful and beguiling anti-hero, Haverford Downs (later played by John Gielgud), was an amalgam of Rumpole, Clifford Mortimer and Ali Forbes. John was a friend; his protégé Geoffrey Robertson was our counsel and he and I both thought John might support my defence of reasonable comment. But no: “I'm sorry darling, I can't help you,” said Mortimer in a very little voice; so Forbes got his out-of-court settlement.
The spirit of Mortimer's father, a great divorce barrister, whose cases filled the law pages of The Times in the 1920s, remained in Turville Hearth Cottage, largely unchanged since those days. He sat at his father's desk, built by his Uncle Harold Heal, brother of the more famous Ambrose; he used his father's old walking sticks, and slept in his father's bed. It was vastly touching to sit next to him when Sir Derek Jacobi became the last of many actors to play his father on stage in A Voyage Around My Father. Mortimer sat in his wheelchair at the Donmar, watching Jacobi in his, on stage, and tears filled his eyes. Increasingly, he resembled Rumpole, with stained waistcoat and habit of quotation. His memory was prodigious, even when he affected the vagueness of old age. Torin Douglas, of the BBC, told me that when they met, Mortimer asked: “Are you named after the comedian Torin Thatcher?” Yes, said the astonished Douglas: Torin Thatcher was a friend of his parents.
Yet he was more tortured as a writer than anyone supposed. He was cast down by an unsympathetic review; he was made wretched by the revelation that the classic 1981 TV serial Brideshead Revisited was not, in fact, his work. Because his demeanour was so affable and he seemed always to have all the time in the world, his output (1,000 words for the Daily Mail could be dashed off in an hour) appeared effortless.
The reality was different. Although he was not a diarist by nature, he had kept a notebook in 2001, which he allowed me to see. That reflected a daily torment, anguish about his future, doubt whether he should even attempt another Rumpole, inability to think of a plot, longing to have another success in the theatre, even jealousy of successful friends such as Tom Stoppard and Robert Harris.
In the event, his annual Rumpole novels, with skimpier plots and large type continued to sell, and his old plays continued to be revived. A double bill of The Dock Brief and Edwin, starring Edward Fox, filled theatres across the land for a year in 2007. Public acclaim never deserted him, and he was hopeful to the end: he was four chapters into another Rumpole when he died.
Nor was he ever at a loss for company. He had gathered about him a positive harem of adoring and beautiful women, including Anna Ford, Ann Mallalieu, Kathy Lette (his “best friend”), Joanna David, Candida Lycett Green, Sinead Cusack and of course, his female-dominated family, and whenever he was in need of their attentive company, they would gather.
He would have been happiest of all with the timing of his death on a Friday morning. If John was not interviewed, or writing a piece for, the weekend papers, his wife Penny used to say, he was cast into a gloom. This weekend, he would have been wreathed in happy smiles.
Times Archive, 1982: Interview: John Mortimer
'I have an obsession with the value of time. The thought of dying infuriates me'
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