FIFTY YEARS AT THE BAR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 December 1939, Page 8

FIFTY YEARS AT THE BAR

MR l\. C. HANLON’S RANDOM RECOLLECTIONS. NOTABLE DAYS OF THE PAST RECALLED. Highlights, as well as quieter passages of an unusually interesting life are presented by Mr A. C. Hanlon. K.C.. of Dunedin, in his "Random Recollections —Noles on a Lifetime at the Bar." As most New Zealanders know. Mr Hanlon looks back upon an altogether exceptional and noteworthy career as a barrister specialising in criminal law. "No living advocate in New Zealand —and very few of those who have gone —” the Chief Justice. Sir Michael Myers, observes in a preface, "has had anything like the experience and number that he (Mr Hanlon) has bad of sensational cases: and none has had a greater quantum of success. Perhaps it has been unfortunate for him that his life should have been spent in a small country where the scope for the activities o£ men in every profession is necessarily limited, for it is certain that his personality, his powers of elocution, his histrionic gifts, and withal his judgment —and brevity—in cross-examina-tion would have won for him as great a reputation among the best of the advocates hi any part of the Empire as. relatively, they have earned for him hero." Mr Hanlon, who was born in 1866 and called to the Bar in 1888 was appointed a King’s Counsel in 1930. Visions of sea voyaging had been awakened in his mind by his acquaintance with ships at Port Chalmers, but on being articled by his father to a firm of solicitors in Dunedin, ho betook himself manfully to six years of legal apprenticeship and study. Having qualified, he spent some bleak months in a little office of his own. knowing the misery of having nothing to do, but then, came the first trickle of clients which was to swell so notably in later days. Before many years had passed, Mr Hanlon had established his reputation as a gifted advocate, and, though he has, as he records, never wavered in his allegiance to Dunedin as his home town, found his services in demand from Auckland to the Bluff to such an. extent that it was impossible to cope with the briefs offering. In his rambling chronicle, as he calls it, Mr Hanlon reviews and analyses many famous or notorious trials which caused a great sensation in their day and have by no means been robbed of their interest by the passage of time, at all events as they are handled and presented in this book. With his narratives of trials, Mr Hanlon has associated observations on the arts of advocacy and cross-examination which naturally carry very, considerable weight. He has much that is both informative and of interest to say also on a number of questions which from time to time command the attention of the public as well as that of members of the legal profession. Amongst these questions are the jury system, the rights of accused persons, and the law relating to divorce. The final chapter in the book'is a tribute, enriched with anecdotes, to the late Sir Josua Williams. of whom Mr Hanlon says:—-

“To everything related to his profession. and especially to his position as a Judge of the Supreme Court, of New Zealand, he brought an erudition that was allied to an exquisite kindliness. I believe he was beloved by all who knew him.”

Though it touches of necessity on sordid and tragic details of life, Mr Hanlon's book is pleasant and bracing in tone, nowhere more so than in the opening chapters in which he tells of his parents, who left Ireland for Australia in 1859 and moved on to Otago in 1862, the year following that of the famous Gabriel’s Gully gold rush, and of his own early life in Southland and Otago. It is something to awaken reflection that this hard-bitten lawyer, as many people would call him. finds himself an unsophisticated person in the presence of the somewhat blase modern’ generation. His observations on this subject are less a confession than a challenge. The most remarkable recollection he retains of his early life, he says, is of the baffling quality of surprise and delight of which the world was full “to a degree that would be foreign to this highly sophisticated, steam-heated age ot bitumen and speed and noise and excitement." Mr Hanlon confesses that he still cannot walk a hundred paces down the street without seeing something to be wonder-stricken or amazed at. whereas '“our unfortunate children seem to he incapable of either perplexity or bevzilderment.” Little as young people of the present day may be inclined to admit the fact, there is point and force in Mr Hanlon's observation:—

I When its enforced times of leisure come upon it. there is little of the old-fashioned pleasure for the "present generation because its faster and more exciting forms of amusement demand as much mental and physical effort, as that given to work, without, too often, yielding a

correspondingly high reward. The author of "Random Recollections" looks back on rougher days than those —days of hard work, limited comfort and tittle leisure. Yet he claims, and some at least will second his claim, that they were spacious days, "eventful and memorable, with Tittle boredom as it is known today and no wasted time in work or play." "Random Recollections" is published by tile Otago Daily Times and Witness Company, Dunedin. It is well printed and produced and is illustrated with portraits of the author and the Byam Shaw cartoon "Cross-examination."