SEK Hulme interview 17 November 2006

Why did Justice Starke think that he himself was not a good lawyer?

Well, I don’t think he did, but he liked to present himself as one of life’s ordinary people. He’d say, “Look, I don't know anything about the law and the cases and all that, but it comes out about this, doesn’t it”, and he’d give you straight down the line. It was very good law and he probably had looked it up, but he wasn’t going to admit that he had. He did have a feel for it, but that was not the public persona that he wished to present. He’d had all kind of hangups with his father, Sir Hayden Starke, who of course had been on the High Court a generation earlier. They fought like Kilkenny cats the whole of their lives. Sir Hayden once had John put off the tram for being drunk. I mean not many fathers have had their own son ordered off the tram, but Hayden Starke did. He also came down to Nicholls and Dever and said he wanted to see John Starke’s fee book. Now John was a pretty successful silk at this time, but if Hayden Starke came in and said he wanted something, he usually got it. He had, Dixon said in his obituary of Starke “a forensic force as formidable as any I have seen”. So Arthur Nicholls showed him his son’s fee book and he was surprised to see how well the son was doing.

Quite late in Sir Hayden’s life, I was arranging to see Starke about something and he said, “Come round about 12 o'clock” and then he said, “Well, look, hang on, I’ve got to call in and see the old man on the way back”, and I thought, well, that would take till lunchtime. I said, “Well, give us a ring after lunch”, and he went, “Oh shit, no, come around about quarter past.” He said, “Look, I quite like the old man now, SEK, and I think he quite likes me now, but we still can’t be in the same room for more than about quarter of an hour without having a fight” and his father was 90 - I don't know, 90 what? So Starke used to call in and have about 14 minutes, then leave and that had gone on the whole of their lives - each of them was used to being the dominant figure wherever he was and you can’t have two of those in the same house, I suppose. A very cheeky bloke was Starke. He and some other students at one time being arrested up in Russell Street, John pushed his shoes through the bars out into the corridor so that the police could clean them for him in the morning. You can imagine how much the police liked that, but this was typical of Starke.

I think if you’d arrested every member of the Bar for drunk driving, at least a third of the Bar would have rung Starke and said, “Can you help me?” and he would have. When they used to put people up before the Bar Council for this or that bad behaviour, Starke defended about half of them. He was that kind of person. He was someone that people went to when they were in trouble.

Conducted for the Bar Oral History project by Juliette Brodsky in Owen Dixon Chambers West and filmed by Rocco Fasano