If the sum is accurate, then its vast size must reflect both the importance of the case and the fact that this was a client with deep pockets and access to his wealthy wife’s capacious handbag.
Dad was proud of the result he had achieved for his client and took the family to a gala preview of Thunderball. At ten, I was not yet at the age when boys long to see the films from which their parents want to protect them. I was at an age when I longed to be protected from the film my parents wanted me to see. The underwater battle which provides the film with its climax (very much Kevin McClory’s idea, as was established in court) horrified me with the grimness of its violence. I kept my eyes closed as much as I could while the harpoon-guns did their worst, and managed not to develop any overwhelming fetish for scuba gear.
Courtroom advocacy is just as much a performing art as dance or theatre. A courtroom is routinely described as being a sort of theatre itself, but it’s a small one — closer to a rehearsal studio than a stadium — and the performance is never repeated. You have to be there. It leaves no traces except written ones, though we’re so used to seeing court cases on film and television that the evanescence of the real thing gets forgotten. It’s easier to form a direct impression of Anna Pavlova’s skills than F. E. Smith’s. Even if Dad had been given his chance to flay Ian Fleming in the witness box there would only be circumstantial evidence to show how he went about it.
The closest thing I can get to a display of Dad’s expertise as a barrister in the Thunderball year of 1963, when he must have been at his most formidable, is the cross-examining of witnesses he did during the Vassall tribunal, as transcribed in the eventual report. Even so it’s like looking at a musical score that lacks expression marks, tempo indications, dynamics. I suppose it’s obvious that the spoken word is elusive even when it has the power to win or lose people money — or freedom — but I had never really thought about it.
John Vassall was a civil servant who had been sent to prison for eighteen years in 1962 after being convicted of passing secrets on to the Soviets. While working at the British embassy in Moscow during the 1950s he had been invited to a party, drugged and photographed in compromising positions with a number of men. The question for the tribunal to decide was whether he had been shielded by his superiors during his miserable career of espionage, the implied motive being a shared sexual secret if not necessarily ideological common ground, though the two were generally thought to converge. Was there in fact (as press coverage of the case had broadly hinted) a nest of perverted traitors at the Admiralty? Why had T. G. D. (Tam) Galbraith, a Conservative Party politician and Civil Lord of the Admiralty, sent letters to a junior civil servant, one who was apparently known in his department as ‘Aunty’, and had even visited him in the Dolphin Square flat that was so obviously too luxurious for a junior’s income such as his?
I remember Dad referring to Vassall at the time, and my confusion about whether this was a name of a person or a role. I knew that to be a vassal was to be an underling, though I don’t know how I knew. Perhaps despite my imperviousness to history I had learned something about feudalism at school, though it was too early for the celebrated Jackdaw series put out by Jonathan Cape, reinforced folders of documents in facsimile that made the past come alive, to my myopic eyes, by making it shine on the level of stationery. From Dad’s grim tone when he said the word ‘Vassall’ I knew not to ask questions, and osmotically absorbed the message that submissiveness was always culpable, though for some people an inescapable destiny.
The Vassall tribunal was Britain’s mirror-image of the Stalin-era show trial, not a charade of manufactured guilt but a masque of questionable innocence. Some sort of whitewash took place under floodlights. If there had been actual evidence against Galbraith, his resignation would long since have been offered and accepted. Instead the ranks had closed behind him, and being examined in public on the eleventh day of the tribunal, Thursday, 31 January 1963, was an ordeal for him but not a hanging matter. It was his job to get through the day somehow, and Dad’s job was to trip him up.
It wasn’t likely that an experienced politician like Galbraith would be broken down by cross-examination, assuming that such breakdowns are anything more than a convention of courtroom scenes in films and plays. Mars-Jones QC wasn’t going to land a knockout blow, nor was it his job to, but he could do something entirely appropriate for counsel retained by the Beaverbrook press, by inflicting paper cuts.
Mars-Jones QC puts it to Galbraith that he is conceding some degree of friendship with Vassall. Galbraith ties himself in knots trying to resist that impossible formula ‘some degree of friendship’.
‘I tried to be friendly with everybody,’ he says, ‘but it is not the same thing as being a friend of anybody’s … It is impossible to say one is an enemy. I think one is therefore presumably a friend.’
Mars-Jones QC presses the point: ‘… there was no degree of friendship between you and Vassall at any time?’ ‘If friendship implies affection, no. I do not know what friendship means, you see, it is such a wide word.’
He claimed to see no difference between Dear Vassall and My dear Vassall as forms of address in correspondence. (How glad he must have been not have written Dear John or My Dear John, leaving the smoking gun of a Christian name in Vassall’s possession.) Under pressure from Mars-Jones QC he says, ‘I am therefore going to eliminate the word “my” from my vocabulary.’ Any impossibility of retrieving Dad’s tone applies equally to Galbraith. The last sentence could be delivered with an attempt at dismissive lightness or with real exasperation.
It was being formally established at a public hearing that Beaverbrook’s papers had printed only responsible innuendo, a nod and a wink in the public interest. From the transcript I get an impression of chilly sparring, a needling cross-examination with an undertone of disrespect.
At some point Galbraith complains about there being no mention in the newspaper coverage of visits paid to Vassall’s Dolphin Square flat of his wife being present. Mars-Jones QC suggests that if he wanted the fact mentioned he should have brought it up himself. Galbraith maintains that it was up to the journalists to ask him. He wasn’t obliged to volunteer the information. This seems rather contorted logic, and Mars-Jones QC points out that journalists asking such a question would seem to be making an indelicate suggestion (never mind that the whole coverage in the press had been suggestively indelicate).
At one point in the cross-examination Mars-Jones QC says, ‘But you still have not answered my question. I have asked it twice.’ ‘Perhaps you will be third time lucky.’ ‘I will try.’ After another bit of skirmishing Dad says, ‘That is not an answer to my question, Mr Galbraith, but I am not going to ask it again.’ This seems more or less rude, in that more deferent era, when speaking to a government minister not charged with any offence.
Mars-Jones QC argues that the edition of the Express that circulated in Galbraith’s Glasgow constituency omitted material printed in the first edition that he later objected to, so that there could be no question of the paper conducting any sort of campaign against him. A major part of Galbraith’s objection attached to the headline, and Dad points out that sub-editors make those decisions. He replies, ‘I am really very ignorant on the make-up of newspaper work. So far as I can see, everybody is able to shuffle off his responsibility to somebody else.’