A Life of Crime: The Memoirs of a High Court Judge. Harry Ognall

      

      A LIFE OF CRIME

       The Memoirs of a High Court Judge

      Harry Ognall

       Copyright

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

      Copyright © 2017 Harry Ognall

      Cover photograph © Annings Digital Photography, Ilkley

      Harry Ognall asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

      Source ISBN: 9780008267469

      Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780008267476

      Version: 2018-11-06

       Dedication

      To Sally, for so many reasons.

      ‘That’s it, then’

      ‘There are worse prisons than words’

      Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

       Epigraph

       Prologue

       Chapter 1: Beginnings

       Chapter 2: An Opening Door

      

       Chapter 3: The Silk Road

      

       Chapter 4: Advice to the Young Advocate

      

       Chapter 5: A Tribute and a Testament

      

       Chapter 6: Scarlet and Ermine

      

       Chapter 7: At the End of the Day …

      

       Epilogue

      

       Acknowledgements

      

       About the Author

      

       About the Publisher

       PROLOGUE

      Chinese wisdom encourages us to take comfort that ‘even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’. But what if the journey is not one that lies ahead, but one of retrospect? Does that need less resolve – or more?

      My life in the law was filled with so much that enjoyed a high profile at the time, and which has left a legacy of continuing interest, and sometimes fascination. That said, there is an obvious danger that, as a central actor in those dramas, my recall may now be corrupted by the erosion of the passing years. Or my account may be tainted by the temptations of egotism, or the lure of the apocryphal.

      And so I have put off this moment for a very long time, until it has become very clear that I should either embark now, or never. I must do my best to tell it as it really was.

       1

       BEGINNINGS

      What follows will be the odyssey of my life at the English criminal Bar and as a Queen’s Bench judge, recounted through the prism of some of the more memorable trials in which I was involved. But every narrative must have a beginning, and my early years seem to me to be as logical a starting place as any. Wholly to ignore the first twenty-five years of my life seems to me, anyway, to leave a void. However accidental my ultimate choice of career may seem to have been, perhaps within my early years is to be found the seed bed out of which my future grew.

      I was born in 1934 in Salford, Lancashire, of middle-class Jewish parents. They were never more than easy-going in their orthodoxy, and (save in my early days at school during the war) my religion never featured as a significant or oppressive aspect of my life. I was named (curiously) Harry Henry, after my paternal grandfather, who had died one month earlier. I know very little about him. He was by all accounts a kind, modest and hard-working man. He lived with his wife, Bessie, in Rutherglen, Glasgow, and was a councillor for the Gallowflat Ward in what was then the separate town of Rutherglen, serving for one year as its provost, or mayor. He made the improvement of educational facilities and standards his special interest. He ran a small business, selling smoking pipes and tobacco.

      My father, Leo, was the oldest of my grandfather’s three sons and a daughter. He was born in 1908 and left school at sixteen. Thereafter, he worked first in Glasgow and then in Manchester in a variety of generally mundane jobs until the outbreak of the Second World War. (For a short time he was a cub journalist for a national newspaper, and achieved temporary