Juliette Brodsky
Just during these early days and you’ve already given a very interesting portrait of some people that you encountered in those early days, also you all read with very interesting senior counsel, many of whom went on to great distinction in their later years. Now I’ll just do a little roll call here – John Batt, you read with Sir Ninian Stephen …
John Batt
Yes.
Juliette Brodsky
… Later of the High Court and Governor General, of course. Clive Tadgell, you were with Sir John Young. Bill Ormiston, you read with Dick Griffith, you mentioned him previously.
Bill Ormiston
Yes.
Juliette Brodsky
He died tragically young, I understand. JD and James Merralls, you both read with Richard Newton. And I wouldn’t mind just starting with Richard Newton for a moment because he together with Sir Keith Aickin, I suppose, were the leaders of Eagle Star Chambers – would that be a fair description?
James Merralls
Oh no, John Young was in Eagle Star.
JD Phillips
Fullagar.
James Merralls
And Dick Fullagar, but I wouldn’t put him in quite the same class …
Clive Tadgell
Although as you were saying earlier this morning, Jim, Aickin had (taken) silk before all those people.
James Merralls
He was the only silk in Eagle Star.
Clive Tadgell
So he was the head of chambers in fact.
Bill Ormiston
Now, you (Juliette) made a slight technical error - you said we read with senior counsel. In fact you couldn’t read with senior counsel …
Juliette Brodsky
Senior – juniors, you’re quite correct, yes sorry.
Bill Ormiston
Junior counsel, we hoped towards the top of their time as juniors, and got the benefit, certainly I did, of their experience.
JD Phillips
You had to be at least - was it 10 or 15, at that stage, years?
Bill Ormiston
I thought 7.
Juliette Brodsky
Well, back to Richard Newton who was quite a character, I believe. James, you talked about how on your first day, he banged a brief down in front of you that was covered with dust and said that the brief was two years old?
James Merralls
He kept his briefs in one of those old vegetable stands. (Laughter) It was a plastic-covered wire vegetable stand in the corner of his room and he went across to the lowest shelf and withdrew a brief and banged it on the table. Dust went everywhere. He then smoothed it and handed it to me and said “Mum-um-um-um … you may care to” – he had a very gravelly voice and a slight stammer - “might care to have a look at this and if you care, write a draft for me”. I opened it and discovered that he’d had it for two years. And I commented on this and he looked at it and he said, “Mum-um-um-um … yes, most of them are like that, but the customers are all stiffs”. (Laughter) He did a lot of work concerning deceased estates!
Juliette Brodsky
Obviously he had a sardonic sense of humour.
James Merralls
Yes, very, quite black.
JD Phillips
His father was a surgeon, wasn’t he?
James Merralls
His father was a famous surgeon, he was a knighted surgeon, Sir Alan Newton, and he belonged to the Stephen family …
Juliette Brodsky
Which was connected to Virginia Woolf?
James Merralls
Well, not connected to, she was a member of the family, yes.
Clive Tadgell
So was Griffith, wasn’t he?
Bill Ormiston
Dick? No, no, he had an interesting set of forebears - both Irish and Welsh.
JD Phillips
Yes, he was a De Burgh.
Bill Ormiston
He was a De Burgh on one side, and a Griffith - that was the Welsh side.
JD Phillips
The De Burghs were very ancient.
Juliette Brodsky
Dick Griffith was another self-described eccentric?
Bill Ormiston
Yes, well, he had a variety of pens I can remember. I think there were over 20 colours he had and he was a fastidious person and he knew all the rules and he knew in which order they (the colours) should be used for the purpose of making amendments, including purple which I think came at 7 or 8 or something like that on the list. But he had a marvellous library and a marvellous knowledge of books, which he passed on to a degree to me, but he had a beautiful library …
John Batt
He shared them when I came up to see him.
Bill Ormiston
Oh, he shared all his information with everybody.
JD Phillips
He had a curious practice …
Clive Tadgell
It was a lending library, his chambers really, wasn’t it?
JD Phillips
He did deceased estates, originating summonses in the afternoon, and in the morning he tended to do workers compensation and I asked him once about it and he said “Oh, the first (morning) pays for the second (afternoon)”.
James Merralls
He had what he called “maximum earning periods”.
Bill Ormiston
And when I was reading with him which was in the middle of 1962, he said, “I’m giving up my workers compensation practice at the 30th of June and I will not take any more briefs - if I take even one, people will come back and pester me, so I’ll have to stop”. So he then concentrated on his equity practice, which he clearly enjoyed the most. But he knew a lot about medical matters for the purpose of workers compensation, because he started medicine. He did one year’s medicine before he changed to law in the early 1940s.
Juliette Brodsky
Interesting. Why, may I ask, I was reading in a Bar News - it said, I think, that he’d passed on the habit to you of carrying two briefcases?
Bill Ormiston
I don’t remember Dick having quite as many briefcases as I did, but I was an eccentric in that respect.
John Batt
Bill, at least on the Bench, got up to three and maybe on occasion I think four.
Bill Ormiston
Yes well, certainly if you count the computer, it was four.
Juliette Brodsky
So, was that all your reading or were you carrying other materials in those briefcases?
Bill Ormiston
Well, basically it was reading which I hoped to complete, but it was textbooks and appeal books – there was a great deal of paper even if the paper was never looked at.
|
