Clive Tadgell

(Maurice) Ashkanasy used to drive into chambers in a fairly large – not flashy, but a brand new car.

James Merralls

It was a Buick.

Clive Tadgell

Was it? Rather a large car, and he saw (Dr) Coppel, whom he professed to detest, waiting in pouring rain for a tram at the corner of Riversdale Road and Glenferrie Road, say, and Ash said to himself, “I’ll get this fellow”. He pulled up and said, wound down the window, “Like a lift in, Bill?” And Bill in pouring rain could hardly decently refuse, I suppose, and he got in and they sat together in silence until the new Buick was turning into Owen Dixon chambers. Ash was not very familiar with this new-found parking spot, and as he was doing the turn, the car scraped right along the wall and Coppel is supposed to have said “By George, Ash, that was close”. (Laughter)

John Batt

He (Coppel) had the habit of always rubbing his fingernails on his lapel and then looking at them.

Juliette Brodsky

Yes, I believe, James, you said people thought he was sharpening his talons.

James Merralls

Sharpening his talons, yes, because he was a very incisive cross examiner with a precise choice of language and an acid tongue. He made a number of enemies among his contemporaries, but he was very nice to juniors. I had the good fortune to do a little work with him and he was always very, very nice, courteous, he took you into the case. I was his junior in my first appeal in the High Court. It was one of those three judge courts, small bench cases, it was a tax case. And he’d prepared his argument in some detail and I’d read it in typescript. The bench was Sir Garfield Barwick, Mr Justice Kitto and Mr Justice Owen. He presented his argument for some time and then he was about three quarters of the way through the script, and to my horror he turned to me, and he had rather a high pitched voice, and he said “Jim, Jim, I think we have them” and sat down. (Laughter) We had them all right, we won two-one.

Juliette Brodsky

But how did he know? How could he tell?

James Merralls

I don’t know, but he did, he was a risk taker.

JD Phillips

I argued against him, too, in the High Court in Testro v Tait when Ashkanasy pulled out for want of funds and I was left carrying the case and Coppel was very kind to me then, too, because he could see how terribly nervous I was. He did a lot to calm me down.

Bill Ormiston

He was an interesting character.

Clive Tadgell

Phillips had a great encomium from Kitto.

JD Phillips

Oh that time, yes.

Bill Ormiston

But he (Coppel) had been made acting judge on at least two if not three occasions in, I think, the early 50s and it was thought that he would get the next permanent appointment because there was a numerical limit as I recall at the time, and he was only an acting judge. But he was never appointed because he made a sufficient number of enemies from the way that he conducted his cases, so it is said. And it is one of the reasons why I think a number of us are very dubious about proposals for acting judges because of the way in which people can, as it were, lobby against a (permanent) appointment of an acting judge just for personal reasons arising out of being dealt with rather hardly in court. The second thing about Coppel, if I might go on, was that he was the leading counsel, as I recall it, on the list that I was assigned to when I first came to the Bar when a fellow called Harvey had come out from England and this was one of the risks of being a barrister, with which I wasn’t entirely familiar. Clive (Tadgell) was also on the same list. It had only I think about 30 or 35 people, but Mr Harvey unfortunately had the habit of, so we’d later discovered, of “tickling the peter” and eventually this was found out, I think it took a good two years to find it out and he was then sacked. And we had to have first an acting clerk and eventually we found Ken Spurr who was a very fair and good clerk, but Mr Harvey disappeared. But at the time of course, there wasn’t enough money to pass on from the clerk’s account to the barristers and what Coppel arranged, I think with Xavier Connor and I can’t remember who else was involved with this, was that the silks and perhaps some of the other senior members of the list should bear the burden at first and that all junior barristers on the list would be paid and they, that is the silks, might eventually be paid out of the clerk’s fee which was a guinea …

JD Phillips

A shilling in the guinea.

Bill Ormiston

A shilling in the guinea, and I think after perhaps five or six years, maybe they were paid out but I’m not even sure of that. But they took that burden and I thought that was a very kind and generous thought, and that did show that he was, you know, very thoughtful.

JD Phillips

The collegiate atmosphere was very strong.

Clive Tadgell

I think (Murray) McInerney had something to do with that, too.

Bill Ormiston

I don’t think he was on our list.

Clive Tadgell

I don’t think he was, but he might have been Chairman.

Bill Ormiston

He might have been Chairman of the Bar, but I just thought it was very generous of these people who were directly affected to say, “Well we’ll stand back and let the juniors take their fees”.

Juliette Brodsky

I suppose for all of you, all of these interesting practices and behaviours, contrast very markedly with how things are now in terms of things like, for example, charging by the hour and …

Clive Tadgell

Well, speaking for myself, it’s 27 years since I was at the Bar and comparing my knowledge of it with the present time is just an impossibility.

JD Phillips

I think charging by the hour was bad and I think it made the law much more expensive. It rewarded barristers for their work a bit more equitably, but I still think the old idea of a fee on brief was the better one. It distinguished the barrister from the solicitor and I think in part it’s been responsible for the way solicitors now do some of the advocacy work themselves. It’s slowly moved across.

John Batt

I had a brief to argue in some case that the Taxing Master should allow hourly charges in a big case. It was Coffey and somebody, that was the case, but I was in fact briefed in part by the Bar Council to argue this, but we did not succeed on that point.

JD Phillips

It was a long-standing fight with the Taxing Master, wasn’t it?

