John Mortimer with Leo McKern as Rumpole

Rumpole at Christmas
By John Mortimer,
Viking, Rs 399

Billy Bunter, William Brown, Captain Haddock, Obelix, Asterix, Humphrey Appleby... the list is long of what George Orwell once called “first class characters” who have provided endless enjoyment without quite belonging to what is often referred to as high culture. To this list should be added the name of Horace Rumpole of Old Bailey. As P.D. James once wrote, “Rumpole, like Jeeves and Sherlock Holmes, is immortal.’’ It is thus difficult to accept that this could very well be the last collection of Rumpole stories. John Mortimer, the creator of the wily barrister-at-law, died this year.

Rumpole practised at the Old Bailey and lived at Froxbury Mansions in the Gloucester Road with his wife, She Who Must Be Obeyed. (Woe betide those who miss out on the capitals.) His life was a model of routine. Before setting out for work, he had a simple breakfast of egg, bacon and fried slice. For lunch, in a pub opposite the Old Bailey, he ate a steak and kidney pie that he washed down with a pint of Guinness. In the evening, before dinner, his refreshment was an ordinary claret available from Pommeroy’s Wine Bar in Fleet Street, a vintage that Rumpole called “Chateau Thames Embankment’’.

In this book, readers meet Rumpole over Christmas. Rumpole had no “rooted objection’’ to Christmas Day but he had no special fondness for it. “It’s an occasion,” he ruminates, “when time tends to hang particularly heavily on the hands. From the early morning alarm call of carols piping on Radio Four to the closing headlines and a restless liverish sleep, the day can seem just as long as a fraud on the Post Office tried before Mr Injustice Graves.’’ The rituals of exchanging presents are equally tedious: “It takes less than no time for me to unwrap the tie which I will seldom wear, and for Hilda to receive the annual bottle of lavender water which she lays down rather than puts to immediate use.” After the exchange of presents comes the Christmas fare: a supermarket turkey with all the trimmings followed by a glass of port. The excitement of Christmas Day was the decision to stand or not to stand for God save the Queen after Her Majesty’s speech.

On rare occasions, the routine was broken when She Who Must Be Obeyed took Rumpole to spend Christmas with a friend in a village in Norfolk or, on another occasion, to a hotel in the Cotswolds or on yet another, to a health farm. In Norfolk, Rumpole discovers that the new squire of the village is a “familiar face” whom he once sent to prison. The discovery led to a huge endowment from the squire for repairing the spire of the village church. In the Cotswolds, in a pretty country house hotel, the sight of a judge standing in as Santa Claus in a children’s party sets Rumpole off on the path of saving a young Muslim boy who had been framed for murder.

Rumpole was always at his best in court, cross-examining or leading a witness. He tried the patience of judges but persevered. He was driven by the belief that every accused was innocent till 12 honest men found him guilty. He won his laurels in the famous Penge Bungalow case when he was a young white-wig, and he did it alone and without a leader. That formidable triumph had been possible because of his extensive knowledge of bloodstains. Rumpole did not believe in great rhetorical flourishes in court. He plodded on diligently in the cause of justice.

It was the underplayed humour of John Mortimer that made the Rumpole stories memorable. There was nothing pompous about Rumpole in a wig and a silk gown. He could still be standing next to you in The Tube on the Circle Line going home to She Who Must be Obeyed. Good night, Rumpole.