AFTER JOWITT When Jowitt was Attorney General, he required a devil to assist him with his work. Colin Pearson, who had been a pupil to Walter Monckton and remained in Monckton’s chambers thereafter, had been offered the job. Pearson was born in Canada but came to England when he was seven, and took a first in classical honour moderations at Balliol in 1920. He was a socialist and when Jowitt crossed the floor in 1929 Pearson had written to him to welcome him into the Labour party. Pearson was doing cases, mostly rating cases decided by magistrates, for Jowitt as the Attorney General’s devil. In Gray’s Inn in 1929 Jowitt had attended, as President, a moot which was a problem concerning the escape of some tiger cubs from a travelling circus and involved an application of Rylands v Fletcher.16 The Master of the Moots was Sir Plunkett Bastion (yes, seriously). A young Patrick Devlin made an impression in his moot speech. Devlin happened to be introduced to Pearson some time thereafter who told him that Jowitt was looking for a second devil. Cheeseman telephoned Devlin and invited him for interview and he was duly appointed. Pearson and Devlin resided in the secretaries’ room at the Law Courts (the Attorney General had several rooms in the Law Courts at his disposal) and on most days either or both of them went after court to Jowitt’s room in the House of Commons. Thus they both got to know Jowitt, and started spending time socially with him and his wife both at their house in London and at weekends at their farm. Patrick Devlin had achieved a lower second both in the history and then law tripos at Cambridge17, albeit he had been President of the Union, and passed the bar exam with a third in 1927 notwithstanding managing to fail constitutional law. He came to the bar after a short period working in the solicitors’ firm of Sir John Withers. Devlin did 16 John Sackar, Lord Devlin (2020) Hart Publishing (“Sackar”) p43 17 Academic success eluded a number of the distinguished lawyers and judges of prior generations. Robert Megarry, Vice Chancellor in the 1970s and distinguished property lawyer, was congratulated by his tutor at Cambridge on his economy of effort as if he had obtained one less mark he would have failed.
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