Bill Ormiston

Yes, but it was eventually accepted. I know, I got a number of briefs for the Tax Commissioner a number of years ago and it was quite a good part of my practice although I can’t say I was really an expert in tax but I quite enjoyed the work. But they were very mean and they brought in a policy - I think in 1973 - of paying a minimal fee, which really was not a market fee for most of the work that one did, apart from the fact that they were quite difficult cases for the most part. They said - that is, the Commonwealth Crown Solicitor who briefed – “Well you can have conferences” and I said, “I don’t really want conferences, I really just want to get a decent fee and I can work at it”. They eventually came around to the view (that) they would allow me to mark by the hour for the time I put into reading papers and researching, because quite often they were big files one got from the Tax Commissioner and they were all upside down too, it was their habit in those days to put all the pages back to front, even individual letters were back to front. It took a lot of time sorting them out. I was able to survive in that way on those miserable brief fees, and that’s how I got into the habit of doing it. It would have been in the early 70s, I think, and not many people did it in those days because this was just a way out for me with tax briefs.

John Batt

Yes, well, I got briefed on that basis a little later.

JD Phillips

And their fees were much less than everybody else’s. We did a lot of briefs for the Deputy Commissioner of Taxation, he’d give you 3 bankruptcy briefs at 4 guineas each.

Juliette Brodsky

Just before we move on to a couple of other topics, you wanted to speak a little bit more about Lou Voumard?

James Merralls

Yes, Lou Voumard was an interesting man. He wrote a book on the law on the sale of land in the 1930s, which I understand was submitted for an LLD at Melbourne University, which was refused. A number of members of the Bar thought that perhaps Dr Coppel should not have been given an LLD for his work on Bills of Sale if Voumard were to be denied one for The Sale of Land which was in the opinion of many, including me, a more substantial work. But he (Voumard) was a great favourite with small solicitors, conveyancing solicitors, and he was regarded as the point of reference in disputes about contracts for the sale of land, leases and other property matters. He had a big opinion practice, often in conference, and his opinion was often accepted by other solicitors, once it was known, because of his reputation. He also had a reputation for being a very low charger, he was a modest man and he did charge considerably less….

JD Phillips

Yes, where some would charge $30, he would charge $10, that’s the sort of recollection I have.

James Merralls

…than other barristers of the same seniority.

JD Phillips

He ended up doing an inquiry, didn’t he, into the local government, the redistribution of municipalities, the first one?

James Merralls

Yes, he did.

John Batt

Also, he was an arbitrator under the Sale of Land Act.

James Merralls

He was the first arbitrator under the Sale of Land Act - he was a most delightful man of Swiss extraction. His father had been a watchmaker in Wangaratta.

JD Phillips

You can’t get more Swiss than that.

Juliette Brodsky

And of course he was later chair of the Bar Council?

James Merralls

No, I don’t think he ever was. But he, like Coppel, was not appointed a judge when others perhaps less deserving were in the 1950s. I once was present when he was acting as arbitrator. A solicitor who’d known him for years, asked him why he hadn’t become a judge and he said, “No-one ever asked me”.

Juliette Brodsky

Is that true?

James Merralls

Yes. That’s what he said.

Juliette Brodsky

Why would that have been the case if he was so respected?

James Merralls

Because the Bench was very small and …

Bill Ormiston

He was a very specialised barrister too, he very rarely did much work outside property law, conveyancing and the like. He might have done a case on charities occasionally.

James Merralls

Yes, he did.

Clive Tadgell

Was he not one of your (Batt’s) predecessors as Chancellor of Wangaratta?

John Batt

He might have been.

James Merralls

He was. I know that because he was on the Trinity College Council as such, or as the representative.

JD Phillips

In those days, too, as I understand it, for appointments the Solicitor General would put forward four names to the Attorney General – this is what I understood to be the case, according to gossip at the Bar – that four names would go forward, being the four most senior people qualified for the appointment and the Attorney would pick one. So there was room there to pick any one of four. Some didn’t get there because there just wasn’t room.

John Batt

I had heard that he (Voumard) had been offered a County Court appointment and there was a change of government before it could be implemented and it went by the board.

James Merralls

I don’t know, I’ve never heard that.

JD Phillips

I had heard it, but that’s only rumour at the Bar.

Clive Tadgell

That’s right, it’s a blessing he didn’t receive it.

JD Phillips

There are so many rumours at the Bar, one barrister even had the misfortune during our time to be congratulated (while appearing in the County Court) that this would be his last case - that he’d just been appointed - and he had to get up and say he knew nothing of it, and as it turned out, he wasn’t appointed either.

John Batt

Well, one person suffered quite a bit, he wasn’t briefed for a while when everyone thought he was going to the bench.

James Merralls

Louis Voumard had a very structured style of advocacy. He numbered his propositions. I can remember hearing him argue a case in the High Court. In fact it was a patent case, it was out of his normal jurisdiction. He was asked a question by Sir Alan Taylor and he looked up at the bench and said “The answer is yes, and my ninth point….”.

Bill Ormiston

Yes, he was not a very flexible barrister and he didn’t appear in court all that much.

James Merralls

But he was a bonnie fighter.

Bill Ormiston

Oh yes.

John Batt

There was a Butterworths copyright case where he got very cross, I think with - was it Sek (Hulme) on the other side?

James Merralls

I appeared for the trustees in a case involving the trust funds of the Tobacco Growers Association from Myrtleford - Bright. There was a schismatic association and both associations - the old and the new - were fighting over the trust funds. Voumard appeared for one and Coppel for the other and I was for the trustees and they fought like cat and dog throughout the case. The judge was Sir George Pape who was a very nice, rather bluff man. He looked like John Bull, and he kept saying, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, please”.