Leading Counsel

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31256, 31 December 1966, Page 4

Leading Counsel

Marshall Hall. A Biography by Nina Warner Hooke and Gil Thomas. Arthur Barker. 276 pp., index.

For about the first 30 years of this century, the great advocates of the law courts held special places in the affection and administration of the English public. The appearances in court of such as Carson, Rufus Isaacs, F. E. Smith, Patrick Hastings, Norman Birkett, attracted the attention given in later years to film stars, and in more recent years to the pop artists. No-one of the company of the great advocates was dearer to the public than Sir Edward Marshall Hall, the subject of this new biography by a husband and wife team. Reasons for Marshall Hall’s attraction above other lawyers to the public of his time may be discerned in this book which reveals a flamboyant man who liked an audience and knew how'to use one, a man of strong character, an excellent, painstaking, and persistent advocate, who was specially brilliant when medical matters and jewellery were associated with his briefs; and most of all perhaps because Marshall Hall himself would occasionally appear as an underdog as a result of one of the clashes with the bench in which he never hesitated to engage when he felt (not always rightly) that his clients’ interests were being prejudiced. Marshall Hall engaged in some notable cases, the best known being prominent murder cases in which he defended the accused. Readers of lawyers’ reminiscences will be familiar with most of these cases: and they were discussed extensively in an earlier biography of Marshall Hall, written some 30 years ago, by Edward Marjoribanks, himself a lawyer. Naturally, Marshall Hall’s most famous cases are part of the story the present biographers tell, but neither being a lawyer (one is a playwright, the other a journalist), their interest is perhaps more in the man than in the advocate.

Marshall Hall’s private life was not easy. His first marriage was unsatisfactory from the beginning, and it ended in nasty tragedy. The biographers develop the theory that out of sufferings in his private life there grew the

compassion for the miserable and oppressed that Marshall Hall exhibited so often in his professional life. Certainly the present biographers strive, with a good deal of success, to make a whole man of a handsome, impressive, eloquent figure in wig and gown, appearing in, and often dominating, dramatic trials in the courts, that other writers have made familiar.