Free Kid Gloves by Adam Mars-Jones Page A

security concerns. Dad had some firearms training and was even issued with a gun,
though it was kept locked up in the safe of the Gray’s Inn Treasury Office where there was no
risk of its being useful. Certainly if the weapon had lived in the flat, I would have wanted to
see it and Dad would have wanted to wave it about with all due solemnity.
    Before terrorism put judges at risk, there was
the old-school underworld. The High Court Judge Edmund Davies, who lived at number 1 Gray’s Inn
Square, received threats after he passed controversially severe sentences on those responsible
for the ‘great’ train robbery of 1963. Precautions were put in place. Cynthia Terry, wife of the
Under-Treasurer (and also my godmother, ‘Aunty See-See’ as we called her), was asked to give up
her normal seat in the Chapel and position herself upstairs in the gallery. There she would be
well placed to deter, by screaming or lobbing a hymn book, any intruder devious enough to walk
into the Inn from High Holborn and enter the Chapel during morning service.
    I feel sure that if Aunty See-See was
combat-ready in any marked way she would have mentioned it.
    Dad was certainly advised, once terrorism was a
real force, to check the underside of his car for explosive devices. I didn’t ever see him do
it. In fact my mind’s eye shows me him verymuch not doing it: leaning over
to one side a little way from the car, as if that would give him the necessary visual access. By
this time his Jaguar days were over and he drove sensible estate cars with automatic
transmissions. Then I see him going halfway down on his knees for a better view before realizing
he would risk sullying the excellence of his suiting with dirt if he allowed his knees to touch
down on the road surface. He considers the use of newspaper to protect the cherished cloth and
then understands that ink-smudges are at least as much of a threat to his turn-out as
tarmac-scuffs … of course none of this amounts to a memory. On a television screen these
images would be accompanied by a caption warning of RECONSTRUCTION , though why
anybody but me would want to watch I couldn’t say.
    If the national shock delivered by the Moors
Murders had led to the restoration of the death penalty, Dad might have found himself in
difficulties. He not only disapproved of the death penalty, implicitly on religious grounds, but
said, after the event, that he would not have accepted appointment as a judge if he was required
to pronounce it. Technically capital punishment was retained for a few specialized offences,
such as treason, piracy with violence, and arson in naval shipyards, but it would be a scruple
too far to expect him to decline preferment in case these virtually hypothetical crimes
materialized in his court.
    His principle wasn’t tested, since the black cap
remained a historical item (he became a judge in 1969), but that doesn’t make his moral position
unreal. It’s true that I never saw Dad undergo a real crisis of conscience, and his ambition
seemed to lie close to the core of him, though I saw enough discrepancy of temperament in the
last phase of his life not to be so sure. What’s the appropriately judicial phrase? To reserve
judgment.
    What Dad felt he learned from
the Moors Murders case was that pornography was an actively corrosive force. The books Ian Brady
read, the images he saw, inflamed and released an underlying inhumanity. It’s doubtful that even
before 1966 he was in favour of sexual material being made freely available – I can’t see him
approving of a world in which copies of
Reveille
and
Titbits
were brazenly
displayed where minors could see them – but after that case his opposition became definite.
    If conversation turned in that direction he would
maintain that the last word on the subject had been spoken by Pamela Hansford Johnson in her
book
On Iniquity
, which describes her change of heart on this issue from a liberal to a
conservative stance, the catalyst