Sir Samuel Cooke

an aversion to noise and had a baize door installed as a second door to his room to minimise external sound.

Whilst in the post-war years there was a measure of anti-semitism at the bar55 it does not seem to have surfaced in chambers: there was a Jewish head of chambers (Karmel), Gumbel and Kahn-Freund had fled Nazi occupied Europe, and Tony Jolowicz had joined subsequently. Karmel was succeeded as Head of Chambers by Sam Cooke. He took firsts in both the classics and law tripos. He was placed first in the bar final examination in 1936, receiving the Certificate of Honour. He was President of the Cambridge Union in 1934 and was known there for his fiery advocacy, which makes it all the more surprising that his practice at the bar was largely advisory and there is little record of him in the law reports. There is no reported case where he was led by either Devlin or Sir Samuel Cooke Pearson, one case where he was led by David Karmel. Any interest in politics which he had when at the Cambridge Union seems to have disappeared. In 1938 he joined the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, where he contributed to the drafting of the Education Act 1944 and of the Crown Proceedings Act 1947. In 1946 he returned to private practice, joining 1 Brick Court. In 1947 he served as constitutional adviser to Lord Mountbatten, Viceroy of India at the time of Indian independence. He was Junior Counsel to the Ministry of Labour and National Service from 1950–60, although most of his practice at the bar consisted of commercial advisory work. Gordon Slynn was one of his pupils.56 He became a QC in

55 For example, the obituary of Gavin Lightman, The Times 4th August 2020, which recounts the difficulties he had. 56 It is not clear why Slynn did not stay at 1 Brick Court, although the number of Brick

Court members in later years who were turned down by his chambers at 1 Hare

Court is striking.

1960, went to the High Court bench in 1967, and was appointed as the second ever chairman of the Law Commission. Afflicted by a nervous system disease, Cooke died in office aged 66 in 1978.

Curiously, there were no new Chancery judges appointed between 1951 and 1960 because no vacancies arose: Gerald Upjohn remained the junior Chancery judge from his appointment in November 1951 until his promotion to the Court of Appeal. An attempt to send the Chancery judges on circuit proved disastrous and was swiftly abandoned. One of the elderly QB judges, Mr Justice Hallett, was quietly told to retire after the Court of Appeal had ordered a new trial on the grounds that the judge had interrupted the evidence of the witnesses excessively; a rather brave and unusual judgment for 1957, sensitively expressed by Denning LJ in the knowledge that it would bring an end to the judge’s career.57 The Commercial bar was dominated by 3 Essex Court. In 1961, Lord Kilmuir as Lord Chancellor took a policy decision that no chambers should have more than two QCs. 3 Essex Court already had two (Alan Mocatta and Eustace Roskill, John Megaw having gone to the bench) which created a problem when John Donaldson and Michael Kerr applied for silk. That led to a split creating 4 Essex Court where 3 Essex had an annexe. The inane and anti-competitive Kilmuir policy was quietly dropped the following year but the Essex Court split was permanent; in fact, Mocatta and Roskill went on the bench almost immediately which ironically made the split unnecessary in any event. The other principal commercial chambers were 7 King’s Bench Walk, home of Tom Denning, Henry Brandon, and Robert Goff, and 1 Hare Court (Patrick Neill, Roger Parker, Henry Fisher and Gordon Slynn).58

The City firms of solicitors did not have litigation partners. Litigation was run by managing clerks, some of whom wielded great power over the bar. The late VV Veeder remembered doing a summer internship under the redoubtable managing clerk at Slaughter and May and being told that there were two barristers they were accustomed to instruct: “Mr Saville who is good on the facts but not so good on the law and Mr Bingham

57 Jones v National Coal Board [1957] 2QB 55, Heuston p174 58 1 Hare Court lost its prominence over the generation that followed and merged in 1997 to become Serle Court.

who is good on the law but not so good on the facts.” Conferences usually began with counsel offering the solicitors a cigarette from a box kept on the desk.

In 1957 the film Brothers in Law came out. Based on a book by Henry Cecil, who was in fact a circuit judge,59 it featured Ian Carmichael as a young barrister. On his first day of pupillage his pupil master finds himself in two courts at once, and so sends Carmichael off to secure an adjournment in one of them. Predictably, the adjournment is refused and Carmichael has to argue the trial on the first morning of pupillage. This led the Bar Council to adopt a rule that pupils could not appear in court during the first six months of pupillage. In his more serious book (written in 1958), Brief to Counsel, which was an introduction to the bar for those considering joining, Henry Cecil described the different branches as follows:60

As a general rule, if you are more interested in pure law and drafting documents than in advocacy, you should go to the Chancery

Bar as opposed to the Common Law and vice versa. …there are distinguished practitioners at the Divorce and Criminal Bars but it is difficult for a Common Lawyer to understand why anyone should want to go to either of them. So much of the work there is sordid or monotonous or both. The standard of learning required at those

Bars is, however, lower than either at the Chancery or Common

Law Bar…The Admiralty Bar and the Parliamentary Bar are too highly specialised to need treatment here. If you are already thinking of going to either Bar it will probably be because you have friends or relations connected with one of them.

Although the author goes on to mention tax, rating and town and country planning, the Commercial bar does not get a mention at all.

59 His real name was Henry Leon. 60 Henry Cecil, Brief to Counsel (1958) Michael Joseph p46.