In the olden days, every chambers had a Senior Clerk. Now things are slowly changing. Extempar Chambers (you remember, ‘We Don’t Judge, We Just Care’) have something called a Director of Advocacy Services.
My chambers still has a Senior Clerk. His name is Clem Wilson – and he scares the living daylights out of me.
Most people will have seen legal dramas on TV where the stereotypical depiction of barristers’ clerks is as a ruthless former East End barrow boy blessed with the cunning of an especially cunning fox, who pit their crafty, working-class street wits against those of the lumbering toffs who pay their wages – I have to say that this is entirely realistic. The only difference between the fictional clerks of TV and my Senior Clerk is that mine isn’t a cockney, he comes from Manchester, and this, somehow, makes him seem even more ferociously scary.
Most of the junior members of chambers are petrified of him. Occasionally, there is talk of a coup to oust him, but that is only after a few pints at the Erskine, when everyone is sure that he’s nowhere to be seen.
On my first day in chambers as a pupil barrister, he called me into his room.
‘You must be Russell Winnock,’ he said.
‘Yes, Mr Wilson,’ I said, ‘that’s right.’
He then gazed up at me, in a way that a cunning fox might gaze at a particularly stupid hedgehog.
‘Now, if one year from today you are lucky enough to be taken on by chambers and become a tenant, I shall cease calling you Russell Winnock and I shall call you Mr Winnock – but not until then, you understand that?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘of course.’
‘And if you’re any good, then I shall be proud to do so. But, if you’re rubbish and you make a tit out of me or chambers, I’ll get rid of you, is that understood?’
I continued to nod.
‘Now, you are a very lucky young man, Russell Winnock, because your pupil-master is going to be Mr Sherman.’
‘Fantastic,’ I said, with the enthusiasm of a collie dog, though I hadn’t the first clue who Mr Sherman was.
‘There are two things you need to know about Mr Sherman. First, he is a genius, second, like all geniuses, he has his particular foibles.’ At this point he looked at me with a strange intensity, which I have come to realise is his way of trying to indicate that he is employing some euphemism and that he wanted to see if I understood. I didn’t. I didn’t have a clue what he was going on about.
‘Alright?’
I nodded and my Senior Clerk continued, ‘Now today, Mr Sherman is at the Bailey. I suggest you wait for him in the waiting area, he’ll be around shortly to pick you up.’
‘Thank you Mr Wilson,’ I said, ‘thank you.’
I went to leave – but before I did, Clem Wilson called out to me again, ‘And Russell,’ I turned around, ‘some words of advice. For the next twelve months, don’t even try to have a personality of your own; don’t make any friends; and don’t do anything stupid.’
‘Right,’ I said, beaming in a confused way like a half-wit, as bits of my personality flaked off there and then.
I took myself off to the waiting area and sat, patiently, until eventually my pupil-master arrived. I heard him before I saw him – his great baritone voice, oozing masculine power and confidence. He was talking to one of the clerks.
‘What pupil?’
‘Your new pupil, Mr Sherman, he’s waiting for you in the foyer.’
‘No one told me I was getting a bloody pupil. Whose idea was this?’
‘Head of Chambers, Mr Sherman, he thought it would be a good thing.’
‘Well I hope she’s got big tits and makes good coffee.’
‘It’s a boy, Mr Sherman, his name’s Russell Winnock.’
‘A boy? What, like in short trousers?’
‘No.’
‘Oh for god’s sake. The last thing I want is some young lad hanging around me – pupils are a bloody nuisance at the best of times.’
I soon realised what Clem Wilson meant by Ronnie Sherman’s foibles: he was a hopeless chauvinist, misogynist and snob and an even more hopeless alcoholic. He had clearly been given me as an unwanted gift in a desperate attempt to re-invigorate his interest in a flagging career, because Ronnie Sherman had become one of those old barristers who spends more time talking about the great cases of the past than preparing the mediocre cases of the present.
My six months with Ronnie were indeed an education. I learnt how to do a bail application without having any clue what your case actually was; I learnt how to drink a bottle of wine and two pints of bitter during lunch, after which I would watch my pupil-master either swerve and sway on his feet as he embarked on a lengthy and meandering cross-examination, or engineer an adjournment because he was not actually capable of embarking upon any cross-examination at all. I learnt how to ignore Judges, solicitors and junior clerks; I learnt how to lie to a wife or loved one about my whereabouts and I learnt how I was entering the profession at the worst time ever. ‘Russell,’ he would tell me, ‘you should have been doing this job twenty years ago – the money was great and everyone knew their place. Not like now.’
But amazingly, despite this reluctance to have me hanging round him, and despite the fact that he was mostly pissed after two o’clock, Ronnie Sherman did teach me some vital things about being a barrister: he taught me how to properly address a Judge, how to conduct yourself in court and about the strange rituals and customs of the Bar and the judicial system; but most of all, he taught me – and I’m not sure that he would admit to this – about how to treat your clients. You see, despite his bluff snobbery, pomposity and supposed antipathy towards most other sectors of society, when Ronnie Sherman was with his clients, he was transformed. When he entered a cell or a conference room, he would instantly change; he would listen gently and carefully, instinctively understanding and empathetic. Every client, regardless of the charge they faced, their background or history – tragic or stupid – would be treated with compassion and courtesy. In an instant he could put a young lad facing prison for the first time at ease, or coax a confession out of the worst kind of sex offender. And that ability – to build a trusting relationship with your client – is possibly the most important that a barrister can possess. Because the law isn’t just about, well, laws and statutes and being learned or clever, it’s about people. As a barrister you’re becoming involved in a person’s life at a time when that life has gone wrong.
And that, dear reader, is the beauty of the pupilage system. A young barrister, fresh from Bar School and totally wet behind the ears, spends the first six months of his or her career doing nothing but sitting behind their pupil-master, observing the right and wrong way to do things.
A couple of years after being my pupil-master, the Lord Chancellor’s department decided to make Ronnie a Judge; surprisingly, considering his outward disapproval of most people’s lives, they made him a family Judge.